<p>Hello! I have heard that Cornell is very demanding...does that really depend more on what a person is majoring in? What is your major and how have classes in your department been as far as difficulty? Anyone familiar with the linguistics department? Just wonderin.</p>
<p>I'm pretty curious about this myself. On one hand, i know an engineer will have a very demanding workload, but what about someone in the Hotel School?</p>
<p>its hard no matter what the major, except maybe hotelies. but the course load is veryy heavy, but doably. for me, im a pam major and i did pretty well this semester but i also didnt go out to often.</p>
<p>i dont know about you, but i know of several hotel classes that actually have the correct median - a (GASP) C is AVERAGE!!</p>
<p>Its all relative, like there are hard hotelie classes, but I would say that architecture and engineering are the hardest. And everything else is still hard, but in a different way.</p>
<p>can someone explain this whole median thing to me?</p>
<p>median is the middle number, so in that class if there were grades ranging from 60 to 93, the median could be like a 72, which would make the median grade a D+, i think, or the median could even be an 87, so the median grade would be a B. I have read that cornell now puts grades on the students grade reports in a way that it includes their grades and the medians of that class, so your grade would say a B and then it would say the median was a C+, so that would put some significance on your grade, meaning that your B was higher than at least 50% of the people in that class (not bad), but if your grade was a B and the median was an A, it would show that that class was easy and either you didn't understand it or you didn't work hard, so it is basically a way to judge your grades to the peers in your class. I am not sure if i answered your question, but I think I did, I hope it helps.</p>
<p>However the median is only one way to express the average in the class, there are 3 simple ways, the mean the median and the mode.</p>
<p>Mean: the sum of the set of numbers divided by the number of numbers.
Median: the middle number of the set of numbers
Mode: the most occurring number in the set of numbers</p>
<p>Grades for a random class:
61, 69, 72, 73, 88, 92, 92, 96, 98</p>
<p>averages for that class...
Mean: 82.33% (741/9)
Median: 88%
Mode: 92%</p>
<p>So you can see why they don't do mode, it is higher than both the mean and median and is really not an accurate representation of the class, b/c what if two people got a 52 and everyone else had a unique score above 80
With mean and median it is more of a toss-up, I think they don't use mean b/c there could be outliers, and median is good b/c it tells you where the middle 50% of the class lies.</p>
<p>Hope that helps.</p>
<p>thanks psquared :)</p>