Hopkins, Princeton, Cornell, Carnegie mellon...are the "grind" reputation real or outdated?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Recently heard from a friend their sophomore DC at Chicago finds the work more manageable than feared (was expecting where fun goes to die), and read on here schools on the title no longer have grade deflation. Is this true? College counselors and private consultants (the 2 we have talked to so small sample size) seem to still think these are grind schools where too many students graduate with low GPAs.

Anyone with with DCs at these schools now with real-life recent experience and not just recycling hearsays?

Every one of them has a median Gpa of 3.65 -3.8, similar to the rest of the ivies and T10 besides Harvard and Duke which inflate (3.9,3,85 median). All of these schools require a lot of work to get above the median, with certain concentrations/majors requiring many more hours than others. That is life. It hardly makes the named universities any grindier than the rest of their peer schools.

How would you know if you didn’t attend every one of these schools? Speculation. Hearsay.

Grade inflation or not. A kid at one of the named schools still needs to put in a lot more effort to get the same gpa.

A kid at one of those schools needs to put in more effort than one at UVA but a kid at those schools does not have to put in more effort than other ivies or MIT or stanford. The peer groups are the same as far as talent and competition to be able to be top half. One could argue MIT is a notch harder than any of them.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I don't think of Princeton as having a grind reputation.

STEM is a grind at Princeton

Princeton is at an academic crossroad. They want to admit more FGLI (it's now the #1 institutional priority as they have more money than god and legacy preference is gradually diminishing), but FGLI often have lower preparedness and were admitted TO. TO ends at P this year so it will be interesting

Couldn’t Princeton just lower the academic expectations for FGLI admits, but keep everything the same for the rest of the students?

Ha! Trust me, it is not just FGLI kids who struggle. Many, many kids from top privates, top magnets, legacy kids, etc. have a hard time at Princeton, especially first year. You deal with it, go into easier majors, get academic support, deal with the grade deflation and hope grad schools will give you the Princeton pass when evaluating you against a Harvard gentleman's B.

Or schools can admit the right students to begin with.

You’re assuming it’s really simple to admit the “right” students in the first place. I’m guessing you mean using stats like SAT. The problem is, some kids will grind for years to get their score up. Let’s say we’re talking about a really rigorous college with a higher SAT bar. If it requires years of studying to get a 1550+ for one student, and a few weeks of studying for another student, how is a college supposed to tell these two apart? And how is that first student going to keep up with the second student once in college and under pressure to keep up in the same classes under similar time constraints?

I never mentioned the SAT—that’s your assumption. If some people enjoy studying endlessly or tiger parents have no clue what competence means, that’s their decision. Identifying the right fit is schools' responsibility if they request such a high tuition. If other merit-based institutions—many of them globally ranked—can successfully select the right candidates, why can’t we? If University of Cambridge can nurture talent like Demis Hassabis, why aren’t we able to do the same?

American and UK universities both have a track record of nurturing immense talent. They both also have a record of students who fail to thrive. It’s hard to predict sometimes based on the high school record, and there is no crystal ball. But it’s partly the responsibility of the parents and students to find a good match as well. Don’t just go to a place for prestige. The OP is absolutely right in thinking that just because you can get into a high rigor school doesn’t mean it’s the best decision for you.

There are some reliable predictors.

The SATs are a good predictor but they are not reliable on their own.
GPA at high rigor high schools combined with SAT scores are much better predictor.
Add in a USAMO/USAJMO (possibly even AIME) qualification or other science Olympiad qualification and you can pretty reliably predict positive academic outcomes.

I wouldn't consider math competitions. If that's the case AI should go to college not your kids.

I hope you are being facetious or snarky. The Math Olympiads are still a benchmark for the latest AI models, which cost billions in capex to set up and train. Even the bleeding edge ones need millions of tokens, long chains-of-thought and test time compute and not insignificant human interaction to approach gold medal level performance after running for hours (wall clock and not CPU/GPU time). High schoolers have to solve these in roughly 1.5h per problem.

There are about 250 high schoolers in the US that qualify for USAMO (which arguably is at least as difficult if not more than the IMO) and about 150 or so get honorable mentions or medals. Most of these could medal in IMO as well (were it not for the super-high competitiveness of the US IMO selection process).

So, while college success (or in academia) does not require one to be good at Olympiad level math, being good at them is a good indicator of college success.

Sure—except most people in these competitions aren’t participating purely out of a love for math. Many are using them as stepping stones to firms like Jane Street or Citadel. For them, it’s more about strategic positioning than genuine curiosity—competition is for racehorses. Solving problems quickly isn’t what drives humanity forward; deep, original thinking does.

In engineering fields, a solid command of calculus is a reliable indicator that a student can handle the rigor of college-level work. For liberal arts, however, qualities like critical thinking and creativity are far harder to quantify—and as an engineer, that’s outside my area of expertise.

Olympiad math is far deeper and far more original than anything in high school, along with being deeper than undergrad math and requiring more originality than undergrad math homework assignments: https://web.evanchen.cc/faq-school.html#S-9

The vast majority of jobs and college majors have nothing to do with the Olympiad math.

True but we’re talking about elite jobs and abilities. Olympiad math may not be used in anything directly but it is, to a very large extent, an indication of raw talent.

This is essentially the same argument on any competition including sports.

Lol, not it is not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why can't students study and get evaluated "properly"? Why is it called "grind"? It is called learning and evaluating.

Not everyone deserves a trophy. Studying or get out of the school to do something more meaningful to your life.

Deflationary curves and rampant to now professional cheating at the top killing the curve can make it very demoralizing. If schools dealt with that dynamic then it would be different.

The issue is academics have different priorities. Grades mean nearly nothing in graduate admissions- you just need to pass around a 3.5-3.7 minimum and after it’s all about recommendations and your publication/research history. Jobs used to not care about grades but they’ve turned a leaf where they want colleges to do their job in discriminating who is and is not their version of competent.

Yike. Thought STEM professions are all skills based. Why would employers check grades?

For my student, in STEM, without a doubt his near perfect grades propelled him upward in graduation school options. Research, academic jobs on campus, and recs were good, but I believe grades in a very tough major pushed him over the top.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't think of Princeton as having a grind reputation.

STEM is a grind at Princeton

Princeton is at an academic crossroad. They want to admit more FGLI (it's now the #1 institutional priority as they have more money than god and legacy preference is gradually diminishing), but FGLI often have lower preparedness and were admitted TO. TO ends at P this year so it will be interesting

Couldn’t Princeton just lower the academic expectations for FGLI admits, but keep everything the same for the rest of the students?

Ha! Trust me, it is not just FGLI kids who struggle. Many, many kids from top privates, top magnets, legacy kids, etc. have a hard time at Princeton, especially first year. You deal with it, go into easier majors, get academic support, deal with the grade deflation and hope grad schools will give you the Princeton pass when evaluating you against a Harvard gentleman's B.

Or schools can admit the right students to begin with.

You’re assuming it’s really simple to admit the “right” students in the first place. I’m guessing you mean using stats like SAT. The problem is, some kids will grind for years to get their score up. Let’s say we’re talking about a really rigorous college with a higher SAT bar. If it requires years of studying to get a 1550+ for one student, and a few weeks of studying for another student, how is a college supposed to tell these two apart? And how is that first student going to keep up with the second student once in college and under pressure to keep up in the same classes under similar time constraints?

I never mentioned the SAT—that’s your assumption. If some people enjoy studying endlessly or tiger parents have no clue what competence means, that’s their decision. Identifying the right fit is schools' responsibility if they request such a high tuition. If other merit-based institutions—many of them globally ranked—can successfully select the right candidates, why can’t we? If University of Cambridge can nurture talent like Demis Hassabis, why aren’t we able to do the same?

American and UK universities both have a track record of nurturing immense talent. They both also have a record of students who fail to thrive. It’s hard to predict sometimes based on the high school record, and there is no crystal ball. But it’s partly the responsibility of the parents and students to find a good match as well. Don’t just go to a place for prestige. The OP is absolutely right in thinking that just because you can get into a high rigor school doesn’t mean it’s the best decision for you.

There are some reliable predictors.

The SATs are a good predictor but they are not reliable on their own.
GPA at high rigor high schools combined with SAT scores are much better predictor.
Add in a USAMO/USAJMO (possibly even AIME) qualification or other science Olympiad qualification and you can pretty reliably predict positive academic outcomes.

I wouldn't consider math competitions. If that's the case AI should go to college not your kids.

I hope you are being facetious or snarky. The Math Olympiads are still a benchmark for the latest AI models, which cost billions in capex to set up and train. Even the bleeding edge ones need millions of tokens, long chains-of-thought and test time compute and not insignificant human interaction to approach gold medal level performance after running for hours (wall clock and not CPU/GPU time). High schoolers have to solve these in roughly 1.5h per problem.

There are about 250 high schoolers in the US that qualify for USAMO (which arguably is at least as difficult if not more than the IMO) and about 150 or so get honorable mentions or medals. Most of these could medal in IMO as well (were it not for the super-high competitiveness of the US IMO selection process).

So, while college success (or in academia) does not require one to be good at Olympiad level math, being good at them is a good indicator of college success.

Sure—except most people in these competitions aren’t participating purely out of a love for math. Many are using them as stepping stones to firms like Jane Street or Citadel. For them, it’s more about strategic positioning than genuine curiosity—competition is for racehorses. Solving problems quickly isn’t what drives humanity forward; deep, original thinking does.

In engineering fields, a solid command of calculus is a reliable indicator that a student can handle the rigor of college-level work. For liberal arts, however, qualities like critical thinking and creativity are far harder to quantify—and as an engineer, that’s outside my area of expertise.

Olympiad math is far deeper and far more original than anything in high school, along with being deeper than undergrad math and requiring more originality than undergrad math homework assignments: https://web.evanchen.cc/faq-school.html#S-9

The vast majority of jobs and college majors have nothing to do with the Olympiad math.

True but we’re talking about elite jobs and abilities. Olympiad math may not be used in anything directly but it is, to a very large extent, an indication of raw talent.

This is essentially the same argument on any competition including sports.

Lol, not it is not.

Too bad— and most AI models can reach IMO-level performance. Would you call that raw talent too?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why can't students study and get evaluated "properly"? Why is it called "grind"? It is called learning and evaluating.

Not everyone deserves a trophy. Studying or get out of the school to do something more meaningful to your life.

Deflationary curves and rampant to now professional cheating at the top killing the curve can make it very demoralizing. If schools dealt with that dynamic then it would be different.

The issue is academics have different priorities. Grades mean nearly nothing in graduate admissions- you just need to pass around a 3.5-3.7 minimum and after it’s all about recommendations and your publication/research history. Jobs used to not care about grades but they’ve turned a leaf where they want colleges to do their job in discriminating who is and is not their version of competent.

Yike. Thought STEM professions are all skills based. Why would employers check grades?

For my student, in STEM, without a doubt his near perfect grades propelled him upward in graduation school options. Research, academic jobs on campus, and recs were good, but I believe grades in a very tough major pushed him over the top.

Thank you for the insight.
My kid is definitely capable of handling a rigorous curriculum at any college, but I’m hesitant about suggesting the highly grind-focused schools like the ones mentioned here. I don’t think it makes sense to devote so much time exclusively to academics that it comes at the expense of other important areas of development, such as soft skills.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't think of Princeton as having a grind reputation.

STEM is a grind at Princeton

Princeton is at an academic crossroad. They want to admit more FGLI (it's now the #1 institutional priority as they have more money than god and legacy preference is gradually diminishing), but FGLI often have lower preparedness and were admitted TO. TO ends at P this year so it will be interesting

Couldn’t Princeton just lower the academic expectations for FGLI admits, but keep everything the same for the rest of the students?

Ha! Trust me, it is not just FGLI kids who struggle. Many, many kids from top privates, top magnets, legacy kids, etc. have a hard time at Princeton, especially first year. You deal with it, go into easier majors, get academic support, deal with the grade deflation and hope grad schools will give you the Princeton pass when evaluating you against a Harvard gentleman's B.

Or schools can admit the right students to begin with.

You’re assuming it’s really simple to admit the “right” students in the first place. I’m guessing you mean using stats like SAT. The problem is, some kids will grind for years to get their score up. Let’s say we’re talking about a really rigorous college with a higher SAT bar. If it requires years of studying to get a 1550+ for one student, and a few weeks of studying for another student, how is a college supposed to tell these two apart? And how is that first student going to keep up with the second student once in college and under pressure to keep up in the same classes under similar time constraints?

I never mentioned the SAT—that’s your assumption. If some people enjoy studying endlessly or tiger parents have no clue what competence means, that’s their decision. Identifying the right fit is schools' responsibility if they request such a high tuition. If other merit-based institutions—many of them globally ranked—can successfully select the right candidates, why can’t we? If University of Cambridge can nurture talent like Demis Hassabis, why aren’t we able to do the same?

American and UK universities both have a track record of nurturing immense talent. They both also have a record of students who fail to thrive. It’s hard to predict sometimes based on the high school record, and there is no crystal ball. But it’s partly the responsibility of the parents and students to find a good match as well. Don’t just go to a place for prestige. The OP is absolutely right in thinking that just because you can get into a high rigor school doesn’t mean it’s the best decision for you.

There are some reliable predictors.

The SATs are a good predictor but they are not reliable on their own.
GPA at high rigor high schools combined with SAT scores are much better predictor.
Add in a USAMO/USAJMO (possibly even AIME) qualification or other science Olympiad qualification and you can pretty reliably predict positive academic outcomes.

I wouldn't consider math competitions. If that's the case AI should go to college not your kids.

I hope you are being facetious or snarky. The Math Olympiads are still a benchmark for the latest AI models, which cost billions in capex to set up and train. Even the bleeding edge ones need millions of tokens, long chains-of-thought and test time compute and not insignificant human interaction to approach gold medal level performance after running for hours (wall clock and not CPU/GPU time). High schoolers have to solve these in roughly 1.5h per problem.

There are about 250 high schoolers in the US that qualify for USAMO (which arguably is at least as difficult if not more than the IMO) and about 150 or so get honorable mentions or medals. Most of these could medal in IMO as well (were it not for the super-high competitiveness of the US IMO selection process).

So, while college success (or in academia) does not require one to be good at Olympiad level math, being good at them is a good indicator of college success.

Sure—except most people in these competitions aren’t participating purely out of a love for math. Many are using them as stepping stones to firms like Jane Street or Citadel. For them, it’s more about strategic positioning than genuine curiosity—competition is for racehorses. Solving problems quickly isn’t what drives humanity forward; deep, original thinking does.

In engineering fields, a solid command of calculus is a reliable indicator that a student can handle the rigor of college-level work. For liberal arts, however, qualities like critical thinking and creativity are far harder to quantify—and as an engineer, that’s outside my area of expertise.

Olympiad math is far deeper and far more original than anything in high school, along with being deeper than undergrad math and requiring more originality than undergrad math homework assignments: https://web.evanchen.cc/faq-school.html#S-9

The vast majority of jobs and college majors have nothing to do with the Olympiad math.

True but we’re talking about elite jobs and abilities. Olympiad math may not be used in anything directly but it is, to a very large extent, an indication of raw talent.

This is essentially the same argument on any competition including sports.

Lol, not it is not.

Too bad— and most AI models can reach IMO-level performance. Would you call that raw talent too?

Telling me you’re low iq without telling you’re low iq.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't think of Princeton as having a grind reputation.

STEM is a grind at Princeton

Princeton is at an academic crossroad. They want to admit more FGLI (it's now the #1 institutional priority as they have more money than god and legacy preference is gradually diminishing), but FGLI often have lower preparedness and were admitted TO. TO ends at P this year so it will be interesting

Couldn’t Princeton just lower the academic expectations for FGLI admits, but keep everything the same for the rest of the students?

Ha! Trust me, it is not just FGLI kids who struggle. Many, many kids from top privates, top magnets, legacy kids, etc. have a hard time at Princeton, especially first year. You deal with it, go into easier majors, get academic support, deal with the grade deflation and hope grad schools will give you the Princeton pass when evaluating you against a Harvard gentleman's B.

Or schools can admit the right students to begin with.

You’re assuming it’s really simple to admit the “right” students in the first place. I’m guessing you mean using stats like SAT. The problem is, some kids will grind for years to get their score up. Let’s say we’re talking about a really rigorous college with a higher SAT bar. If it requires years of studying to get a 1550+ for one student, and a few weeks of studying for another student, how is a college supposed to tell these two apart? And how is that first student going to keep up with the second student once in college and under pressure to keep up in the same classes under similar time constraints?

I never mentioned the SAT—that’s your assumption. If some people enjoy studying endlessly or tiger parents have no clue what competence means, that’s their decision. Identifying the right fit is schools' responsibility if they request such a high tuition. If other merit-based institutions—many of them globally ranked—can successfully select the right candidates, why can’t we? If University of Cambridge can nurture talent like Demis Hassabis, why aren’t we able to do the same?

American and UK universities both have a track record of nurturing immense talent. They both also have a record of students who fail to thrive. It’s hard to predict sometimes based on the high school record, and there is no crystal ball. But it’s partly the responsibility of the parents and students to find a good match as well. Don’t just go to a place for prestige. The OP is absolutely right in thinking that just because you can get into a high rigor school doesn’t mean it’s the best decision for you.

There are some reliable predictors.

The SATs are a good predictor but they are not reliable on their own.
GPA at high rigor high schools combined with SAT scores are much better predictor.
Add in a USAMO/USAJMO (possibly even AIME) qualification or other science Olympiad qualification and you can pretty reliably predict positive academic outcomes.

I wouldn't consider math competitions. If that's the case AI should go to college not your kids.

I hope you are being facetious or snarky. The Math Olympiads are still a benchmark for the latest AI models, which cost billions in capex to set up and train. Even the bleeding edge ones need millions of tokens, long chains-of-thought and test time compute and not insignificant human interaction to approach gold medal level performance after running for hours (wall clock and not CPU/GPU time). High schoolers have to solve these in roughly 1.5h per problem.

There are about 250 high schoolers in the US that qualify for USAMO (which arguably is at least as difficult if not more than the IMO) and about 150 or so get honorable mentions or medals. Most of these could medal in IMO as well (were it not for the super-high competitiveness of the US IMO selection process).

So, while college success (or in academia) does not require one to be good at Olympiad level math, being good at them is a good indicator of college success.

Sure—except most people in these competitions aren’t participating purely out of a love for math. Many are using them as stepping stones to firms like Jane Street or Citadel. For them, it’s more about strategic positioning than genuine curiosity—competition is for racehorses. Solving problems quickly isn’t what drives humanity forward; deep, original thinking does.

In engineering fields, a solid command of calculus is a reliable indicator that a student can handle the rigor of college-level work. For liberal arts, however, qualities like critical thinking and creativity are far harder to quantify—and as an engineer, that’s outside my area of expertise.

Olympiad math is far deeper and far more original than anything in high school, along with being deeper than undergrad math and requiring more originality than undergrad math homework assignments: https://web.evanchen.cc/faq-school.html#S-9

The vast majority of jobs and college majors have nothing to do with the Olympiad math.

True but we’re talking about elite jobs and abilities. Olympiad math may not be used in anything directly but it is, to a very large extent, an indication of raw talent.

This is essentially the same argument on any competition including sports.

Lol, not it is not.

Too bad— and most AI models can reach IMO-level performance. Would you call that raw talent too?

Telling me you’re low iq without telling you’re low iq.

Resorting to attacks after runs out of arguments — a pattern from certain culture.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Recently heard from a friend their sophomore DC at Chicago finds the work more manageable than feared (was expecting where fun goes to die), and read on here schools on the title no longer have grade deflation. Is this true? College counselors and private consultants (the 2 we have talked to so small sample size) seem to still think these are grind schools where too many students graduate with low GPAs.

Anyone with with DCs at these schools now with real-life recent experience and not just recycling hearsays?

Every one of them has a median Gpa of 3.65 -3.8, similar to the rest of the ivies and T10 besides Harvard and Duke which inflate (3.9,3,85 median). All of these schools require a lot of work to get above the median, with certain concentrations/majors requiring many more hours than others. That is life. It hardly makes the named universities any grindier than the rest of their peer schools.

How would you know if you didn’t attend every one of these schools? Speculation. Hearsay.

Grade inflation or not. A kid at one of the named schools still needs to put in a lot more effort to get the same gpa.

A kid at one of those schools needs to put in more effort than one at UVA but a kid at those schools does not have to put in more effort than other ivies or MIT or stanford. The peer groups are the same as far as talent and competition to be able to be top half. One could argue MIT is a notch harder than any of them.

False. At grinder schools, the norm is study 24/7. Whether or not the peer groups are similar in terms of raw talent, the competition is different when students study all the time vs have a work life balance.