Did your child find college to be more academically challenging than high school?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
Agreed, top 10 is also a thing and it refers to the USNews top 10. But USNews top 3 or in general top 3 is not really a thing in elite college lingo. |
Anonymous
My DC has this quite often in pre-med classes. I think a lot depends on your major. Science classes have been pretty challenging, and I hear that about schools across the board. Same for engineering. |
Anonymous
+10000 from what i have heard. never heard much though about where Dartmouth falls re grade inflation. |
Anonymous
And God forbid a DCUM poster should fail/refuse to use “elite college lingo.” (Hey is “elite college lingo” “really a thing”?) |
Anonymous
| Went to a big name boarding school. College was by far easier. |
Anonymous
Is 3.9 at ivy so much harder to get compare to state u? For STEM field? |
Anonymous
Some universities require grading on a curve. This generally is only done in the sciences, though. Depending on the university, the "center" of the curve will be a "C" (traditional way) or a "B" (because otherwise you have a lot of students fail). |
Anonymous
Some majors are more interested in class rank than others. Pre-med majors are like this because medical school is like this. It's a way for graduate schools to figure out how well your daughter did in terms of everyone else in her class, not by some objective measure of amount of material learned. The best grad schools want the best students in the class; they figure they are all smart enough to learn the basics. This is very, very different from the grading system in grade school (or most university courses), where there is a certain amount of material to learn, or a certain number of points, and your grade is based on the percentage of that material you have learned. It is so different, that I think we ought to at least introduce STEM students to it in grade school even if we never actually grade them that way, because it blindsides a lot of freshmen. The closes we come in grade school is class rank, followed by the competition to get into colleges which are based on incremental achievement over other students, rather than some kind of absolute measure of "good enough." |
Anonymous
+2 must be UChicago parents or YP parents. ridiculous |
Anonymous
| Big 3 to known rigorous private college. From reports, very well prepared in terms of critical thinking, writing, research discipline and proofs. Thought Big 3 on an advanced path was challenging but reports that it pales in comparison with college in terms of rigor and pace. My observation though is that the challenge is really premised on what the student selects to do with their education. All the schools at this level have great academic resources. It's their own inclinations, the peer group influence and faculty advising that drives how aggressively the students pursue higher level coursework. |
Anonymous
Ha - this sounds exactly like me, 20 years ago. Also did private high school to selective STEM college (is there an HYP equivalent for STEM? MIT, Caltech, and maybe Harvey Mudd? Then I went to an MCH). The first year was rough, but I got it figured out somewhere in the 2nd year. My kids aren't there yet, but what I've observed from friends going off to college: the coursework is faster paced and more challenging, but the external competition and pressure is lower. Some kids are self-driven and that's fine, but there's no external force saying that you MUST get As instead of Bs or the world will end. In high school, it's all about GPA for college admittance. Once you're in, you just need to graduate - nobody ever asks you what your GPA was, or cares if you got a few Bs at Stanford. I guess this is different if you're planning on law school or something, though. |
Anonymous
| Also matters if you’re trying to land the plum summer internship or for your first job out of college. |
Anonymous
The college frenzy is over the top crazy but I don't know if I would say college life is quite that laid back. A kid's grades and classroom performance will affect how welcome they are in the better study groups, eligibility for clubs and programs, internship opportunities in addition to top graduate school admissions. And in a grade inflated school where A's are the norm, academic pressure is replaced by the need to distinguish oneself with ECs which is equally if not more challenging in its way. IMO competitiveness ratchets up and is much more complex to navigate. Remember as soon as they hit that college campus, their competition for where they may want to go next either attend elite schools or are top of class. That's assuming of course they care about being able to select among the widest possible options. |
Anonymous
| American colleges are not known to be academically demanding until graduate level. |
Anonymous
UChicago...please stop you re killing me ? it is most probably this one though; YP people say top ivy or HYP if they don't wanna be specific. |