Hopkins, Princeton, Cornell, Carnegie mellon...are the "grind" reputation real or outdated?

[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.

Agree, very very hard to quantify. Perhaps some of these competitions like bio or chem olympiads may signal that you would ace the MCAT and do well in medical school. But when it comes to basic science, I cannot think of a simple signal for research potential. For example, I think the ISEF competition is a poor signal of scientific promise. I have nothing against it--it's a nice activity and a good way for kids to get some exposure to research. It is an especially good motivator to beef up your presentation and scientific communication skills. But not everyone has the means to participate, and I hardly think doing well means you have more promise than someone who didn't do well, or someone who didn't even participate. I wish we could measure genuine curiosity, creativity, and passion, but we can't.

Out of the box thinking and "stick-to-it-iveness" (i.e. persistence) are about the only predictors, but are hard to measure.

[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: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.

That's moving the goalposts by a lot. The point was whether Olympiads are a good predictor of college success, more so than SAT. And objectively that is correct. Whether the xMO kids do it for strategic positioning for quant jobs is not relevant. And there are reliable studies that show that IMO medalists end up publishing more impactful research than the non-medalist/non-IMO counterparts. Also, if you have met these kids, they are well beyond calculus in 9th/10th grades so they can handle the rigor.

And yes, calculus errors can cause a bridge to collapse but then again mucking up volatility in Black-Scholes can lead to the LTCM crash. Rigor is required in both aspects.

I don’t need to meet those. Plenty of them are probably sitting in FAANG offices, working on automating white-collar jobs or optimizing ad revenue.

And if someone believes they’re a mathematical prodigy, why bother with college at all? You don’t need an IMO medal to learn options trading or writing AI models. If that’s the ultimate goal, they can skip college and go straight into quant roles or private equity. Like the genius kid left SpaceX for Citadel.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Over 95% of all colleges are test optional, and we are talking about math competitions now? If we can’t even agree on the most reliable predictor, how is it realistic to use a ultra niche one?

The discussion started with the "grind" colleges (Hopkins, Princeton, CMU...) Hardly the 95% of colleges. And most of the "grindy" majors end up attracting these Olympiad kids (at least at CMU/MIT....)

[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: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.

That's moving the goalposts by a lot. The point was whether Olympiads are a good predictor of college success, more so than SAT. And objectively that is correct. Whether the xMO kids do it for strategic positioning for quant jobs is not relevant. And there are reliable studies that show that IMO medalists end up publishing more impactful research than the non-medalist/non-IMO counterparts. Also, if you have met these kids, they are well beyond calculus in 9th/10th grades so they can handle the rigor.

And yes, calculus errors can cause a bridge to collapse but then again mucking up volatility in Black-Scholes can lead to the LTCM crash. Rigor is required in both aspects.

DP. If all you mean is, "my kid is an olympiad winner or semifinalist, therefore I can reasonably predict they will be able to succeed at a high rigor school without too much stress," then I agree with you. But I don't think kids should participate in these just in order to get into these schools. Nor would I want to discourage the kids who didn't succeed or participate in these from going to such schools because they are not the only indicator.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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

STEM is a grind at Princeton

STEM is a grind anywhere.

John Nash’s department.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Over 95% of all colleges are test optional, and we are talking about math competitions now? If we can’t even agree on the most reliable predictor, how is it realistic to use a ultra niche one?

The discussion started with the "grind" colleges (Hopkins, Princeton, CMU...) Hardly the 95% of colleges. And most of the "grindy" majors end up attracting these Olympiad kids (at least at CMU/MIT....)

WHUT? Even at MIT CMU, Olympiad kids are absolutely a small minority. WTF are you talking about. You are an idiot!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Over 95% of all colleges are test optional, and we are talking about math competitions now? If we can’t even agree on the most reliable predictor, how is it realistic to use a ultra niche one?

The discussion started with the "grind" colleges (Hopkins, Princeton, CMU...) Hardly the 95% of colleges. And most of the "grindy" majors end up attracting these Olympiad kids (at least at CMU/MIT....)

WHUT? Even at MIT CMU, Olympiad kids are absolutely a small minority. WTF are you talking about. You are an idiot!

Let me explain it to you slowly, since you are slow -- I said that a majority of the Olympiad kids end up at these schools. Of course they are in the minority there. There are only a few 100 such kids and the total number of undergrads (STEM or otherwise) is in the thousands.

[Anonymous]

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.

Completely out of date. Ask anyone who is a professor involved in admissions.
For PhD, anywhere in the Top-30 for that department/field, 3.7 is the general floor to be considered as a US student coming out of undergrad. Internationals do not have the same inflation, lower GPAs are expected and fine.
For Top 10 programs you'd better have a 3.85+, and the research and recs, unless you have one-in -1000 type research or from a very competitive undergrad (ivy, MIT, stanford, CMU), then 3.75-8 could be the floor with the right background.
Masters programs in stem often take 3.5+ but NOT the top ones or ones that have partial funding--those reject 3.7-8 all the time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Over 95% of all colleges are test optional, and we are talking about math competitions now? If we can’t even agree on the most reliable predictor, how is it realistic to use a ultra niche one?

The discussion started with the "grind" colleges (Hopkins, Princeton, CMU...) Hardly the 95% of colleges. And most of the "grindy" majors end up attracting these Olympiad kids (at least at CMU/MIT....)

WHUT? Even at MIT CMU, Olympiad kids are absolutely a small minority. WTF are you talking about. You are an idiot!

Let me explain it to you slowly, since you are slow -- I said that a majority of the Olympiad kids end up at these schools. Of course they are in the minority there. There are only a few 100 such kids and the total number of undergrads (STEM or otherwise) is in the thousands.

That’s a stupid response. You admits they are absolute minority, yet you propose using that as a criteria for screening applicants. Did you see how stupid that is?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Over 95% of all colleges are test optional, and we are talking about math competitions now? If we can’t even agree on the most reliable predictor, how is it realistic to use a ultra niche one?

The discussion started with the "grind" colleges (Hopkins, Princeton, CMU...) Hardly the 95% of colleges. And most of the "grindy" majors end up attracting these Olympiad kids (at least at CMU/MIT....)

WHUT? Even at MIT CMU, Olympiad kids are absolutely a small minority. WTF are you talking about. You are an idiot!

Let me explain it to you slowly, since you are slow -- I said that a majority of the Olympiad kids end up at these schools. Of course they are in the minority there. There are only a few 100 such kids and the total number of undergrads (STEM or otherwise) is in the thousands.

That’s a stupid response. You admits they are absolute minority, yet you propose using that as a criteria for screening applicants. Did you see how stupid that is?

Who said anything about screening based on Olympiad performance? All I pointed out was that Olympiad problems are hard (AI struggles to solve it), so it should (and does) predict college success to a reasonable extent, more than SAT (at least in the STEM fields). And many if not the majority of these Olympiad kids end up in these "grindy" colleges (their choice).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Over 95% of all colleges are test optional, and we are talking about math competitions now? If we can’t even agree on the most reliable predictor, how is it realistic to use a ultra niche one?

The discussion started with the "grind" colleges (Hopkins, Princeton, CMU...) Hardly the 95% of colleges. And most of the "grindy" majors end up attracting these Olympiad kids (at least at CMU/MIT....)

WHUT? Even at MIT CMU, Olympiad kids are absolutely a small minority. WTF are you talking about. You are an idiot!

Let me explain it to you slowly, since you are slow -- I said that a majority of the Olympiad kids end up at these schools. Of course they are in the minority there. There are only a few 100 such kids and the total number of undergrads (STEM or otherwise) is in the thousands.

That’s a stupid response. You admits they are absolute minority, yet you propose using that as a criteria for screening applicants. Did you see how stupid that is?

Who said anything about screening based on Olympiad performance? All I pointed out was that Olympiad problems are hard (AI struggles to solve it), so it should (and does) predict college success to a reasonable extent, more than SAT (at least in the STEM fields). And many if not the majority of these Olympiad kids end up in these "grindy" colleges (their choice).

Ok, Ashley. You are pointing to about 100 kids and stating the obvious. Thank you for your contribution to the discussion. Meaningless though.

Also, instant response is not required nor expected. Find something better to do in real life.

[Anonymous]

Grades matter in grad/phd admissions. Kids gotta passed the PhD qualifying exams to continue and the exam is different from school/program. Mine had written exam covering all the core engineering undergrad classes followed my an oral exam. Undergrad grades matter. Generally good engineering schools are grade deflation because it is graded on a curve where only about 20% get As.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Grades matter in grad/phd admissions. Kids gotta passed the PhD qualifying exams to continue and the exam is different from school/program. Mine had written exam covering all the core engineering undergrad classes followed my an oral exam. Undergrad grades matter. Generally good engineering schools are grade deflation because it is graded on a curve where only about 20% get As.

No, that’s backwards. Curves are used to boost the grades *up* from very low scores.

[Anonymous]

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?

Depends on the major. Biz econ or CS+math double major?

[Anonymous]

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.

Have you taken an in-person tour at a place like Caltech, MIT or CMU? The kids there tell you it's a ton of work, 10-12 hours x 7 days a week. Why are some parents so nervous about their kids' future employment prospects that that want them to start brutal job training 7 days a week for 4 years (or more) starting at age 18?

It's not even job training. It's partially work for the sake of work to separate the dream de la creme de la cremr from the creme de la creme, and partially grade school prep. Indeed, students often find themselves under prepared for industry relative to similarly talented peers at similarly prestigious non-grind schools.