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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m shocked at how many people on here seem to think that only the best and brightest can succeed at top schools. It may be true that kids need to be that to get into those schools, but most people who have been to one admit that it’s not that hard to get good grades there. [/quote]

I don't get this, either. Have college curricula changed much during the past decade?

I was in a PhD program at Harvard and TA-ing many classes. The idea that these classes are so unbelievably hard that 99.9 percentile kids are struggling to keep up sounds insane to me. It was really not that hard. The kids were smart (especially premeds) but not once in a lifetime geniuses. If you came to classes, read the textbook, did the practice problems, you got an A. A+ was another story, and that was difficult.

[/quote]

I can sort of believe that because Harvard has been grade inflated for a long time. But most of those undergrads were probably easily scoring 99th percentile on their SATs though, and a 90th percentile kid would be more unusual. Perhaps this is why they found the courses easy. Moreover, 99.9th percentile is just 1/1000 kids, very smart, and probably more typical of MIT undergrads. This is not the definition of a once in a lifetime genius. [/quote]

Also I went to Hopkins and had to really bust my rear in a lot of classes in order to get an A or A-, and I had a 99th percentile on the SATs without much prep. [/quote]

Ok. But are these 99.99 percentilers not studying? Are they just walking into, say, biology finals knowing everything already?

I never said that, in my time, students at Harvard didn't need to study to get an A. I said - if you do this, this and that... and doing all that takes some time, even if you are very smart. Maybe 99.99 takes less time than 99.9, depending on the subject. But it's still doable. You are in college, you are supposed to spend time studying. This is not "struggling".

Struggling is when you study all day long and there is no result. From my experience, there were few Harvard students that were like that.[/quote]

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