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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=dcmom12345]Update: 
Socially everything has gotten better and I fee DD is enjoying the city but academics have even gotten a little worse which is adding more stress(multiple phone calls home crying over exams and homework). Thinking about switching major(wants to ensure ad least a 3.0 gpa) but she has never enjoyed the humanities before and is a little sad about "losing math". [/quote]

My impression from this thread is that your daughter is starting to like Columbia, has an IQ of 150 or the equivalent, was never challenged at all in grade school or high school, and now is in classes designed to challenge kids with IQs of about 165 or the equivalent, is passing everything, is getting some C’s and is getting a lot of B minuses.

If that’s correct, I think she should just stay at Columbia, get tutoring, take a lot of economics electives and learn to swim with the sharks.

Reasoning:

- The people here who expect all kids in T30 STEM majors to get GPAs over 3.5 every year are ignorant idiots who should be trampled to death by elephants. Or drowned in ponds. They have no idea what it’s like to have an IQ of 150 and suddenly be in a room where a third of the students have IQs of 165. It takes some time for a normal, very bright kid to get used to studying with a bunch of baby Stephen Hawkings.

- Learning how to deal with academic challenges is incredibly important for people with IQs of 150. People with IQs of 150 can do anything if they learn how to learn, but they’re pretty much as unemployable as semiliterate high school dropouts if they don’t learn how to apply themselves and cope with the boredom involved with studying difficult things. Your daughter is now experiencing what most other kids have experienced since third grade. The whole point of paying Columbia so much money is to put your daughter in the first place she’s ever been where learning is as hard for her as sixth grade was for most of her classmates.

- Chances are the professors are hazing the students to some extent and trying to weed out a lot of premeds and pre-engineers. Getting higher grades will probably get a lot easier for your daughter once the weeding out is over and your daughter understands how college works.

- STEM professors tend to be much harsher about grading than humanities majors are. If your daughter has a 2.5 GPA now, that’s probably the equivalent of a 3.5 GPA for a humanities major. Any sensible grad school admissions people who  see many applications from Columbia grads will know that your daughter is a victim of grade deflation.

- Hanging out in classrooms full of baby Hawkings may be terrifying, but it’s also amazing. If your daughter can pass classes, why give that up?

- She can probably double major in economics, or take a lot of economics electives if Columbia doesn’t have formal double majors. Then, after she gets her bachelor’s, she can go to grad school for economics, data science, finance or actuarial science and change from being an ugly math-physics duckling into being a beautiful quantitative finance swan. She won’t get the privilege of slaving away as an academic for decades, but she will go be a quant for ungodly amounts of money at Goldman Sachs or the like. She’ll have a terrific quality of life, and no one will care what grades she got freshman year at Columbia. [/quote]

Has the IQ scale changed?  I thought 140 was genius level back in the day.

So what is someone now classified with a 165?[/quote]

My thoughts too, exactly. 165 is nuts. But I do appreciate the points made in the post overall. Maybe compare 125 to 140 or 145.[/quote]
Keep going down. Most kids at these schools are 120 IQ types; they just work hard and have had all the educational privileges to be had growing up. Makes sense, because 120 IQ types tend to be more successful than 140+ types. Once you get way higher on the scale, you have kids who march to the beat of their own drum or don’t have a work ethic. For that reason, would not at all be surprised if you numerically found more true geniuses at a large, mid-tier state flagships than, say, Columbia.[/quote]

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