Reply to Hopkins, Princeton, Cornell, Carnegie mellon...are the "grind" reputation real or outdated?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't think of Princeton as having a grind reputation.[/quote]

STEM is a grind at Princeton[/quote]

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  [/quote]

Couldn’t Princeton just lower the academic expectations for FGLI admits, but keep everything the same for the rest of the students? [/quote]
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, [b]go into easier majors, get academic support[/b], deal with the grade deflation and hope grad schools will give you the Princeton pass when evaluating you against a Harvard gentleman's B. [/quote]

Or schools can admit the right students to begin with.[/quote]

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?[/quote]

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?

[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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

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. [/quote]

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.
[/quote]

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 [b]there are reliable studies that show that IMO medalists end up publishing more impactful research[/b] 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.

[/quote]

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.
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