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What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

washingtonpost.com

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Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#121

Post by WalterBright »

ebola1717 wrote: post #100
thomasahle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is when the grades given on assignments influence what goes on your final exam papers. At a university, only the final exam should count. This way you can give honest feedback, and the student doesn't feel obligated to point out every little mistake to try to make you change your decision. It also allows them to misunderstand things at first, but then 'get' it later. Of course universities don't like this…

My experience was that the top students (now PhD students at MIT, Stanford, etc) were very diligent about homework. In the honors classes, you often needed to go far above and beyond the textbook for some questions. The average students (still smart kids, many working at Google, Amazon, etc) were much more lax about it, and wouldn't work that hard to solve the hardest problems in a set.

What worked for me (Caltech) was to make sure I understood 100% of all the homework problems front to back, before going in to the exam.

Living in the dorms helped enormously with this, because I could usually find someone to help me with particular problems, and I sorely needed that help.

Anything less meant I was in deep doodoo on the exam :-) because that's the wrong time to try to figure out how to apply what was learned in lecture.

This was good enough to reliably get a B. To get an A, I had to work much harder and go beyond the homework.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#122

Post by [deleted] »

maksimum wrote: post #54
irrational wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.

Oxbridge have an average acceptance rate of 18% for undergrads. Harvard is 6%. Assuming similar applicant pools, many who got rejected by Harvard would have been accepted at Oxbridge. Obviously that's only one measure of prestige.

[deleted]

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#123

Post by kafkaesq »

The original title was way better. It may have sounded a bit splashy - it wasn't out of line with the overall narrative of the article.

And there's certainly no need to soft-peddle Harvard's moral and intellectual cowardice, as revealed in this episode.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#125

Post by bllguo »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #115
bllguo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strong counterargument. But I strongly believe homework shouldn't be graded. Incentives are completely misaligned; you're penalized for getting things wrong, when that's a natural result during the learning process. No surprise, then, when cheating becomes a major problem. I personally found doing problem sets and being able to check my answers immediately to be the best way to learn. There's no point to jus…

Except when it comes to writing programs, the homework is the only thing that even remotely demonstrates your utility to an employer. I would go as far as to say that exams should not count, only homework should.

What? What employer has ever looked at a potential hire's homework?

If you don't grade exams but grade homework, then homework just becomes a take-home exam...

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#126

Post by buchanaf »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #117
buchanaf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I didn't go to an Ivy, that's clearly not true. Do you honestly think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Goldman, law schools, medical schools, etc., are going to accept you if you have poor grades? Not everyone can count on "daddy".

Yes, at least for the tech companies. Grades are irrelevant at FB/MS/Google.

Again, I have no anecdotal experience, but I have a hard time believing that the new hires for those 3 companies are anything but students from top-tier colleges with near perfect grades. To be fair, I'm sure a couple of years of work experience and they probably don't care as much.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#127

Post by alva »

irrational wrote: post #14
NumberSix wrote: post #9

The article ends with: It’s a system that polishes privilege, its byproduct a contempt for earned authority. Many of the people who started with this attitude had it ratified and encouraged by perhaps the most prestigious university in the world — and now they’re running the whole show. Emphasis on now added. Who in their right mind thinks people who attend Harvard and a handful of other elite universities and prep s…

Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.

The UK educates more world leaders than the US, which is impressive considering the difference in size. Although this of course could simply be down to prestige rather than quality of education. This sort of challenging of grades would almost never be accept in the UK however!

http://www.hepi.ac.uk/2017/08/05/uk-just-number-1-educating-...

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#128

Post by WalterBright »

Animats wrote: post #25

Harvard's graduation rate is 97.5%. Yale 97%. Princeton 96.9%. It's hard to flunk out of the Ivy League. Non Ivy League highly selective schools: Caltech 92.3%. Stanford 93%. MIT 92.2%. UC Berkeley: 90.9%. Low 90% success rate is normal there.

I wonder how they're measuring it. I attended Caltech in the 70s, and the percent who entered as freshman and graduated as seniors was much lower. You could see it just in the number of students at each level, it declined every year.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#129

Post by [deleted] »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #105
wutbrodo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantifying prestige and definitively ranking the three is beyond me, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Harvard was considered more prestigious, in large part because it balances (reputationally speaking) "new-world dynamism" and "old-world prestige" better than Oxbridge does. The latter without the former has connotations of sclerotic inefficiency.

I think this "new-world dynamism" but might actually count against US schools if it makes them seem non-rigorous. Oxbridge teachers I've met are rigorous (in terms of their expections of students, not their own methods). Regarding the US, I can only offer how I came by my own priors in family that in traditional subcontinental style is always on the lookout for prestegious schools. I learned at my father's knee that…

[deleted]

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#130

Post by csa »

buchanaf wrote: post #120
csa wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you flunked your way through Harvard, that's going to be difficult. Not really. Maybe "flunking your way through" would be awkward, but these folks know the easy majors. See Government at Harvard. See W's surreal academic career for an example of a well-connected but relatively unintelligent person get a Yale undergrad degree and a Harvard MBA.

Yes, people like George W. Bush, who are in the top .00000001% of privilege, don't need to do well before college, in college, after college, or even as a state or country's highest elected official. However, for most of the mere mortals at Yale and Harvard, they still have to compete with the every other college graduate, and some of those other college graduates are pretty smart themselves.

The context of the discussion was a highly connected person who will inherit their dad's investment bank -- the "elite and priveleged" mentioned in 'ryandrake's initial reply. W falls into this category, and I wouldn't say that privilege of that kind is quite as rare at elite schools as you make it out to be (~5-10% of the student body?). W might be an extreme example, ditto with "inherit an investment bank", but privilege is not hard to find at elite schools.
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