I didn't go to Harvard and I'll freely admit that when I come across Harvard people, they are as a general pool, stunningly impressive in whatever discipline they are in.
What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
141–150 of 206 posts
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#142Harvard'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.
It could also be at least partly related to higher selectivity and more financial aid, and/or rich parents, that make school easier. But I dont actually know what goes on in ivy and off ivy league elite schools. Also consider that these may just be better run schools which also provide more and more useful assistance to students. Edit: I would like to add I think this article title is extremely clickbaity, and plays…
One of the issues I think is that people no longer are making a distinction between opinion pieces (which this is) and articles. They're only looking at the domain name. Given that you describe it as an article, might you have done the same? (This isn't meant as a slight. We all have overlooked things at one time or another.) I'm not sure how to rectify this. To their credit, the publications still label them as such. Perhaps the labels should be larger.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#143Harvard'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.
CMU: 88.1%
High. EPFL: 55% (http://sae.epfl.ch/echec-statistiques).
[I've never heard any very good arguments for either high or low pass rates]
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a graduate student at Harvard for five years (two Masters degrees), and the article is spot-on. Grade inflation was a big topic while I was there (some prof had written an editorial blaming it on affirmative action), and everything she said resonated with me. In fact, your comment is so clueless and un-self-aware, I'm kinda shocked that someone with your apparent bio could have written it. That you did pretty p…
These schools are big places, so it's not all that surprising different people have different experiences. What department, out of curiosity? I had experience in molecular biology and computer science at Harvard and mol bio at Princeton. (But yes, I saw zero of this in any of those places)
Lol, I'm so sorry, this is unkind and very possibly inaccurate, but I read your "what department" question like this:
"Where were you on the internal Harvard hierarchy that we both know is incredibly important to Harvard folks, but that the outside world generally knows nothing about. I need to know where you were on the status ladder so I can decide how much of your comment, like the article author's (she's on the lower side of the middle of the ladder) is sour grapes from someone who hit a velvet rope inside the club and is bitter about it."
Like I said, this is probably deeply unfair, and if it is then my apologies, but after spending five years there I can't help but parse it this way.
FWIW I was at the Div school, which is near the bottom, so we're all keenly aware of these issues because the lower you are on any hierarchy the more that hierarchy and your place in it defines your experience of the whole. It's only the folks on top who can afford to be ignorant of the kinds of issues that everyone below them has to carefully navigate.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#145I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to…
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…
The school where I studied CS as an undergrad didn't even have grades. It was all about the narrative evaluation, which considered only things the student actually accomplished or learned. So a typical narrative evaluation in the sciences would have a sentence for each of the course topics that a student demonstrated some knowledge of somehow at any point in the course, like a discrete math course might have "He showed an excellent understanding of number theory proofs in the coursework and final exam."
If you really screwed it up, your evaluation wouldn't say anything bad, but it would be damned with faint praise and they could reduce your academic credits.
Overall it's a much higher resolution picture of a student's education. I transferred from a school with traditional grades and I prefer the narrative system. It really stressed out a lot of students who were too indoctrinated in the traditional game process of getting the right number of points for their target grade; some of them never quite figured out that they should just focus on actually learning the subject.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
In academic circles, yes. Socially, not so much. A huge portion of the middle class in the UK went to Oxford or Cambridge. Something like 25% of Etonians get into Oxford or Cambridge. For the Westminster school that number is something like 45%. Harvard does not have that same grip on the corresponding class stratum in the US, but Harvard also has far fewer undergraduates than Oxford or Cambridge and the US is a much…
A huge portion of the UK's middle class cannot have gone to Oxbridge, simply because they're too small. They take 3000 people each or together 0.01% of the UK's population each year.
But what portion of the 17-19 year olds of the UK do they admit every year? I think it's around 3%. That means Oxbridge is guaranteed to have educated a greater portion of the UK's middle class than went to the US's HYP, also ran Ivy League schools, MIT, Stanford and CalTech. One thirtieth of the US population does not attend a super elite school.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#147The 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.
As an american, yes. I'd say Harvard and Yale are much more prestigious than oxford or cambridge. Most americans don't even know what oxford or cambridge is.
It's also been my experience that most chinese/asians prefer harvard/yale/ivy league and of course our top engineering schools ( MIT/Cal Tech/etc ). Stanford and Carnegie Mellon also seem to be very desired by chinese/asian students as well due to prominence of technology.
Are you european? If so what's the reputation of harvard/yale in europe vis a vis oxford/cambridge and other european colleges?
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#148Harvard'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 just remember the difference between Stanford 30 years ago and San Jose State.
At Stanford students that were failing a class or getting a grade that was too low would just drop it and retake it the next semester. At San Jose State you couldn't drop a class after the first two days. Stanford you could retake a class for a higher grade. SJSU, you could retake a class if the grade was lower than a C. But they'd average the two grades.
San Jose States Engineering department also graded on a curve, no exceptions. Only 5-8 people out of a class of 30 was going to get an A.
Also at San Jose State if your grades dropped too low you didn't get put on academic probation, you were gone.
Not just picking on Stanford, I've heard similar reports from people that went to other high ranked schools.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#149I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to…
What a scam it all is. How tragic that you TAs are apparently complicit. Edit: Thanks for the downvote but giving higher grades because it's more convenient than doing the right thing is... the wrong thing. Painful that at some point it felt like your (and many others') best choice but it was still wrong flat out. Hey maybe now you can "change the system from the inside!"
Some additional questions after your edit:
1. How does one define the "wrong thing"? Genuine question.
2. What about soft grading makes it a scam? Since letter grades are distinctly not criterion referenced, I struggle to see a strong justification for this claim. Please help me understand.
3. What makes you think that anyone in the system wants it changed? I humbly suggest that very few people actually do -- the current system is super-low friction and allows professors to work on the things that they are actually evaluated on.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#150Earlier 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…
Really? Spreading grades out among various assignments and tests is how I managed to pass university (I coincidentally also attended the University of Calgary, hi rdlecler1!). I would have imploded if it all came down to a single giant exam. Why the heck would you want academic achievement to come down to a handful of hours of actual performance? What goal does that serve? University isn't the Olympics.
Why, preparing for an interview.