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>If every student scored 99%, then 99% is now a C grade. See the logic? Selectivity is causative to difficulty in classes with a curve AND that is a quantitative inductive conclusion which is incredibly hard to counter with qualitative anecdotes.

No I don't. The center of the curve ('C') doesn't need to be calibrated around the median. 'F' can be chosen as the median, or you can choose an objective scale (this did happen) rather than a subjective curve. I've seen 'qualitative anecdotes' that the curve isn't centered around 'C' and I reject the notion this anecdote is impossible. I don't know why you can't understand the curve can be adjusted so like-performers across schools get a similar grade, resulting in higher GPAs at selective schools and lower GPAs (initially) at non-selective ones.

>I also don't know why you're bringing up ABET when we agreed it's trash and irrelevant.

Because you made a false assertion everyone couldn't be failed, when in fact at least in the institution it was REQUIRED that everyone be failed if everyone fails to meet ABET designated criteria. It supports that your claim is specious.

>Curves are different, so are the students going in. But when you look at the whole, by the law of large numbers (aka basic probability) a pattern emerges. Selective schools have smarter people and are therefore harder overall because of these curves. The generality is true despite exceptions that may exist. You can say on average, what I say is more likely to be true.

False. Again you depend on the fallacy the curves can't be calibrated around something like 'the average student fails and the course follows the difficulty of .' If I give an IQ test to a cohort to a group of lower intelligence people, the 'curve' looks bent and biased towards lower score. If I give it to people of upper intelligence, the curve 'looks' bent towards biased towards higher score. But in the end it is the curve that is objective across cohorts (schools), despite higher intelligence in one cohort ('school') than another. The difficulty is unchanged, even though selectivity is introduced.

>The top 10% indicates that the bottom 90% failed to perform at the level of the top 10%.

That only sets the ceiling. If the 'top 10%' have a 50% pass rate, that doesn't stop the bottom 90% from having a 49% one, well above your 25% threshold for 'anybody with a pulse.'

> Your assumption which imo is much more far fetched is stating that this correlation DOESN'T exist.

My assertion is that all we know is it's likely the top picks may tell us the ceiling for expection of the bottom, but not the floor. And it tells us little to nothing about how difficult the cirricula is, unless we compare to like-kind top picks at another cirriculum (which without selectivity, could be difficult to compare in practice.)

>You hold the standard too high, then nobody passes the course. A certain percentage has to pass, therefore, for a non-selective school the curve MUST be lowered for more people to pass. As I stated before, although there's no official rule stating that schools can't fail everyone, it's pretty stupid for a school to fail everyone. Bad for business and various other things.

> said two things that by induction leads to higher difficulty. Literally. Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has. THEREFORE difficulty increases. As I stated before this hinges on the correlation between performance before entering the university with actual performance at the university in an engineering curriculum. That's the basis of my thesis right there. It is unreasonable to deny that correlation.

Fallacious reasoning, the two schools could have the exact same cirricula, teacher, everything and merely different students and when graded against objective criteria, or appropriately calibrated (shifted down/up) shaped curves, they can have both equal difficulty and grade parity for performance. The university I went to is NOTORIOUS for having the least grade inflation, much lower than many 'selective' schools, which also helps fix the exact problem you are worried about.

>Thus by this logic a non-selective school MUST lower the bar or too many people will fail.

Not at all. They just didn't give a fuck. Engineering drop-out is their feeder program to the other programs; better to keep the rankings high to bait people in than make engineering easier resulting in lower rankings and lose the bait. Engineering drop-out commonly became successful engineering tech or even successful doctor, lawyer, etc via side-channeling of people who were baited into the university via engineering rankings. They would have happily failed out everyone from what I can tell, and if you didn't meet ABET designated objectives they were REQUIRED to fail you. You can't just wash this away with your vendetta not believing that this can be true -- I saw people with excellent performance fail merely for missing a single ABET criteria. Moreover recall at least one class where I believe the majority failed or dropped out, making the median an 'F' or 'D'. Apparently where you went, you implied the median was a 'C', so there's a difference already. This is a public school that couldn't give a flying fuck if most the undergrads failed out.

> Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has.

Having higher performers doesn't change the curriculum or necessary even the grading, it simply means those individuals may be better prepared to tackle equal difficulty found at both non-selective and selective schools. If I bring in the population at random to do 10 pull-ups each and seperately bring in a bunch of professional football players to do same, the difficulty is the same despite a massive change in selectivity.

>More people of the same level of talent out of this distribution make it through Georgia Tech than they do at my school.

I'm not terribly familiar with Georgia Tech or your school, and it's possible, I dare say probably even likely, your school was more challenging than both mine and Georgia Tech, but we can't say the delta in difficulty was BECAUSE of the selectivity. I'm guessing the university I attended didn't show up on your radar because you swapped us into the sciences (computer science) instead of engineering, and my university is not so remarkably ranked in computer science. In fact it would be impossible to gain a CS degree there without acceptance into an entirely different college of science (for which I have no basis for comparison).

> only top 10 CS school

I thought we were talking about engineering. I guess we can stop here. At the school I attended, CS is not engineering but rather science (which is in the name) so we don't even have a basis for comparison. It's a bit pedantic on face but it drastically changes everything to be in college of science instead of engineering from the bottom up where I went to university. Are you sure CS was in the college of engineering where you attended?

>Certainly there are exceptions aka Anomalies, but the generality is impossible not to be true. It's an axiom of probability. You could very well be a genius of unparalleled talent that came out of a non-selective program.

Having more qualified people attempt to complete the degree is not same as being more difficult. Moreover, attrition could be so high at the 'anybody with a pulse' institution that by the time junior year comes around the quality of cohort looks the same as at the selective school.

Like in all things, it's important not to end up on the maximalist end of the spectrum. Obviously an individual is not only the result of a certain social conditioning nor only an isolated madman, and that's not Arendt theory; but it's undisputable how even the leaders brought to extreme consequences certain societal instincts that were present. When you compare the qualities of Italian fascist leaders with German ones, for example, you can see the differences: while Italians were focused on heroism and individual excellence (as expoused by D'Annunzio, for example), Germans valued more order in all systems - which is why the holocaust was as effective as it was. That's because the societal views that shaped them were different.

That does not mean that society carries all responsibility for the actions of this or that person, of course, that's never the case. What the banality of evil tells us is that society contains the conceptual germs for behaviour that can turn atrocious, when brought to extreme lengths by this or that individual.

I can't give a full answer to your question without revealing things I don't want to put online. The best I can do is say I don't know. It's hard to judge what would have happened otherwise, what opportunities I might have pursued.

So, I answered as best I can. But even if, under yours or anyone's definition, we were better off, what does that say? An economic system or society (can't really full disentangle the two) where a family is either unable to survive or do more than barely survive unless their kids work in this way... That does not seem like a society optimized for for its own best outcomes as a whole or for many individuals either. I also don't have any magic answer that would fix things either, but acknowledging the problem is a necessary step along the way. Asking if my family was better off is just asking if a shitty situation would have been any shittier otherwise. I prefer to think we should work towards less shitty circumstances overall, and the entrenched systems aren't it.

> So taking the same test among the high IQ group getting a 95 gets you a C

This is the source of your confusion.

Your whole argument about the curve centers around the flawed and bizarre presumption that the curve has to center around a C. It doesn't always work that way, I don't think you understand some curves are different including the median score possibly being an 'F'. You're depending on some standardized curve, when in fact there's no requirement that be the case (and it often isn't). In the example with the footballers, every footballer gets an 'A' and with the random population the average gets an 'F' because the curves are compensated so that effectively there is an objective-like standard to maintain parity across like-performers.

>It's a probability distribution determined by scores from students. Nothing can be calibrated or adjusted here.

Of course something can be adjusted. you can make 'A' top 1%, B next 1%, C next 1%, D Next 1%, and fail the bottom 96% for instance. Not everyone has to grade to make sure most people pass, which apparently was the case at your selective school. At non-selective school the whole point is to fail every unfit person possible; it's even better for the school because engineering program was mostly bait to get these people into broader programs within the university.

You can go to the media, sue, or whatever. In my case it would look like this in the media "middle-class white man slightly less successful after being held to high standards" -- yeah that'll sell great! A few foreign students committed suicide after failing out of engineering paid for with their families 3rd world life savings and even then no one cares. Good luck telling the judge that you didn't like the grade the professor gave you. Maybe your selective school mostly filthy-rich people with money to waste on lawsuits tying up the courts with cases that are meritless but wear down the college enough that they eventually relent.

>You understand that curving a grade is based on average scores right

Your curve may have been based around C being average. I have seen 'curves' where the average was F or D. I have seen courses where there is no curve as well, and isntead an objective system. A non-selective school can introduce a 'curve' where like performers get the same grade as in a selective school.

> The curve makes sure that only a small percentage of people get an A and guarantees a percentage of people fail.

Yeah our 'curves' weren't always like that. They were adjusted to compensate for non-selection present in our program. I.e. all people may fail or in a group of top performers no one may fail.

>Selectivity influences difficulty. Period.

Tell yourself your deranged and confused lie over and over, and tell me more about how you don't understand how different schools may grade differently (to objectively obtain same grade results as 'selective' school) even while maintaining SAME difficulty with a selective school.

> I thought we were talking about CS

Programming isn't equal to CS. Did you even study engineering or CS? Even chemical engineers program. These are all basic concepts you've missed, it's really hard to believe you have any experience at all in ABET accredited engineering program.

>ABET requires it in name, but no institution does this.

Maybe your institution acted fraudulently, but I saw people fail or incomplete a class for failing to meet ABET requirements. You're simply lying on this point to support your pathological obsession with denying selectivity does not confer difficulty.

>So they fail everyone in the class and the angry students take their outrage to the media? Then the parents come in and start a lawsuit which leads to a PR nightmare. Less students join the next year because nobody wants to be part of a school that failed an entire class.

No they fail almost everyone, the engineering rankings go up even further because any survivors are more impressive, and the rest filter into different programs. Everyone wins when almost everyone fails. The school uses engineering program as bait to draw people into other programs as much as anything. Failing almost everyone out is a win-win because it strengthens the bait and feeds money into other programs to broaden the school.

> The test is harder among the high IQ group. This is definitive man.

You have no understanding of an IQ test. It's meant to provide an objective outcome so that no matter the subset in a group taking the test, the measurement of the individual is the same. Taking the test with a group of fellow high-performers doesn't give you a lower IQ score. It's not harder no matter how selective you make the group taking the test. Universities can provide like feedback in grading. back to the analogy, the IQ score is the grade, get it?

>Selectivity influences difficulty. Period.

Selectivity doesn't confer difficulty. Period.

>Your whole argument about the curve centers around the flawed and bizarre presumption that the curve has to center around a C. It doesn't always work that way

That's where they usually center the curve. This is where MOST schools set the average. It's not bizarre it's actually bizarre if a school doesn't do this. There is no requirement for this to be the case JUST LIKE there's no requirement to grade people off of A,B,C,D, or F grades. But people do it anyway because of culture and ubiquity.

If your school doesn't do this, then your school is clearly outside of what is normal. Any school that doesn't grade off of a curve tends to be an easier school, because these schools don't have an absolute requirement for a certain amount of people to fail.

>Of course something can be adjusted. you can make 'A' top 1%, B next 1%, C next 1%, D Next 1%, and fail the bottom 96% for instance.

No dude. A probability distribution is AN OBSERVATION. You cannot adjust data that's observed. You clearly were talking about the shape of the curve, but now you seem to think we're talking about the grading policy. Clearly I marked a delineation here.

>Good luck telling the judge that you didn't like the grade the professor gave you.

It's a jury. Not a judge. And telling the judge that the ENTIRE class failed is a valid argument bro. You don't even have to tell that to a judge. Tell it to the dean and the dean will have a talk with that professor. It's absolutely insane for a whole class to fail.

>Maybe your selective school mostly filthy-rich people with money to waste on lawsuits tying up the courts with cases that are meritless but wear down the college enough that they eventually relent.

I went to a public school buddy. None of BS affirmative action by race or money. So the school is loaded with Asians. Meritful to the point where it shows disparity among race. Asians rate highest in academic achievement and scoring, if your school isn't by population rated most heavily by Asians then your school is most likely performing meritless admissions.

>Your curve may have been based around C being average. I have seen 'curves' where the average was F or D.

Setting the average score to an F or a D is a one way ticket to retaliation. If it occurs at all it's fucking rare. I'm more inclined to believe you're lying here. But whatever.

>Yeah our 'curves' weren't always like that. They were adjusted to compensate for non-selection present in our program. I.e. all people may fail or in a group of top performers no one may fail.

Send me a link to your "curve" rules. Is it a standard or is it special to your school? If it's a standard methodology there should be some information or wiki on it somewhere.

>Tell yourself your deranged and confused lie over and over, and tell me more about how you don't understand how different schools may grade differently (to objectively obtain same grade results as 'selective' school) even while maintaining SAME difficulty with a selective school.

Of course schools grade differently. But there is a generality and a norm that schools tend to cluster around. That's the Bell curve normal distribution and A,B,C,D,F grading scale centered around the center of the curve. MOST schools do this and therefore you can make a GENERAL statement about all schools that says: "Selectivity influences difficulty. Period."

Any school that doesn't do this is outside of the norm. You're using outliers as your evidence.

>Programming isn't equal to CS. Did you even study engineering or CS? Even chemical engineers program. These are all basic concepts you've missed, it's really hard to believe you have any experience at all in ABET accredited engineering program.

This is just pedantic. You're getting knee deep into language issues. Nobody is even sure if CS should be engineering or even a science. It's clearly closest to math. But why get into this BS? It's off topic. Nobody cares bro. I don't want to argue about this shit. Stay on topic.

I don't need to study the intricacies of ABET. I don't even care about that garbage. My school was ABET accredited that's all they told me, I believe it, but I don't advertise it on my resume because the name of my school is more famous then ABET itself. Nobody puts ABET on their resume and nobody cares. We both agreed it's trash. I don't understand why you're bringing it up if YOU AGREED it's garbage.

>No they fail almost everyone, the engineering rankings go up even further because any survivors are more impressive, and the rest filter into different programs. Everyone wins when almost everyone fails. The school uses engineering program as bait to draw people into other programs as much as anything. Failing almost everyone out is a win-win because it strengthens the bait and feeds money into other programs to broaden the school.

https://www.reddit.com/r/college/comments/3t48ej/what_happen...

Nobody in that thread agrees with you. But fine. Keep your opinion. The way you talk about it almost seems like you didn't even go to university. I know you did though, but your opinion is so far out there that you would benefit in knowing that barely anyone else shares it.

>You have no understanding of an IQ test. It's meant to provide an objective outcome so that no matter the subset in a group taking the test, the measurement of the individual is the same. Taking the test with a group of fellow high-performers doesn't give you a lower IQ score. It's not harder no matter how selective you make the group taking the test. Universities can provide like feedback in grading. back to the analogy, the IQ score is the grade, get it?

Dude. This is just pedantic again. Replace IQ with whatever you want to indicate a higher performing group, or more intelligent group. I just used the word to indicate that the POPULATION of people that were applying was overall superior.

The detailed intricacies of an IQ test are irrelevant. I am well versed in what an IQ test is and what an IQ score means. BUT WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT IQ TESTS.

First off different universities do provide different hardness levels in tests. Most of them try to make it hard enough so that 75% is the average score. Failing to make that number the score is curved. Generally more selective universities DO HAVE more challenging tests, but this is anecdotal and is hard to objectively measure.

What can be measured is curving. ASSUMING all else is the same and we follow the STANDARD methodology not used by garbage outlier schools When all else is the same other then selectivity, selective schools are more difficult.

>Selectivity doesn't confer difficulty. Period.

You're just being stubborn. When you reach for outlier evidence that's how you know you're searching for evidence to support a premeditated conclusion rather than using evidence to construct a conclusion.