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My final quarter I took Psych 101.  It was summer.  Nearly all the class were first quarter freshmen.  The professor was excellent, the topic was very interesting to me, and they had extra credit experiments you could do that also were fascinating.  I actually was reading the text book because I was interested, not to make a grade.  Needless to say, I "did well".  The prof would announce the grades and they'd be 98, 78, and 65.

After about 3 incidents, some freshman raised his hand and told the professor that it wasn't FAIR having this senior in the class (I sat in the back and didn't look 16 like the rest of them).  The professor told him "Son, life is not fair, and I'm here to teach you about life."

I wanted to applaud.

I loved calculus and took an extra two quarters of it that I didn't need to as electives, one of which was an obvious "weed out" course.

Of course I haven't used it since. So today I'd be hard pressed to even solve a simple derivative.

I enjoyed it, but I didn't take anything beyond what was required. I was busy enough with my engineering curriculum!

hah, the phrase "selective universities" strikes a nerve for me

hah, the phrase "selective universities" strikes a nerve for me

My AP US History teacher is one of the favorite teachers I've ever had. He was also probably the most challenging teacher I had in HS. 

During "back to school night" or whatever they called it, my mom was in his presentation and he said "I am going to give your kids more work than they can possibly handle. I'm going to give them the kind of workload as if they have no other classes. I'm going to do this to teach them time management."

She said later that what was going through her mind was "Oh no... These are kids who will absolutely KILL themselves to do the work and get it done. This is going to crush them!"

It didn't crush us. In fact, it taught us an amazing thing about the ability to dig deep and get things done--lessons that I'm sure helped all of us when we got the real workload of college and then [hopefully for every one of his students] when they got into the real world.

Those "highly selective universities" like to tout their graduation rates, as if every one of their students weren't the sort of high achiever AP type of students who would sooner die of exhaustion than disappoint their teacher. The less selective universities have lower graduation rates, but they offer opportunity to anyone willing to work for it, with the knowledge that some of them aren't as willing as they thought they were. 

Harvard grads have better overall outcomes than Ball State grads, and a lot of people think that means that your education is better at Harvard than Ball State. Instead, it's more due to the fact that the only people Harvard admits are the types for whom Ball State wouldn't even rate "safety school" status. 

Statistics don't lie; people lie.

But I digress. When I was a high school student one would take AP courses primarily to get ahead of required college courses. Nowadays kids take AP courses to improve their GPA to improve their chances of getting into selective universities. If one is truly interested in getting ahead on college courses, the local junior college--if there is one available--is the best bet. But kids in suburbs like mine don't do that as often because those courses don't improve the high school GPA which is the ticket to the selective university. It's ridiculous. Not least because the AP courses aren't as good as most of the junior college courses.

This is a subject that strikes a nerve for me.

Me too. Big Time.

I'm highly selective about what I allow to strike a nerve with me.  

My general notion is that there are a handful of universities that really stand out on a resume in a positive way.  Even pretty good ones don't really garner attention when a hiring managed is scanning what could be one of 500 such documents.

And of course seeing Harvard doesn't mean the candidate is really that competent.  I've seen some pretty nice resumes with high GPAs associated with candidates who apparently forgot anything they learned in college.  Memorize and forget.

I THINK they wanted med school and didn't make it and now had to try and find a real job.

But people really like to lie using statistics.

It makes the lies seem "official."

People become pleased with themselves for understanding stats and manipulating them towards their desired outcome.  Genuine understanding of stats is knowing the valid from the invalid and having the ethics to share undesirable outcomes.
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That's where it gets screwy and makes most people toss out all stats...which hinders things.