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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

In undergrad, the professor who taught intermediate microeconomics told us about how law and business school admissions officers knew how tough his course was (it was the weeder course), and that doing well would be a feather in our cap. I made the mistake of believing him. The savvy students took intermediate micro at nearby schools and transferred the credit along with a higher grade.

Graduate schools will look at rec letters and take the professor's praise into account, but they haven’t the slightest notion of whether a class you took is hard or not. Students who want to optimize their future prospects know this, and select their courses accordingly. Oh, and employers know/care even less than graduate schools.

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> In undergrad, the professor who taught intermediate microeconomics told us about how law and business school admissions officers knew how tough his course was (it was the weeder course), and that doing well would be a feather in our cap.

The hubris and egomania of professors never ceases to amaze.

Perhaps this could have been true for the local community, but with 2800 colleges in the US with over 100,000 professors combined, there is no way any even extremely large admissions office could keep track of the retirements and new hires let alone the quality of a particular professor. Why would any office have such a position to keep track of professor quality? How could that add to the assessment better than an interview?

> The hubris and egomania of professors never ceases to amaze

You're assuming that they were unaware what they were saying wasn't true. It's possible they were fully aware it wasn't but said it anyways for professional advantage.

Professional Advantage over the students?

Professional advantage over other professors who are either more scrupulous or less convincing. All else being equal, a professor with students clamoring to get into their course will have more influence than one whose course no one wants to take.

I'd say it's the opposite.

I'll speak to my experience in the US Ivory Tower and STEMy R1s mostly: Professors are ranked and gain tenure nearly entirely based on their research output as it relates to grant funding. Classes are generally seen as a cudgel to scare nontenured Professors into getting more grant money. If you slack on the grants, you have to teach classes, generally. It is a very intentional vicious cycle. A Professor with a popular class is a bad thing, as it means they'll have less time to research and apply for grants.

Professors that like to teach generally go to much smaller colleges where the above comment may be true, but I don't have experience in those kinds of places and can't confirm or deny. It does sound really nice though!

I think that may be the experience in STEM, but not in humanities or social sciences. In this particular case, teaching was seen as a very important part of the job because it was at an elite liberal arts college. But even at R1 schools, humanities professors focus on writing/teaching, not grants as much.

In this case, the school was very small (1,400 students in total), so there was no competition between professors for enrollment. This was the weeder course for the major, so all majors had to take it. One professor taught it each fall, and it was always this professor — except when he was on leave.

In his defense, he was a senior professor at the top-ranked liberal arts college in the nation, which has a reputation for low grade inflation. I would believe that his grades would be taken seriously by econ PhD programs, but not JD/MBA programs.

Thanks for the clarification!

This also applies to high school in my experience. I had a lower GPA but took AP classes, my friends who took easy classes got into better schools.

Same though I’d say that the group who optimized for grades over challenging themselves in high school didn’t fare so well. Same in college actually. I don’t have much law school data but it seems like the folks afraid of competition when they’re young don’t grow into it when they get older.

At least with AP classes you get a GPA bump that affects the raw numerical calculation. That way, you can come out ahead if you get A- or better in the AP class. I recall that for some schools/purposes, they just looked at your GPA without weighting, but for most purposes they gave credit for weighted grades. This also applied to class rank, but for me all of this was a couple decades ago.

AP classes served only to keep the hoodlums out when I took them. I still don't understand what the point is of them. Not one of them were anything like a real college course. If someone wants to shortcut some credits, I recommend memorizing some flash cards and taking a DSST/CLEP exam.

My AP classes were phenomenal and honestly much better than my undergrad courses which would have had a hundred students in them and met much less frequently. They also cut a year from my undergrad.

I bombed my AP tests after a year of stress, what a waste of time and a consequential amount of money at the time

Whereas the community college classes I also took in high school were like 8 weeks long, and - like the rest of college - you really only needed to do the midterm and the final and you get the same credit

AP test score transfers credit across the country while being unnecessarily stressful and long courses. community college credits cannot be guaranteed to transfer and have more utility locally or in an adjacent school system, while being shorter semester long courses. Dollar costs are adjacent.

If your costs for community college and an AP test were adjacent your local community college must be a bargain. AP test currently costs $97 while the local community college is $185.50 per credit hour. Our local school system actually pays for the 1st 4 AP tests a student takes so the difference is even greater.

>AP test score transfers credit across the country while being unnecessarily stressful and long courses. community college credits cannot be guaranteed to transfer and have more utility locally or in an adjacent school system, while being shorter semester long courses. Dollar costs are adjacent.

That really changes if you get a degree though and AP classes are not necessarily guaranteed to meet whatever requirements some degree program specifies. Personally I had an AP CompSci class that I scored a 5 on but it counted for absolutely nothing for my CompSci degree yet the classes I took at the local Community College transferred to state college and satisfied their prerequisites. The actual college courses were easier than AP to boot. If you get an AA degree at the community college then you're probably better off transferring to another college with the degree than with AP class credits at least in my experience. I lived in a state that offered free dual enrollment so I was able to cut a bunch of core classes at the high school and get most of an AA at the same time.

You just sparked a therapy thread about the dubious ROI of AP programs! :-)

I went to a good uni in the same city as my high school. The admissions officers told me they knew my (mediocre) grades (all tough classes) were fine cause they were familiar with my high school and this helped me get in with lower than average grades. My test scores were generally good as well. This was repeated by the other two schools. Why did I get to talk to the admissions officers? I played sports. Even D3 schools had a former admissions officer or dedicated one who gave the coaches reads on everyone pre-admission. I got these reads from them.

Even Carnegie was familiar with my highschool (5 states away from MO), I just didn't get in there as I didn't have time to re-take the basic SAT Math as I had forgotten more geometry from freshman year than I needed to get to their high bar. I did nail the SAT2 math though. Many schools took that or the ACT which I did better on.

I think it depends on the size of your college/uni and how many other kids from your school go there.

I do remember being pissed watching one of my friends go up and get national honor society honors for their senior year because they finally passed their third try at freshman Algebra and had really high marks overall their senior year, where I was pulling a class high 89% in Stats but my gpa was not high enough.

Seems to have worked out going to engineering though which definitely did not grade inflate when I was there.

> Why did I get to talk to the admissions officers? I played sports. Even D3 schools had a former admissions officer or dedicated one who gave the coaches reads on everyone pre-admission. I got these reads from them.

How come sports have such important role in the US school system? Between this and all the scholarships I hear or read about, I feel that sports are effectively a "cheat code" for academic success - why learn anything when you can play all day and still get into the best universities because of athletic accomplishments?

A big part of this is collages have plenty of candidates with good grades and test scores it’s hard to differentiate at the high end. Writing a successful novel is a bigger boost than sports, but sports are easier.

Sports are name recognition advertising for the schools. They also generate an affinity in potential students while they are still children as they follow the teams games. It also creates an affinity for the schools with the general population, which is politically advantageous, especially when the school wants their state to appropriate more funding. There are also some of the smaller schools who use slots on the sports teams as a way of boosting enrollment. Some Division III schools have nearly half the students on a team. Division III schools do not provide athletics scholarships so that expense doesn't exist but they do get tuition money from the student-athletes. Many of these schools don't care if you have talent or not, they're using the lure of being a "college athlete" and the ego boost it provides the student and their family, as an enrollment tool.

To elaborate, there are 130 "D1" scholarship teams in football in the US. There are 893 (https://www.ncsasports.org/football/colleges) teams overall. This is similar for other sports. This means 12% of college sports are what people are thinking of when they say college sports (eg what they might see on tv). So a very vocal minority.

Sound body and sound mind go together. The popular idea of jocks being dumb meatheads is not true. I have worked in the uppermost echelons of the financial markets and a lot of the big players are/were athletes.

one of the things I continue to find hilarious is how much we got recruited at my uni for work in financial industry. My school is in St. Louis, and D3 sports. Every year someone from one of the trading firms up in chicago would roll down (and started to be alumni) and talk to all of the business athletes. They'd go after the ones with good but not stellar grades. They didn't talk to engineers as they figured they had jobs already. I eventually asked... WHY do you show up every year.

Turns out they needed smart kids who could deal with pressure and who were PHYSICALLY LARGE. Why not the smartest? they already had good offers elsewhere. Why large? because they trained them up and tossed them in the pit. They loved the 6'5" kids from football and basketball. They took our football center who was 6'9" 375 and had a 7' wingspan and could box out like no body's business. He told me later it was easy once he got the math. He'd just stand in the middle of the floor, he could see everyone on the walls, and when surrounded, could make space but also just reach 3-4 levels of surround deep to other people and hear them more easily as well.

"This is their entree into a career, use what you got kid".

I don't know why but I just get a chuckle out of seeing my giant buddies in suits, but also of a place that physical attributes actually help in a mostly mental activity.

My first job at a hedge fund, a lawyer friend asked me: "how'd you get the job"

"I think it's because I'm tall"

I literally had no explanation. As you said, not particularly smart...

Did you immediately get signed up for the basketball team?

My nickname in high school was shaq

Corruption. Allows an additional non objective criteria to let the powers at be manipulate the “rules” to their favor with plausible deniability. It also inherently benefits richer people because poorer people will not have as much resources to invest in sports (for example, the kids need to help parents’ operate business).

On the high end (division 1), it is also a taxpayer subsidized training/filtering mechanism for the for profit professional sports leagues. The taxpayers, from high school to college, fund the development and resources for figuring out who the best players will be to hire for the professional sports businesses.

Unfortunately, most US colleges are more interested in making money than education, and sports is more lucrative in the US than educating people.

Most schools lose money on sports overall (especially true for D3), so this explanation seems unlikely.

“The 2020 report found only 25 Division I programs had revenues exceeding expenses. No Division II or III program had revenues exceeding expenses.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-explain-it-me/shou...

Honestly my school did the math. It's division 3 non scholarship, this means people play sports for fun. Almost none play pro. Sports are there as an enrichment for the school and student, they don't earn a direct profit for the school, they're actually a loss leader the same as other student activities. But they realized that if you did extra activities in college you were 70% more likely to donate as alumni. Statistically everyone who went to the school was successful and made decent money. They realized you did 50% less activities in college than you did in HS. Most kids have one or two activities max in HS unless you count sports. I was a 2 sport athlete, ran pep rallies for student council and started the TV station, so four. I did 3 activities in college, football, TV station, and fraternity.

So I'm a school that half the applicants are valedictorians and stuco presidents, how do you decide who to bring in: you go for breadth and variety. If you were an outstanding athlete then the team would do better and everyone had a better time and more money. Also it's another bullet point to toss on the list on the brochures: we made the playoffs in X, Y, Z, Q, S, T. We have 31 national championships. Most of the sports teams there are above average. They like to be in consideration for the former Sears Trophy, now Directors' Cup, the trophy for the best overall athletics program, aka the most national championships across ALL sports in a season.

Why admissions officer access? Simple, there are 5k undergrad, about 20 admissions officers and around 400 incoming athletes across all sports. That means 2k+ applicants. With around 32k applications a year for the school more than enough to warrant a dedicated officer. However I believe they were shared with the academic scholarship intake queue as well. Why did the athletic department have an former admissions officer? Because admissions officer is an entry point job at a lot of schools. This person had been a mid level officer and then went into administration at the athletic department.

Surprising or not there were a very large number of very smart kids in athletics there. One soccer player was a Rhodes scholar. One season we had 2 burger King academic all Americans on our football team, they give out one a week across all college sports. My year in football alone graduated 4 doctor's who all had near 4.0 in engineering undergrad which had a 2.8 average.

Athletics didn't allow me to skate by. It did give me a professor who was in my court, the coach. Like having a second parent. Like your advisor is SUPPOSED to be but usually isn't. That was the only real advantage once in school. I personally did the normal college load, and did around 3600 hours of sports on top of it as did the other athletes. I also graduated with a computer science degree. My grades were actually better in season because I had negative free time. All I did was school and sports.

This isn't your Hollywood movie D1 athletic department. I actually had several teachers try and fail me for playing sports. And several very supportive teachers It's a nerdy school. One teacher tried to fail 3 of the volleyball players because they would miss their Saturday final because they were traveling for the national championship instead of just moving the exam 1 day.

The vast majority of schools are not Division 1 sports. The reason I heard from other schools on my admissions was I applied to a d3 school, a d2 school, and a several D1 schools. Two of the D1 schools told me not to waste my time playing college D1 ball, I wasn't big enough. Northwestern told me the same and told me that they'd had one person even do football and graduate from engineering in the last 30 years. They were kind enough to meet with me in person as I was at an academic summer camp there. They were more like 6k hours in sports. I was grateful for that frank advice, even though I would have had the experience of beating notre dame at notre dame and going to the rose bowl the next season (and very bad seasons thereafter) if I had gone.

But thank you for assuming I got through college by being a mediocre football player.

I went to high school in Florida so we had dual enrollment available at the local community college for free and it counted as high school credit as well as college credit. Quite frankly the actual college class was way less work, an easier grade for all of my classes, less uncertainty about if the credit would actually transfer to whatever degree program, etc. AP classes always seemed like a scam in that regard, especially with the option to take a summer class or a class outside of high school hours to free up a period for an extra elective at the high school.

I remember cheating was absolutely rampant among East and south Asian students when I went through undergrad (a mere 3 years ago) to the point where something like 70% of all honor cases (cheating investigations by the student council) were this demographic - multiples their proportion of the student body.

Many got away with it and had excellent GPAs as a result, no doubt a credit to their job prospects, and all it cost was their “academic integrity” (if such a thing matters at all anymore)

Was this among Asian immigrants or Asian American students?

Separately, the student council investigates cheating allegations? I'd think there would be confidentiality concerns that would prevent student inquiries.

Asian immigrants especially, but some 2nd generation+ students who come from Asian communities in the area who were still pretty traditional. I personally had to report 4 south Asian students blatantly cheating for an exam, and had a cheating ring of maybe 8 East Asian international students busted in my 2nd semester honors math course.

On student council: there was significant student govt at my school. Student council, but also student honor councils and student justice councils. Honor handled all cheating cases, justice handled disciplinary cases. I’m not sure how they handled confidentiality, but even as a resident advisor you can encounter some sensitive stuff and the culture was one of “student run society” with the professional staff to guide it.

This was at a “public Ivy”

Very interesting! How were the students cheating? In real time on exams, or collaborating on take-home work? Do you think these demographics cheated more than other students, or got caught more?

What’s a “public ivy”? The Wikipedia entry claims this term includes UC Irvine/Riverside/etc., which seems like a stretch. Is there a tighter or more well-known definition?

I'm not sure on the cheating ring or other cases, but for the one I witnessed it was blatantly sharing each others exams + answers during the busy "turn in your exams" moment of a crowded auditorium.

One East Asian student I talked to said it was a cultural difference, cheating in academics just wasn't considered that big a deal and very common in competitive districts (international students from China or India for instance, or competition at top high schools like Thomas Jefferson). Basically "everyone does it and if you don't you'll be left behind".

It was a top 20 school but not ivy. Have always heard "public ivy" and it competes for "top public university", near or topping the list most years.

At my school, we had a disciplinary council composed of several students and several faculty members, which met monthly to handle any cases of academic misconduct. Confidentiality was expected and we were reminded of this fact at the beginning and end of every meeting.

The vast majority of cases were "simple cheating" (e.g. sharing answers during a test, collaborating when collaboration was specifically forbidden). Of these, a large percent were foreign exchange students, who explained the behavior as either a difference in the nature of education (individualist in the US vs collectivist in their home country) or a claimed misunderstanding of the instructions due to language barriers (despite reasonable TOEFL scores required to be admitted).

From talking with faculty who had served on the committee for longer than me, while those were occasionally the issue, more often than not students cheated for one of two reasons: 1) external pressure for them to get a good grade (e.g. parents paid tuition proportionally to GPA, or punished for poor grades), or 2) desire for credential over knowledge or apathy towards the education itself.

Then they become research professors and make up data in their "research". There is a crisis where the papers cannot be replicated. Probably because they are all lies.

I dont understand why there isnt some institution who just sits and replicates papers all day.

Hm, I wouldn't be so categorical. I remember sitting at the class council in a somewhat selective post-highschool school in France, and the teachers knew very well that in highschool A, a student with 16/20 average grades in math from professor X was likely to be as good as a student with 12/20 in highschool B with professor Y, and used this info for admission. They didn't know this for every highschool/prof, but still for many of the good ones in southern France (I remember discussions ranging from Perpignan to Nîmes)

You're talking about school distinctions, which doesn't have anything to do with what the person you're responding to is saying. They're talking about taking the class elsewhere, and transferring the credit, so the end transcript would not materially distinguish. They'd still have the cachet of the institution that they're graduating from, not where/who took each class.

Doesn't work like that in France.

Interesting! My experience is with US colleges and law schools, of which there are a lot more. I think that’s why there’s not a lot of detailed knowledge.

> Hm, I wouldn't be so categorical.

The Lycee -> Grande Ecole track in France isn't comparable (smaller, specialized, local.)

0. US business/law schools are singular, professional degrees with way more variety in the applicant funnel.

1. Program rankings/prestige are "everything"

2. Rankings are heavily weighted on quantitative acceptance/matriculation profiles by GPA and entrance exams (GMAT/GRE/LSAT).

3. As a result, GPA handicapping (for difficulty) doesn't really happen for top MBA/JD programs.

It is a matter of principle that no course or program should be easier than another. Of course, this principle does not match reality. But as an academic in a management position, I try hard to level the playing field at a course level.

You can't level a playing field where students can just buy all the answers online and get the same degree. At this time a university does not function as proof of education. It's proof of elitism. That one is not too poor, and will take on a lot of debt and follow orders.

Any course that does not hand make its materials should not be accredited.

Almost completely agree.

I have put a vast amount of energy and time into raising the bar of our course material.

University and education has always been a certification game.

What matters is that an institution has approved you and certified what you know.

>It is a matter of principle that no course or program should be easier than another.

It makes no sense and I don't think there's solid reasoning behind this concept

like... why?

Why?

Simple…

1. Students would flock to easy courses and avoid hard ones. Students can be very mercenary, especially when they are choosing electives. They want the degree, not the learningf experience (some of them anyway).

2. Lecturers would make courses deliberately easy in order to purchase good student feedback. One of my first tasks as manager of my program was to put a stop to lecturers who were giving an average grade percentage of 98 (I kid you not... 98 freakin percent). FYI student feedback is one metric of tenure.

I am not saying that all subjects are of the same difficulty. I am simply saying that it is perfectly possible to package domain-specific knowledge/skills in approximately demand-equal lumps.

Hmm, in my world like 95% of the courses are mandatory and you cannot change it (or maybe it's very tricky to do, so I've never heard about it), so first point is not as relevant "here".

Second point I think should be solved by standardized tests which have other benefits.

>I am simply saying that it is perfectly possible to package domain-specific knowledge/skills in approximately demand-equal lumps.

but why? some concepts are easier than the other and for some courses people are... let's call it more likely to be prepared

for example "here" people have english classes (as a second/n-th language) since elementary school, then in middle school, then in high school and once again when attending higher edu institution

so when they've been learning english for something like 14 years then of course they're going to have easier time when comparing to some compiler construction class or something like that

Yes… most of a program is core. However, in more than one case I dealt with, there was different content and wildly different grading practices in different classes of the same course. Clearly unfair practice.

> Second point I think should be solved by standardized tests which have other benefits.

In a design program the course content is defined generally but a lot of leeway is allowed as to how it is delivered.

The general point I am making is that fairness should be maintained. In my experience, students care almost more about fairness in grading than they do about their grade.

Purposefully avoiding academic challenge sounds like a poor strategy for grad school success! From my experience, the best students take classes based on interest rather than ease, and they are more prone to overload their schedules (rather than optimize for high GPA).

The strategy is about optimizing admissions rather than success. Probably because the fear of "not getting passed this important checkpoint" is baked into school. That teaches to optimize for the checkpoints. And people can really take those lessons to heart.

Reading this makes me appreciate the preparatory school / competitive exams / Engineering school system.

You could have some hard teachers netting you some 5/20 average grade and it would have no bearing on your school entry exam score.

The French system has issues too, just different ones.

The system is extremely disingenuous. It looks fair if you take a casual glance at it but it’s actually completely rotten. Administrators from the education ministry mercilessly impose on most high schools in the country a strict adherence to the official curriculum and disallow any form of selection but as always in France a few select high schools are above the rule and start preparing selected students years in advance. If you look at the official statistics, you will see that a clear funnel to the top schools exist at least from middle school. When you consider where you get your engineering degree still significantly impact your career in your fifties (I’m not kidding), it’s all kind of a joke actually.

My main advice to prospective French students is generally to just go study abroad and then never come back and before I’m taxed of just being bitter I do have a degree from one of the prestigious Parisian schools.

> When you consider where you get your engineering degree still significantly impact your career in your fifties (I’m not kidding), it’s all kind of a joke actually.

No true in CS, and not true in biology. I'm now 28k above the average (not median) pay for CS engineers in France at 31, nobody asked me for a diploma i don't have anyway (i did not validate my bachelor in math and did not really finish my CS school as i was hired during my last internship and couldn't find the time to validate it) and no questions were ever asked about my school years.

Only stuff they asked is previous experience, experience with technologies and amazon architect certification (that i didn't have).

For biology (and geology, and probably physics too but i lost touch with my friends in those areas), the thing that really matter is which professor and/or which lab did you work for. Even if you get an biology engineering degree, you can follow through with a doctorate if you went to the right labs. As for geology, you can come from a rural area and be good at one of the worst highschool in the departement, then go to a university ranked 10th and still be the only French astrogeologist doctor in years and work directly with Curiosity teams.

So true, local accolades are simply unknown in the wider realm. Big name brand travels farther than niche ranks of stellar departments in smaller known universities.

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