As an uncle told me many moons ago:
Do more in college. Write a rock opera, spend a week curled up in the union learning about black holes, be good enough to tutor.
Don't just graduate with nothing but a taste for bad jazz and cheap beer.
Do more in college. Write a rock opera, spend a week curled up in the union learning about black holes, be good enough to tutor.
Don't just graduate with nothing but a taste for bad jazz and cheap beer.
My father went to a small, rural school whose local police force generally took the approach that as long as it didn't hurt anyone "At worst, a night in jail and no record of the arrest." Even for what would be considered distribution of hard drugs now.
When I went to school, students got a slap on the wrist for burning a hole in their dorm floor with thermite.
10 years after I went to school, a student was charged with a terrorism offense for making a dry ice pressure bottle and tossing it out of their dorm window as a joke.
And as near as I can tell, it's gotten stricter since. See: bitching about Harvard's dismantling of independent fun.
"Make lots of mistakes" isn't feasible if it ends up on a permanent record.
Dumb example I’ll share for a laugh is when I went to university (graduated 2013) they would put you on the sex offender registry for peeing outside and even for going in the wrong gendered restroom. One time I got obliterated and desperately needed to puke. But I was in a dorm where every other floor had your gender’s bathroom. Given my luck I was on the wrong floor. So my choice was potentially end up a sex offender for puking in a girl’s restroom stall or puke in the stairwell thus stinking it up for weeks. Guess which choice fear motivated me to make. Sorry about the stairwell, guys.
(Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh. Not sure how internationally read it is, but a worthwhile classic. British degrees are classified from firsts to thirds (via upper and lower second class honours) - but the story is (initially) set at Oxford, which at the time awarded fourths.)
Free link to the book here:
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945/w...
I was ready to withdraw and reconsider engineering as a major.
Later still they posted the cut offs. 40 was the cutoff for an A. Avg was 36 and the cutoff for a B. My 48 was the 4th highest score.
I would have preferred the British system
Here in the US we have a saying of " C equals Degree", so kinda the exact opposite of the UK saying. Strange!
"C's get degrees": The bare minimum to get the credential is the optimal use of resources.
"You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything between.": Either excel at school to maximize your achievement or don't worry about your grades and simply pursue whatever comes your way from the opportunity to be there to enrich your life.
In retrospect? Yeah, I probably should have taken a B and finished relevant things faster. I have almost zero use for my understanding of the mathematic accounting of the particle-in-a-box.
Of course in grad school a C is a failure, so the wiggle room is slightly less generous.
Back in my day it was “Ds get degrees”.
Yes, the standard for graduate admission around the world (and also other things, like undergraduate research awards in Canada) is upper second.
This is not true of other places which award Firsts.
I'm only kidding, but more seriously it's certainly not all equal, and few are really in a position to compare any two, nevermind several - it's a bit of a joke that we then make 'a 2:1 in an engineering or related subject' or 'at least 3.5 GPA' or whatever a requirement as though the institution and cohort doesn't make a difference at all.
If you look at the top 1/3 of Harvard students who deserve to be admitted on academic grounds, you end up with a much smaller pool than "top 1/3 of Harvard students".
Even if you were right, though, it’d be an odd take — even if 25% (or 50%!) of Harvard students were admitted noncompetitively, they would simply not be part of the top 5% of Harvard students? Like they’re not diluting the top 5%, they’re just not in it.
I stand by “top 5% of Harvard” is a higher bar than “top 1/3 of Oxford”. But I will grant you that these are all based on GPA anyway, a rather noisy measure of even academic ability, let alone anything else we might care about.
Universities in the UK treat a degree from the US with a 3.7 or 3.8 or higher GPA as equivalent to a first according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_c...
Probably more are familiar with the British Granada Television adaptation, which was shown here on the Great Performances series on PBS. I don't know how well that conformed with the book.
'[Puts book down, objecting to Charles also occupying himself] I do think you might talk to me - I've had a very exhausting day. Entertain me. Take me out of myself.'