

Careful with that Koolaid - nqureshi
http://www.mistakesmademag.com/peter-reinhardt-learned-this/

======
rickr
I'm curious to hear more about the 'reality distortion field'. You say 60-80%
of people failed to use the tool - what was the basis for continuing on? Did
you have a plan to mitigate the visits to other sites? When was the next time
you tested and what were the results?

------
Semiphore
It also might have a huge point where just because you thought you were in MIT
that you weren't there by luck and was smart enough.

~~~
hga
Luck only gets you into MIT after you pass the cut of it deciding you can do
the work, most especially a term of the calculus past the AP BC sequence, and
calculus based mechanics and E&M. When I last had figures (since then I gather
applications have increased), about 13,000 applied, and about 3,000 were
judged to be able to do the work, from which MIT had to extend enough offers
to get a class of ~1100.

MIT does a good job of this, as a rule students who choose an appropriate
major make As and Bs, unless they're having personal problems.

However these sorts of smarts have no bearing on the failures experienced by
this guy; heck, he would have been better off staying longer and rubbing
shoulders with people who've had success in business. There's plenty of
opportunity for that, from the professors who are given one day a week for
their own business pursuits to all sorts of formal entrepreneurial stuff.

But it's not something MIT cares about in admissions, besides looking for
evidence you can do projects, which has no bearing on projects producing stuff
people will buy; note this guy did not fail from an inability to make
something work _per se_.

~~~
pekk
> as a rule students who choose an appropriate major make As and Bs, unless
> they're having personal problems.

This is grade inflation, not a badge of pride to MIT.

~~~
hga
Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is
online), and there's been none except for a "'60s" period that coincides with
the draft, a widespread phenomena of the time. Heck, since I attended in the
'80s, they've reduced the pass-fail period from your entire freshman year to
just your first term.

What's happening is that MIT very carefully matches its student body to the
demands it places on them, something that's worked out well since the post-
Sputnik reforms in K-12 science and math education (for more historical
perspective, when it started, post-Civil War, a large fraction of students
would only be mastering the calculus at the end). There's many levels of
oversight including the "outsiders" in Visiting Committees, feedback in the
system, etc.

And MIT _really_ cares about undergraduate education (which I gather is all
too rare except at "low end" higher education where the school has no
pretenses about doing a lot of serious research; one of my chemistry TA came
from such a school). All classes are taught by tenured or tenure track
professors, with exceptions that prove the rule such as SF author Joe
Haldeman, and professors don't get tenure unless they're adequate at teaching.

I once witnessed the EECS department head make a professor read every student
evaluation (i.e. students providing feedback) for a course he'd just taught,
all but one of which were negative (and the positive one was a special case),
and at the end told him he'd never again be allowed to teach that particular
course. Etc. etc.

ADDED: MIT tries very hard to be a meritocracy, and since it's focus is on
"you can't fool Mother Nature" engineering and science, that's practical.

Semi-disclaimer: I have a lot of ties and history with the EECS department,
but being an EECS major is not one of them, I was science track.

~~~
thedufer
> Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is
> online)

Citation? Every source I can find shows that a) they haven't released average
GPAs since 2000 and b) from 1950-2000 they inflated grades at or above the
average national rate.

~~~
hga
Source was as I remember _The Tech_ , MIT's student newspaper, but I can't
find it right now, it was a raw data series. This '75 article starting on page
5
[http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf](http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf)
covers '62-'72, but the data I looked at went quite a bit further. If you're
really interested I can try harder.

Note that you should throw out results from the '50s and a bit further, when
science and especially math education was poorer and MIT had to accept and
weed out students. If one was really serious about this, you'd have to find
the transition to when they could send acceptances to students they were quite
sure could do the work, which had long been the case when I was got in in '79.

Can't say anything based on data about this century; do wonder why they
stopped releasing them, but there are reasons that wouldn't touch on grade
inflation _per se_ , e.g. the dot.com crash resulted in a great discontinuity
for the EECS, which lost more than half its students, after having 40% of them
for decades. That resulted in the panic which replaced SICP/6.001 with
_harder_ introductory courses (it's even less a place where a pure CS type can
slide by on two pure EE courses after the first required course), and it was
some time before EECS enrollments returned (and not just at MIT, e.g. Stanford
experienced this).

Hmmm, I'm not at all sure what that period might have done to the outside of
EECS student body, but I could see many mathematically strong students simply
not going to MIT, and my source on what's going on, who would definitely know
in at least the School of Engineering, hasn't mentioned any grade inflation
problems, I'll ask if that's changed.

There's also one discontinuity before this century, when a professional
admissions director actually followed the faculty's official
guidelines/rules/whatever on who to admit. There are two classes that were
_much_ less strong, this was fixed when e.g. physics faculty members made a
big fuss and admissions got realigned with reality.

As for "every source", there's plenty that talk about MIT "suffering" from
grade _deflation_. Actually a problem with others interpreting MIT GPAs vs.
schools with notorious grade inflation, pre-meds are understandably very
concerned about this; search on mit grade deflation.

~~~
thedufer
Yes, there are plenty of articles discussing MIT and grade deflation.
Unfortunately, none of the ones I could find have any data - its all anecdotal
from students. The hard data I did actually find
([http://www.gradeinflation.com/](http://www.gradeinflation.com/)) shows grade
inflation at MIT matching that at Harvard (the media's favorite grade
inflation target) almost perfectly from 1950-2000.

I never thought this before, but now that I've actually looked at what little
data is available, it looks an awful lot like the MIT grade deflation thing is
a myth.

~~~
hga
Ah ha, _this_ site is where the data series is, specifically:
[http://www.gradeinflation.com/MIT.html](http://www.gradeinflation.com/MIT.html)
and my memory about _The Tech_ is from where they got a lot of their data.

So, you're telling me, the GPA going down 1/100 of a point in the quarter
century of 1976-2000, is evidence of grade inflation???

If you can seriously look at this time series, accounting for the two factors
of better post-Sputnik math and science education and Vietnam War avoid the
draft, or simply limit yourself to the period after both of those ('73-75 for
the draft, by which time the upper level post-Sputnik reforms would have hit
the applicants), then factor in that freshmen went from pass/fail to grades in
their second term during this period, and say MIT has statistically
significant grade inflation, we have no basis for a discussion.

~~~
thedufer
If we're allowed to pick and choose our time series, the quarter century
before that MIT saw inflation at almost double that of the grade inflation
poster child, Harvard.

Yeah, you can rationalize based on outside events, but without real data on
how much of the change is actually attributable to those things, you're just
fitting facts into your worldview. How do we know there aren't similar events
in the quarter century you've chosen that are forcing deflation?

------
meritt
Meta to the article itself but this SumoMe stuff is incredibly annoying. It
breaks the flow of reading. There are highlights on here which end in the
middle of a word
[[http://i.imgur.com/6zQjwvW.png](http://i.imgur.com/6zQjwvW.png)]. And now I
just had an email-newsletter popup occur halfway through reading the article.

~~~
mschuster91
I'm one of those guys who randomly clicks or highlights text while reading,
and it's dead annoying if doing clicks on a text with the normal text mouse
cursor causes an action!

Please, website owners: provide visual cues if the behavior of your website
differs from normal websites.

~~~
twowordbird
Must maintain maximum APM while reading articles

~~~
girvo
Look, if I'm going to get out of Diamond in Starcraft 2...

