Without evident irony, all but one of the reputable liberal arts colleges in my state got Fs. My school, Really Fucking Huge State U, got a C.
Not only is that list crap, it’s bunk. For my alma mater, its note on the Composition requirement is incorrect. Same goes for the US Government or History requirement. The other notes are equally invalid.
Wow no Illinois school gets more than a “B” which is what my school got. No wonder I can’t get a job
I want me a refund, I paid for an “A” school not do “B” school 
I might as well chime in with the school I got my degree from. (Given how terrible they were they are not my alma mater, they don’t deserve the term.) Anyway old FU got a B. Lets see, they’re given credit for having a lit course but that’s not actually true. (They have no lit requirement. I had to check since they didn’t have one when I went there about 20 years ago and they still don’t have one.) Of course they do have the under grad torture requirement but I’ve mentioned that already. (It, like cake, is a lie.) Hmm, looks like they lessened up on the math requirement since I went there but they’re not getting credit anyway.
I know I’ve said this before but I would think I most students would be better off with concerned, knowledgable faculty that use their experience to help students select the best courses for them to get the most out of their education.(Which pretty much gets you an F.) You know, versus say old FU which pretty much made it a point they didn’t care about their students and that they weren’t big on that old “undergrad education” thing and would have dumped it if they could. (But by god, they’ve got a piece of paper with hard and fast rules. Screw those stupid chump students if this only F’s them over.)
Can you place out of that requirement? My alma mater is the same, but apparently (according to their ranking criteria) if you can test out of it, it doesn’t count. (Yet testing out of a foreign language is okay.) We also have a natural sciences distribution requirement, but I’m guessing it allows for courses that are “too narrow,” and thus gets rejected, too. We had a history distro, too, but it wasn’t specifically US History. So no dice for that.
This is a decidedly odd ranking system. Aha…it looks like if you click on the school name, they tell you exactly why points were not counted for certain requirements.
What school allows Slavic linguistics as a math substitute?
My alma mater, a true blue dyed in the wool Liberal Arts School, got a C. Bullshit.
ETA - My boyfriend went to the local shitty state university and got a fraction of the breadth of education I did, and it gets a B.
Okay, I’ll be the contararian tonight.
Fom their FAQ:
So they’re pretty clearly saying they’re not issuing a catch-all grade for the university; they’re just grading one aspect.
Hence this:
is missing the point.
Of course the average Harvard grad is smarter than the average Midwestern State grad; they were miles and miles smarter before they went to college. You test golf schools by sending me and Tiger Woods to two different ones, and then seeing who produces the better golfer at the end… somehow I don’t think that’ll work.
What they’re after is trying to assess the value added by the college, and factor out what kinds of kids go there to begin with – i.e. give higher marks to a school that takes in average or below average students and then gives them a rigorous curriculum instead of a school that takes in smart kids and then lets them take “Gynecology in the Ancient World” as their only history class, or “Introduction to Television” as their only course in the Humanities.
Well, if it’s required, then they are focusing on what’s taken, no? Requirements are the only things you know a student will take. If you based it on what’s offered … well pretty much everyone gets an A. Generally, any courses you can get at Massive State U that aren’t available at Average-Sized U are going to be pretty specialized.
No they do say it. They define Composition as
You can disagree with that, but it is by no means some freaky position to take; opinions of the efficacy of across-the-curriculum are pretty mixed among people who study it.
IMHO (as a former freshman comp teacher) across-the-curriculum can be fine, IF the prof is actually taking the time in the class to teach writing. But especially when you have, say, a History prof teaching the class, is that prof going to sit down with a kid and work on the kid’s inability to write a coherent paragraph? Maybe, maybe not. It certainly isn’t what that Historian’s main training is, or his main interest. It can easily end just be another history class with a few pointers about rhetoric thrown in. For kids who already write well, eh, no problem. But for kids who come to college reading and writing at well below college level (which is to say, most of them), that’s a deficiency that isn’t getting rectified. They’ll just go through four years of college getting marked down on papers, but still passing (assuming they do know the material) and graduating. It’s entirely possible to have a 500 verbal SAT, a 3.4 GPA, (which can get you into plenty of famous schools) … and an eighth-grade writing level. This is especially true for minorities. Telling that kid he doesn’t need to take a class focused writing with a trained writing teacher is, IMHO, a real disservice.
Hello, Mr. Ad Hominem. I don’t know how much the people who were involved with them at their founding have an influence now, but I don’t see how it makes a difference. They’re making factual claims that are either true or false.
Such as…
From the catalogs would seem to be the obvious place. Pretty much all colleges put them online.
If you don’t mind my asking, where did you go to school? Cause it’s certainly possible things have to change. For instance:
but http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/pdf/CURR.pdf says “completing (with a quality grade) a first-year language sequence” is enough.
Those who say there’s errors – where did you go to school? Everyone says the website is wrong … howabout some specifics?
This is in GQ, right? Let’s look at facts. We can argue whether or not their criteria are the best possible (I’m not at all convinced they are) or even good, but IMHO it’s a better approach than say, basing it on “reputation” and pricetag, which is pretty much all US News does. I like the objective, factual approach they take.
So: where are they incorrect on the facts?
Northwestern. It’s not a math substitute. It’s a “formal studies” substitute, which includes math, some linguistics courses, and music theory.
The thing is, their “facts” aren’t. As I mentioned above, they incorrectly described the requirements for graduation at my university.
Yet we have no way to know if this is true unless you tell us the name of your uni. **JCubed **thought they were wrong, too, but it appears he was mistaken.
Where did you go to school, and what is the error on the website?
They’re not even consistent. For my school, they actually do list a composition requirement, but I did test out of it. (I think you had to get a 4 or 5 on one of the AP English exams; I got a 4 on the Lit exam.)
There’s a lot of schools that accept AP scores but not SAT. That’s not an unusual distinction to make.
All college rankings (or rankings of anything) are not to be trusted. They reflect the biases of the people who make them up, and even the slightest change (changing the weight you give to one category by a small amount) creates major differences in how the rankings come out.
This particular site is even worse than people like US News; it seems to assume college should be teaching the same things they taught in 1945.
I think one thing that is not addressed is that while in some schools you can game the system to have overly narrow courses as GE requirements, few students do. In practical terms a rigid one-size fits all GE requirement is not necessary for a student to get a broad education. Indeed for a signifigant population of students with special circumstances (say, international students) overly rigid GEs would be at the detriment of their education.
My school had a wide variety of GE requirements that could be filled with an equally wide variety of classes. It would indeed be possible to get a degree while completely ignoring some subjects. But, this doesn’t mean you can ignore ALL of the subjects- at best you could dodge one or maybe two. Even then, it won’t be a complete dodge. I tried my best to get out of doing math, and I still had to take two math-heavy physics courses. Sure I avoided a pure math class, but I don’t think I missed out on much. I still got some quantitative thinking without having to grit my teeth through a class that I’d just forget immediately after anyway.
Flexible GE requirements also allow someone to avoid the most basic courses in their major. If you are an American history major and you are going to spend four years studying specific topics in American history, it’s almost certainly a waste of your time to take a broad survey class populated by people who couldn’t care less about the subject.
Where did you go to school?
Or economics. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
They were too chicken to give MIT an F, so I don’t care. But Chicago, is an excellent example of what is wrong with this picture. They mark Chicago down for not requiring Econ, but give credit to some Podunk school that does - not considering that the education you get if you take Econ at Chicago is several orders of magnitude better than you’d get from some tired adjunct prof at the other school, who reads Samuelson at his students.
It goes like this, from best to worst:
- Wossamatta U
- Hamburger U
- Clown College
- Barber College
- State College
- Private College
- Ivy League
- Cardinals
I’m not clear on what point you’re making. The website discounts schools with requirements you can test out of. They say that my alma mater requires a composition course. In theory, it does, but it is, in fact, possible to test out of it. So they should discount it. They don’t, because not only is it biased, it’s actually incorrect.
Whether or not it’s the SATs or the AP exams is irrelevant. I’ve never heard of a university allowing someone to use their SAT scores to test out of a subject anyway.
BTW, both even sven and I attended the University of California, Santa Cruz. I still agree with her assessment. I did have to take a quantitative course. So I took Astronomy 1 instead of a pure math class. Who cares? I still had to do math and think quantitatively, and it was much more interesting to me than calculus would have been. (I know this definitively because I ended up having to take calculus for my master’s degree and it was not fun.)
AP credit is not testing out of a requirement; it’s getting credit for a course that you took in high school which fulfills the requirement. Even if I have that wrong, “[w]hether or not it’s the SATs or the AP exams” is still perfectly relevant because they’re requirements quite clearly say that they only discount testing out due to the SAT. They don’t say anything about AP credit, so that’s allowed. How is their rating of your school incorrect according to their criteria?
Likewise, it’s within their criteria if a school waves the math requirement if you score well on an AP test or pass a departmental exam, but not if it’s due to SAT or ACT score (probably because that’s 9th grade math.)
I’ve never heard of a school that waves requirements due to ACT/SAT scores, but there are some shitty schools out there. I know a guy in El Paso who went to UTEP some years back. Apparently he was the only person in the entire freshman class able to take calculus the 1st semester. Some place like that might do it.