Seeing the thread about Matt Damon reminded me of a question that I had during Good Will Hunting. If somebody were really smart, and knew everything, what would it take for them to get a degree from say an Ivy League School? Could they just pay, and test out of all the classes? Get an honorary degree somehow? How valid would an honorary degree earned in this way be?
Doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, you still have to do the coursework. Of course, if you’re the next freakin’ Fermat or something, you’ll ace all your classes, anyway, right? Anyway, it doesn’t matter how smart you are; you almost certainly will still have something new to learn in your classes. Nobody intuitively just knows all of mathematics (or physics or whatever your subject is.) You have to be exposed to the material and think it through.
I teach at a college, and, for example, and if some shmoe walked up to me and said, “My brilliance is unrivaled and my knowledge of the subject matter exceeds your own. I want to test out of your class,” I’d tell him that he can test out of my class the same way everyone else tests out of my class: by taking the three prelims and the final on their scheduled dates.
My understanding of honorary degrees is that they are usually granted for ceremonial purposes. They do not imply the mastery of a subject.
An easier route would be just to bypass the whole undergrad thing and go straight into a graduate program. If you could convince a couple of professors in a particular department that you were capable of doing amazing advanced research without any further preparation they would probably be able to work with the administration to carve out a spot for you that didn’t require taking the required classes.
They’d probably still require you to take the master’s exams though. And to get your doctorate you’d still have to write your thesis. All you’d be avoiding is the preliminary coursework.
In Heinlein’s Number of the Beast a character describes how he wanted to get a Ph.D with the minimum possible effort. So he got a degree in Education.
Note also that being really smart does not make you smart at everything. Colleges require people to take courses outside their major. So many English courses and so on. Some of this can be quite difficult for people who have always “coasted” on their brain power but hit a college course they can’t coast on. (It hits in college for most “best in class” people when they end up in a college with thousands of other “best in class” people.)
That assumes that their major is an area they are good at. In Computer Science, I have seen a lot of quite clearly bright people who should Pick Another Major ASAP. Yeah, you can make a lot of money with a CS degree, but you need to transfer to the B-School. Now. I’m not saying you’re dumb, but just that this is not the area for you. (Whew.)
Back to the OP. I don’t care how bright you are, you have the same requirements, the same homework, and the same tests as everyone else. (If you prove you are capable, in all respects, then there are extra goodies available that makes college interesting.)
You still have to fullfill all the requirements of a degree. You might be able to place out of some of the college courses in high school. I knew one guy in HS who was so smart at math he was taking college level courses.
If you are super smart, you might be able to take more classes at a time than an average student and thus finish in less time. Keep in mind though that if you are getting a Phd in particle physics or something, chances are your peers are also pretty smart. Good Will Hunting kind of gave the impression that Matt Damon was a genius and everyone else at Harvard was a moron.
If Heinlein was right and a PhD in Education is obtainable with minimal effort, I must be a bigger moron than I thought.
Seriously, though, for a PhD program to be easy (in any field), you’d have to be a super-smart person in a sub-par program.
I think msmith has it right right. Generally a baccalaureate degree requires 120 credits minimum. No college I know of will let you take less than half those hours at that school and still be awarded a degree. So while you could take AP tests earn credit other ways, you’d still have to do 60 hours of actual college work. I think taking 21 hours a term is as feasible as it would get–not because so much work would overwhelm a genius, but because scheduling would be impossible. It can be especially hard to take that many during the summer because offerings are more limited.
But best case scenario, where you placed out of classes and received 60 hours of credit for them, and could take all of your requirement in order and during summer school, too, you could be out in 1 1/2 years.
Going straight to grad school isn’t an option. I don’t think even enthusiastic faculty could get you around the fact that one is not elegible for admission without a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution.
Aren’t there a couple of states that allow you to become a lawyer with just the bar exam? That would essentially be the same as getting a law degree.
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Even if that’s the case, you would probably need a law degree to be considered for most positions. Not sure, though.
Additionally, there are a lot of classes in college where the factor that really determines your grade is how much effort you put in, regardless of how smart you are. That’s why I chose math: it rewards smart, lazy people.
If I were a genius, I’d do this, after realizing that, to an Einstein like me, a bought honorary degree is just as valuable as an earned “genuine” degree:
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Call the my degree school and talk to someone in the chancellor’s office. My approach is: I’m interested in donating a large sum of money to the school, and receiving an honorary degree for life achievement. Can we talk round numbers here? If I wanted to be more discreet, instead I’d research the last few people who got honorary degrees and what they did to “earn” them. Anyway, so now I have a dollar amount for what it would cost to buy a degree today, Factor 1.
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Factor 2 is the time it would take to complete a normal academic program from my current starting point.
Factor 3 is how long it would take me, working as a genius mind you, to earn factor 1. Fortunately my genius allows me to estimate this accurately.
If factor 3 > factor 2, I get a normal degree.
If factor 3 < factor 2, I buy myself one.
Not exactly Ivy League – But you said the person was brilliant, right? Well, since he already has the knowledge, let him go to one of those diploma mills (there are a number of them out there-I once knew a superintendent of schools that got his PHD at one) and purchase whatever degrees he wants. One would assume the degrees will open the doors of post education situations and the brilliance will do the rest.
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For a real life example of a true genius who received a “Bachelor of Science by Research” (the degree was called a Ph.D. from 1920) from Cambridge, you might be interested in the life of Ramanujan. There’s a biographical sketch here: http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ramanujan.html.
I’m sure professors of mathematics around the world are routinely plagued by letters from cranks who claim to have found a way to square the circle (or whatever). But in the back of their minds there must be a little spark of hope that, like G.H. Hardy, one day they’ll receive a letter from the next Ramanujan…
This was the case in Virginia, or at least it was as of a couple years ago. It required working for and studying under a lawyer (in an apprentice-type relationship) for a number of years, after which one could take the Bar.
Honorary degrees are just that: an honor. They do not demonstrate genuine mastery of an academic subject any more than being given the key to a city enables you to open a lock. SInmilarly, people who are named admirals in the state navy in Nebraska don’t really get to command ships.
There are a number of prominent minsters who refer to themselves as “Doctor” on account of an honorary degree, but this is considered tacky and pretentious, and causes embarassment among their colleagues who have legitimate academic credentials and may see them as acting like buffoons. Years ago I worked in a shelter for the homeless which was affiliated with a religious organization. A minister who worked there who had a substantial academic background privately referred to a less accomplished colleague there who continually introduced himself as “Dr.” So-and-So as having credentials which were “self-inflicted”.
There are states which do not require that one be a graduate of an accredited law school in order to sit for the bar exam. One is California, which is said to typically have the highest failure rate in its bar exam of any state. There are in California a number of small unacredited law schools which essentially teach exam taking techniques as distinct from teaching a substantial overview of the law.
I attended law school in Missouri. A classmate of mine later moved to California and took an exam review course. A classmate in the review course felt a bit overwhelmed as they took training in writing a cogent answer to a bar essay question, and asked her if she had ever experienced anything like this. “Well yeah”, my friend said, “my five hour course in legal research and writing in my first year of law school”. The woman who asked her this question had gone to an unacreditted California law school which operated out of a suite in an office building. Her research class had been largely limited to being assigned to write two brief legal memos based on research done at a computer terminal.
It is my understanding that while one can get a law license in a state such as California without having gone to an accredited law school, law firms there are, understandably, prone to taking a close and skeptical look at the academic background of potential employees.
By contrast, the last I heard, graduates of accredited law schools in Wisconsin are not required to sit for the bar exam in order to be licensed. The longtime head librarian at my law school was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and was never licensed outside of that state, despite having administered a law library in Missouri for more than thirty years. Being primarily interested in library science, she had never sat for a bar exam. It is apparently the feeling of the legislature in Wisconsin that the experience of going through law school can be burden enough to entitle one to a license.
I’m too lazy to check, but I seem to recall seeing something about a residency requirement for undergraduate degrees at the institution where I received mine, entailing at least two years (or some such amount) of actually being at the campus.
Of course, this is the theory, and if you’re the next Ramanujan, you could indeed work something out, without having to resort to a diploma mill. It would probably entail you doing the bare minimum of classes for a bachelor’s degree (maybe even a little less, as you could likely talk a couple, though not all, of your professors to give you credit based on your proven knowledge of the subject), and at the same time doing your PhD thesis.
The key is not being incredibly bright – big deal, dime a dozen at Ivy-type schools – but being able to make enough immediate contributions to your chosen field that the department has no doubt about your value.
The problem is that there aren’t that many fields today where one person can make that kind of clear impact on their own. Maybe some branches of mathematics, and a tiny, tiny chance that someone could make a theoretical physics breakthrough just be reading on their own, but I can’t think of any other fields where one person working alone (without expensive labs, etc.) could make substantial contributions.
If it’s a faculty position you want, rather than a degree, you could just become a wildly successful (critically and popularly acclaimed) author, and then just accept a teaching post without ever having a degree.
Not entirely true. A childhood friend of mine is a certifiable math genius…when his father died his freshman year of college, he got very depressed and dropped out of college after the year ended to go off to Budapest to study with some wacko Hungarian theoretical mathematician for a semester. He never did return to undergrad, preferring to go straight into working for several years for the sometimes-lauded, sometimes-cursed Steven Wolfram. He spent part of those years working on Mathematica, and part as a slave/research assistant for Wolfram’s latest book (he is even footnoted in it somewhere; it’s a loooong story involving an intellectual property lawsuit, among other things).
My friend is now finishing his Ph.D. at Cal Tech in mathematics. I don’t know the administrative details of how he managed to get himself admitted to the Ph.D. program with no bachelor’s degree, but I can assure you that no matter how much of a math genius he is (I’ve known him since he was about 10 years old, when he had a special arrangement to skip part of 5th grade to come over to the middle school to take algebra…by the time he was a H.S. freshman or sophomore, he had to take math classes at a local university, because there was nothing left for him to do math-wise at our H.S., and we had 3 classes in AP Calculus), he does not have enough undergrad credit in other departments for any normal U.S. school to even consider granting him a bachelor’s. He is one of those extremely rare genius-type individuals who has a variety of interests and talents, and a normal social/family life, but no undergrad degree.
Of course, the fact that one of my friend’s best childhood friends (and H.S. math team buddies, for that matter) is a bonafide MacArthur Fellow (aka Genius Grant recipient) who teaches at Cal Tech probably helped smooth the administrative path somewhat. I bet there is some wiggle room in the Ph.D. admissions criteria, along the lines of “must have bachelor’s degree or equivalent level of academic/professional achievement.”