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It's kind of in poor taste. It's not like other top programs aren't as rigorous as MIT (they are). Also it kind of derails the thread because now we're dick-mea

It's kind of in poor taste. It's not like other top programs aren't as rigorous as MIT (they are). Also it kind of derails the thread because now we're dick-measuring over whether MIT is the most rigorous program.

hga 11y ago
It's not like other top programs aren't as rigorous as MIT (they are). Sorry for my lack of clarity. I said nothing good about MIT's CS program per se (quite to the contrary...), it's MIT and CalTech that remain by far the most rigorous major undergraduate universities in the US (I'm not counting the tiny humanities colleges that rigorously do things like the Great Books, and maybe I'm missing some). Something its CS graduates indirectly benefit from, but it's not inherent to the CS program, which in its post dot.com crash I have little respect for. No others even come close in subjects required of all students; as I mentioned in a message downstream, as of the '80s the math requirement for Harvard was proving you could do algebra. On the other hand, they have the world's "best" first year undergraduate math course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55), Harvard has been very strong in math for a very long time. But serious math (and science) is not required of all students. So, yeah, you want to measure the dicks of us CalTech and MIT alumni as a population, go right ahead, you just won't be happy with the result if you think your school as a whole is better, with the noted exceptions that still retain rigor in the humanities. None of which says that a graduate of another school isn't every bit as good, it just wasn't required of them.
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- argonaut 11y ago
  > it's MIT and CalTech that remain by far the most rigorous major undergraduate universities Yeah that's not a fact at all; it's just your opinion. This is why I agreed with the other poster that this wasn't a great thread of argument; we're just dick-measuring based on our own experiences at this point. You can attempt to try to bring in what you believe to be "objective" measures (like course requirements), but 1) those measures are themselves questionable, and 2) the selection of criteria to judge is itself a subjective judgment.
  - hga 11y ago
    How else are you going to define the overall rigor of colleges than by the required curriculum for all students who attend them? Here I'm returning to the wider scope that includes those small institutions that have every student read and discuss "the great books" with their peers and one or more facility members who have a clue, and others that might follow such a model of rigor. Here's a neat story about how one student was implicitly recruited to one of them: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/06/shimer-college-illinois-worst-school-america http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/06/shimer-coll... Jibran Ludwig – recounts to me the strange tale of how he ended up here. One night two years ago, when Jibran was 15, he was sitting in an Amtrak station in upstate New York reading Plato’s Republic and getting annoyed by the translation. The Greek gods had been given capital Gs, which struck Jibran as an erroneous Christian reinterpretation, and so he decided to abandon the book and try and find something closer to what Plato had intended. It was election night. The woman sitting opposite Jibran had an iPhone. So he went over to ask her the results. As he approached her, his Plato in his hand, she looked alarmed. “Oh,” she said after a moment. “I thought you might be one of my students and I didn’t recognize you and I felt embarrassed.” She explained that she was Susan Henking, president of Shimer, “and Plato is the kind of thing we read”. “If the president of this college thinks I might already be there,” Jibran suddenly thought, “maybe it’s where I should be.”

hga 11y ago

It's not like other top programs aren't as rigorous as MIT (they are). Sorry for my lack of clarity. I said nothing good about MIT's CS program per se (quite to the contrary...), it's MIT and CalTech that remain by far the most rigorous major undergraduate universities in the US (I'm not counting the tiny humanities colleges that rigorously do things like the Great Books, and maybe I'm missing some). Something its CS graduates indirectly benefit from, but it's not inherent to the CS program, which in its post dot.com crash I have little respect for. No others even come close in subjects required of all students; as I mentioned in a message downstream, as of the '80s the math requirement for Harvard was proving you could do algebra. On the other hand, they have the world's "best" first year undergraduate math course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55), Harvard has been very strong in math for a very long time. But serious math (and science) is not required of all students. So, yeah, you want to measure the dicks of us CalTech and MIT alumni as a population, go right ahead, you just won't be happy with the result if you think your school as a whole is better, with the noted exceptions that still retain rigor in the humanities. None of which says that a graduate of another school isn't every bit as good, it just wasn't required of them.

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argonaut 11y ago
> it's MIT and CalTech that remain by far the most rigorous major undergraduate universities Yeah that's not a fact at all; it's just your opinion. This is why I agreed with the other poster that this wasn't a great thread of argument; we're just dick-measuring based on our own experiences at this point. You can attempt to try to bring in what you believe to be "objective" measures (like course requirements), but 1) those measures are themselves questionable, and 2) the selection of criteria to judge is itself a subjective judgment.
- hga 11y ago
  How else are you going to define the overall rigor of colleges than by the required curriculum for all students who attend them? Here I'm returning to the wider scope that includes those small institutions that have every student read and discuss "the great books" with their peers and one or more facility members who have a clue, and others that might follow such a model of rigor. Here's a neat story about how one student was implicitly recruited to one of them: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/06/shimer-college-illinois-worst-school-america http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/06/shimer-coll... Jibran Ludwig – recounts to me the strange tale of how he ended up here. One night two years ago, when Jibran was 15, he was sitting in an Amtrak station in upstate New York reading Plato’s Republic and getting annoyed by the translation. The Greek gods had been given capital Gs, which struck Jibran as an erroneous Christian reinterpretation, and so he decided to abandon the book and try and find something closer to what Plato had intended. It was election night. The woman sitting opposite Jibran had an iPhone. So he went over to ask her the results. As he approached her, his Plato in his hand, she looked alarmed. “Oh,” she said after a moment. “I thought you might be one of my students and I didn’t recognize you and I felt embarrassed.” She explained that she was Susan Henking, president of Shimer, “and Plato is the kind of thing we read”. “If the president of this college thinks I might already be there,” Jibran suddenly thought, “maybe it’s where I should be.”