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Here the common strategy for STEM degree programmes is to admit most people and then make first year hard enough that e.g. 2/3 of students are eliminated. In so

Here the common strategy for STEM degree programmes is to admit most people and then make first year hard enough that e.g. 2/3 of students are eliminated. In some sense it is more fair than strict admission criteria.

rvp-x 6y ago
I can see a future cynical me talking about how brutal it is to lure poor students and have them take loans to pay first year tuition only to kick them out a year later with nothing to show for it, if they're not the top 1/3 for some reason.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  This is in the context of a free education system, the only thing the poor students loose is a bit of time.
  - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
    A year is A LOT of time, and you have to explain why you lost a year later on. Also, even in "free" education systems, some taxpayer is going to ask "why the hell am I paying for 2/3 of crappy students, can't you just raise the bar at the beginning, and only accept the top 1/3?"
    - zajio1am 6y ago
      It is not that they do not learn anything during that year. Also, many of them later got admitted to some 'easier' school and got their credits transferred.
    - newbie578 6y ago
      A year is a lot? Then what is 5 years, a lifetime? Let's not fool ourselves, a year is NOTHING, it passes as soon as it arrives. There is nothing bad with people "loosing" a year or two, or perhaps even more. In an ever more pacing world, we should readjust and look back, some might "sacrifice" a year, but they also learn valuable experience so not all is lost. Today, when people's work time can last 50 years easily, what is a year or more? Let people "search for themselves". Let them try out the hard things, let them explore and value experience, realize if something is for them or isn't. In the end, we learn most from our mistakes, not successes.
      - codeisawesome 6y ago
        I sometimes wish I could remember that a year is a short time. I’m often wracked by guilt about not progressing at sub-yearly “ticks” on some aspects.
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      > and you have to explain why you lost a year later on. That's only if you do nothing else for the rest of the year...
- orwin 6y ago
  not grandparent, but where i live it's the same system: ten years ago tuition were 230€/year until your master degree, roughly half got cut after the first year and a fifth/quarter the second year.
- poohblahoyamo 6y ago
  Oh oh. Those are called Caribbean medical schools.
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  That's essentially the same argument Supreme Court justice Rehnquist made during a case regarding the use of affirmative action in university admissions.
nerfhammer 6y ago
rather than accepting them for an entire year and then kicking 2/3rds of them out, why not don't kick them out and just teach three times as many students. feels more humane somehow
- orwin 6y ago
  If you're not making into year 2 (or year 3), you can repeat ad vitam aeternam.
- Kalium 6y ago
  Students are only occasionally actually kicked out. Much more common is that they struggle with the coursework, decide it isn't for them, and pick a different direction. How many years of time do you think it is humane to provide to a student before suggesting somehow that they might consider an alternate use of their time?
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Where I went, there was a hierarchy of lesser degrees to pick from.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  That’s called lowering your standards. It punishes the third who would have made it under the old system. Better to have a test. Doesn’t waste a year of the lives of the two thirds who drop out.
  - gowld 6y ago
    Me learning doesn't hurt you.
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      But lowering the standards does. And that’s the only way you’re going from a pass rate of a third to 100%. You might be able to double pass rates to two thirds by putting many more resources into teaching but that costs money or comes out of research time/teacher satisfaction. You learning does hurt the top of the class if you’re a marginal student. Students on the verge of failure take up a lot more instructional and administrative time than the top third who were going to get through anyway.
bmaisonp 6y ago
In some sense more fair, but also in some senses less kind and less efficient. Let me give an anecdotal view as someone who had a brush with it at another big state school. University of Washington (Seattle) has a similar system in which some majors are 'capacity constrained' meaning some students would be directly admitted to the program, but the vast majority of them would only enter the major program after being accepted via application while already attending school. Highly competitive programs included Business and Engineering, but this even spilled over into less popular STEM variants like Math. Their CS program was and is the most competitive of these. At its worst an application round would have ~2000 applications and only ~600 open slots. During my time there, I met a handful of students that had applied every session for the last few years to no avail. The opportunity cost is enormous. It's both a waste of time and money on the part of the students to spend multiple years wasted taking intermediate courses, retaking major-application required courses and reapplying. That's why the administration is slowly converting over to deciding major on admission, too much visible grievance on the part of students. That aside, if it's competitive enough, it turns into a second college admissions process. Students retake the core classes required for an application like they would retake the SAT or ACT. Never mind that they passed CS 142 with a 3.4, only a 4.0 will get them in so they waste a quarter perfecting the most basic java programs for content they learned a few months prior. Students also try to engineer around the competition: a common refrain was that the equivalent courses at community college were much easier, but given the same weight in the admissions process so students would go to another college to take an easier course just to have a better shot at their dream major. The point is that the competition for these colleges will come to a head somewhere. If it's not the college application process then it will be at the school itself. It can be managed, but putting it off till later leads to a greater burden on the losers of this process. They are faced with the choice of changing majors, changing schools or persisting with the hope that maybe the fifth application will be different than the fourth. Fostering this kind of environment was a mistake on the part of UW. Perhaps it would have been better if they restricted applications to first years and weeded them out completely from the start like they do in your area, but letting the college admissions process do it might be much more efficient on the part of both the schools and the students.
- gowld 6y ago
dehrmann 6y ago
My college did this. They don't have the strictest admission standards, but they're ranked well in STEM because of this. What's funny about people criticizing standardized tests in college admissions is, at least in a big school, 80% of your Calc I grade is effectively three standardized tests, so if someone's just "a bad test taker," throwing them into the deep end with 1200 other freshman engineers isn't doing them any favors.
- redwall_hp 6y ago
  My university, another state school, did the same sort of thing. They have something like a 50% graduation rate, and employ the same sort of washout techniques in science classes. My freshman CS classes dropped to less than a quarter of their initial size by the end of the first semester. The math department is very selective about transferring credits too, to stop people from taking an easier Calc class at a community college.
sytelus 6y ago
What does those 2/3rd do then? Do they lose a year?
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  That depends on the student's choices. I dated a woman in college who was trying to get a degree in speech pathology. Because it was an "impacted" program, they use the process of having students take general core courses and then reevaluating them. She didn't get into the program after her first year. Given the choice of taking degree adjacent courses for a year or changing majors, she chose to go into special education instead. There were other schools in the state that offered speech pathology but they were branch campuses. Given the choice between speech pathology from a directional school or a special education degree from Big State University, she went with special education. That was her choice. From what I can tell from her Facebook posts, it seems to have worked out well for her.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
The colleges also make more money that way. A 500 person freshman lecture class is a money maker. A 50 person capstone class is a money loser. I agree it's nice to give people a chance but it's not all rose considering the debt many of those people who don't make it take on.
BobbyJo 6y ago
That is a very expensive way of deciding who gets a degree. Also, it doesn't eliminate the problem of scarcity with those first year seats. You still need to decide who gets the chance to try in year 1.

rvp-x 6y ago

I can see a future cynical me talking about how brutal it is to lure poor students and have them take loans to pay first year tuition only to kick them out a year later with nothing to show for it, if they're not the top 1/3 for some reason.

SiempreViernes 6y ago
This is in the context of a free education system, the only thing the poor students loose is a bit of time.
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  A year is A LOT of time, and you have to explain why you lost a year later on. Also, even in "free" education systems, some taxpayer is going to ask "why the hell am I paying for 2/3 of crappy students, can't you just raise the bar at the beginning, and only accept the top 1/3?"
  - zajio1am 6y ago
    It is not that they do not learn anything during that year. Also, many of them later got admitted to some 'easier' school and got their credits transferred.
  - newbie578 6y ago
    A year is a lot? Then what is 5 years, a lifetime? Let's not fool ourselves, a year is NOTHING, it passes as soon as it arrives. There is nothing bad with people "loosing" a year or two, or perhaps even more. In an ever more pacing world, we should readjust and look back, some might "sacrifice" a year, but they also learn valuable experience so not all is lost. Today, when people's work time can last 50 years easily, what is a year or more? Let people "search for themselves". Let them try out the hard things, let them explore and value experience, realize if something is for them or isn't. In the end, we learn most from our mistakes, not successes.
    - codeisawesome 6y ago
      I sometimes wish I could remember that a year is a short time. I’m often wracked by guilt about not progressing at sub-yearly “ticks” on some aspects.
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    > and you have to explain why you lost a year later on. That's only if you do nothing else for the rest of the year...
orwin 6y ago
not grandparent, but where i live it's the same system: ten years ago tuition were 230€/year until your master degree, roughly half got cut after the first year and a fifth/quarter the second year.
poohblahoyamo 6y ago
Oh oh. Those are called Caribbean medical schools.
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
That's essentially the same argument Supreme Court justice Rehnquist made during a case regarding the use of affirmative action in university admissions.

nerfhammer 6y ago

rather than accepting them for an entire year and then kicking 2/3rds of them out, why not don't kick them out and just teach three times as many students. feels more humane somehow

orwin 6y ago
If you're not making into year 2 (or year 3), you can repeat ad vitam aeternam.
Kalium 6y ago
Students are only occasionally actually kicked out. Much more common is that they struggle with the coursework, decide it isn't for them, and pick a different direction. How many years of time do you think it is humane to provide to a student before suggesting somehow that they might consider an alternate use of their time?
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Where I went, there was a hierarchy of lesser degrees to pick from.
barry-cotter 6y ago
That’s called lowering your standards. It punishes the third who would have made it under the old system. Better to have a test. Doesn’t waste a year of the lives of the two thirds who drop out.
- gowld 6y ago
  Me learning doesn't hurt you.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    But lowering the standards does. And that’s the only way you’re going from a pass rate of a third to 100%. You might be able to double pass rates to two thirds by putting many more resources into teaching but that costs money or comes out of research time/teacher satisfaction. You learning does hurt the top of the class if you’re a marginal student. Students on the verge of failure take up a lot more instructional and administrative time than the top third who were going to get through anyway.

bmaisonp 6y ago

In some sense more fair, but also in some senses less kind and less efficient. Let me give an anecdotal view as someone who had a brush with it at another big state school. University of Washington (Seattle) has a similar system in which some majors are 'capacity constrained' meaning some students would be directly admitted to the program, but the vast majority of them would only enter the major program after being accepted via application while already attending school. Highly competitive programs included Business and Engineering, but this even spilled over into less popular STEM variants like Math. Their CS program was and is the most competitive of these. At its worst an application round would have ~2000 applications and only ~600 open slots. During my time there, I met a handful of students that had applied every session for the last few years to no avail. The opportunity cost is enormous. It's both a waste of time and money on the part of the students to spend multiple years wasted taking intermediate courses, retaking major-application required courses and reapplying. That's why the administration is slowly converting over to deciding major on admission, too much visible grievance on the part of students. That aside, if it's competitive enough, it turns into a second college admissions process. Students retake the core classes required for an application like they would retake the SAT or ACT. Never mind that they passed CS 142 with a 3.4, only a 4.0 will get them in so they waste a quarter perfecting the most basic java programs for content they learned a few months prior. Students also try to engineer around the competition: a common refrain was that the equivalent courses at community college were much easier, but given the same weight in the admissions process so students would go to another college to take an easier course just to have a better shot at their dream major. The point is that the competition for these colleges will come to a head somewhere. If it's not the college application process then it will be at the school itself. It can be managed, but putting it off till later leads to a greater burden on the losers of this process. They are faced with the choice of changing majors, changing schools or persisting with the hope that maybe the fifth application will be different than the fourth. Fostering this kind of environment was a mistake on the part of UW. Perhaps it would have been better if they restricted applications to first years and weeded them out completely from the start like they do in your area, but letting the college admissions process do it might be much more efficient on the part of both the schools and the students.

gowld 6y ago

dehrmann 6y ago

My college did this. They don't have the strictest admission standards, but they're ranked well in STEM because of this. What's funny about people criticizing standardized tests in college admissions is, at least in a big school, 80% of your Calc I grade is effectively three standardized tests, so if someone's just "a bad test taker," throwing them into the deep end with 1200 other freshman engineers isn't doing them any favors.

redwall_hp 6y ago
My university, another state school, did the same sort of thing. They have something like a 50% graduation rate, and employ the same sort of washout techniques in science classes. My freshman CS classes dropped to less than a quarter of their initial size by the end of the first semester. The math department is very selective about transferring credits too, to stop people from taking an easier Calc class at a community college.

sytelus 6y ago

What does those 2/3rd do then? Do they lose a year?

Mountain_Skies 6y ago
That depends on the student's choices. I dated a woman in college who was trying to get a degree in speech pathology. Because it was an "impacted" program, they use the process of having students take general core courses and then reevaluating them. She didn't get into the program after her first year. Given the choice of taking degree adjacent courses for a year or changing majors, she chose to go into special education instead. There were other schools in the state that offered speech pathology but they were branch campuses. Given the choice between speech pathology from a directional school or a special education degree from Big State University, she went with special education. That was her choice. From what I can tell from her Facebook posts, it seems to have worked out well for her.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

The colleges also make more money that way. A 500 person freshman lecture class is a money maker. A 50 person capstone class is a money loser. I agree it's nice to give people a chance but it's not all rose considering the debt many of those people who don't make it take on.

BobbyJo 6y ago

That is a very expensive way of deciding who gets a degree. Also, it doesn't eliminate the problem of scarcity with those first year seats. You still need to decide who gets the chance to try in year 1.