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Another fun anecdote about those times and MIT specifically. My brother was arguably the top student to come out of the Atlanta Public School System in 1996. Th
by lefstathiou 3y ago
Another fun anecdote about those times and MIT specifically. My brother was arguably the top student to come out of the Atlanta Public School System in 1996. This was a kid used to being the best in everything he did. He starts at MIT and takes the Calc 2 placement exam (he got a 5 of course on the AP BC test) and scores an 11 out of 100. He said the teaching assistant sat him down and told him “we are not in Kansas any more, forget everything you think you know, you are not prepared to be in this class and we will not accept your AP test results.”
Unfortunately, I recall in 1996 4 or 5 students committed suicide at MIT due to the academic rigor (which is why the first year was pass fail).
I’m not advocating for this system just sharing stories told to me.
- nunez 3y agoAmazing. If you as an educator did that sit-down at the high school level, you'd be fired or be rubber roomed.
- ghaff 3y agoWhile there are softer subject escape hatches at a school like MIT (and I've known some very smart people have taken them while remaining in technology-related areas generally), it's hard to avoid math and hard science/engineering topics in general. And there are a lot of straight A students in high school (and most people at MIT were at least close to that) who were fine with memorized plug and chug high school physics suddenly hit stuff they just can't handle and struggle to just pass the class. In my experience, MIT is actually pretty good about wanting to help students work their way through once they've been admitted. But there's definitely a firehose aspect to a lot of it a lot of incoming students aren't prepared for--even leaving aside a lot of the distractions and other elements of suddenly being away at college.