One of my pet peeves in high school was the G.P.A. game. I knew more then one person who took classes (and didn’t take some classes) because, in the weighted grade point average system, getting an A in certain classes could actually bring down your G.P.A.

So there were people who take AP classes, where an A was worth more than a 4.0 in lieu of other classes they may have been interested like, say, Anatomy or Photography or Music. It doesn’t really encourage creativity or individuality, in my opinion.

It’s beginning to take a toll on the education system on a national level, so CNN reported.

“Extra credit for AP courses, parental lobbying and genuine hard work by the most competitive students have combined to shatter any semblance of a Bell curve, one in which ‘A’s are reserved only for the very best. For example, of the 47,317 applications the University of California, Los Angeles, received for this fall’s freshman class, nearly 21,000 had GPAs of 4.0 or above.

That’s also making it harder for the most selective colleges — who often call grades the single most important factor in admissions — to join in a growing movement to lessen the influence of standardized tests.”

I’m not sure what this means for college admissions in the future - supposedly schools are putting greater emphasis on the SATs, but does a standardized test really measure college aptitude?

I’m curious to see how undergraduate admissions will evolve in my lifetime. Maybe 20 years from now students will be mailing in multimedia applications to schools.

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
Grade Inflation|Admissions

Educated Nation commented on the New York Times article claiming that some students were taking a backdoor approach to getting into college. That is, applying to a less competitive program within a university and then transferring into a more competitive one.

To see what the scoop was on this at UC Berkeley, I caught up with a few undergrads and asked some questions. Here’s what I found out:

Getting into college can be tricky business. UC Berkeley freshman Daren Blevins is a math major, but he’s known since high school that he wanted to study engineering at Cal. That’s what he intends to do, but it never would have happened if he had not employed some subterfuge.

Feeling that his chances for admission were poor in bioengineering, he applied as a math major. It worked — just as it has for an increasing number of students trying to gain admission into selective universities, according to a recent New York Times article.

“I figured I’d apply to something everyone else wasn’t applying to so I’d have a better chance of getting in,” said Blevins, who is already taking engineering classes.

Freshman Kristina Fayer said Blevins’ strategy made sense. “When you’re applying they tell you engineering and chemistry are really selective and hard to get into,” she said.

At UC Berkeley, the average SAT score for this fall’s freshman class fell between 1790 and 2160 out of 2400, according to the Undergraduate Admissions Office.

And SAT scores within individual colleges at Cal indicate that selectivity varies. In Fall 2006, SAT score for the College of Letters and Science was 1953. That compares to 1892 for the College of Environmental Design; and 1842 in the College of Natural Resources.

In Fall 2005, 75 percent of freshman in the College of Engineering had an SAT Math Score above 700. In stark contrast, only 25 percent of students in the College of Environmental Design had a Math Score above 720.

But Cal students who have been around longer said that most undergraduates change majors simply because they are trying to find one they like, and sometimes that requires a little moving around.

Sophomore Mary Mayeda switched from the more selective College of Letters & Sciences to the less selective College of Natural Resources because it offers the attention she needs.

“CNR is really small and we have advisors who can focus on students. People don’t get lost in the numbers,” she said, referring to the department by its acronym.

Sophomore Kristen Johannessen has a friend who recently transferred into a competitive engineering major, though it was not a premeditated move, she said.

“She just realized that it was what she wanted to do,” said Johannessen.

The flow goes both ways, said Robert Giomi, Associate Dean of Student Services in the College of Engineering. About 10 percent of freshman engineering students switch majors every year when they realize that their passions lie elsewhere. About 75 students apply for transfer into engineering every year, and about 65 make the cut, he said.

“A small fraction of students who know competition in engineering is stiff are taking the backdoor approach,” said Cindy Manly-Fields, an undergraduate advisor in the bioengineering department, with regard to the major-changing students she sees.

Students must determine whether they want to study engineering during their freshman year said Manly-Fields. “The problem is with engineering is you already have to have taken the courses. You can’t decide on engineering your sophomore year, it could set you back,” she said.

Yet, she sees many students coming into bioengineering during their sophomore year. These students must have settled on engineering at least a year prior, Manly-Fields wagered.

“But I get all kinds of reasons,” she said. “Some of these students are undeclared engineering majors.”

Gimio also warned that student attempts to play the strategy game could backfire.

“It would be easier [for students] if they had applied directly to the College [of Engineering] as freshman. Once they are here they are graded on performance in college at Berkeley, which is often not as good as their high school performance,” he said.

Incoming freshmen intent on coming to Cal still feel otherwise, said Brad Speer, a freshman this year.

“I’ve seen this pattern of behavior a few times,” said Speer. “It’s kind of like a last resort to get in if UCB is a first choice school for someone.”

Speer’s friend, a current senior in high school, is applying to Berkeley as an electrical engineering major but plans to switch to a more selective major later on.

The backdoor game might be less common at Cal as it is at other schools because the admission’s variations between departments are less sharp.

In 2005, education and music programs at Vanderbilt had a 44 percent admit rate versus a 31 percent admit rate in liberal arts programs. Some applicants capitalized on this difference. “The cute phrase they use down there is Chopin-ing your way in,” Howard Greene, a consultant told The New York Times.

Blevins, the freshman math major, who plans to move into bioengineering is still betting that his strategy will work for him.

Nevertheless, he said, he’ll wait until next year to apply to engineering. “I heard a lot of freshman try this and get denied. It’s better to apply in your second year,” he said.

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
Backdoor Admissions|Admissions

NPR today ran a story about the mainstreaming of video game development as viable college major. Game development has arrived in the upper echelons of academia; it has outgrown it’s previous status as a novelty “Buffy the Vampire Studies” type of major. From the NPR lead off:

This year, the University of Southern California enrolled its first class of undergraduate students who will major in video-game development. The school is not the first major university to have a program in video games. But the curriculum is not all about car races and shootouts.

Note that the degree USC offers is not called “video game development” rather, it’s a subset of a very marketable CS degree: “Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (games).” The classes offered at USC are more traditional CS fodder: C++, Java, AI, 3D animation, computer programming. Still, the degree description sounds just like the career schools who have been offering this degree for years, “Students graduating from this program will be capable of engineering next-generation games and simulations and their technologies in the entertainment and serious game fields.”

Here is a list of career schools offering video game design degrees.

Life | School | Education | Technology

Are colleges today more selective than ever? According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling , over the last 20 years the college admissions selectivity rate hasn’t changed; 4-year colleges on average still accept 75% of their applicants. But Harvard and Princeton are just as selective as they’ve always been with acceptance rates under 13%. Forget SAT prep, it’s private college coaches and counselors who are giving kids the edge they need to get into the universities of their dreams (only 2.6% of the nation’s colleges accept less than 25% of applicants).

I listened to an archived NPR program about college admissions in which two private college counselors tell their side of the story. College counselors want to act as guides for their clients, helping them to find the college that’s “the right fit” for the student in question. Both of the counselors interviewed tended to try to steer the students (read: their hyper parents) away from “brand-name schools.” Some parents are hyper and have hired a counselor to better their kids’ chances of getting into the best schools. Some parents are overwhelmed and confused by the application process itself as well as by the sheer number of colleges to choose from. The two private counselors repeatedly stated that “name brand” schools are often the focus of the parents, which is a big part of why the parents felt their kiddo needed the extra advantage a private college counselor could give them.

My initial gut reaction to the whole idea of private college counselors was utter disgust that parents can do this for their kids. It seemed like one more item in the already long and messed-up list of bizarre, high-pressure hoops that parents demand their kids to jump through because a child who is anything but stellar makes his / her parents look like failures.

But college counselors aren’t entirely evil. They do this for a living, so they’re better at it than a parent or a high school student doing it for the first time. They have probably toured hundreds of colleges, and have a good idea about the personalities and the philosophies of different schools. They have seen more schools than any student will ever have the time or the money to check out, so the counselors will be far better able to match the best fitting school with the student. They have excellent book recommendations such as: Colleges That Change Lives by Loren Pope, and Rugg’s Recommendation on the Colleges by Frederick E. Rugg. (more…)

Entrepreneurs Are H-O-T

If you have a yen to make a dollar (holy bad joke, Batman) by joining the entrepreneurial ranks (the badness of that is still hurting me), then you are in luck, my friend. Being young and hip and using your noggin to come up with the next new thing is now considered perfectly respectable. So much so, that High Point University is now offering a Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship.

“The Entrepreneurship major is intended for people who are interested in becoming owners of small businesses, working in a family-owned business upon graduation, or who are interested in the unique concerns of managing a small business. Students will learn to deal with the issues of starting a new business venture and also the management issues unique to the small business.”

Which means that you might possibly be able to work it so the ‘rents will pay for you to learn how to kick some entrepreneurial booty. Or, if your parents won’t fork out the tuition, student loans are more easily obtained than business loans. I’m just saying.

You can look at all the entrepreneurial hype as intensely frustrating competition if you’ve already been slaving away in your basement for years working on that digital shoehorn. Or you can look at the new wave as inspirational information (I‘m rolling my eyes, too). Glean what you need, and try to remember that competition makes the world…shinier?

Here are some interesting articles that will either make you sing with inspiration or flare your nostrils and close your eyes while you try to keep the anger inside.

If you want to wonder what in the hell you’ve been doing with all of your spare time, be sure to read about the bright young things, all age 25 and under, who are considered by Business Week Online to be the best young biz whizzes in America. This includes the kiddos from YouTube, Digg and Facebook. And Ben Casnocha of Comcate, who you can just tell is incapable of turning his brain off. I think he just never stops.

Not on that list: Ramit Sethi. Is he under 25? Not sure. But he’s ridiculously smart, and it’s impossible for me to not have absolute respect for someone who has a ranting blog called Things I Hate. It doesn’t matter how foul my mood or how not funny my life is at the moment; if I read one line of Things I Hate, I’m laughing so hard I’m crying (and also snorting, which is certainly unfortunate and not at all polite).

An article on the blog gradschoolstory.com lists one of the top ten reasons for going to graduate school as the perfect place to start starting up your startup. It’s late, and yes, that was satisfying to write.

The Guardian has several articles in their technology section about a whole slew of Web entrepreneurs.

Web 2.0 in general
Bebo, Michael and Xochi Birch
Blogger/Odeo, Evan Williams
Craigslist, Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster
Del.icio.us, Joshua Schachter
Digg, Kevin Rose
Feed Burner, Dick Costolo
Flickr, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield
Last.fm, Martin Stiksel
Netvibes, Tariq Krim
Technorati, David L. Sifry
Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales
WordPress, Matt Mullenweg
Writely, Sam Schillace

And if you just want to look at something pretty and be able to think to yourself (in a totally non-competitive way) “That’s genius! Why didn’t I think of that? Of course! A dance floor that generates usable energy!” then you should take a gander at Springwise.com. It’s one idea after another, in streamlined and well-lit perfection. Yes, it’s the rainy season in Seattle and I require well-lit websites.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

College | College Education

The NY Times ran an interesting article about wading through college stats. Statistics rarely tell the whole story, they’re misleading, and they don’t measure what’s important. What do statistics really tell you about a school? Are they even useful?

Here are the top statistics to pay attention to (or not):

1. Average Class Size at 25
Read the fine print. Ask how often you will have small classes.

2. Majority Percentage of Full-Time Faculty
Disregard # of PhDs on staff.

3. Retention Rate Above 80%

4. Average SAT Scores
Note that most averages are slightly inflated.

5. Diversity

6. Graduation Rates
Graduation rates should be above 55% for students graduating in four years. 75% for students graduating in five or six years. Disregard statistics for students who get jobs within a year of graduation.

Read the full article here.

College | College Education | College Admissions

The Internet is now a sciece of its own, according to researchers at MIT and The University of Southampton in Britain. A New York Times article discusses how the two universities will soon begin a joint research program in “Web science.”

“Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized Web systems work.”

The new discipline is different from computer science in some critical ways.

“The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.”

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
Web Science|College Majors

Looking for an internship or a job is always stressful. There are loads of sites out there but here are a few sites worth visiting:

1) Washington Post Grad Guide - Interactive site with tips and advice on how to find a job and manage your budget as a new grad.

2) Monster - Job listings and career advice

3) Idealist.org - Lots of jobs listings in the non-profit/development sector

4) USAJOBS - Listing of many, many positions with the federal government.

5) CareerBuilder - Job listings

6) jobs.joelonsoftware.com - A must-visit listing of software jobs, sources tell me

7) AIESEC - AIESEC helps students and recent grads gain international work experience. It’s a way to live abroad, get paid and travel, virtually anywhere in the world.

8) Vault - Information/articles on salaries, jobs, careers, higher education

9) Craigslist - Yes, there are people who have found good jobs on craigslist

10) Jobdango - Lists jobs exclusively in the Oregon/Washington area

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
Jobs|Internships