Telling Story on Carnegie-Mellon’s Homepage

Committed to ‘EXCEL’ – Carnegie Mellon University | CMU.

Here is what is telling to me.  Instead of responding to students having difficulties with hard courses by either grade inflation or content deflation, they are actually just helping the students learn the material.

Here is what I wrote:

I hope that present and prospective students of CMU realize how much this story says about a CMU education.

I taught math for many years at a university where, in terms of abilitiies, the students are quite similar to the ones at CMU. Math there is quite different than at CMU. That is why I think that it is so important for serious students deciding to go to any school to understand how to look at this article to see what it says about CMU’s administration and faculty – and that what exists here is not neccessarily the norm.

This is what stood out to me about this story. That the school helps students in ‘…programs offered for traditionally difficult courses, such as 21-127 Concepts of Math…”

Here is why that stands out. The common response to students struggling with difficult, but critically important material, is just to dumb it down and rob the students of learning what they need. Here is an example of how this happens. It is from the Spring 2012 edition of Washington University in St. Louis’ Arts and Sciences Magazine:

The (physics) professor “…brought a new way of teaching to campus…[he] scrapped the traditional lecture format…In a typical class, they hear one or more 10-minute lectures … talk about two-minute problems in groups…Students… were clamoring to get in…”
About 90% of the students in this course went into the final expecting an A.
This is how many schools, not just Washington Univ., respond to student complaints about difficult courses. CMU responds differently. They help the students and don’t deflate the content. (I looked at the course material for 21-127 to see for myself.) If you are a student at CMU, you should be excited about that. If you are considering CMU and get in, great. But if you don’t get in, be very careful to read between the lines and ask questions when you consider another school.