This is what I'm talking about!!

[forensicbuzz]

What's wrong with opening up borders to the world? We want to attract the best minds from all over and they're definitely not all located in the Southern US. Some of my favorite experiences were spending time with my international friends. I learned a lot about the world when I was often one of the only US born students in a group. People from India, Korea, Chad, Saudi Arabia, etc. All really fun students who were open to learning American customs. I went mostly to parties hosted by my Indian friends because those were more fun than the ones I went to at frats. In the classroom, international students were always really bright and very hard working considering if they failed out, they couldn't just drive back home to Marietta and cry on mom's couch. They had to do well.

I also think it's great we're raising the standard for entry. It's the only way to be competitive for those best minds, otherwise they're going to MIT, CalTech, Duke, etc. I see a lot of current high school students who still hold GT as a backup because our prestige isn't on that level. Yet. As for retention, I think the improvement in technology and on campus resources have allowed for GT to become easier to stay in. Being able to share various documents and textbooks and open chat rooms for study groups and questions has done a lot for making GT easier to stay in. But I wouldn't say the content is any easier. It's just easier to communicate those ideas. The only way it could return to the reputation it had when you thought it was cool is if they decided to remove all of the infrastructure they put in place to help students.

The Administration has changed the philosophical approach to undergraduate students. There is no way you go from 35% (4-year) retention to +97% freshman retention without a whole-sale change in approach. Whereas GT has historically been easier to get into as a Georgia resident, it's much more difficult now. Unfortunately, a large portion of that 65% loss were in-state students who were just not prepared for the rigor of the Tech freshman experience. My understanding is that the Georgia residents enrolling today are a much higher caliber student than when I was in school in the late 80's/early 90's. Couple this with a de-emphasis on weed-out classes, and it's just a different environment. Ivy leagues have been using this approach since time immemorial.

 

[jacobchbe]

As a recent Georgia Tech grad, I don't give a damn if the football players take special needs courses. I want to win a national championship.

 

[33jacket]

The Administration has changed the philosophical approach to undergraduate students. There is no way you go from 35% (4-year) retention to +97% freshman retention without a whole-sale change in approach. Whereas GT has historically been easier to get into as a Georgia resident, it's much more difficult now. Unfortunately, a large portion of that 65% loss were in-state students who were just not prepared for the rigor of the Tech freshman experience. My understanding is that the Georgia residents enrolling today are a much higher caliber student than when I was in school in the late 80's/early 90's. Couple this with a de-emphasis on weed-out classes, and it's just a different environment. Ivy leagues have been using this approach since time immemorial.

Exactly. Thx for sayin what i tried to in a better way

 

[ChasonBaller]

Coach Reveno already selling it to bball recruits

 

[MtownJacket]

You've got to be kidding me. As a recent engineering graduate (May '16) this flies in the face of everything Georgia Tech has meant to me. Like other posters have said, I want Tech to have great players and win a lot of games, but I want to do it with Tech-Men, not with skating through gimmie classes with no educational value whatsoever. We are not UNCheat or Ugag. Don't get me wrong, I love hearing about the great recruits we can attract, but I'm hoping to attract more Jaytlin Askew's (enrolling in robotic engineering/ME) than guys that ought to be somewhere like UNC or ThugU.

Gotta get those required 6 humanities credit hours. Why is this any worse than art history? At least this intersects arts and technology.

 

[MtownJacket]

Omg.

Tech opening up its borders to the world has changed the school more than a damn elective.

Back before clough tech stood for a school intent on training and developing the south in engineering capacity with a heavy focus on Georgia students. Now. Forget it. Try to get in. We think we are mit and we are not.

The gt landscape has totally morphed in the last 20 years. Clough spent a ton of time butt sniffing the elite academics; hence one reason he landed his role after tech and he pushed the mission of the school to game the us news rankings.

It was never like this its first 80 years of existence. Gt wasnt hard to stay in. Hard to get in too. But now its like impossible to get in. And judging from recent retention easier to stay in.

The school has changed. What made it cool for me was you knew it was so hard to stay in, that if u finished almost regardless of gpa you were worthy.

I cant speak for today. Maybe its still the same. But retention is way higher (us news baby. Gimme retention. Gimme endowment. Gimme research)

Pretend the difficulty level of Tech remains constant. Then you raise admissions standards and the quality of incoming Tech students skyrockets. Wouldn't those more qualified students be better prepared to handle the same challenging classes? Wouldn't a decreasing retention rate follow naturally from increasing incoming student quality even if difficulty remained constant?

Tech won't win the grade inflation battle by cranking up the difficulty of intro physics to recapture the vibe of the '80s. All that does is cause excellent Tech students to graduate with a mediocre GPA. Grad schools don't realize that a 3.6 at Tech is like a 4.0 at Stanford. Quit whining because young grads are smarter than you are.

Edit: and if you think Tech should lower their admissions standards to make it easier to get into you are smoking crack.

 

[Cam]

The Administration has changed the philosophical approach to undergraduate students. There is no way you go from 35% (4-year) retention to +97% freshman retention without a whole-sale change in approach. Whereas GT has historically been easier to get into as a Georgia resident, it's much more difficult now. Unfortunately, a large portion of that 65% loss were in-state students who were just not prepared for the rigor of the Tech freshman experience. My understanding is that the Georgia residents enrolling today are a much higher caliber student than when I was in school in the late 80's/early 90's. Couple this with a de-emphasis on weed-out classes, and it's just a different environment. Ivy leagues have been using this approach since time immemorial.

I can definitely agree with that. What @33jacket was saying is also true. Times have changed. You can't exist as a university anymore that weeds people out. Not only is it going to crush you financially, but nobody is going to want to attend your school. Most people don't learn how to study until about their Junior year, which by then it's too late if you get weeded out. Cost of attending school now is far too high to risk not getting your degree. Not saying the 65% of people who failed out had an easy life back then, but the value of a bachelors degree was worth much more back then to take that risk. Nowadays a bachelors is hardly enough and making yours ungodly difficult to obtain is only going to deter people, regardless of reputation. A lot of my friends couldn't find jobs immediately when they graduated (not just GT), they were forced into going to graduate school where an M.S. is the new B.S (hence why I'm now getting a Ph.D.). Personally, I feel like GT has hit a good medium. My degree was definitely difficult to obtain. I had to sacrifice a lot to obtain it and, frankly, a lot of times my best just wasn't good enough. But on the other hand, I never felt that professors were ever trying to weed us out. We always got a fair shot, but it was never handed to us either.

Its also worth considering that the enrollment has skyrocketed since 2000. I can't find it now, but I remember hearing that the alumni base is overwhelmingly made up of people who graduated in the last 20 years because they pump out more graduates than decades prior. I think it's important to keep our doors open to Georgia residents, but the decrease in admission percentage is offset by the shear number of people who are applying and being admitted. That comes with increasing school prestige.

 

[Sideways]

I can definitely agree with that. What @33jacket was saying is also true. Times have changed. You can't exist as a university anymore that weeds people out. Not only is it going to crush you financially, but nobody is going to want to attend your school. Most people don't learn how to study until about their Junior year, which by then it's too late if you get weeded out. Cost of attending school now is far too high to risk not getting your degree. Not saying the 65% of people who failed out had an easy life back then, but the value of a bachelors degree was worth much more back then to take that risk. Nowadays a bachelors is hardly enough and making yours ungodly difficult to obtain is only going to deter people, regardless of reputation. A lot of my friends couldn't find jobs immediately when they graduated (not just GT), they were forced into going to graduate school where an M.S. is the new B.S (hence why I'm now getting a Ph.D.). Personally, I feel like GT has hit a good medium. My degree was definitely difficult to obtain. I had to sacrifice a lot to obtain it and, frankly, a lot of times my best just wasn't good enough. But on the other hand, I never felt that professors were ever trying to weed us out. We always got a fair shot, but it was never handed to us either.

Its also worth considering that the enrollment has skyrocketed since 2000. I can't find it now, but I remember hearing that the alumni base is overwhelmingly made up of people who graduated in the last 20 years because they pump out more graduates than decades prior. I think it's important to keep our doors open to Georgia residents, but the decrease in admission percentage is offset by the shear number of people who are applying and being admitted. That comes with increasing school prestige.

This is definitely second hand and not in any scientific, a young man in our church spent approximately 5 years at Tech. He graduated with a BS in computer science in 3 years after taking classes at our local community college. He spent a couple of years getting his master's and was a TA. He says that the students that had the most difficulty adjusting to Tech were the internationals especially Chinese and Koreans due to language difficulties. He became fluent in Japanese and was impressed with the diversity of the student body but felt like (as some have alluded) that the pendulum has swung way to far in admitting foreign students because of their difficulty in making the adjustment. It was his understanding that many of them are under tremendous pressure to do well at Tech and it was painful for him to watch the all too predictable results of lofty expectations meeting reality.

 

[jchens_GT]

My English class was on pop culture/ music

Similar. We watched Cohen brothers movies and wrote papers about them.

 

[Cam]

This is definitely second hand and not in any scientific, a young man in our church spent approximately 5 years at Tech. He graduated with a BS in computer science in 3 years after taking classes at our local community college. He spent a couple of years getting his master's and was a TA. He says that the students that had the most difficulty adjusting to Tech were the internationals especially Chinese and Koreans due to language difficulties. He became fluent in Japanese and was impressed with the diversity of the student body but felt like (as some have alluded) that the pendulum has swung way to far in admitting foreign students because of their difficulty in making the adjustment. It was his understanding that many of them are under tremendous pressure to do well at Tech and it was painful for him to watch the all too predictable results of lofty expectations meeting reality.

Chinese students had the most trouble with the language barrier from what I saw. I won't argue with that. I think Chinese and English are among the most dissimilar languages. That being said, they seemed to be the only one that struggled that much. All Indians I met were completely fluent, even if they had never set foot in the US. Most of the people I've met from South Asia were like that. Koreans were less fluent (I helped one friend edit a lot of her reports to proper English), but were still much better at the language than Chinese. You might be able to make theories about level of access to English media in these countries or something. Outside of Asia, students from Africa, South America, or the Middle East might have come in with strong accents, but we never had too much trouble communicating unless we were in a loud bar. Personally, I found it kind of cool to be the only fluently monolingual person in a group project, it widens your world and culture perspective which is very important. All that being said, I think people on this board are really overestimating the number of international students. Only 1,626 out of 15,142 undergrads are foreign. That's 10.7%. Georgia students make up nearly 60% of the student population (9,045/15,142). Seems like they're taking care of their home grown to me. What would be ideal for people saying the pendulum has swung too far?

 

[Sideways]

Beats me. I did not go to Tech. I was just repeating his experiences, which by the way, were within the last two years. He is not the sort to make stuff up. I do know that as a TA he was adamant about the cheating that went on among some students.

 

[Cam]

Beats me. I did not go to Tech. I was just repeating his experiences, which by the way, were within the last two years. He is not the sort to make stuff up. I do know that as a TA he was adamant about the cheating that went on among some students.

Definitely not calling your friend a liar. In fact, I agree with him for the most part. I just asked my roommate about this, who was a CS TA for 3 years at GT. He said the international students probably came in to office hours maybe a bit more often than US born, but they were earnest about learning and working through projects end to end. Said they had more trouble utilizing text resources. As for cheating, that's definitely pretty prominent at GT (mostly concentrated in Greek societies with access to a Word and brothers/sisters who are TAs), but international students have been shown to cheat more often than others in some studies.

 

[Sideways]

Definitely not calling your friend a liar. In fact, I agree with him for the most part. I just asked my roommate about this, who was a CS TA for 3 years at GT. He said the international students probably came in to office hours maybe a bit more often than US born, but they were earnest about learning and working through projects end to end. Said they had more trouble utilizing text resources. As for cheating, that's definitely pretty prominent at GT (mostly concentrated in Greek societies with access to a Word and brothers/sisters who are TAs), but international students have been shown to cheat more often than others in some studies.

Understood and acknowledged. He would get kind of defensive about the cheating (he has a very strong sense of justice ) and yes the Greeks were among the worst offenders. I would gently remind him that as I taught him in Sunday school, not everyone was as gifted in some areas as he is and that none of us are without some imperfection. Nonetheless, he is a very proud Tech alumnus and is destined for great things.

 

[forensicbuzz]

Word is not cheating. If the dumb instructor wants to reuse old tests, that's not on the student. However, the Greek system does have an unfair advantage over the GDI's who don't necessarily have access to Word.

 

[ibeattetris]

Word is not cheating. If the dumb instructor wants to reuse old tests, that's not on the student. However, the Greek system does have an unfair advantage over the GDI's who don't necessarily have access to Word.

Things may have changed, but every professor in CS was required to provide the previous X number of midterms/finals (I forget the actual number) when I was a student. Word was probably still better since it doesn't have a strict restriction on how many you can have on record, but it really shouldn't be that necessary to go back that far in advance.

 

[forensicbuzz]

I only took one CS class, and it was in Textiles. In the late 80's/early 90's you were pretty much left to your own devices. A good Greek friend helped my survive Def Bods.