A company called Ultrinsic is making it possible for students to win money by betting on their grades at 36 colleges. Students can be rewarded for earning A’s or take out grade insurance if they think they will not do well in a class. Is it wise to motivate students with monetary rewards? Is betting on grades even legal?
From U.S. News and World Report, here are accounts of nine road trips to college campuses situated in different parts of the country.
From U.S. News and World Report, here are ten recommendations for parents to help their college-bound kids.
Faced with a growing collection of books and periodicals and a decreasing amount of space in which to store them, Stanford University’s Engineering Library has started to faze out print forms in favor of digitizing them, according to NPR.
For the moment, the Engineering Library is the only Stanford library that’s cutting back on books. But Keller says he can see what’s coming down the road by simply looking at the current crop of Stanford students.
“They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online,” he says. “I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going.”
And while it’s still rare among American libraries to get rid of such a large amount of books, it’s clear that many are starting to lay the groundwork for a different future. According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books.
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From the New York Times, here is a sampling of free lecture videos from some of the world’s most renowned professors on topics such as finance, anatomy, and physics.
From New York Magazine, here is a short article offering insight into what goes on inside admissions rooms at small liberal arts colleges.
From the Wall Street Journal, here is an article to remind you that rejection from your top choice school isn’t the end of the world.
Both Warren Buffett and “Today” show host Meredith Vieira say that while being rejected by the school of their dreams was devastating, it launched them on a path to meeting life-changing mentors. Harold Varmus, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, says getting rejected twice by Harvard Medical School, where a dean advised him to enlist in the military, was soon forgotten as he plunged into his studies at Columbia University’s med school. For other college rejects, from Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy and entrepreneur Ted Turner to broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw, the turndowns were minor footnotes, just ones they still remember and will talk about.
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An article by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy in Teachers College Record compares grading tendencies in public and private american colleges and universities. The article is being made available here on Rojstaczer’s blog until next month, when TCR opens up the content to non-subscribers. From the abstract:
Here we report on historical and recent grading patterns at American four-year colleges and universities. Records of average grades show that since the 1960s, grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public-commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade. These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. They also may help explain why undergraduate students are increasingly disengaged from learning and why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technology.
In the U.S. News and World Report, Kim Clark lists 10 factors to consider when determining whether a college’s financial aid offer will be large enough to meet your needs.
This year, Tufts University offered applicants the opportunity to post a Youtube video as part of their applications. This New York Times article has more information on the response.
