While attending an elite school (known for the STEM discipline) as a STEM student, I took summer STEM courses at two different state universities and now work at a state university. If the textbooks were the common ones and not written by the professor teaching the course, the courses were still definitely different. The homework and testing were the main thing. Testing at the state school were often multiple choice (I went through 4 yrs of elite school without ever filling out a bubble) and the homeworks were far more challenging. The homework at the elite school were impossible to figure out on your own unless you were that top 1% of the students. The homework from the state schools were problems in the book. State school tests were typically easy enough to have a grading system without or with only a small curve. Additional problem books from the bookstore would actually be useful. Those books were useless to me at the elite university, as our test questions were far far more complex, combining multiple principles into one problem. Elite school has an army of TAs who can assess and assign partial credit because each one just grades one question. The average grade in a lower level course was never in the 70s also below and often far below and everything was graded on a curve with a C/B- as the mean. We never had questions that just asked for a definition. Every test was open notes, open book because you had to know how to apply multiple principles together to solve a problem.
The other consideration is that MIT, Stanford and others have no problem providing their lectures and books online because they know the value of an elite education is outside the lecture hall.
Last edited by Chana; 06/30/14 06:41 AM.
