Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Why High School Rankings are Meaningless: article

I recently explained to a family member (who grew up in another country) that Stanford was not an Ivy League school, and that the Ivy League was "an athletic conference composed of sports teams from eight private institutions of higher education in the Northeastern United States", quoting the Wikipedia. Her plausible logic was

(1) Stanford is famous
(2) the Ivies are famous
(3) Stanford is an Ivy

Bostonian, I think that for those not from the NE or from Academia, "Ivy" is often used loosely as a synonym for "Elite/Most Applicants Turned Away/Highest Level of Prestige."

So while the term may technically mean just those 8 schools, to most people, it means something more like some loose collection (defined idiosyncratically, if you talk to people about it) collection of institutions that they have very high respect for as institutions (be it warranted or not).

Duke isn't an Ivy League, either.

However, I was more than willing to go there for law school rather than Cornell.

Ithica is cold.

Conversely, it was my impression in high school that I was getting less homework in AP than my compadres in the non-AP equivalents... to which they would respond, "At least I don't have to write nearly so many essays!" This was a trade in which we both considered ourselves winners.

My perceptions are slightly skewed, mind you, by the fact that for my most labor-intensive classes (namely, math), I solved the problem of excessive homework by not doing it. Also affecting my perceptions was the fact that I could crank out an essay of acceptable quality, on any topic, in one hour. So take that for what it's worth.

Neither Duke nor Stanford are Ivy League schools no matter how much you want to twist the definition.

Granted, you may have to be from the Northeast to understand this.

There are also essentially two levels within the Ivy League.

Real Ivies and Safety Ivies.

I thought those were "Baby Ivies." Or "Second Class" depending on one's perspective within the Ivory Tower itself.



In all seriousness, I wasn't defending the "It-means-whatever-I-want-it-to-mean" crowd. Revisionism like that kind of bugs me in general terms, fwiw.

Just offering a plausible explanation of the phenomenon.

It's an excellent explanation of the phenomenon, which makes it an excellent indicator of general relevance.

If you are talking to someone and they think that Stanford is an "Ivy League" school, you can be certain that you are talking to one of the lumpenproletariat and adjust your expectations accordingly.

Ditto. Pretty much exactly. My main claim to fame in college was the ability to walk into an exam cold and fill a bluebook in an hour with well-structured writing. LOL.

Take my word for it-- in modern high school reality, there are two important differences in addition to the fact that these things are fundamentally reversed now (that is, the AP classes have a lot MORE work associated with them than the standard versions do).

1. Quality ain't what it used to be. Not by a long shot. So those not-so-rigorous classes with less writing also don't ask students to produce much in the way of excellence, either... and even less so now.

2. More is just more, not better. It's not that the quality expectations are SO much better in AP, actually. Appallingly.

AP students are taught--specifically-- to tackle the kinds of multiple choice items which will appear on AP exams. Yes. They spend class time on this now. As opposed to cranking out acceptable quality essays.



I.will.be.so.glad.to.be.done.with.this.garbage. This is such a perversion of what I consider education to be that it is disgusting to me as a human being.

Oh yes. That AP History class my DS dropped after 2 weeks was full of practice for the AP exam. The most egregious examples were the amazing forty-minute lightning essays. The kids would get a topic and were told to write about it for 40 minutes. No sources or footnotes allowed. Just keep writing!!

The instructor left my son and I on his mailing list for the whole year. I just looked through his messages and saw that the class covered World War II and the Cold War in a single week. The assignment for those topics was the same as it always was every week: read the chapters and take the multiple choice tests. Passing the tests required memorizing the kinds of picayune details that are fodder for MC test questions. Talk about needing fortitude to get through it! Blech.

Looking back on my own AP classes in the 80s, the stuff we did in Calculus was a reasonable approximation of college-level material. And Mr. W. never gave a multiple choice test. English was not even close to the college writing courses I took the next year. European history was somewhere in between --- but it was much better than the model in the AP US History class my son dropped. Again, no multiple choice tests and there was an expectation to cite our sources in papers.

In thinking about how these classes work now, calling them "college level" is really something of a sad joke. They aren't. They're...kind of more of a business model for the testing and test prep industries.

No, the person with the mistaken view is pretty smart.