So Newsweek said NCSU is the 8th easiest University to get through in the US.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/galleries/2012/08/05/college-rankings-2012-least-rigorous-schools-photos.html

8/22/2012 11:30:59 PM

Don't feel like editing, but essentially their basis was that most people graduate and are accepted.

[Edited on August 22, 2012 at 11:32 PM. Reason : *]

8/22/2012 11:31:41 PM

this is stupid

8/22/2012 11:32:51 PM

[Edited on August 22, 2012 at 11:33 PM. Reason : .]

8/22/2012 11:32:53 PM

Don't feel like editing

8/22/2012 11:33:18 PM

I wonder if they broke it down into engineering versus the other areas.

I knew a lot of people that took the engineering route, flunked out, and went poli sci.

8/22/2012 11:35:21 PM

[Edited on August 22, 2012 at 11:37 PM. Reason : didn't feel like editing ]

8/22/2012 11:36:59 PM

i like how 3 of their top 5 are florida schools

and thats just in their top 5

8/22/2012 11:37:34 PM

everything i took outside of my major was far easier than even highschool. hell, i took a graduate level history class just because it was interesting and an easy GPA boost, as opposed to my junior-level MAE classes where 40% of the class received a "D" or "F" in some cases. engineering was a kick in the junk (i'm sure hard sciences across the board are, once above the weed-out classes).

8/22/2012 11:39:03 PM

^ I agree...all the nonsensical courses. I took chemistry, material engineering & sci, and comp sci courses.... once you get up to a certain level, its not a walk in the park... it feels like Newsweek is saying anyone from NCSU had a walk in the park

[Edited on August 22, 2012 at 11:41 PM. Reason : f]

8/22/2012 11:40:51 PM

it's ok. if you look at their "25 most rigorous schools," they've got Davidson at #3.

8/22/2012 11:41:57 PM

Humanities are dragging us down. Engineering hard. Everything else easy as balls. Made As in classes I went to 3-4 times.

8/23/2012 12:02:31 AM

BUSINESS MAJORS

8/23/2012 12:18:20 AM

ENGINEERING MAJORS: they get it so easy; they get an A+ for figuring out that they could live in a multiverse where they could have flunked out in a Christian college for suggesting that Snooki got pregnant illegitimately.

[Edited on August 23, 2012 at 12:48 AM. Reason : I think I am right... Todd Akin? I need your guidance]

8/23/2012 12:45:43 AM

not credible... UNC is not listed in most liberal...

8/23/2012 12:48:39 AM

maybe i'm biased because they're dissing my skoo, but i don't see how you can really measure this down to a list of ten. so many variables.

8/23/2012 12:52:27 AM

When the people that employee me bring this up, it looks bad on me... is NCSU really that easy to get through?

8/23/2012 12:53:19 AM

i went through the college of management... i would have to admit it wasn't as tough as i might have expected college to be, but the majority of students wouldn't have a respectable GPA without studying...at least imo. but how on earth am i supposed to say it's easier or harder than any given university?

8/23/2012 12:58:02 AM

I kinda agree...nearly every non-major elective I've taken has been an easy A, and I don't take BS electives unless it's required. Even the junior-level EE and MAE courses I've taken were A's with back-burner effort. However, my junior and senior level NE courses are the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life, intellectually. I sometimes feel that my dept. is a completely separate entity from the rest of NCSU

This isn't intended to spark an engineering school pissing contest, every individual has his own strengths and weaknesses. But bullshit articles like this that only look at gross statistics and yet potentially influence public opinion of my degree is complete bunk. Do they even consider the vet school? Those kids are insane

[Edited on August 23, 2012 at 1:04 AM. Reason : lol @ my own contradiction]

8/23/2012 1:02:40 AM

hahahaha holy shit alabama's median SAT score is 1130. would not have expected that from a state's flagship school.

and a year or two ago wasn't penn state #1 on the wall street journal's list for most highly recruited graduates or something? and wasn't state top 20?

8/23/2012 1:33:00 AM

Florida has mountains

8/23/2012 1:53:32 AM

I watched the video associated with these rankings, and good God, Newsweek is trying so hard. The effort is pretty impressive actually.

Quote :

"oneshot: Don't feel like editing, but essentially their basis was that most people graduate and are accepted."

No. If they'd done that, we wouldn't have made the list by a long shot. We take a lot of crap for having a low graduation rate. Our four-year graduation rate is 42%. Chapel Hill's rate, for comparison, is 75%.

Anyway, there were four factors that Newsweek considered:

1. Percentage of students accepted
2. Median SAT/ACT scores of those students

These two factors determined the school's selectivity, and only the top 200 most selective schools were used. Also, SAT/ACT scores were used to determine student aptitude. Next factors:

3. Survey data from students about workload manageability at http://www.collegeprowler.com. Our page there says 632 students have been surveyed, which is a pretty good sample size, depending on how it was created (how it was taken, if it's representative of all the departments/students, etc...). However, there is a "Take a Survey" button on the website, and if that's how they got their data, then it's useless.
4. Student-to-faculty ratio. Larger class sizes = less rigorous, according to Newsweek.

Anyway, schools got ranked as less rigorous if they had bigger class sizes and if students reported it being easier than student aptitude suggested it should be. Obviously, this ranking process leaves a lot of room for disagreement.

So, if you disagree with our ranking on this list, the super cool guy in the Newsweek video says we should make our own videos in response and send them to him. And they're going to create a compilation of our responses and post it to the Internet--they're so hip and with-it! Anyway, in addition to becoming lifelong readers of Newsweek, I think we're also supposed to go to collegeprowler.com and set-up an account today!

[Edited on August 23, 2012 at 3:37 AM. Reason : It's becoming more and more apparent that I need to get a life.]

8/23/2012 3:29:53 AM

So I found another article about it, and it gets worse. Two more factors they used:

In addition to using the quantity of professors on hand, they also accounted for the quality of professors. In order to accomplish this, they used student evaluations posted to http://www.RateMyProfessors.com.

They also accounted for freshman retention rates (again, looking for something higher than what you would expect given student aptitude).
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/features/college-rankings/2011/least-rigorous.html



Of course, this ranking is garbage, and I knew that before I looked into how they came up with it. But this methodology is especially bad. So I guess now I'm going to have to continue with what I was already doing: not subscribing to or buying Newsweek.

[Edited on August 23, 2012 at 6:28 AM. Reason : Annoyed by this crap and people's responses to it.]

8/23/2012 6:11:47 AM

Quote :

"Don't feel like editing, but essentially their basis was that most people graduate and are accepted."

I read this from two other blogs but I guess it is not how they determined it.

Regardless, anyone that graduated from NC State must have had a cakewalk. < /sarcasm >

8/23/2012 6:45:38 AM

Maybe I'm dumb but I definitely didn't find it to be "easy"

8/23/2012 7:02:48 AM

I found the smaller classes easier than the larger classes personally, but maybe that has partly to do with me wanting to be at them a lot more than the giant weed out and required elective classes

8/23/2012 7:15:32 AM

No West Virginia U?

Survey is bunk.

8/23/2012 8:18:37 AM

Sure, I had some easy classes. I also had some beasts. I got through college just as easily as my friends who went to UNC, Duke, Wake, William & Mary, etc. But I went 10 years ago, maybe some kids fucked shit up since I left. I'll always remember how tough I found organic chemistry and econometrics.

Shit I even took a forestry class for once for an easy grade, and that asshole made us do homework every week (or every other week).

Oh well, I don't care. Hopefully my law degrees will remove the taint of my NC State undergrad degree haha

8/23/2012 8:31:49 AM

Someone who did not go to a rigorous college came up with the ranking metric.

8/23/2012 8:57:49 AM

i didn't find undergrad or grad school to be especially hard...but i didn't care to work toward a 4.0, so maybe that's it

i think that, overall, NCSU is not especially hard to graduate from...graduate with honors? sure, that's going to be harder

as a general rule, i think that anyone who "flunks" out of an undergraduate program is just lazy, as opposed to stupid (otherwise they probably wouldn't have gotten in in the first place)

8/23/2012 9:20:31 AM

Obviously the people who created this list didn't look at all the complaints about Dr. Warren that are posted on TWW.

8/23/2012 9:31:30 AM

Guys, i love my school and I wouldn't say it is the 8th easiest school in the nation, especially given UNCs recent scandal and their 80% distribution of As and Bs. However, its not a particularly hard school. I did engineering* without much effor. With that being said, I would bet good money that NC State's engineering program is far more difficult than UNCs Comm school which contains 75% of its students.

A really good study would be one that followed up on careers of bachelor degree graduates. While UNC does develop students that become very excellent wait staff, NC State's students go off to do far greater things per capita.




*Not industrial because that doesn't count. That is really just business.

[Edited on August 23, 2012 at 9:46 AM. Reason : industrial ]

8/23/2012 9:45:41 AM

lol, FSU is #2.

8/23/2012 9:52:54 AM

Quote :

"it's ok. if you look at their "25 most rigorous schools," they've got Davidson at #3. "

lol that pretty much debunks it right there.

8/23/2012 9:56:31 AM

we have far too many professors that are absolutely shitty at teaching to be that easy a school

8/23/2012 10:01:12 AM

^ lol

8/23/2012 10:21:37 AM

Quote :

"Do they even consider the vet school? Those kids are insane"

#3 Veterinary program in the nation. That's got to count for something.

8/23/2012 10:39:00 AM

this and other rankings are meaningless.

the only ranking that matters is average salary of graduates at various points in their career. But even this is less dependent on the institution and more dependent on what degrees are offered.

don't be a ranking slave

8/23/2012 10:54:56 AM

I thought UCSF and WI-Madison are good schools ( for graduate at least). But I thought both were great for undergrad too, while I was applying.

8/23/2012 11:01:58 AM

Their metrics are a joke.

A survey asking kids how hard their classes are? Please.

8/23/2012 11:40:50 AM

We aren't one of the top 10 least rigorous colleges in the us. Even if you accept their criteria as a valid measurment, they are only measuring the top 200 most selective schools in America. So we aren't being compared to schools like UNCW and ECU.

And IMO a managable schedule is a good thing, no?

[Edited on August 23, 2012 at 11:58 AM. Reason : ]

8/23/2012 11:57:01 AM

In Ergonomics, one of the questions asked on a test was:

Which text is easier to read?
A) Larger
B) Smaller

8/23/2012 11:58:01 AM

Quote :

"I thought UCSF and WI-Madison are good schools ( for graduate at least). But I thought both were great for undergrad too, while I was applying."

it's U of San Francisco, not UCSF. Also, I thought UCSF is graduate school only.

8/23/2012 11:58:53 AM

I highly doubt any employer worth being hired by is going to reference this list. Calm down.

8/23/2012 12:32:38 PM

It looks like they put a lot of emphasis on student-to-faculty ratio. Since when does that have ANY impact on how difficult a class is?

8/23/2012 1:01:29 PM

Quote :

"Humanities are dragging us down. Engineering hard. Everything else easy as balls. Made As in classes I went to 3-4 times."

Apparently our English classes are pretty easy.

8/23/2012 1:08:15 PM