How to Stay in an Ivy League School: Breezing Through, Crazying Out, and Everything in Between
IvyGate’s Guide to Admissions: Part IV
Somewhere between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s untimely death and that Tom Green movie about Harvard, some misconceptions of the awesome Ivy League education have spiraled out of control. First of all, the classes are not that difficult—seriously. And if you don’t like just plain easy classes, there are stupid easy ones too! Beware, though, it’s actually pretty easy to get (sort of) kicked out for a million things besides getting a C. Wait, you didn’t know that grades are being phased out in the Ivies? Welcome to the high graduation-rate heaven of the still very profitable elite universities.
So if you’re one of the happy few, be prepared to abandon all those bright-eyed ideals of your presumably successful high school career. Time to get greedy, lazy, jaded, and depressed.
1. Shine your shoes and practice that shit eating grin. A good grade is not hard to find at any Ivy if you know the right way to slut it up. First of all, we’re all familiar with this grade inflation myth, right? Without even getting into the whole argument, it exists. According to the Boston Globe, over half of the grades given out at Harvard in 2007 were in the A-range. The real question, then, is how to make sure you’re in the lucky half rather than the poor bastards who have to settle for B’s, a sure fire dive into a life of destitution and, consequently, fewer orgasms. The answers…
- BORROW a learning disability. No kidding. Just make it up, go to health services, and enjoy with the fun medication or exemptions from required credits. One anonymous source told us about an anonymous freshman from an anonymous school who convinced doctors that he had an inability to learn foreign languages and thus avoided the language requirement. Too bad he wanted to be a comp lit major.
- BEG your professors for extensions, exemptions, and excellent grades you don’t deserve. It’s an art in its own way, but little things like attending office hours (with lots of cleavage) and chatting with your TA (with lots of cleavage) really do translate into better results.
- STEAL someone’s identity! A couple years ago, a con artist got into and attended Columbia–though that’s no big deal. Or you could just steal somebody else’s work. If Kaavya Viswanathan (among others) can bullshit her way up, so can you!
After the jump: skipping class, going nuts, and graduating happy! Plus, hating the Ivy League, leaving, and coming back by novelist Andrea Seigel.
2. Skip the Hard Classes and Fake the Easy Ones. It’s a well-known fact that Ivy course guides are thick, poorly-designed, and full of ways to squander your tuition dollars. Harvard has a course called “Dinosaurs and Their Relatives,” a particularly “notable” class according to the Crimson, and a wine-tasting seminar (for credit) that may or may not return this spring. Or head to Yale for this:
alcohol and other drugs in american culture: If you did not salivate the second that you read the name of this course, you seriously must be illiterate. This definitely wins the “name that sounds most like the content of my favorite mtv shows and thus i must take it class” award this year, taking the crown from food psych and fat and thin. The reviews look really good for this gut, and I have no doubt in my mind that the entire swim team will be sitting together for this one when I show up on day one. This gut is hotter than Michael Vick and Matt Sills combined right now.
If you do make the fatal mistake for signing up for something remotely challenging, please read the above advice on snuggling in between a professor (named Mansfield’s) buttchecks for extended deadlines and consciously inflated grades.
3. Take a Leave of Absence, or, The Trouble With the Crazy Card. At the end of the day, the Dean has a vested interest in keeping graduation rates high (for Newsweek ranking, etc.) so Ivy League universities are all but designed to shoo all admitted students towards commencement—no matter how long it takes. This system can have both positive and negative effects depending on how you swing it. Andrea Seigel, author of a novel about a Brown student living in the infirmary, told us about the perks of her own in-and-out experience at an Ivy:
I’d love to say that I left Brown for Berkeley for mostly ideological or educational reasons or something, but really, I set that ball in motion after freaking out that my boyfriend was graduating from Princeton and going back to the west coast until he figured out what he was doing with his life…..I must have been aware of how flighty I can be because instead of dropping out of Brown, I just took a leave. The administration was fine with it, but they had no cause not to be because they didn’t know what was going on. I went to Berkeley…..
But the bottom line is that I didn’t think the education was as good, and I realized that pretty fast. I’m sure it’s comparable if you’re doing something more educationally concrete, like learning engineering or a language, but since I was, unfortunately, interested in a more abstract kind of learning, I had to admit that Brown was teaching me to think in a much more complicated way than Berkeley. So I dropped out of Berkeley and let Brown know I was coming back for senior year.
Yes! If you have any doubts just take off for a while and come back whenever! Be advised that if you push it too hard (that is, develop an illness or do moderately poorly in a course), you may be submitted to the university’s steadfast “Involuntay Leave” procedure. You might also make sure you’re the right candidate to allow back in no matter what. Like this one:
When I dropped out of Barnard College, the dean’s form for my withdrawal said ‘unconditional readmission,’ which was either due to my reason for leaving, or the fact that I had no financial aid.
So get out while you can! And apply for grants while you’re gone, because the Ivy League has a dangerous amount of money.
4. If You Really Need to Leave, Just Leave. As sobering and unsnarky as this may sound, the Ivy League experience can suck and the education is not all it’s cracked up to be. While some people think that the ivory tower is ohmygodawesome, it actually drives others out of their minds. This situation can yield extensions, etc like one ill-willed reader explains:
the easiest way to get a deadline extension or work out a “special deal” with the deans (who control the serious grade/coursework alterations, not the professors) is to schedule an appointment with the student health department’s therapist. unfortunately, you’ll get stuck in a loop of follow-up sessions where you’ll have to talk out your worries about being a failure at life, or doubting your sexuality, or breaking up with your soulmate boyfriend, to the point that you’ll start believing it and drive yourself insane for real. but you’ll definitely get the extension you want. i know one kid who had so many personal crises the dean ultimately called his parents to check on the severity of things. since his mom was willing to lie, it was fine.
But it’s also ultimately unspeakably sinister that these schools allow that to happen. A letter last year from an Ivy freshman to Salon.com sums up the collective awful:
I just have no place here anymore, and I’m really alone and isolated and depressed nearly all the time. I don’t know what to do, and I certainly have no idea how to begin making headway on my homework. Most days I feel accomplished if I just go to class. I feel as though I can’t do anything, much less think, much less write. I feel like I can’t do anything right.
Welcome to the suck. Instead of selling her soul by staying, let’s hope “California Dreaming” actually transferred back to one of those colleges with good parties and attractive people. And will graduate happy. By the way, this is by no means a guide to have a good college experience.
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Read more: Admissions, andrea seigel, gut course, ivygate guide to admissions, leave of absence
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January 26th, 2009 at 12:06 am
I feel really bad for anyone who actually had such a terrible experience with their college experience. I’m hoping that I am not the only one who finds these claims of mass suffering exaggerated.
January 26th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Depressed people tend to generalize, when they aren’t being overly self-critical. Chances are those people would have been just as miserable somewhere else.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:24 am
this post is false. My classes are hard as shit. Ever heard of a bell curve? grade inflation is dead but the worst part is people think it’s still around. So a B is damn good in a wharton class but because the myth of grade inflation is perpetuated by people like you, we’re screwed.
“I just have no place here anymore, and I’m really alone and isolated and depressed nearly all the time. I don’t know what to do, and I certainly have no idea how to begin making headway on my homework. Most days I feel accomplished if I just go to class. I feel as though I can’t do anything, much less think, much less write. I feel like I can’t do anything right.”
this person would be depressed wherever they go. my god
January 26th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Agreed that this post takes a few individuals out of context in an attempt to generalize to the Ivy League population at large. Princeton academics are no joke for most students.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Come on people! This is Ivygate..Give me a fucking break ! And waving a bottle of Veuve Cliquot in that picture? Please…. Now days even at Brown we are not doing anything less than Dom Perignon (1999 great vintage, by the way) …This is the Ivy League for Christ’s sake…
January 26th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
I’d also like to agree with the posters about the issue of grade inflation. While it is not terribly difficult to pull off a B in most classes at Harvard, it becomes progressively more and more difficult to earn a B+, an A-, and finally the coveted A. Also most of the time, especially in introductory classes, the material is poorly taught and the exams test above and beyond what is covered in lecture and p-sets. So no, Harvard is not “easy,” and the bell curve is often not your friend when your classes are filled with overcompetitive, obsessive Type As.
And as for those bashing the poor depressed student, give me a break. While that student may have had difficulty adjusting to any college, there are certain elements of an Ivy League institution that exacerbate those problems (overly competitive peers, large impersonal classes, poorly taught intro courses, etc.)
January 26th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Dartmouth reports the median grade for every class on transcripts. So, an A in a class where everybody got an A is less meaningful than in A in a class where most people got a B. It discourages students from seeking out gut courses.
January 27th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Classes are not that fucking hard. Do the homework, study for the exams, and (here’s the secret!) if you don’t feel like you understand a topic, don’t wait until exam-time to go to office hours to get help.
It doesn’t take a 100 hour week to do all this. Instead of playing Snood during the day, get some shit done and then you can go out pretty much every night. Stop complaining about how much reading you have on Twitter and just fucking do it.
School is not as hard as you cry babies make it out to be. Put in a little effort, learn to manage your time, and you can be partying 4-5 nights a week with a sweet 3.7+ in any major.
January 27th, 2009 at 1:50 am
^Agreed
January 27th, 2009 at 1:59 am
princeton DOES have grades and hard classes and with grade deflation, princeton is not just a brand but rather a very difficult academic institution
January 27th, 2009 at 3:31 am
Having attended two – count ‘em! – Ivy League schools, one of which was known for a very difficult grading system, I can tell you that it’s somewhat hard to do well, but not really.
If you were smart enough to get in, and you are capable of time management, you WILL graduate cum laude +.
If you were smart enough to get in, and you suck at time management, you probably won’t get Latin honors… but you’ll probably have a B average at the very least.
And if you didn’t deserve it, you’ll find it very difficult, because as Whartonite said, you’re graded against a bell curve. And that bell curve is made of people who are ALL smarter than you. So good fucking luck.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:31 am
this post is in poor taste & is just generally untrue, at least according to my experiences. I have a genuine learning disability, I worked my ass off to get here, and I’m working my ass off to stay here, to do well, and to graduate. I’ve never heard of anyone who’s “gamed” the system to abuse testing accommodations here or elsewhere, and even if they did, beyond slightly extended exam time there is really very little that ODS does that would benefit an ordinary student who got into this, or any other ivy.
You want my textbooks on tape? Great, I’ll trade you my books on tape for your 20/20 vision, you fucking prick.
January 27th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
CC ‘10, no one is denigrating those who have legitimate learning disabilities — they have every right to the accommodation that they receive. However, the operative word is LEGITIMATE. While you may not know people who have gamed the system by going through batteries of tests, I definitely know many people in that category.
It’s especially prevalent in the northeast private school environments where kids who just aren’t that smart suddenly are revealed to have learning disabilities which require that they receive unlimited time on tests in honors classes that were designed with time pressure and strenuous pacing in mind. There’s something very funny going on where upward of 30% of the students in a given high school year (and no, not a special class) apparently have learning disabilities serious enough to warrant extra / unlimited time on exams.
Moreover standardized tests like the SAT, LSAT, etc. are also designed with major time pressure in mind (especially the latter). Having double the amount of time to take those tests would give most an edge, if nothing else, so they could double, triple, etc. check their answers. In extreme cases, it might mean that the LD-faking student who simply isn’t at the intellectual level where they would get a chance to answer all the questions is able to make themselves look much more talented than they actually are.
And lastly, it’s unfair to people like you, because your situation is unfairly questioned because there are others taking advantage of the system. If anything, you should offended at those gaming the system and using pretend learning disabilities to make themselves seem better than they actually are. You’ll have to take my word that LD abuse really does happen (again, especially with the northeast, private school crowd) and it’s becoming more of a problem these days with more selective admissions and people looking for any edge that they can get.
January 27th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Followup to my post, it’s the people who pull those types of stunts in high school that are able to artificially inflate their GPA / SAT scores to help them get into Ivies. And then, especially because they have a long-established record of receiving accommodation, they can push the envelope much easier in advocating for unneeded accommodations once they get to college — since when you apply for most ODS services, you’re asked for a record of previous accommodations you’ve received, etc.
Also, the LSAT, GRE, GMAT, etc. test-taking points I made above still apply to students in college as well. Yes, I’ll admit LD abuse isn’t as flagrant in college as it is in high school, but it’s still there, especially for sake of grad / law, etc. admissions tests.
January 28th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Class Day speaker has been leaked at Yale and elsewhere. Get on this shit.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Don’t foget to mention vital importance of avoiding any and all majors/programs which even begin to demand rigor – that means you, Wharton, Cornell engineering, etc.
February 4th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Grade deflation Grade deflation Grade deflation sucks….(seriously. B’s started at 96% in a class I had last semester. Talk about not-worth-your-time)