A few days before Christmas, some poor Penn student in computer science professor Steve Zdancewic’s “Programming Languages and Techniques” class didn’t like the grade Zdancewic (or, probably, one of his 16 assistants) posted for him, and, yup, immediately dashed off a bothersome email to say so.

Less important than how or why The Daily Pennsylvanian posted this email—the student sent it to the listserv for a class of 200-odd students, duh—is the dark, hilarious content therein. Shall we?

“It’s possible I’ve made a calculation error . . .  but I do not believe so.” Or, YOU ARE WRONG. The two subsequent emails are sort of tedious—Zdancewic tells him what’s what and that’s that, then the student basically calls him incompetent, and that he (the student) is “confused.” And so on. Still, it’s sort of amazing to see this example, in fine detail, of the Ivy League’s historic and rather total obsession with its own quantification. This is a habit seen in the daily newspapers’ endless admissions coverage—e.g., see here, and here, and here, and here, and here—plus, it goes without saying, the U.S. News & World Report rankings and its imitators, which are always world-stoppingly important and intrinsically meaningful.

But take anything the Ivy League likes. Harry Potter, let’s go with. (Bear with me.)  Read the rest of this entry »

Harvard and Princeton reinstated their early admission programs for this year’s admissions cycle. According to this nifty chart put together by Jeremy Bleeke of the Columbia Spectator, ED/EA applications remained constant or increased slightly at Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth, while dipping slightly at Penn, decreasing more at Columbia, and dropping significantly for Yale. It is unclear just how much of this has been because of Harvard and Princeton’s programs, but we’re willing to wager that it’s more than a little.

The New York Times has a more detailed discussion here, complete with stats.

Earlier this month, Trojan released its 2011 Sexual Health Report Card, which ranks colleges based on factors like how many free condoms you can pilfer from campus health services without getting noticed. While some Ivy Leaguers are not known for, let’s say, getting laid, our schools have made sure that we will be very safe in the circumstance that sex does happen to us.

Let’s take a look at the results:

• According to Trojan, Columbia, where students can Ask Alice how to get rid of hickeys and where to pump breast milk on campus, is the #1 most sexually healthy campus in the nation for the second year running.
• Brown, the birthplace of naked parties, comes in 4th, up one from 5th last year.
• Princeton, eager to get behind last year’s “gentlemen’s sex competition“, has improved its ranking from 8th to 3rd, sending a signal to students that any subsequent stately sexcapades shall be seriously safe.
• Harvard fell from 16th to 30th.
• Yale and Cornell held pretty steady, at 14th and 17th respectively.
• Penn fell, from 38th to 42nd.
• After falling sixty-one spots in 2010, from 19th to 80th, Dartmouth is up slightly to a pretty unimpressive 67th.

View the official press release with the complete rankings here.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this post incorrectly published rankings from 2010. Our bad.

Here’s a rundown of the Occupy Wall Street movement around the Ivy League campuses, ranked in order of excitement:

Columbia – Hundreds (thousands?) of Columbia students have been to the protest at some point over the last few weeks; the catchphrase around campus is “have you gone yet?” A large walkout took place last Wednesday. Some students arrested earlier. University President and over 300 professors declare support for Occupy Wall Street; Jeffrey Sachs leads a pack of  students downtown to join protests and avoid watching the football team get ransacked by Penn at Homecoming.

Harvard - Scores of Harvard students join Occupy Boston, five arrested. Harvard doesn’t get much appreciation, though: a Boston Herald op-ed slams student protestors for their $50,000 tuitions and lovely, neo-Georgean dorms with – gasp – private bathrooms! Also, labor unions protest Harvard as a ‘tool of corporations’.

Brown - Econ, history, poli sci, and sociology professors hold an Occupy Providence Teach-In inside a lecture hall packed with “several hundred people.” Meanwhile, Occupy College Hill begins meeting 3x a week on Brown’s Main Green, and even has their own wiki page. Not so disorganized, after all!

Yale – Students will Occupy New Haven this weekend; counter-protest group led by the Yale College Republicans announces it will “Occupy Occupy New Haven“.  Awww snap!

Cornell - Some Cornellians trek to New York City and join protests, others Occupy Cornell on Friday (minutes from the protest here). One op-ed’er tells protesters to “stop protesting and study for LSATs.” Not sure how that one’s gonna work out.

Penn – Occupy Philly receives statement of support from 87 faculty. Penn students travel to protests in Philidelphia (includes a glorious quote by a Wharton sophomore who supports the movement anonymously, saying his sentiments are “not consistent with the general sentiments of Wharton”).”Occupy Wharton” Facebook group is a dud.

Dartmouth – Protesters standing around on a patch of grass apparently want to cure AIDS, stop climate change, and elect Ron Paul.

Princeton – Little online evidence that anybody at Princeton gives a damn, other than one student op-ed calling protesters throwing his support behind the movement after being pleasantly impressed by the  ”jobless potheads” and “banjo-strumming hippies”.

If you have any tips or links we should know about, please email us at tips@ivygateblog.com!

Would you rather: Join the Penn Quidditch team? Sit through a Billy Joel concert? Or join Cannon Club for the low, low price of $850? Don’t worry, “none of the above” is a viable option. Here are your Tuesday headlines:

• Brown: Columnist urges us to embrace the present, by arguing that “there are few Jewish men who know how to truly satisfy, or at least that is what my friends say.” Wait … what? [Daily Herald]
• Columbia: GS student, an openly gay Air Force vet, reflects on the end of DADT. [Spec]
• Cornell: Gaudy bear statues? Bad. [Daily Sun]
• Cornell: Jaywalking crackdown? Worse. [Daily Sun]
• Cornell: Billy Joel concert? Absolutely the WORST. [Daily Sun]
• Dartmouth: Seniors drop resumes, while Andrew Lohse sits in a dark corner somewhere, feverishly typing an op-ed. [The Dartmouth]
• Penn: Quidditch jokes write themselves. Why even bother? [The DP]
• Princeton: Eating club begs for new members. [The Prince]

“Fight the Power” Friday (Part 2)

Kenneth Goldsmith, a English professor at Penn, has a unique take on authorship, that being: Plagiarism ain’t so bad, necessarily!

Goldsmith’s argument (we think) has something to do with authorship being pretentious and paternalistic, especially in our hyper-connected day and age, when information is cycled and recycled millions of times every day, at the speed of an electron. (Maybe?) To that end, he teaches a class each year called “Uncreative Writing,” in which students are actively encouraged to rip-off their classwork from other writers. Seriously.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing.

Aaaanyway: Crimson columnist Isabel E. Kaplan wrote a pointed critique of Goldsmith’s philosophy earlier this week, which basically amounted to, “This is bullshit.” And we were interested in the good professor’s response. So we shot over an email asking what he thought of the criticisms. In his reply, Goldsmith referred to the column as “stupidity,” then threw the question to some former students, at which point things got a little bit weird.

Read the rest of this entry »

When we first conceived the Hall of Heroes, our intent was simply to single out Ivy students whose opinions deserved a gentle bit of mocking. But then we happened upon the following story, which doesn’t precisely fit this column’s mission, but certainly produced the same end result: FACEPALM.

Most college seniors are probably sending out a veritable avalanche of cover letters these days. The economy is getting worse, and nobody has a job, so it’s time to pitch your skills like a common whore, at the street corner of every I-bank in lower Manhattan. Pretty standard.

But one unidentified Penn senior, in his job-seeking gusto, accidentally sent out one mass-email to every single person on Wall Street. Wall Street then proceeded to mock him vigorously.

Here is the offending correspondence:

Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 $;31 PM
To: [EVERYONE]
Subject: University of Pennsylvania Senior interested in Analyst Position upon graduation

Hello,

My name is <redacted> and I will be graduating from the University of Pennsylvania this may. I am very interested in pursuing a career in investment banking upon graduation and I wanted to know if your firm would be hiring analysts this coming summer. I know you are busy and would appreciate any time you could give me. Thank you in advance and I hope to hear from you soon. My rsum [sic] is attached.

Best regards,

<redacted>

And, behold, an unbelievable screen-grab of the actual email, right after the jump!  Read the rest of this entry »

Call it “Skullfucked: The Straight-to-DVD Sequal,” if you will.

A group of Penn students found out the hard way last Spring that sometimes when your roommate doesn’t seem to be going to class, ever, it isn’t just because he doesn’t do morning sections. It may actually be that he’s not a student at all, and he’s just waiting until you leave the house in order to pilfer your bank account. 

Penn junior Zach King — along with another (heretofore unnamed) student — brought charges against a guy named Eugene Tinsley (no relation) last June, after it became clear that Mr. Tinsley was not, as claimed, a student of Penn, but rather an artist of the long-con variety.

Tinsley apparently met King sometime last year, and quickly insinuated himself into the Penn student’s life. The two began rooming together — though Mr. Eugene, of course, didn’t pay any rent — and it wasn’t too long stuff got real.

Per the Daily Pennsylvanian:

After not receiving rent from Tinsley for several months, King and his roommates “nicely kicked him out,” King said. Tinsley left for a period of time before moving back in with them around winter break last year. Later in the school year, when King went to buy gas for a trip, his card was denied, even though he knew he had enough money.

When Penn Police investigated the matter, King discovered Tinsley stole about $1,300 in checks from him. Tinsley also “involved another student who had been duped the same way,” King said.

Yikes! But how did the con man do it?  Read the rest of this entry »

Stuff happened this weekend, most of which sounded pretty cool, even if nobody noticed. Here are your Monday headlines:

• Brown: If a dirty beat drops at Brown, but no one comes to listen, did it even really happen? [Daily Herald]
• Brown: The battle over ROTC rages on. [Daily Herald]
• Columbia: Spectrum bloggers have way too much free time on their hands. [Spec]
• Cornell: “Oh, haha, did I say I was robbed at knife-point? What I actually meant was the opposite of that. Sorry for the misunderstanding. No big deal, right? Right, officers?” [Daily Sun]
• Cornell: Drowning victim’s parents to Cornell: “For the life of us, we cannot fathom how you have been able to accept drowning after drowning and not have taken substantive action to put an end to these tragedies.” [Daily Sun]
• Harvard: This year’s iteration of “The Game” will feature less underage drinking, in theory — though probably not in practice. [The Crimson]
• Penn: Basketball players play basketball. Merriment is had by all. [The DP]
• Yale: America’s second horniest college freaks out about “Sex Week.” Campus leaders explain and address the controversy. (Oh, hi there Alex.) [YDN]

Everywhere we look, somebody is raging against something — whether its Iranian dictators or political correctness, peeing in public or paying bills promptly, and in full. Make the change you want to see in the world, people! (Or, you know, just make a Facebook group about it.) Here are your Thursday headlines:

• Columbia: Looks like someone never got the memo about those Ahma(dinner)jad invitations being rescinded. [Spectator]
• Cornell: B.o.B.’s manager finally pays $1,000 vodka bill, three days after the fact. And all it took was a major blog writing about it. Classy guy! [Daily Sun]
• Cornell: Columnist rails against police efforts to crack down on public urination. Fight the power, bro. [Daily Sun]
• Harvard: The Greeks, like kudzu, are gaining ground — inching ever closer to campus — and may soon soak up every last ounce of Harvard’s light-beer reserves. [The Crimson]
• Penn: Lebron James is coming to Philly this weekend for an event more hyped than “The Decision.” [The DP]
• Yale: “If Yale had a rape culture, there would be students and faculty speaking in favor of rape. Rape would be a common practice; it would be routine to hear someone talking about raping or being raped by someone last weekend. People would discuss what styles or methods of rape they prefer.” [YDN]