Columbia University in the City of New York

I absolutely hated Columbia. I came to Columbia from a boarding school with very high academic standards and expected to work just as hard in college, if not harder. Yet, even in classes that people said were "sooo hard" I felt like the standards were set pretty low. For example, in my Lit Hum class freshman year our teacher said she was horribly disapointed with the results of our class's first paper assignment because most people hadn't even bothered to come up with a thesis. Excuse me? If you're in college, you should be able to write a suitable academic paper, and the fact that so many of the people I met at Columbia could not, spoke to the quality of the school.

In a similar vain, I found the grading was set to the lowest common denominator. I am no genius, but I completed my freshmen year classes (in everything from Lit Hum to Latin) with straight A's. I never got lower than an A- on any test or paper either. I thought that it was completely unacceptable that the work was so much less challenging than my highschool. I felt totally cheated.

On the plus side, I think that the benefits of the core are many and I ended up loving the books we read in Lit Hum, though the overly pretentious and completely hollow student discussions could have been much improved. I also liked the latin department, though the whole classics departement is kind of neglected. I hated, HATED the frontiers of science class. I can't think of a more pointless, unorganized, and unfair course. In the end it all came down this: I transferred to Harvard.

Male -- Class 2000