Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research and educational institution located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Undergraduate academics

There is a large amount of pressure in the classes, which have been characterized as "drinking from a fire hose" or "academic boot camp." Although the perceived pressure is high, the failure rate both from classes and the Institute as a whole, is low. The school's emphasis on technical excellence and information sharing results in a situation where faculty, upperclassmen, and fellow students are remarkably helpful even to newly arrived freshmen. This culture of helpfulness offsets the academic stress to a certain degree. Furthermore, students are not assigned letter grades in their first semester; instead, they are graded Pass/No Record. To allow the students to gradually adjust to regular grading, second semester is ABC/No Record. For both semesters, classes that a student fails are noted on the internal transcript but erased from all external records. (Prior to the 2002-03 academic year, both terms were graded Pass/No Record.) In subsequent terms, students receive letter grades without a modifier (+ or -). A student's grade point average is calculated on a 5.0 scale, with A=5, B=4, C=3, D=2, and F=0.

Related Topics:
2002 - 03 - Grade point average

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Majors are numbered with roman numerals; for example, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is Course VI, while Mathematics is Course XVIII. Students will typically refer to their major by the course number, saying "he's Course Eighteen" rather than "he's a math major." Subjects within each course also have numeric identifications, which most students use more frequently than the written names; the course number is given with an Arabic numeral, then a decimal point, and a subject number. This pattern differs from that of many U. S. universities; the course which many universities would designate as "Physics 101" is, at MIT, "8.01." For brevity, course number designations are pronounced without the decimal point and by replacing "oh" for zero (unless zero is the last number). Thus, the above course at MIT would be pronounced "eight oh one," and the course "7.20" would be pronounced "seven twenty." For more information on naming and pronounciation conventions around campus, see here.

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Course requirements

All undergraduate students are required to take a variety of courses (called the General Institute Requirements, or GIRs) beyond those required for their major. These include two terms of physics (8.01 and 8.02), a term each of biology and chemistry, two terms of calculus (18.01 and 18.02), as well as eight terms of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS). The HASS requirements are intricately constructed: students must take three "distribution" or "HASS-D" classes, which are designed so that they give broad subject overviews with little or no prerequisites. HASS-D classes, many of which are offered by department 21, are divided into several numbered categories, and students are required to take HASS-D courses in at least three separate categories. Furthermore, students must choose a "concentration" among the HASS subdepartments (which are not the same as the numeric HASS-D categories). One might concentrate in literature, for example, or in music or a foreign language. Concentrations typically require three or four classes within that subject.

Related Topics:
Physics - 8.01 - 8.02 - Biology - Chemistry - Calculus - 18.02

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Those students who graduated earlier than the Class of 2005 had a writing requirement which was divided between "Phase I" and "Phase II." A Phase II paper typically involved researching a topic in one's field of interest and writing about it in a suitable style for a textbook or a journal article. More recent graduating classes have exchanged this procedure for the "Communication Intensive" system. Students are required to take two "CI" classes within their chosen major ("CI-M" courses). These classes are chosen by the department to instruct the students in the forms of communication used in that field. (For example, in Course 8, the CI-M classes are 8.13, the first semester of the physics laboratory class, where one learns to write papers and give technical presentations on experiments; and 8.06, the third term of quantum mechanics, where students choose topics not covered in the main coursework, research them in the scientific literature, and write a paper on the topic their classmates can understand.) In addition to the CI-Ms, students are required to take two CI classes outside their major, chosen from the HASS departments. Many HASS-Ds are also HASS-CIs, but certainly not all. http://web.mit.edu/commreq/index.html

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The General Institute Requirements, and in particular the HASS arrangements, have drawn ire and criticism from some quarters. In the spring of 2005, a student-operated advisory committee was formed to address the merits of changing the GIR curricula. The committee's initial report stressed the need to simplify the HASS system in particular. Blog-based discussions brought student input on the initial report, but the committee did not substantially revise their paper, deciding instead to include an addendum with students' opinions that had been expressed online. http://web.mit.edu/committees/edcommons/students/report.html A subsequent proposal includes a shift away from the original HASS requirements to voluntary classes for those interested in humanities.

Related Topics:
2005 - Blog

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Class structure

Most of the science and engineering classes follow a standard pattern. Typically, a professor gives a lecture that explains a concept. Then, teaching assistants lead recitations to explore fuller details, or often to provide students help on homework problems. Problem sets (colloquially known as "psets"), given roughly weekly, are designed to enable the student to master the concept. Students often gather in informal groups to solve the problem sets, and it is within these groups that much of the actual learning takes place. Over time, students compile "bibles," collections of problem set and examination questions and answers. They may be created over several years and are often handed down "from generation to generation"—bearing in mind that "generations" of student time may be short-lived.

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These "bibles" were one issue addressed in Snyder's The Hidden Curriculum. After studying the behavior of MIT and Wellesley students, Snyder observed that the "bibles" are often in fact counterproductive: they fool professors into believing that their classes are acquiring knowledge as intended, and so both professors and students become locked into a feedback situation to the detriment of actual education.

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In many classes, especially those beyond the introductory classes, the problem sets make up a relatively small fraction of the grade. The rest of the evaluation consists of performance on tests, which typically contain grueling problems that measure the students' ability to apply their knowledge, often to something not specifically covered in class. Problem sets and tests, even for the large introductory freshmen classes, are usually free response, hand graded, with much partial credit given to people who almost get the answer right. This is highly labor intensive, and after a test for a large class one can see a room full of teaching assistants and professors hand-grading the examinations.

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The lack of machine grading and multiple-choice stems from the belief that understanding the concept is almost as important as getting the right answer. For example, students are seldom strongly penalized for making arithmetic mistakes, and partial credit tends to be generous. Tests often consist a small number of large problems which are subdivided into smaller steps. Test problems are intentionally extremely difficult and often clever, and are designed so that few students can obtain a perfect score. On the other hand, the assignment of grades reflects the difficulty, and most classes end with a grade distribution centered around B or C.

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Although professors often use the average performance of a class to gauge the difficulty of an exam or a course, MIT policy does not permit grade cutoffs based purely on predetermined percentages or statistics (i.e., grading "on a curve") http://web.mit.edu/uinfo/academics/grading/grades/how.html. This policy is intended, in part, to prevent a competitive atmosphere where the students want one another to do poorly in order to improve their own prospects.

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