Undergraduate Academics

MIT utilizes a 4-1-4-based academic calendar. Its tuition and fees are $40,732 (2011-12). Admission to MIT is extremely competitive. 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. There is a refreshing lack of so-called "weed out" classes. The anti-authoritarian nature of the school – combined with its 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.

Majors are numbered, and students will typically refer to their major by the course number rather than the name. For example, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is Course 6, while Physics is Course 8. Classes within each course also have numeric identifications, which most students use more frequently than the written names. All students are required to take basic physics (8.01 and 8.02), a semester of biology, a term of chemistry, as well as calculus (18.01 and 18.02).

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, 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.

In many 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.

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. Test problems are intentionally extremely difficult and often clever, and are designed so that few students can obtain a perfect score. However, the awarding of partial credit can mitigate the difficulty, and moreover, many professors "curve" the scores to reflect how the class as a whole fared on the test. Most classes end with a grade distribution centered around B or C.

Alumni

Finishing my letter I can’t help mentioning the most prominent names of Institute’s alumni. Many of MIT's over 120,000 alumni have had considerable success in scientific research, public service, education, and business. Among them Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, MA-1 Representative John Olver, CA-13 Representative Pete Stark, former British Foreign Minister David Miliband, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, physicist Richard Feynman, and former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi. Prominent institutions of higher education have been led by MIT alumni. More than one third of the United States' manned spaceflights have included MIT-educated astronauts (among them Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin). MIT alumni founded or co-founded many notable companies, such as Intel, McDonnell Douglas, Texas Instruments, 3Com, Qualcomm, Bose, Raytheon, Koch Industries, Rockwell International, Genentech, Dropbox, and Campbell Soup. According to the British newspaper “The Guardian”, MIT alumni have formed 25,800 companies, employing more than three million people including about a quarter of the workforce of Silicon Valley. Those firms between them generate global revenues of about $1.9tn (£1.2tn) a year. If MIT was a country, it would have the 11th highest GDP of any nation in the world. MIT managed $718.2 million in research expenditures and an $8.0 billion endowment in 2009. As of 2011, twenty-four MIT alumni won the Nobel Prize, forty-four were selected as Rhodes Scholars, and fifty-five were selected as Marshall Scholars.

Best wishes,

Mike

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