Umm, not all bosses have pointy hair. I've certainly heard of small companies with similar, if slightly less radical incentives to employees to do creative, entrepreneurial kinds of things. Basically, the issue is the more freedom you give your employees, the better they need to be. If you tell a slacking idjit that he can spend 20% of his time pursuing his "own interests" you can forget about that 20% of his time doing anything useful for the company.
Major corporations don't usually have the calibre of employees across the board to make this sort of system work. They have evolved large bureaucracies as a way of extracting valuable workproduct from extremely mediocre talent.
So I'd agree with a PHB at a major corporation, this probably would be a bad idea for his company.
You mean there are technically competent users who don't switch XP to the Classic theme the second they get their hands on it? That, and reconfiguring explorer to not suck horse dong are the first things I do whenever I sit down to a Windows XP machine. And if it's somebody else's machine, tough titties to them.
By porting all these commonly used OSS apps to Windows, it helps commoditize the OS itself. This is however a double edged sword. It makes migration to Linux from Windows easier, but also reduces the incentives (excellent Linux-only software) to make the move.
Which of these will win out remains to be seen. One of the problems with Linux is that as there is no monolithic entity strategizing about this stuff on a macro level, just a bunch of individual entities following their own locally optimal development plans, you may not end up with a globally optimal strategy for OSS adoption or for the community as a whole.
Hah, you can go on eBay and buy 500 to 1000 acres of West Texan land for a couple grand. So 165,000 acres may not be free, and that is a lot of land, but the stuff is practically free out there.
They aren't using it. They are using the Neptune plugin developed by MeadCo. AOL just licensed it for redistribution from them. AOL has no developers left who could write 20 lines of decent code anymore.
Dwindling? They axed all browser development some time ago and fired all the old Netscape developers. Netscape is only a low cost ISP, and an AOL brand now. AOL outsourced the development of the new Netscape-branded, FF-derived browser to some other company, they couldn't even do it in house.
Actually, I think they realized FF was becoming popular, decided they could squeeze some more brand equity out of the Netscape name to promote their Netscape ISP offering, and that's what motivated this decision.
That's strange, definitely not the same stereotype over here in the US. Not to say that there aren't people who buy 325s and "rice" them out or ghetto them up, it does happen, but it's a small portion of the people who own BMWs. A drug dealer or other well-off ghetto denizen is more likely to be driving an Escalade with spinner rims and ultra high tint windows.
In any case, I bought an M3 because it's the best compromise between a sports car and a practical, drivable daily use car that I know of in my price range. I'd get two cars, but living in the city (Boston, now New York) the issue is parking (~$400 a month near where I live in Manhattan) which ends up being more expensive than a second car itself.
Real men drive M3s. And I'm sick of this annoying stereotype, that BMW drivers are all full of shit marketing types. Not everybody that has enough money to drive a bimmer is full of shit.
But I agree, the new M5 is the balls. That'll be mine in a few years.
Nobody really cares what goes on underneath the hood. The real issues are 1) ease of installation on an unmodified OS 2) aesthetic quality and performance of GUI. If you can get both of these with some embedded implementation of X11 based on the Cygwin stuff, then more power to you. But don't expect anybody to take an office suite seriously that requires you to install a complete windowing system on top of your native OS just to make it work. Installing Cygwin isn't terribly hard or anything, but unless the whole process is completely seamless from a user perspective, people just won't do it. And companies will drop it like a hot potato.
So in short, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with using the X11 version of OOo on Mac OS X, except that it doesn't mesh with the native look and feel, subjectively feels slower than any native Aqua app does, and requires (or at least it used to - it may be integrated into the install process now, haven't checked the OS X builds in ages) separate installation of an X11 server before it will work. These are all completely unacceptable in a mass market office suite.
Can't we just call them "international criminals" and all be happy about it? Somebody is committing a flagrantly criminal act, either for personal gain, retribution against a competitor or former employer, or maybe just some 3733+ hacker cred, depending on who the ultimate perpetrator turns out to be.
If your goal is to inflict mass terror on a population, hijacking popular domain names seems to be a pretty poor way of accomplishing it. If you just want to waste people's time, cost a business lots of money, and generally be a vandal, then it seems like a reasonable thing to do.
I was slightly off, it's more like 10%. And as I mentioned in another post, it's not just Harvard, it's every school - what bothers me about this whole thread is it's an attempt to smear Harvard unfairly.
And though being a legacy does increase your chances substantially, it's not a guarantee by any means (only about 40% of legacy applicants get admitted to Harvard).
And the athletics stuff is relatively tame at Harvard compared to places like big state schools, where huge numbers of students are basically given a complete pass on any academics because they are part of some cherished sports program. At least at Harvard, athletes are expected to do the same work that anybody else is, and held to the same standards (and yes, some do fail out - don't believe the statistics Harvard shows, a lot more people fail out then they want to let on).
To put it another way, when you meet somebody who went to Harvard, there is a 90% chance that they weren't a legacy. And a very good chance they are quite smart. But obviously, the way you distinguish the wheat from the chaff is the same as you do anywhere - you see what they did with their college education, in college and afterwards. There's a big difference between somebody who squeaks by and takes easy classes at any college, and somebody who challenges themselves, does well, and demonstrates initiative to do something worthwhile with themselves.
So what's your point? You acknoweldge that every leading school does this because it's good fundraising practice, Harvard is no worse than the rest of the Ivy League, and the Ivy League aren't the only schools guilty of it either. Even desireable state schools do this, so it's not just private schools either.
That's why I get twirked when people point to Harvard like it's the most egregious perpetrator, which it isn't.
And describing the Ivies as "conservative and backwards looking" pretty much proves that wherever your father went to school, you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Harvard is anything but conservative - it's very liberal, the professors, the students, and the administration. Pretty much everybody except the people who manage the endowment. In any case, preserving legacy admission "benefits" (not guaranteed admission, just the extra consideration factor) isn't going to go away, ever, at private schools that are funded primarily by the donations of alumni.
As you say - I wouldn't want to go to a school where too many people are there who didn't merit anything, because it devalues the school. The question is are those 10% of people so distinctively worse than the other 90% that they noticeably devalue the degree? Not in my experience. If it was 30%, would it devalue the degree? Absolutely. So yes, this is a careful balance between keeping standards up, pleasing alumni, and raising money to keep improving the school, hiring the best professors, etc.
Re:Federal funds should not go to schools with leg
on
Who Needs Harvard?
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Okay, then that's essentially every school in the country, not just the Ivy League. State schools included - you think only private schools engage in this practice? It's good fundraising practice for them. See these numbers for some more examples.
Almost no school "gives" spots to legacies, they just give them extra consideration. The idea that somehow only Harvard does this is a trollish lie perpetuated by morons like our dear Slashdot editors who have been posting nasty anti-intellectual, anti-Ivy League trash all day.
I simply don't believe that. First of all I really don't think they keep those kinds of stats due to the embarresment it may cause.
I'm sorry, but this is wrong. I can describe several reasonably random samplings of students (we are assigned to Freshman year dorm rooms randomly, with a few exceptions). You can choose to believe what you want, but you are basing your claims on no data except that you've read about Gore's daughters or Natalie Portman at Harvard. My father is a social worker, and my mother was a pharmacist, then a pharmaceutical company executive. My freshman year roommates - one was the son of a professor from MIT and a professor from Northeastern (smart, not rich), one was a black guy from Alabama whose parents were certainly neither famous nor rich, one was from a very middle class family in Tennessee. Our neighbors - one was a girl from a small town in Canada who was really good at hockey (she played on the Canadian olympic team our sophomore year), one was a quiet girl from the midwest somewhere, then a girl from a fairly well-to-do Asian family from Connecticut, and one girl who was from an old money WASP family from New York, who was the only one from the lot who could have been considered "wealthy".
Then there was the rooming group I ended up joining up with in our sophomore year blocking group (again, they were placed together randomly as freshman). One guy from a lower middle class Cuban family from Miami, who is now in law school, one guy whose father is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, then one girl from a fairly poor first generation Asian immigrant family, one girl from a middle class family (father was an electrical engineer), half Hispanic, half Jewish, from Connecticut, a girl from the South whose single mother worked for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (they had very little money, she had grown up in a trailer), and the one who was a friend of mine from high school in New York (an Asian girl, whose family were well-off as many successful Asian families around here are, and owned several pieces of real-estate, but certainly not very wealthy by anybody's standards).
So there you have several at least semi-randomly chosen samplings. Not one of them was the child of anybody famous (my freshman year roommate whose father is a well-known professor at MIT comes closest, but that's geek fame at best) and only one of them can be classified as truly wealthy out of the lot (how many did I enumerate there, 15 or so?).
So go on believing what you will. My anecdotal measurement may not be a truly statistically valid study, but it bears a whole lot more merit than your belief, which is based on nothing more than general suspicion, while mine is based on four years of observation.
The Gore daughters and Natalie Portman are the exceptions, not the rules. Other than Natalie Portman (who started my Senior year) there were no famous actors at Harvard - except this one girl who had been on some TV series, whose name escapes me at the moment, not truly famous, frankly. This was when I was there in 1996-2000, and no models (models? At Harvard? You gotta be kidding me - we would have KILLED for some models). There were a couple of other children of political types I met in my time there, like Bill Weld's son (Weld was Governor of Massachusetts at the time), but in fact David Weld was a very bright guy, a physics major too. I am guessing he would have gotten in regardless of who his father was. I can't comment on the Gore daughters since I never met them.
If you hire somebody solely because of the college that they attended then you aren't doing a very good job at screening applicants. Obviously any college's degree only means so much. And if you hire a black person who graduated from a top college, you should realize that person more likely than not got in due to affirmative action, and wasn't qualified to be there either.
See these numbers. In short, if you hire a graduate from most any decent college, there is a comparable chance that they got in because they are a legacy.
Oh, and I was slightly over in my estimate, it turns out a total of only about 10% of each class at Harvard are legacies. And about 20% are black or hispanic. I leave it to you to figure out which form of admissions preference does more to screw over the middle class.
Or Black. Or Hispanic. Etc. In any case, as I said in my other reply to you, the children of the very wealthy and famous are a tiny fraction of the population at Harvard. Do Al Gore's daughters probably get slightly more consideration than your average applicant? Sure, but _any_ college will do that because they want them to attend.
Most of the slots in ivy league schools are taken by legacies, the famous and the wealthy.
Saying it repeatedly doesn't make it true. If 10% are legacies, perhaps 2-3% are children of the famous (or famous themselves, like Natalie Portman), and maybe 3-5% are children of the fabulously wealthy. Then a good 15% are there because they are athletes. And perhaps 20% because they are minorities. So while you are worrying about righting the injustices of the world, maybe you could note that there are a lot more minorities at Harvard due to affirmative action than there are children of the famous or fabulously wealthy.
Are there a lot of upper middle class people among the remainder? Yes, just because they are more likely to attend better high schools (either private or public schools out in the burbs), get more instruction and personalized attention with their studies and all the other factors that make SAT scores, college admissions, etc. correlate to socioeconomic status in general. But it really doesn't look like what you describe at all.
The playing field in life isn't perfectly level either. As I said in another post, the legacy admissions stuff is way overblown, and represents a small minority of students at Harvard, and probably similarly so at other top schools. The vast majority of students get in by their own merits, as did I and most of my friends.
And never forget, as any Boston resident knows, ya can't pahk ya cah in Hahvahd Yahd.
Re:Ivy League is no plus for tech grads
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Who Needs Harvard?
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When everybody gets an A at Harvard, how could it be otherwise?
I can see you obviously didn't attend Harvard as a hard sciences major. I can assure you, not every physics major receives all As. In fact, there were several of our required concentration classes where grades were posted on the prof's door (by student ID of course) and there was something that looked quite like a normal distribution centered around a high B to B+ with several low end Cs, maybe even a D/F, and only 1 or 2 As. And these were physics courses for physics majors at Harvard, who one can presume are probably smart as hell to have gotten there in the first place (I can assure you that the legacy admits people are bitching about in this thread don't go on to become physics or math majors).
Upper level physics classes are different, of course, because the culling has already occurred. In physics, my freshman year Physics 16 (Honors Mechanics/Spec. Relativity for Physics Majors) class started with about 75 students, and ended up with about 35. If you made it past that, you were probably qualified to be a physics major. Comp. Sci. was comparable, though CS 50/51 were taken by many non-majors. The big filter class there was CS 121, taught by then-Dean Harry Lewis (I got an A in CS 121, incidentally). A good 15-20% of the people who took the class dropped it or failed it outright, and those who couldn't muster a B usually decided "Computer Science" meant something harder than they had anticipated and switched majors.
And if you want real filtering, you should check out Math 25/55. I took this class freshman year, and that taught me that *I* wasn't good enough to be a math major. My first three quizzes and homeworks I scored under 60% on (apparently not too bad as scaled scores, I probably could have hacked a B/B- in the class if I'd stuck with it instead of going over to Math for Physics geeks).
Harvard's grade inflation issues are mostly in core classes and soft humanities, as I would guess is the case at the vast majority of top universities in this country.
Please see this. Since the thread started about Harvard, it seems only fair to point out how the new President of Harvard University has moved to change this over the last year. If your family makes less than $40,000, you have zero expected contribution to tuition, less than $60,000 a substantially reduced contribution.
I think that's a pretty huge move towards fairness, don't you?
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, not all bosses have pointy hair. I've certainly heard of small companies with similar, if slightly less radical incentives to employees to do creative, entrepreneurial kinds of things. Basically, the issue is the more freedom you give your employees, the better they need to be. If you tell a slacking idjit that he can spend 20% of his time pursuing his "own interests" you can forget about that 20% of his time doing anything useful for the company.
Major corporations don't usually have the calibre of employees across the board to make this sort of system work. They have evolved large bureaucracies as a way of extracting valuable workproduct from extremely mediocre talent.
So I'd agree with a PHB at a major corporation, this probably would be a bad idea for his company.
You mean there are technically competent users who don't switch XP to the Classic theme the second they get their hands on it? That, and reconfiguring explorer to not suck horse dong are the first things I do whenever I sit down to a Windows XP machine. And if it's somebody else's machine, tough titties to them.
By porting all these commonly used OSS apps to Windows, it helps commoditize the OS itself. This is however a double edged sword. It makes migration to Linux from Windows easier, but also reduces the incentives (excellent Linux-only software) to make the move.
Which of these will win out remains to be seen. One of the problems with Linux is that as there is no monolithic entity strategizing about this stuff on a macro level, just a bunch of individual entities following their own locally optimal development plans, you may not end up with a globally optimal strategy for OSS adoption or for the community as a whole.
Err that last sentence didn't quite make sense (need to learn to preview before submit, I know).
I meant "So 165,000 acres may not be free, and that is a lot of land, but the stuff is really cheap out there."
Hah, you can go on eBay and buy 500 to 1000 acres of West Texan land for a couple grand. So 165,000 acres may not be free, and that is a lot of land, but the stuff is practically free out there.
They aren't using it. They are using the Neptune plugin developed by MeadCo. AOL just licensed it for redistribution from them. AOL has no developers left who could write 20 lines of decent code anymore.
Dwindling? They axed all browser development some time ago and fired all the old Netscape developers. Netscape is only a low cost ISP, and an AOL brand now. AOL outsourced the development of the new Netscape-branded, FF-derived browser to some other company, they couldn't even do it in house.
Actually, I think they realized FF was becoming popular, decided they could squeeze some more brand equity out of the Netscape name to promote their Netscape ISP offering, and that's what motivated this decision.
That's strange, definitely not the same stereotype over here in the US. Not to say that there aren't people who buy 325s and "rice" them out or ghetto them up, it does happen, but it's a small portion of the people who own BMWs. A drug dealer or other well-off ghetto denizen is more likely to be driving an Escalade with spinner rims and ultra high tint windows.
In any case, I bought an M3 because it's the best compromise between a sports car and a practical, drivable daily use car that I know of in my price range. I'd get two cars, but living in the city (Boston, now New York) the issue is parking (~$400 a month near where I live in Manhattan) which ends up being more expensive than a second car itself.
Customer: "Hi, I walked by, and I was thinking I'm really in need of a dynamic solution..."
Salesman: "Well great! You've come to the right place! We have all sorts of dynamic solutions here!"
Real men drive M3s. And I'm sick of this annoying stereotype, that BMW drivers are all full of shit marketing types. Not everybody that has enough money to drive a bimmer is full of shit.
But I agree, the new M5 is the balls. That'll be mine in a few years.
"What kind of horrible death is Jar-Jar Binks gonna die?" Since we have not seen him in Episode IV and later.
Yet. Just wait till Lucas finishes his next round of revisions.
Nobody really cares what goes on underneath the hood. The real issues are 1) ease of installation on an unmodified OS 2) aesthetic quality and performance of GUI. If you can get both of these with some embedded implementation of X11 based on the Cygwin stuff, then more power to you. But don't expect anybody to take an office suite seriously that requires you to install a complete windowing system on top of your native OS just to make it work. Installing Cygwin isn't terribly hard or anything, but unless the whole process is completely seamless from a user perspective, people just won't do it. And companies will drop it like a hot potato.
So in short, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with using the X11 version of OOo on Mac OS X, except that it doesn't mesh with the native look and feel, subjectively feels slower than any native Aqua app does, and requires (or at least it used to - it may be integrated into the install process now, haven't checked the OS X builds in ages) separate installation of an X11 server before it will work. These are all completely unacceptable in a mass market office suite.
Can't we just call them "international criminals" and all be happy about it? Somebody is committing a flagrantly criminal act, either for personal gain, retribution against a competitor or former employer, or maybe just some 3733+ hacker cred, depending on who the ultimate perpetrator turns out to be.
If your goal is to inflict mass terror on a population, hijacking popular domain names seems to be a pretty poor way of accomplishing it. If you just want to waste people's time, cost a business lots of money, and generally be a vandal, then it seems like a reasonable thing to do.
I was slightly off, it's more like 10%. And as I mentioned in another post, it's not just Harvard, it's every school - what bothers me about this whole thread is it's an attempt to smear Harvard unfairly.
And though being a legacy does increase your chances substantially, it's not a guarantee by any means (only about 40% of legacy applicants get admitted to Harvard).
And the athletics stuff is relatively tame at Harvard compared to places like big state schools, where huge numbers of students are basically given a complete pass on any academics because they are part of some cherished sports program. At least at Harvard, athletes are expected to do the same work that anybody else is, and held to the same standards (and yes, some do fail out - don't believe the statistics Harvard shows, a lot more people fail out then they want to let on).
To put it another way, when you meet somebody who went to Harvard, there is a 90% chance that they weren't a legacy. And a very good chance they are quite smart. But obviously, the way you distinguish the wheat from the chaff is the same as you do anywhere - you see what they did with their college education, in college and afterwards. There's a big difference between somebody who squeaks by and takes easy classes at any college, and somebody who challenges themselves, does well, and demonstrates initiative to do something worthwhile with themselves.
I cannot believe we just Slashdotted the Media Lab. MIT, bow thy head in shame.
So what's your point? You acknoweldge that every leading school does this because it's good fundraising practice, Harvard is no worse than the rest of the Ivy League, and the Ivy League aren't the only schools guilty of it either. Even desireable state schools do this, so it's not just private schools either.
That's why I get twirked when people point to Harvard like it's the most egregious perpetrator, which it isn't.
And describing the Ivies as "conservative and backwards looking" pretty much proves that wherever your father went to school, you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Harvard is anything but conservative - it's very liberal, the professors, the students, and the administration. Pretty much everybody except the people who manage the endowment. In any case, preserving legacy admission "benefits" (not guaranteed admission, just the extra consideration factor) isn't going to go away, ever, at private schools that are funded primarily by the donations of alumni.
As you say - I wouldn't want to go to a school where too many people are there who didn't merit anything, because it devalues the school. The question is are those 10% of people so distinctively worse than the other 90% that they noticeably devalue the degree? Not in my experience. If it was 30%, would it devalue the degree? Absolutely. So yes, this is a careful balance between keeping standards up, pleasing alumni, and raising money to keep improving the school, hiring the best professors, etc.
Okay, then that's essentially every school in the country, not just the Ivy League. State schools included - you think only private schools engage in this practice? It's good fundraising practice for them. See these numbers for some more examples.
Almost no school "gives" spots to legacies, they just give them extra consideration. The idea that somehow only Harvard does this is a trollish lie perpetuated by morons like our dear Slashdot editors who have been posting nasty anti-intellectual, anti-Ivy League trash all day.
I simply don't believe that. First of all I really don't think they keep those kinds of stats due to the embarresment it may cause.
I'm sorry, but this is wrong. I can describe several reasonably random samplings of students (we are assigned to Freshman year dorm rooms randomly, with a few exceptions). You can choose to believe what you want, but you are basing your claims on no data except that you've read about Gore's daughters or Natalie Portman at Harvard. My father is a social worker, and my mother was a pharmacist, then a pharmaceutical company executive. My freshman year roommates - one was the son of a professor from MIT and a professor from Northeastern (smart, not rich), one was a black guy from Alabama whose parents were certainly neither famous nor rich, one was from a very middle class family in Tennessee. Our neighbors - one was a girl from a small town in Canada who was really good at hockey (she played on the Canadian olympic team our sophomore year), one was a quiet girl from the midwest somewhere, then a girl from a fairly well-to-do Asian family from Connecticut, and one girl who was from an old money WASP family from New York, who was the only one from the lot who could have been considered "wealthy".
Then there was the rooming group I ended up joining up with in our sophomore year blocking group (again, they were placed together randomly as freshman). One guy from a lower middle class Cuban family from Miami, who is now in law school, one guy whose father is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, then one girl from a fairly poor first generation Asian immigrant family, one girl from a middle class family (father was an electrical engineer), half Hispanic, half Jewish, from Connecticut, a girl from the South whose single mother worked for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (they had very little money, she had grown up in a trailer), and the one who was a friend of mine from high school in New York (an Asian girl, whose family were well-off as many successful Asian families around here are, and owned several pieces of real-estate, but certainly not very wealthy by anybody's standards).
So there you have several at least semi-randomly chosen samplings. Not one of them was the child of anybody famous (my freshman year roommate whose father is a well-known professor at MIT comes closest, but that's geek fame at best) and only one of them can be classified as truly wealthy out of the lot (how many did I enumerate there, 15 or so?).
So go on believing what you will. My anecdotal measurement may not be a truly statistically valid study, but it bears a whole lot more merit than your belief, which is based on nothing more than general suspicion, while mine is based on four years of observation.
The Gore daughters and Natalie Portman are the exceptions, not the rules. Other than Natalie Portman (who started my Senior year) there were no famous actors at Harvard - except this one girl who had been on some TV series, whose name escapes me at the moment, not truly famous, frankly. This was when I was there in 1996-2000, and no models (models? At Harvard? You gotta be kidding me - we would have KILLED for some models). There were a couple of other children of political types I met in my time there, like Bill Weld's son (Weld was Governor of Massachusetts at the time), but in fact David Weld was a very bright guy, a physics major too. I am guessing he would have gotten in regardless of who his father was. I can't comment on the Gore daughters since I never met them.
If you hire somebody solely because of the college that they attended then you aren't doing a very good job at screening applicants. Obviously any college's degree only means so much. And if you hire a black person who graduated from a top college, you should realize that person more likely than not got in due to affirmative action, and wasn't qualified to be there either.
See these numbers. In short, if you hire a graduate from most any decent college, there is a comparable chance that they got in because they are a legacy.
Oh, and I was slightly over in my estimate, it turns out a total of only about 10% of each class at Harvard are legacies. And about 20% are black or hispanic. I leave it to you to figure out which form of admissions preference does more to screw over the middle class.
Or Black. Or Hispanic. Etc. In any case, as I said in my other reply to you, the children of the very wealthy and famous are a tiny fraction of the population at Harvard. Do Al Gore's daughters probably get slightly more consideration than your average applicant? Sure, but _any_ college will do that because they want them to attend.
Most of the slots in ivy league schools are taken by legacies, the famous and the wealthy.
Saying it repeatedly doesn't make it true. If 10% are legacies, perhaps 2-3% are children of the famous (or famous themselves, like Natalie Portman), and maybe 3-5% are children of the fabulously wealthy. Then a good 15% are there because they are athletes. And perhaps 20% because they are minorities. So while you are worrying about righting the injustices of the world, maybe you could note that there are a lot more minorities at Harvard due to affirmative action than there are children of the famous or fabulously wealthy.
Are there a lot of upper middle class people among the remainder? Yes, just because they are more likely to attend better high schools (either private or public schools out in the burbs), get more instruction and personalized attention with their studies and all the other factors that make SAT scores, college admissions, etc. correlate to socioeconomic status in general. But it really doesn't look like what you describe at all.
The playing field in life isn't perfectly level either. As I said in another post, the legacy admissions stuff is way overblown, and represents a small minority of students at Harvard, and probably similarly so at other top schools. The vast majority of students get in by their own merits, as did I and most of my friends.
And never forget, as any Boston resident knows, ya can't pahk ya cah in Hahvahd Yahd.
When everybody gets an A at Harvard, how could it be otherwise?
I can see you obviously didn't attend Harvard as a hard sciences major. I can assure you, not every physics major receives all As. In fact, there were several of our required concentration classes where grades were posted on the prof's door (by student ID of course) and there was something that looked quite like a normal distribution centered around a high B to B+ with several low end Cs, maybe even a D/F, and only 1 or 2 As. And these were physics courses for physics majors at Harvard, who one can presume are probably smart as hell to have gotten there in the first place (I can assure you that the legacy admits people are bitching about in this thread don't go on to become physics or math majors).
Upper level physics classes are different, of course, because the culling has already occurred. In physics, my freshman year Physics 16 (Honors Mechanics/Spec. Relativity for Physics Majors) class started with about 75 students, and ended up with about 35. If you made it past that, you were probably qualified to be a physics major. Comp. Sci. was comparable, though CS 50/51 were taken by many non-majors. The big filter class there was CS 121, taught by then-Dean Harry Lewis (I got an A in CS 121, incidentally). A good 15-20% of the people who took the class dropped it or failed it outright, and those who couldn't muster a B usually decided "Computer Science" meant something harder than they had anticipated and switched majors.
And if you want real filtering, you should check out Math 25/55. I took this class freshman year, and that taught me that *I* wasn't good enough to be a math major. My first three quizzes and homeworks I scored under 60% on (apparently not too bad as scaled scores, I probably could have hacked a B/B- in the class if I'd stuck with it instead of going over to Math for Physics geeks).
Harvard's grade inflation issues are mostly in core classes and soft humanities, as I would guess is the case at the vast majority of top universities in this country.
Please see this. Since the thread started about Harvard, it seems only fair to point out how the new President of Harvard University has moved to change this over the last year. If your family makes less than $40,000, you have zero expected contribution to tuition, less than $60,000 a substantially reduced contribution.
I think that's a pretty huge move towards fairness, don't you?