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Discovering buried rocks

Every school has a universally acknowledged "gut" course - minimal work for an easy A. At SUNY Albany the intro Earth Science course was called "Rocks for Jocks." At Cornell there was a survey Physics course that the engineers called "Physics for Poets." Can you guess what would happen if everyone knew what the easy courses were?

The Atlantic recently reported on a study about the impact of Cornell's decision to publish the median grades in all courses (after I graduated, of course). Not surprisingly the "easy A" courses saw a dramatic increase in enrollment and students with the lowest SAT scores were the most likely to take them. Cornell intended to preempt this problem by including the median grade of each course on student transcripts, but never got around to changing the transcript policy.

Some may say that the tendency of students with high SAT scores to stick with the tough classes is evidence of academic rigor. I suspect that it just means that high SAT scores at Cornell are ultimately correlated with underemployment.

(Via eLynah Forum)