Yet Another Sign that We Really Are Getting Better Students

Every year the admissions and PR people keep telling us that the students are getting smarter and smarter. We tend to be skeptical in the math department, as we don't see this improvement. And we don't see it for a good reason: You only end up in College Algebra if you can't do algebra, so that course is going to be full of people who are bad at math no matter how smart the freshmen are. Similarly, the super-genius freshmen who took BC calculus in 11th grade and Calc 3 and Diff. Eq. in 12th grade are not going to show up on our "freshman" radar.

But I have seen a sign! Like a daffodil blooming at the beginning of spring! We are starting to see the anxious over-achievers that never before would have attended a low-brow institution such as ours!

This morning a student with a B+ emailed me to ask if she should drop the class because of her grades!