My chances of getting into MIT, Caltech, Harvard etc

[Bipolarity]

When in doubt, take a look at the statistics from MIT: http://web.mit.edu/registrar/stats/geo/index.html. Given the talk of A-levels, I'd guess you are from the UK. There are currently *5* UK students at MIT, and since an undergraduate degree is 4 years, this means they admit one or two students from the UK each year, on average.

So if you are in the Top 3, I think your answer depends *where* in the Top 3 you are.

The A levels is not just taken in the UK. It's taken in many British commonwealth countries for your information including Hong Kong, Singapore, some regions of India etc...

BiP

 

[twofish-quant]

Of course education is still very good over here and from what I can judge from the MIT OCW, courses at my university are tougher than at MIT.

It's part of the US educational system. A lot of the job of US universities is to make up for the fact US high schools are considerably easier than those in a lot of other countries. This includes places like MIT.

You could create a policy that "you must know calculus before entering MIT" but that quite frankly would be quite unfair if you happen to go to a high school that doesn't teach calculus (and a lot of US high schools don't).

Also, one thing about MIT is that "weeding out" is not an option. You must pass 18.01 and 18.02 to graduate. A lot of other schools make calculus incredibly difficult in order to get rid of students. MIT can't.

One of the core values of MIT is the idea that education should be democratized and available to everyone. That's way OCW exists.

 

[twofish-quant]

It is possible that the standards of the OCW lectures were "dumbed-down" a bit to make the course more convenient for the online viewers who may possible prefer slow-paced lectures, and having the option of "skipping ahead" at will.

Having taken 18.01, OCW is a reasonable representation of what basic calculus is like. Now MIT has several different types of calculus classes, so if you think 18.01 is too easy, there are some much harder versions that you can take.

One other things is that MIT puts it's best and most talented teachers in the introductory classes. I took a class in Set Theory, and I thought it was ridiculously easy. The teacher (Sy Friedman) made things look so trivially easy that I wondered what the point of the class was. That was until the day he was absent and had a substitute teacher gave the lecture, and I realized what a teaching genius Professor Friedman was.

Anyone can make math difficult. It takes a talented teacher to make it seem easy.

 

[twofish-quant]

Also calculus is calculus is calculus. You don't attend MIT for the courses or lectures. MIT does have some very well taught calculus courses but you can get them in other schools. On the flip side, I've encountered some people that were incompetent at teaching. Just because you have a Nobel prize doesn't mean that you can teach, and it also doesn't make you a nice guy.

You attend it for things like the UROP program. The one thing that I got at MIT that was worth the tuition was an e-mail account. This sounds crazy. But this was in 1987.

The reason you go to MIT is so you see stuff five to ten years before the rest of the world sees it. Ten years from now, every school will have something like OCW and do online education, but MIT wants to be first.

The big problem with MIT is that it doesn't scale. You have a school that has a few thousand students, and that mains that most people can't get in. The reason I post as much as I do is so that if you can't get into MIT you can know enough of the culture so that you can build your own MIT or build something better than MIT.

 

[Rika]

But you can network power elite there which is worth all those money.

 

[twofish-quant]

But you can network power elite there which is worth all those money.

Yes and no. I've actually never gotten anything directly from anyone that I knew in college. Watching the "power elite" in action, was useful.

Also, one mistake that people make in networking is networking with the wrong people. Unless you are someone's cousin, knowing the CEO of a company isn't that useful. The people you really want to network with are "tomorrow's power elite" which are your classmates from today. If you can't get into a preexisting network, then you need to build your own.