I got a good education at UW. That school made me. You can get a good one anywhere if you work hard and go get it. My impression is that a decent % of UW undergrads are still there to play grab ass and aren't looking to become intellectuals. Where Washington is really elite at the undergrad level is in applied STEM. Very different subset of people in those programs.
My older brother was the 4.0 guy in the family. He got the full ride at UW and then at MIT, and worked under Hans Dehmelt at UW - UW's last Nobel prize winner in physics.
I was the 3.4 guy who'd drive out to the Skykomish after the math midterm to catch a steelhead and smoke a bunch of weed.
I helped Wayne Moses and Charles Jackson pass Anthropology
Have no idea what my grade point was because I dropped out and didn't give a fuck
Yes, but with the Mom's golf clubs reveal, you are no longer qualified to wrap yourself in the clothing of the working class.
I always knew you had too much attitude to have dirt under your nails. Always suspected you ran with the Indian Summer crowd. Probably banged a few Capital High co-eds on the back 9.
Working class my ass.
We were the white trash of the Olympia Country and Golf Club
Oceanography 101 was the one I definitely remember. Ocean is not only easy but it's fairly interesting. I could have sat through a couple of lectures, studied the material for a few hiurs, and aced the final. That was a tap in.
I've made no secret that I didn't have a lot of big time offers out of HS and went the JC route. I had 4.0s in a few real easy ones...math 101, 105 and 107, Geography, Psych 180-something (human sexuality), music history 101. I think that was all of them. I modified my senior year of HS strategy of eekiing out a C in everything to getting the easy As and eeking out a C in any class that mattered.
I remember Oceanography 101 and the Human Sexuality courses ... you remember the ones everyone said were easy grades. I think my schedule never really lined up for those. You could also take statistics in the Sociology Department to satisfy the B school requirement for QM 201 (or whatever it was). The guy who taught the regular course the quarter I could take it was known to be a complete Nazi with grades so I said fuck it. I'll take it with the Sociology kids and cover, which I also did.
Two other sources of 4.0 grades are coming back to me. The well-known Comp. Lit guy named Willis Konick, https://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/sept99/class/konick.html . Very theatrical guy ... stood on desks, super flamboyant and all that. Easy, easy grader. I remember one class he added oral presentations to go with your paper and he's in his office with a grad student while you're talking and he's nodding off because, you know, I didn't know wtf I was talking about. 4.0. Didn't matter. At the time, I thought I wasn't learning anything, but you oughta hear me at cocktail parties now waxing on about Boris Pasternak and what he was trying to say in Dr. Shivago, and Garcia-Marquez in Autum of the Patriarch. Fuck'n a the guy did teach me something.
Last 4.0 I can remember of note was Classics G&R Mythology. Set up for the kid with either a good memory or who actually likes it. I was the latter. I ate it up, so, while it took some effort on his long ass exams, it didn't feel like work because I thought it was interesting. The guy was always announcing that the frat boys who don't come to class and are relying on their test files to cheat had better think again ... presumably because he thought he could write the exam so many different ways that they'd have to study. As I recall he did in fact burn a few frat boys who never came to class probably assuming the test file would save them.
My school was letter grades, so percentage scores translated to letters. Shot out of a cannon freshman year (when I still cared), then started running a side business, got burnt out, and stopped giving a shit to the point of dropping out after junior year. My college "accomplishments" span the full spectrum: If I were taking this seriously, there was the chemistry class freshman year. Big lecture hall, 100+ students, etc. After a mid-term, prof says that she's been doing this for five years, and nobody's ever gotten a perfect score on one of her tests. She looked it over and over for a mistake, but couldn't find one. Somebody'd aced this one, so there would be no grading curve. Everyone--myself included--looked around the room PISSED. "We're gonna find the fucker who broke the curve and beat his ass after class" kind of look. TA's passed out all of the tests. I saw the score in the corner as it was being handed to me and very quickly flipped that fucker face down onto my little desk for the rest of that lecture to hide the score and then got the hell out of there.
On the flipside, I was already burnt out enough by the start of sophomore year that I stopped attending any class for which the grade was determined entirely by a few Scantron tests. I would attend the first day to pick up the syllabus, which would tell me when I needed to show up for mid-terms and finals. Those would be the only other days I'd show up. Why show up to class every day to get an A when you can show up four times, stumble through multiple choice tests, and get a B? The crowning achievement of this philosophy was showing up to my macroeconomics final to find an empty room. The test had been moved to a different day/room, and I didn't get the memo because I hadn't attended class in over a month. Only got a C+ in that one...
Just remembered another funny story of getting a 4.0 in Applied Laziness:
Engineering Tech department had a weed-out course that everyone had to take. Taught by a grizzled old dude who'd seen some shit. That class was just called "Materials" or something like that. It was the only class I ever took that covered an entire textbook, and this textbook was thiiiiick. The class was a weird combination of physics and chemistry and metallurgy and manufacturing processes. Everything from "here are the various thermoset plastics, their chemical makeup, how they're made, and how they're used in industry" to "here's how machinists figure out blade speed in teeth per inch when cutting 4160 stainless."
The whole grade was made up of three tests, and they were crazy because each test had to cover something like 200 pages of material from the text. The lectures were a combination of textbook review and the professor's wild stories from industry, and the homework was always "read 50 pages."
Studied my ass off for the first test and still only pulled a B- or C+ or something like that. The questions were fucking stupid. Details that nobody should have been expected to remember, as opposed to high level conceptual stuff that matters. Here's the thing, though: By a little ways into the test, I realize that the questions looked awfully familiar. All of them.
Get the test back, and, sure enough, every single question is copied word for word from the questions at the end of the textbook chapters. And there's even a handy answer guide in an appendix for every one of those little tests. That was the end of textbook reading for me! After a brief debate with myself over how obviously this must be a trap, and proceeding as if the second test would be the same way was awfully risky, the lazy devil on one shoulder choked out the angel on the other, and, the day of the second test, I just read all of the questions and answers from the back for the relevant chapters, went to the test, and knocked it out of the park.
And the final? I think I was up late fucking around before the test, so I couldn't be bothered to read the answers and the questions. Walking to the final, I just scanned through all of the test answers in the back, then sat for the test. This made for a much more interesting experience, as--no shit--some of the answers I read were "54/235." Or "332 TPI." Or "4-flute." Or "T6." So I had to read the test question and try and think which random fraction or number or heat treating grade on the answer sheet applied to the question.
On the occasions I didn’t get a 4.0 were weird. English 101 was my lowest grade 3.4. Then I had some humanities shit like Greek and Roman lit that took me into the 3.5 range.
Graduated Suma Cum Laude with a 3.9. I went to a shitty school though.
Fun fact. I only drank 1-2 days a week in college.
On the occasions I didn’t get a 4.0 were weird. English 101 was my lowest grade 3.4. Then I had some humanities shit like Greek and Roman lit that took me into the 3.5 range.
Graduated Suma Cum Laude with a 3.9. I went to a shitty school though.
Fun fact. I only drank 1-2 days a week in college.
On the occasions I didn’t get a 4.0 were weird. English 101 was my lowest grade 3.4. Then I had some humanities shit like Greek and Roman lit that took me into the 3.5 range.
Graduated Suma Cum Laude with a 3.9. I went to a shitty school though.
Fun fact. I only drank 1-2 days a week in college.
This story is way better than your 'I survived a head cold' story.
This is actually impressive. I mean other than that English 101 embarrassment.
My first semester of college I got a 1.4. I was put on academic probation. I wasn’t even partying much because I didn’t know anyone and hadn’t found out where anyone cool hung out at. I sat in my dorm room, smoked weed, and played Madden, Fifa, and Call of Duty.
My roommate was doing even worse than me in school. His family was loaded and he would smoke weed all day, stay up until 3 or 4 am because he would nap almost all day. Decent enough guy and he was generous with getting food delivered to our room, but I doubt he’s doing well these days. He also got no girls and was in the fucking room 24/7.
I ended up graduating in 5 years with a GPA around 2.8. Had some 4.0’s but don’t remember many of my classes. The only 4.0 I can remember was a winter session Econ class where you simply had to show up and then there was an open book, open notes, and you could copy any other students test. The professor didn’t care.
I score pretty high on IQ tests and did well on my SAT’s but school was always boring and I had no interest in any of it.
Comments
I got a 4.3 in Pump Kinetics and Intro to Gas Station Socioeconomics.
I was the 3.4 guy who'd drive out to the Skykomish after the math midterm to catch a steelhead and smoke a bunch of weed.
Two other sources of 4.0 grades are coming back to me. The well-known Comp. Lit guy named Willis Konick, https://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/sept99/class/konick.html . Very theatrical guy ... stood on desks, super flamboyant and all that. Easy, easy grader. I remember one class he added oral presentations to go with your paper and he's in his office with a grad student while you're talking and he's nodding off because, you know, I didn't know wtf I was talking about. 4.0. Didn't matter. At the time, I thought I wasn't learning anything, but you oughta hear me at cocktail parties now waxing on about Boris Pasternak and what he was trying to say in Dr. Shivago, and Garcia-Marquez in Autum of the Patriarch. Fuck'n a the guy did teach me something.
Last 4.0 I can remember of note was Classics G&R Mythology. Set up for the kid with either a good memory or who actually likes it. I was the latter. I ate it up, so, while it took some effort on his long ass exams, it didn't feel like work because I thought it was interesting. The guy was always announcing that the frat boys who don't come to class and are relying on their test files to cheat had better think again ... presumably because he thought he could write the exam so many different ways that they'd have to study. As I recall he did in fact burn a few frat boys who never came to class probably assuming the test file would save them.
My school was letter grades, so percentage scores translated to letters. Shot out of a cannon freshman year (when I still cared), then started running a side business, got burnt out, and stopped giving a shit to the point of dropping out after junior year. My college "accomplishments" span the full spectrum: If I were taking this seriously, there was the chemistry class freshman year. Big lecture hall, 100+ students, etc. After a mid-term, prof says that she's been doing this for five years, and nobody's ever gotten a perfect score on one of her tests. She looked it over and over for a mistake, but couldn't find one. Somebody'd aced this one, so there would be no grading curve. Everyone--myself included--looked around the room PISSED. "We're gonna find the fucker who broke the curve and beat his ass after class" kind of look. TA's passed out all of the tests. I saw the score in the corner as it was being handed to me and very quickly flipped that fucker face down onto my little desk for the rest of that lecture to hide the score and then got the hell out of there.
On the flipside, I was already burnt out enough by the start of sophomore year that I stopped attending any class for which the grade was determined entirely by a few Scantron tests. I would attend the first day to pick up the syllabus, which would tell me when I needed to show up for mid-terms and finals. Those would be the only other days I'd show up. Why show up to class every day to get an A when you can show up four times, stumble through multiple choice tests, and get a B? The crowning achievement of this philosophy was showing up to my macroeconomics final to find an empty room. The test had been moved to a different day/room, and I didn't get the memo because I hadn't attended class in over a month. Only got a C+ in that one...
Engineering Tech department had a weed-out course that everyone had to take. Taught by a grizzled old dude who'd seen some shit. That class was just called "Materials" or something like that. It was the only class I ever took that covered an entire textbook, and this textbook was thiiiiick. The class was a weird combination of physics and chemistry and metallurgy and manufacturing processes. Everything from "here are the various thermoset plastics, their chemical makeup, how they're made, and how they're used in industry" to "here's how machinists figure out blade speed in teeth per inch when cutting 4160 stainless."
The whole grade was made up of three tests, and they were crazy because each test had to cover something like 200 pages of material from the text. The lectures were a combination of textbook review and the professor's wild stories from industry, and the homework was always "read 50 pages."
Studied my ass off for the first test and still only pulled a B- or C+ or something like that. The questions were fucking stupid. Details that nobody should have been expected to remember, as opposed to high level conceptual stuff that matters. Here's the thing, though: By a little ways into the test, I realize that the questions looked awfully familiar. All of them.
Get the test back, and, sure enough, every single question is copied word for word from the questions at the end of the textbook chapters. And there's even a handy answer guide in an appendix for every one of those little tests. That was the end of textbook reading for me! After a brief debate with myself over how obviously this must be a trap, and proceeding as if the second test would be the same way was awfully risky, the lazy devil on one shoulder choked out the angel on the other, and, the day of the second test, I just read all of the questions and answers from the back for the relevant chapters, went to the test, and knocked it out of the park.
And the final? I think I was up late fucking around before the test, so I couldn't be bothered to read the answers and the questions. Walking to the final, I just scanned through all of the test answers in the back, then sat for the test. This made for a much more interesting experience, as--no shit--some of the answers I read were "54/235." Or "332 TPI." Or "4-flute." Or "T6." So I had to read the test question and try and think which random fraction or number or heat treating grade on the answer sheet applied to the question.
Best score of the three!
On the occasions I didn’t get a 4.0 were weird. English 101 was my lowest grade 3.4. Then I had some humanities shit like Greek and Roman lit that took me into the 3.5 range.
Graduated Suma Cum Laude with a 3.9. I went to a shitty school though.
Fun fact. I only drank 1-2 days a week in college.
This story is way better than your 'I survived a head cold' story.
This is actually impressive. I mean other than that English 101 embarrassment.
At Shoreline I got a 3.8 in some history class. It's been so long I can't even remember any of it.
My roommate was doing even worse than me in school. His family was loaded and he would smoke weed all day, stay up until 3 or 4 am because he would nap almost all day. Decent enough guy and he was generous with getting food delivered to our room, but I doubt he’s doing well these days. He also got no girls and was in the fucking room 24/7.
I ended up graduating in 5 years with a GPA around 2.8. Had some 4.0’s but don’t remember many of my classes. The only 4.0 I can remember was a winter session Econ class where you simply had to show up and then there was an open book, open notes, and you could copy any other students test. The professor didn’t care.
I score pretty high on IQ tests and did well on my SAT’s but school was always boring and I had no interest in any of it.