You get someone who thinks of themselves as being at the top of their class. To address academic deficits, administrators across the university are scrambling to create special programs of small classes and extra counselors. If I see even a hint of a student having a problem, if somebody does badly on a quiz, I call them into my office. To date, PENS students have an average chemistry grade of 2.63, slightly below the 2.7 average in the 500-student lecture, yet far above the 2.1 of the students in the larger class with comparable College Board scores. But there are only 50 seats in PENS classrooms.
Small classes are expensive.
We just can't afford it. The overall percentage of freshmen at the university who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school has changed little, up to 43 percent this year from 41 percent in 1996. You're not in the top 10 percent, you're not in the business school. Urton Anderson, the undergraduate dean of business, has fielded scores of calls from angry parents and counselors of those he has rejected, but he said the companies that recruit on campus want the minority students being enrolled through the top 10 percent rule. As word of the new system filters across the state, it is changing the entire college application process.