>If every student scored 99%, then 99% is now a C grade. See the logic? Selectivity is causative to difficulty in classes with a curve AND that is a quantitative inductive conclusion which is incredibly hard to counter with qualitative anecdotes.

No I don't. The center of the curve ('C') doesn't need to be calibrated around the median. 'F' can be chosen as the median, or you can choose an objective scale (this did happen) rather than a subjective curve. I've seen 'qualitative anecdotes' that the curve isn't centered around 'C' and I reject the notion this anecdote is impossible. I don't know why you can't understand the curve can be adjusted so like-performers across schools get a similar grade, resulting in higher GPAs at selective schools and lower GPAs (initially) at non-selective ones.

>I also don't know why you're bringing up ABET when we agreed it's trash and irrelevant.

Because you made a false assertion everyone couldn't be failed, when in fact at least in the institution it was REQUIRED that everyone be failed if everyone fails to meet ABET designated criteria. It supports that your claim is specious.

>Curves are different, so are the students going in. But when you look at the whole, by the law of large numbers (aka basic probability) a pattern emerges. Selective schools have smarter people and are therefore harder overall because of these curves. The generality is true despite exceptions that may exist. You can say on average, what I say is more likely to be true.

False. Again you depend on the fallacy the curves can't be calibrated around something like 'the average student fails and the course follows the difficulty of <selective school>.' If I give an IQ test to a cohort to a group of lower intelligence people, the 'curve' looks bent and biased towards lower score. If I give it to people of upper intelligence, the curve 'looks' bent towards biased towards higher score. But in the end it is the curve that is objective across cohorts (schools), despite higher intelligence in one cohort ('school') than another. The difficulty is unchanged, even though selectivity is introduced.

>The top 10% indicates that the bottom 90% failed to perform at the level of the top 10%.

That only sets the ceiling. If the 'top 10%' have a 50% pass rate, that doesn't stop the bottom 90% from having a 49% one, well above your 25% threshold for 'anybody with a pulse.'

> Your assumption which imo is much more far fetched is stating that this correlation DOESN'T exist.

My assertion is that all we know is it's likely the top picks may tell us the ceiling for expection of the bottom, but not the floor. And it tells us little to nothing about how difficult the cirricula is, unless we compare to like-kind top picks at another cirriculum (which without selectivity, could be difficult to compare in practice.)

>You hold the standard too high, then nobody passes the course. A certain percentage has to pass, therefore, for a non-selective school the curve MUST be lowered for more people to pass. As I stated before, although there's no official rule stating that schools can't fail everyone, it's pretty stupid for a school to fail everyone. Bad for business and various other things.

> said two things that by induction leads to higher difficulty. Literally. Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has. THEREFORE difficulty increases. As I stated before this hinges on the correlation between performance before entering the university with actual performance at the university in an engineering curriculum. That's the basis of my thesis right there. It is unreasonable to deny that correlation.

Fallacious reasoning, the two schools could have the exact same cirricula, teacher, everything and merely different students and when graded against objective criteria, or appropriately calibrated (shifted down/up) shaped curves, they can have both equal difficulty and grade parity for performance. The university I went to is NOTORIOUS for having the least grade inflation, much lower than many 'selective' schools, which also helps fix the exact problem you are worried about.

>Thus by this logic a non-selective school MUST lower the bar or too many people will fail.

Not at all. They just didn't give a fuck. Engineering drop-out is their feeder program to the other programs; better to keep the rankings high to bait people in than make engineering easier resulting in lower rankings and lose the bait. Engineering drop-out commonly became successful engineering tech or even successful doctor, lawyer, etc via side-channeling of people who were baited into the university via engineering rankings. They would have happily failed out everyone from what I can tell, and if you didn't meet ABET designated objectives they were REQUIRED to fail you. You can't just wash this away with your vendetta not believing that this can be true -- I saw people with excellent performance fail merely for missing a single ABET criteria. Moreover recall at least one class where I believe the majority failed or dropped out, making the median an 'F' or 'D'. Apparently where you went, you implied the median was a 'C', so there's a difference already. This is a public school that couldn't give a flying fuck if most the undergrads failed out.

> Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has.

Having higher performers doesn't change the curriculum or necessary even the grading, it simply means those individuals may be better prepared to tackle equal difficulty found at both non-selective and selective schools. If I bring in the population at random to do 10 pull-ups each and seperately bring in a bunch of professional football players to do same, the difficulty is the same despite a massive change in selectivity.

>More people of the same level of talent out of this distribution make it through Georgia Tech than they do at my school.

I'm not terribly familiar with Georgia Tech or your school, and it's possible, I dare say probably even likely, your school was more challenging than both mine and Georgia Tech, but we can't say the delta in difficulty was BECAUSE of the selectivity. I'm guessing the university I attended didn't show up on your radar because you swapped us into the sciences (computer science) instead of engineering, and my university is not so remarkably ranked in computer science. In fact it would be impossible to gain a CS degree there without acceptance into an entirely different college of science (for which I have no basis for comparison).

> only top 10 CS school

I thought we were talking about engineering. I guess we can stop here. At the school I attended, CS is not engineering but rather science (which is in the name) so we don't even have a basis for comparison. It's a bit pedantic on face but it drastically changes everything to be in college of science instead of engineering from the bottom up where I went to university. Are you sure CS was in the college of engineering where you attended?

>Certainly there are exceptions aka Anomalies, but the generality is impossible not to be true. It's an axiom of probability. You could very well be a genius of unparalleled talent that came out of a non-selective program.

Having more qualified people attempt to complete the degree is not same as being more difficult. Moreover, attrition could be so high at the 'anybody with a pulse' institution that by the time junior year comes around the quality of cohort looks the same as at the selective school.