Originally posted by: tcsenter
60 Minutes had a spot on IIT a while back, most IIT grads come to the US for graduate school. A few of the grads interviewed said their first year at IIT was harder than the entire graduate study program at Carnegie Mellon and MIT. They kept thinking the hard courses were yet to come...but they never came. lol!
I'm in a graduate field with lots of Asian international students, I have to say that few of them impress me. In Physics, if you go to any graduate department in any of the "great" schools and you see who is "making it", it'll probably be the domestic students.
I have spoken with several international students about this, in other countries they emphasize being able to do specific problems. For scientific fields, this skill is eventually useless since your life's work will never be just an old problem out of a book spun a different way. Most international students will admit that they do better in their coursework but lack the innovation in their research. So while they get A's in their classes they may just do average in the most important part of their graduate work, research. If you look at all the great physicists and all the faculty physicists at good schools you'll notice most are schooled in high school/undergrad from a western country. There's a good reason for this... in America, we teach innovation and not characteristic problem solving as other countries emphasize. In the end, no one cares if you can solve a hard problem everyone else has done, that's useless.
I don't want to get into a long argument about this... but trust me, Asian students often do well in coursework then flake out in research. And to those that think I have bias in my argument, let me say that I'm an Asian domestic graduate student so I have nothing against Asian methods of learning... it's just not the optimal one for higher learning, it's fine for high school and even college where all you do is problems out of a book (hence why you see that American schools always losing in standardized tests).
If anyone wants to argue with me about this, PM me since I'm not going to follow this thread.