Not really. Institute policy disallowed curve grading. I also found the better students to be generous in helping me understand the stuff. Without them I would have flunked out.
The opening words of ACM95a my year are seared into my mind:
"I would like to apologize to the students who took this course last year. I always aim for a mean exam score of 50 and a standard deviation of 10. Last year's mean was 29 and I will attempt to not repeat the mistake"
Haha. I remember AMA95's first lecture where Prof Cohen said "the course catalog describes this class as introductory. It is, but make no mistake, it is not elementary."
AMA95 had a reputation for being a trial by fire. Doing well in it meant you were going to graduate.
Tough as he was, I liked Prof Cohen. He was a no nonsense kind of guy, and obviously enjoyed his subject. I was sorry to read he passed on recently.
At least I didn't hear about people being haunted by 95 afterwards. For us math majors, who instead of 95 had to take Ma108, it tended to haunt us.
For years or even decades afterwards the number 108 would show up. Call a busy tech support line and get put in queue, and you are told "The average wait time right now is 108 minutes". Check after lunch to see if it is time to go back to work...it's 1:08. That number would just show up way more often then it should have.
I know one person who fought back. She took the intro to digital electronics class and the intro digital electronics lab class in her senior year, instead of in her freshman year like most people did, which means she took them after 108.
For her electronics lab project she built herself a digital alarm clock (the traditional project). But her clock was special. It skipped 1:08, instead holding 1:07 for two minutes than going to 1:09.
> It skipped 1:08, instead holding 1:07 for two minutes than going to 1:09.
Haha, love that story. Reminds me of another student who was going to build a digital clock that only displayed the time, very accurately, in 15 minute intervals. Because, he reasoned, nobody should need time more accurate than that!
I, too, built a CMOS digital clock for a freshman lab project out of about 40 chips. It did not work, it just blinked the display LEDs erratically. I still have it, it still does not work and I still don't know why.
My senior EE91 lab project (single board computer) did work, though, but I misplaced it somewhere in the last 40 years :-(
AMA95 is one of the few Caltech classes that I still think about, mostly because it was not useful. Almost all of my other classes have been useful over the years.
I wish that the math sequence for non-math majors had included linear algebra instead.
Personally, I absolutely would not—collaboration on sets among undergrads[0], for example, is very common (and even officially encouraged) in my experience.
[0] I can't speak for the graduate experience, but I'd assume it's also non-competitive?
