THE GRAND EXPERIMENT: Of the nearly 155,500 students from over 160 countries who signed up last May for MITx's first prototype course, "Circuits and Electronics," 7,157 passed. An estimated 23,000 attempted the first problem set, and 9,000 passed the midterm. That puts the success rate at 4.6 percent, which sounds closer to the turnout for an election than a pass rate for a class. Was MITx' program tougher than Stanford's, which had almost a 14% pass rate? (If you took the courses, weigh in!) edX (the new name for MITx) prez Anant Agarwal prefers to look at the bright side: "It's as many students as might take the course in 40 years at MIT." A particularly bright spot: a 15-year old Mongolian student had a perfect score on the final exam, a distinction shared with only 340 other students.
