<p>I have heard that the toughest schools academically are MIT, Caltech, and UChicago (not considering LACs). Do these students get more work and longer assignment than other top schools? I mean, wouldn't the work at say, Princeton or Harvard be just as long and challenging?</p>
<p>Swarthmore maybe even more.</p>
<p>And no. Grade inflation is prevalent among most schools, Ivies included. Work at some schools is known to be harder than others.</p>
<p>My take on this comes in a few doses. I'll try to simplify it as much as possible.</p>
<p>I know people at HYP++++++++++++ who are working their little tails off, working much harder than me at Chicago. Even at "chill" schools like Brown and Vassar, you will find students who give academics their all. However, it seems like at other schools, this academic rigor is by choice, whereas at the schools that are famed for workload, it's not optional and there are no "easy" classes.</p>
<p>I'm positive that you can (and will) find harder classes at other schools than some of my classes at Chicago. But the easiest classes at another school will be much easier than the easiest class at Chicago. The easiest class I've taken so far (Core Bio) was about on-level with AP Bio.</p>
<p>I found my undergrad classes at Carnegie Mellon to be much more difficult than Caltech's in terms of understanding concepts and solving problems through intuition and using logic to solve your way through a problem. I find Caltech classes to be much more difficult from a mathematical and fundamentals standpoint than CMU. Understanding all of the fundamentals and basics completely thoroughly seems to be stressed more than putting everything together for the "big picture."</p>
<p>bump.......</p>
<p>I have friends at HYPSM, and comparing workloads and assignments I can say pretty safely that my freshman curriculum at Caltech is considerably harder than theirs. I am probably slightly below average in terms of work ethic at Tech. Very few people here can get by with little effort, which does not seem to be the case at other schools. My main problem is that we're forced to take proof-based math - which, while a good experience, takes a LOT of time and effort if you haven't seen proofs before. Plus, most people here are taking 5 real classes plus an extracurricular or two. It's not that all the individual classes are harder, but that piled together with one or two that are just painful, the workload seems a bit excessive.</p>