So there is alot of people online who talk about the rigor/difficulty of UChicago classes. Would anyone be able to compare their experience in a UChicago class (preferrably harder premed weeder classes like chem and bio) to their experience in a high school AP equivalent class (ex: AP chem or AP bio). How much more difficult is the UChicago course material/amount compared to these AP classes and tests? Would getting an A in the AP class and a 5 on the exam mean that it shouldn’t be too hard to get an A- in these college weeder classes at UChicago?
Nope.
It’s a lot harder.
Think of your AP class and the kids who got an A in it. These A students are now your average peers in that class and the test levels are cued to distinguish between them - 80-90% will not et an A this time. So, an A in AP Bio means it’s easy to get a C in that UChic weeder class, certainly, but it takes a lot of hard work and innate intelligence to get a B or an A.
Your AP class was 5 days a week for 9-10 months. That content is now covered in more depth over 3 periods a week, over a few months. That gives you an idea of how intense the pace is.
Combine both factors to get an idea of how much harder it’s going to be to get an A.
I think is definitely harder, but it also depends on how hard and challenging those AP classes were at your school.
For example, my daughter’s AP Bio teacher was (is) a superstar, D got an A+, and a 5 on the AP test; she got an A in Bio at UChicago without much difficulty.
Highly, HIGHLY depends on the class. I’d say that STEM courses in general are much harder than their AP equivalents but the weeder sequences are usually offered at different levels. Math 130s, for example, is known to be a pretty easy sequence (probably not much harder than AP Calc) but anything at the 160s or above is much harder. You also have to consider that the vast majority of your classes will base grades primarily on 2-3 tests, which can be challenging to adjust to for new students.
@notawitch is absolutely right ask @carino DD how hard the math 160’s sequence is vs AP Calc. My own DD tested out of the first two 150 series calculus courses and found no difficulty with the calculus portion of the third course but found the non calc proofs difficult because they assumed you already learned proof based math, which isn’t the case for AP courses.
@CU123 I took the 160s. Extremely difficult at first for someone who easily got a 5 on BC, because I had no experience with proof-based math.
@CU123 is totally right. My daughter got A+'s in math all her school career without much difficulty. She did AP Calc AB and BC (with 5’s on the tests) and Multivariable in the senior year with a 99. Math 16100 was a shocking surprise for her. She got a B+, her first B ever. In the second quarter she found out how to approach 16200 and got an A (don’t ask me how 
). The teacher has a Ph.D. in math from MIT.
@notawitch do you think the reason why the STeM courses are harder than their AP equivalents is due to new grading style (2-3 tests) or is the material learned inherently more difficult/complex? Is it possible to get As in STEM classes (and weeder ones) with just hard work, or do you need to inherently be very intelligent to grasp the material or it’s impossible to get an A regardless of the amount of work you put in.
What’s with the idea that STEM courses are special in this respect? Is anyone suggesting that your basic HUM class is no more challenging than AP English Lit? APUSH, APWH: Does Chicago even offer courses that broad and superficial?
I think the Economics Department used to accept 5s in AP Micro and Macro as a substitute for the introductory economics courses, but it doesn’t anymore. Students can still place out of the introductory classes, but they have to pass a UChicago equivalency test.
You only have to take the test if you’re a first year. Lots of people (mostly math people) just drop into 200s their second year without taking a test.
No one thinks STEM has a monopoly on course difficulty once they get their first Hum essay back. Though as any second year or above would gleefully tell you, Hum is the floor of non-STEM course difficulty. Most first years think it is harder mostly because they are terrible writers (usually not their fault) and not because the class is hard.
This has already been said, but Hum, Civ, and Sosc were much harder than any class I took in high school, including AP Bio and Chem, and like HydeSnark says they’re the bottom of difficulty in their fields.
Re: difficulty, a key difference IMHO is that HUM, CIV, and SOSC are required for all students; pre-med weed-out courses are not.
Thus, HUM, CIV, and SOSC are designed so that it takes hard work and generally a strong writing background to get an A, but (absent extenuating factors) you need to really drop the ball to get a C or lower. Professors know there are STEM kids, TAPS majors, economists, etc. taking these classes, and they don’t expect anyone to write the next Great American Novel in HUM or solve the problem of free will in SOSC. For much the same reason, STEM core classes usually aren’t rocket science, literally or figuratively. Simpletons like me need to graduate too.
Pre-med courses are different because A. the College doesn’t require that everyone take them and B. social promotion for people who make life-and-death decisions is probably a bad idea.
^Adding 2 cents to @DunBoyer’s excellent perspective: even beyond the Hum and Civ cores, courses in History or the humanities by and large aren’t exactly “weeders”. Many welcome all students to the seminar table, and the class might even be cross-listed across several majors or departments. You might see quite a variety of lower and upper division students - perhaps even a few grad students - and several different majors, including STEM, represented. This is not nearly as much the case when you go the opposite direction and look at a typical non-core STEM course.
I’m heading into my second year at the College and I had the same PhilPer professor for three quarters. I absolutely loved the class, but not once did I get a paper grade above an A- and I got a B+ in all three quarters. For comparison, I was a straight-A English student from middle school on, including both the AP English classes offered at my challenging high school. I haven’t taken CIV and SOSC yet, but as far as HUM goes, the ones with the harder reputation (PhilPer, Greece & Rome, etc.) are not a cakewalk by any means. All Core requirements have blow-off classes or professors (relative to average-difficulty classes/professors), but if you’re looking for a challenge, you will definitely have no trouble finding one. With that said, my PhilPer professor (Dr. Alex Silverman) probably motivated me the most to improve my writing out of any class I’ve taken in my entire academic career. Hard can be frustrating, but hard doesn’t mean unenjoyable.
I have this imagery of a crotchety old “master” who is trying to mold a young “student.” S/He loves the student and wants that student to be successful and to do that s/he must challenge the student to be the best student he can be. S/he is never satisfied, while the student does show signs of progress and growth, the goal is ever moving to a level of more and more difficulty. When the student looks back upon the way he was when s/he first started teaching him/her the vast growth is apparent. Sounds like an old “B” Kung Fu movie doesn’t it? Or maybe one of those Hallmark movies where a young piano student with a chip on his shoulder is pared with a crotchety old neighbor who smells old and likes cats and is going to be his new teacher and she turns him into a great musician as their weird professional relationship turns from hate to love. These types of learning environments are never found in high school (or at least public high schools I’ve been associated with), but that is the goal of the great learning institution.
^ D’s instructors for Hum and Sosc. were young post-docs or fellows - no crotchety old master à la Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. from The Paper Chase with his “brains of mush” speech. Still, they were tough to please so a good mark on an essay or in the class really meant something. Gives the term “quality grade” a whole new meaning!
A UChicago traditionalist at heart, she enrolled concurrently in Greece/Rome for Hum and Classics for Sosc. One of our friends warned us that she’d get tired of that combination very quickly* but she really thrived so chose well. Ignoring rumors of which sequence was “easy” or “hard”, she simply chose those with the works she wanted to read. It made for a truly enjoyable first year. The irony is that while she is not GPA-obsessed, her cumulative is fine, at least in our view. For her, it’s a true reflection of her abilities and each component was genuinely earned. Seems that loving what you are learning can lead to optimal grades. Imagine that.
*For some reason, no one we know would think of saying that had she enrolled in Calc. 160’s and honors Chem. In our crowd there seems to be a real bias against the humanities and “think-y/write-y” social sciences.