<p>A high number means easier, a low or negative number means harder.</p>
<p>Alabama +0.51
Arkansas +0.44
Auburn +0.32
Ball State +0.78
Bowling Green +0.81
Brown +0.18
Bucknell +0.38
Carleton +0.13
Case Western +0.21
Central Michigan +0.90
Colorado +0.35
Colorado State +0.43
Columbia -0.02
Connecticut +0.42
Cornell +0.10
Dartmouth -0.08
Duke -0.08
East Carolina +0.80
Emory +0.09
Florida +0.49
Georgetown +0.13
Georgia +0.47
Georgia Tech +0.01
Grinnell +0.03
Harvard -0.16
Houston +0.46
Idaho +0.70
Illinois +0.23
Indiana +0.75
Iowa +0.43
Johns Hopkins -0.01
Kansas +0.73
Kent State +0.85
Kentucky +0.52
Kenyon +0.26
Lehigh +0.11
Macalester +0.27
Miami (OH) +0.36
Michigan +0.21
Middlebury +0.09
Missouri +0.45
NYU +0.38
NC State +0.35
North Carolina +0.18
Northwestern +0.03
Ohio State +0.32
Ohio +0.71
Oklahoma +0.50
Oregon +0.70
Oregon State +0.65
Penn +0.13
Penn State +0.41
Pomona +0.03
Princeton -0.31
Purdue +0.34
Reed +0.12
RPI +0.02
Rutgers +0.36
South Florida +0.63
Stanford +0.13
Syracuse +0.41
Texas +0.40
Texas A&M +0.34
UC Berkeley +0.22
UCLA +0.27
UC Santa Barbara +0.40
Utah +0.69
Utah State +0.73
Vanderbilt +0.05
Virginia +0.14
Virginia Tech +0.37
Wake Forest +0.14
Washington +0.51
Washington & Lee +0.03
Washington State +0.66
WUSTL -0.04
Wheaton +0.31
Whitman +0.34
William & Mary +0.10
Wisconsin +0.31
Wyoming +0.69</p>
<p>If you don't see a school (where's MIT and Yale?) you can calculate this using the average GPA (not HS entering GPA, the GPA of the students at the college) and average SAT (math/reading) for a given year.</p>
<p>Easiness = Average student GPA - ((Average M/R SAT - 400)/300)</p>
<p>well, I know for fact already that this list is slightly irregular/wrong.</p>
<p>JHU itself is tougher than Duke and Harvard.
Columbia should be tougher than Harvard and a little more so than Duke.
Cornell is much tougher than Duke, Dartmouth, Harvard, etc as well.</p>
<p>JHU has a lower average GPA than Duke and Harvard but it’s students don’t come close on SAT scores. A Duke or Harvard student would do fairly well at JHU.</p>
<p>Columbia has a similar average GPA to Duke and Harvard and slightly worse SAT scores as well.</p>
<p>Cornell’s average GPA is only about 0.10 lower than Duke, Dartmouth, and Harvard, and it’s SAT scores are much lower.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s saying how easy it is to get good grades, so both of those are factors, yes.</p>
<p>^you’re also using SAT score to determine future GPA. My GPA is significantly higher than the average at my college, but my SAT scores were around average.</p>
<p>you’re also not taking into account that GPA is calculated differently at different colleges. At Cornell and others A+ is 4.3 and they are regularly given out. At Penn A+ is 4.0 and a little more rare.</p>
<p>this is a very stupid way to calculate**, just FYI.</p>
<p>A reputable list was published by Berkeley or something like them for evaluation of Undergraduate Schools and grade inflation/deflation during the medical school admissions process and you will see that schools like Columbia and Hopkins get a greater bump than Duke or Stanford because they are known to be harder and tougher schools grading-wise.</p>
<p>for a tiny second, I thought that your list was official until I looked at it and compared the two.</p>
<p>and though it would be kinda odd for me to mention this, but the “low SAT scores” at JHU and Cornell that you note can be explained in many ways:</p>
<p>JHU includes the SAT scores of Peabody Conservatory admits in their SAT totals, and the admits at Peabody have significantly lower SAT scores than the general JHU student body at Krieger Arts and SCiences and or Whiting Engineering. However, for the GPA average, I don’t think Peabody is factored in. NOTE: Peabody is a MUSIC school, meaning they are mostly judged on their audition. The acceptance rate to Peabody is around 40-50%.</p>
<p>At Cornell, each school judges individually and they take a drop from the Hotel school and some state school affiliates.</p>
<p>JHU minus the Peabody and Cornell Arts and Sciences is just as competitive and high scoring in the SATs as Duke or other schools of similar calibers.</p>
<p>I’ve heard over and over that the three hardest schools in the country are UChicago, Swarthmore (both missing) and Reed. Reed’s number is high because it’s not so popular (only 3365 freshman applicants for 2007-08, compared to Harvard’s 22,955), resulting in lower SAT scores. So this amounts to yet another popularity list, but tempered by GPA. </p>
<p>How about a formula that eliminates popularity, which has nothing to do with how hard a school is?</p>
<p>Minimum score on the SAT Math/Reading is 400. This translates in the equation to a 0.0. The average score, a 1000, translates to a 2.0 (the traditional definition of average). The maximum score, 1600, translates to a 4.0 (maximum at nearly every school.</p>
<p>I guess I still don’t understand the logic behind your equation. Do you compare average SAT score to average GPA and normalize it to a 2.0 average and 1000 average?
I don’t see how your findings are valid, but w/e.</p>
<p>But SAT is a measure of popularity; what does it have to do with how hard a school is?</p>
<p>College GPA doesn’t work either; there’s no standard.</p>
<p>So while it might be useful to identify hard (for those who want to learn) vs. easy (for those who want to skate) schools, it seem futile to combine an irrelevant with a non-standardized measure. IMHO.</p>