How hard are Harvard classes?

<p>wanna know how hard a harvard class is? Go to your local state school.</p>

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<p>This has to be one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read. I have heard Arabic was hard, but there is nothing inherently difficult about languages. You spend time practicing, you do the homework, and you get an A. This is not true of, say, any hard class at a school like Harvard. People here got in because they know how to get As in classes that require practice and memorization. Japanese was a breeze, although looking at different syllabi from other schools I see that it does have a relatively fast pace.</p>

<p>Seriously, Jimbo? You’re going to be that guy? A word of advice from a wrinkled dinosaur to a first-semester freshman who hasn’t gotten any college grades yet (at Harvard or elsewhere): don’t be that guy. I promise you that you had classmates in Japanese who were working their butts off and didn’t get A’s. Publicly declaring that it was a breeze, and that getting A’s is simple for anyone who knows how to practice and memorize, is a really supercilious and disrespectful thing to say. You’ll get a lot less out of college if you keep being that guy.</p>

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<p>You sound precisely like someone who hasn’t actually taken an intro language class at Harvard…or at least Arabic. Can’t speak for the others (and neither can you!)</p>

<p>Also reading my earlier posts in this topic I have no idea why I was being such an asshat. I must have had a paper due or something.</p>

<p>LS1a or LS1b, and what are the differences? Also, how difficult will life be for a physics major?</p>

<p>J.</p>

<p>^LS1a is on molecular and cell biology whereas 1b is more on genetics.
Wow, I didn’t know that the classes were supposed to be so easy. I must be kind of incompetent… O.O</p>

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<p>Yep, papers do that to you.</p>

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<p>True. Then cover the entire year’s material in 1 semester and grade it on a curve where the dumbest kid in the class got a 31 on his ACT (okay, normalize the curve to a 'B" to keep up Harvard’s rep for grade inflation)</p>

<p>My perception of those in math 55 is that they are all math geniuses in he most accurate sense of the word. Any ideas from actual Harvard students?</p>

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<p>This made me laugh.</p>

<p>Yeah, in hindsight it’s a stupid comment but at the time I knew nothing about the course. I would hazard to say that a better descriptor than geniuses would be people who really love math and are dedicated to working extremely hard</p>

<p>Sent from my LG-P509 using CC App</p>

<p>@Dwight As I said, I have heard Arabic is a hard class here. None of the others seem to be. I know from direct experience that Elementary Japanese is extremely straightforward and “hard” in no significant sense. Time commitments do not make a course “hard” but rather hard to manage. If you put in the time and do the assignments, it is difficult not to do well. </p>

<p>I have heard from friends in Swahili, Swedish, and German that those language courses are similarly straightforward.</p>

<p>@CrystalJ Kids in math 55 tend to have a great deal more appreciation for mathematical beauty, and a great deal more experience in proof-based mathematics, than the average math nerd. A good proportion are former USAMO participants. I wouldn’t call many of them geniuses, but perhaps some are. The material is certainly covered at a fast clip.</p>

<p>Wait, my comment earlier to Dwight totally didn’t come out right :eek:. Sorry, I meant to refer to the annoying-ness of papers, not anything related to your comments.</p>

<p>^And there I was thinking you’ve been keeping track of how much of an asshat I am over time. I was looking forward to looking at that data.</p>

<p>Can someone describe their experience from Expos (if that’s the mandatory writing course every freshmen takes?) and how difficult that was?</p>

<p>J.</p>

<p>@JimboSteve; I had a friend in elementary Japanese who spent ~2 hours a day on it but yes, she did still find it difficult to compete with a bunch of students who’d had some Japanese before! Languages are probably the same at every college, though: difficult (especially Asian languages, Arabic; much less so for Italian) but “straightforward.” I doubt there’s a significant difference in language instruction between Harvard and a bottom-of-the-barrel state school, though, so I don’t think that is a good example to use.</p>

<p>@xrCalico, Dwight, I laughed out loud :P</p>

<p>@Joonbug It very much depends on how good a writer you are walking into the course. I didn’t think it was very difficult, but while I am still not a good writer, I was pretty ok even before I started the course. I therefore had much less trouble than my friends who somehow didn’t understand that an academic paper needed one thesis statement, neither more nor less. (Many tended to have no arguments; one tended to have five or six.) You should also pay rather more attention to the scores (student evaluations) of the different teachers than you should to the topics, unless there is a topic with a new teacher you are just DYING to take.</p>

<p>I do think classes are generally pretty difficult–Bs are often easy, As are hard, and sometimes really hard. That definitely varies by major, though. As a humanities/social sciences kid, I must admit to being slightly shocked when one of my friends was “so delighted, beyond happy” with her grade on CS50, the legendarily grade-deflating intro CS course, and I asked what she’d gotten. “Oh, a B.” I was like …</p>

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<p>:p .</p>

<p>@exultationsy True, different levels of work are required by students with different skill sets. However, when I say “difficult,” I usually mean something more like, “give me an extra year to study, and I still might not get a strong A.”</p>

<p>I’m very interested in languages, and was disappointed by my high school’s program, so I took some time while deciding between colleges to look at syllabi for different schools’ Japanese courses. UC Berkeley has a surprisingly rigorous and fast-paced Japanese program. MIT is pretty slow, and Harvard was faster than every school I looked at except for Berkeley. Mildly interesting, useless knowledge: my forte.</p>