<p>How hard is Harvard academically in comparison to other schools your friends attend? Do you ever feel that you do not have enough time to study or that the assignments/tests are too hard? Or does Harvard only admit students it feels are capable of managing the work?</p>
<p>It could be tough. It depends on the classes you are taking. There is certainly some grade inflation, but let's not fool ourselves truazn...it happens at many schools.</p>
<p>see related discussion</p>
<p>That is very weird that <a href="http://www.gradeinflation.org%5B/url%5D">www.gradeinflation.org</a> redirects to Harvard.edu</p>
<p>It's not. Someone thought it was funny and purchased the domain name and simply redirected it to Harvard. Same thing with <a href="http://www.safetyschool.org%5B/url%5D">www.safetyschool.org</a>.</p>
<p>OK. I just thought it was interesting that truazn put the link up as his answer to my question.</p>
<p>He (or she) was being smart-***.</p>
<p>Ever heard of Math 55?</p>
<p>A previous similar thread:</p>
<p>no... what's math 55?... <em>feels dumb</em></p>
<p>Scroll down to the section on Math 55:</p>
<p>Excerpt
"This is probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country; a variety of advanced topics in mathematics are covered, and problem sets ask students to prove many fundamental theorems of analysis and linear algebra. Class meets three hours per week, plus one hour of section, and problem sets can take anywhere from 24 to 60 hours to complete. This class is usually small and taught by a well-established and prominent member of the faculty whose teaching ability can vary from year to year...."</p>
<p>I'm not sure who is teaching 55 this year, but Noam D. Elkies taught it a few years back. Besides being a math prodigy, Elkies is also a fantastic pianist and musician.</p>
<p>Kids who take Math 55 often stay up until 3 - 4AM doing problem sets. And these are Putnam/Math Olympiad types.</p>
<p>Math 55 is for IMO'ers more or less.</p>
<p>I had the privilege this summer of meeting a sixteen-year-old Harvard student who skipped Math 55 and went straight into graduate-level courses in math. (As you can guess, he had extensive background in undergraduate-level mathematics as part of his precollege studies.) So in relation to the OP's question, if you really, really, really like hard courses, Harvard can serve them up, even if you have the utmost background for an undergraduate student in your major subject.</p>
<p>That's not how the relative difficulty of courses works. Not at Harvard, not at MIT, not at Princeton, not at (name the top private school).</p>
<p>Graduate courses, at the universities with the strongest undergrads, are generally graded more permissively than the undergrad courses, and often involve less work. This is especially true for the advanced graduate courses that aren't populated with master's students (some of whom are undergrad dual degrees) or doctoral students preparing for qualifying exams. For a highly prepared undergraduate, those courses can be easier than the regular college courses, where there is plenty of homework and one has to battle all the other young hot-shots for high grades.</p>
<p>The pattern is a little different at big state schools. Their first and second year grad courses often have a big overlap with the undergrad courses at the elite colleges, both in content and administration (grading, regular assignments, exams, etc). Small and advanced seminar courses tend to be less regimented and easier on the grading.</p>
<p>How hard is Harvard? The question is ambiguous. This can mean how tough the grading. Here, I agree particularly with Siserune that graduate courses are graded more leniently. A B in a graduate course can lead to a warning to a graduate student. As for the rest, while there has been much bashing of Harvard over grade inflation, studies have shown that other universities had similar grade distributions. Princeton reacted to the news by capping the number of As, so it now gives fewer As than before (the capping is by department, not courses, so this may affect different cohorts of students differently). Others, however, do not seem to differ significantly from Harvard (the proportion of students awarded honors is a different issue from grading).</p>
<p>The question can also mean how challenging are the courses. Here I cite the experience of a student who had been a TF for a variety of courses in the social sciences and was invited to teach a course at a well regarded local college with a regional reputation. At Harvard, the courses taught by the TF were expected to assign 200 pages per week. At the local college, the visiting lecturer was advised not to assign more than 25 pages per week. Granted, most students were majoring in business rather than the humanities or social sciences, but the different levels of challenge were still substantial.</p>
<p>By any measure, Math 55 is difficult. But for anything else, my take is what is easy for one student can be quite difficult for another, and vice-versa. And this definitely includes courses in general education for which there are no pre-requisites.</p>