<p>I've gotten by relatively easy in high school with APs and a good gpa, and it's allowed me to have a lot of free time that I've quite enjoyed. </p>
<p>I'm now looking at Columbia, and I realize it is an "elite" school, but does that mean it's particularly strenuous or difficult academically? I'm talking about work-load really; in high school I've rarely had homework every night, don't study much, and only work really long for things like papers. Does Columbia have a heavy nightly work load?</p>
<p>It is probably harder than what you are doing now, but you will still have plenty of free time. Also the GPA as a function of work relationship is not linear. A modest effort will get you a B or even and A, but pulling a GPA in the 3.6-4.0 range requires more than just a little more effort.</p>
<p>Don’t delude yourself. It’s college. And it’s an Ivy League school. The quality of the work that students do is quite high.</p>
<p>It’s difficult to judge the nightly workload, since your time at college is so much more flexible. If you wanted, you could do no work and just cram for the finals and write all your papers at the last minute, but that’s a terrible idea. If you manage your time reasonable, you’re probably looking at an hour or two of reading a night, plus weekly problem sets if you’re taking math/science classes, and a few hours each week working on papers if you’re taking humanities/social sciences classes.</p>
<p>Your workload depends on your major, your target GPA, and your professor. From what I’ve seen on average, CC students have significantly less homework than SEAS students (around half to two-thirds as much). CC students can skip the readings for most of their classes and still achieve a B+/A-, an A takes more work and you’ll need to differentiate yourself from the class. SEAS students will get below average (around a B/B-) if they do not keep up with the material week by week with the problem sets. It’s due to the nature of the work (right/wrong in engineering versus effort/argument in CC) as well as the average grades for each school (2.8-3.3 in SEAS vs 3.3-3.6 in CC).</p>
<p>The Core classes such as Lit Hum, CC, Music Hum, and Art Hum inflate your grade significantly. It depends on your professor, but the majority of teachers will hand out B+/A- as the average, and many professors give A+/A/A- to over 50% of the class. The average Economics major in the college will need around 5-10 hours outside of class to achieve a 3.6 GPA from my experience. I’m probably biased because the mathematics in Economics classes is incredibly easy, though it might be difficult for less quantitative students.</p>
<p>Well I can’t tell you from experience since I’m still a high school student, but it really all depends on what courses you take and how much effort you put in. After all, it’s university and you make your call, but if you get into Columbia and with it’s expensive tuition and great reputation, I think Columbia should be academically challenging (because of the thorough and versatile education) so that it will be worth your time, money and effort.</p>
<p>rising junior here, just popped on to see if there was any hurricane chatter, felt a need to respond to this question</p>
<p>first, no one can actually answer this question for you. the difficulty level of your coursework will depend on what classes you take, what your major is, and compounding factors like extracurricular commitment. furthermore, even if you told us what classes you were taking, their difficulty will depend on the professor. the variability of difficulty within a class like lit hum or cc is very high, all depending on which professor you have. some professors will cut out texts, some will add them, some will assign 3 papers, some 2, etc. it really depends.</p>
<p>you will probably need to work at least 1 hour out of class for every hour you are in class. at least. some classes will require more work, some less. in a week where you have 1200 pages of reading and are in class for 18ish “hours,” you might need to do 23ish hours of work out of class. you might need to do 40. who knows. </p>
<p>my points are that–1) if you are a humanities major, count on lots of reading and writing. see bwog for a link to an article about the value of a humanities education, which notes that a class should have at least 40 pages of reading a week to be productive. at columbia you’re looking at more like 100-300 per class. 2) if you are a science/math major, count on lots of problem sets. so, the difficulty of 1 or 2 will depend on how fast/good you are at reading/writing and/or doing problem sets.</p>