<p>it depends on what u major in, if u major in psych at MIT, it’s probably still easier than Chemical Engineering at Iowa State.</p>
<p>“Not really. Firstly, 31 ACT is exactly at the 25%. That is misleading, however, given that about 25% of Harvards incoming class are hooked admits… Those scoring 30 or under on the ACT that are unhooked (athlete, URM, legacy, developmenal) could probably be counted on your digits (under 20)”</p>
<p>I highly doubt that the 25th percentile is 31, and then the 25.1st percentile is 32. I’m sticking with “more than.” </p>
<p>It doesn’t matter how those with the 31 and under got there, they’re there. They’re taking classes, they’re forming a significant portion of the curve. We’re not talking about how easy it is to get into Harvard, but who is actually there taking classes.</p>
<p>I’ve been to schools of different “quality” - being a student in different colleges, and teaching in different colleges. Based on my own experience, the answer to OP’s question is: Yes. </p>
<p>It’s not because of the textbook (they could use the same textbook), not even because of the teachers, it’s because of the peers. It is hard to get into prestigious schools, so generally students there are better prepared. Instructors can move faster, cover more material, go into depth, etc. If most students in a class are poor academic-wise, the teacher doesn’t want more than half of his class to fail, he’ll have to slow down, water down, etc. So if you’re a good student, you feel not challenged, or even bored. On the other hand, when you are in an environment where your peers are smart and well prepared for college, you will have to work harder for sure to be with the crowd.</p>
<p>(based on experience being a student/professor in physics/engineering area.)</p>
<p>"morrism, I agree with you entirely. Partial Diff Equations at a state school is not the same course at Princeton, Columbia or Harvard. Sefago disingenuously claims in post 14 that his post 6 was in line with what you are saying when if you read it carefully he makes it explicit that other than a “bit” of dumbing down the courses at state schools and stronger ones are the same.</p>
<p>Let me destroy these foolish arguments: Prof X teaches a class titled “Relativity” to freshmen at state school. Prof X teaches same class at Princeton to following students: Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Kapitsa, Fermi. Same course?</p>
<p>In other words, the intellect of the students will strongly determine the depth of teaching and of course the grading on the curve making the selective college course more rigorous. This is a no-brainer argument. "</p>
<p>Ramaswami- if you took the time to take look further down, you would have discovered that I further elaborated on my point. The first post I made was not clear enough.</p>
<p>Infact you are just reiterating what I said in post #13 again- if you notice I was one of teh first who said the caliber of students dictated the depth of the material. I have being saying this in previous posts before this thread came up especially in response to claims that Michigan for example is academically stronger than Emory, Rice and Vanderbilt on a departmental basis. I have been stating this continuously on CC. </p>
<p>PDE would be similar at Harvard, Princeton and Columbia though. At most top state schools the curriculum would be the same too I bet. The professors have access to each other’s syllabuses and would be attempting to measure up to the standard of their peers. The little differences would be minute and based on factors such as instructional quality (for those who learn in class) The bulk of learning and the major differences would be based on assigned course work and exams. The higher the caliber of students the more difficult the professor would likely set the exam. Smaller classes and faculty interaction make it more possible for professors to pay attention to your work and give you feedback. </p>
<p>For text-based course work like Humanities, this would also be the same reason. A stronger student body will be able to construct more logical and well structured arguments in their papers.</p>
<p>My argument about "this school being stronger than the other school was based on a primary concern I have always had- when people claim one undergraduate department is stronger than another. When making my first comparison, I aligned Harvard with a generic college because I did not want to name any college as a particular example. However my argument is this- people’s claim that schools like say Vanderbilt with weak graduate department are weaker than Berkeley in science does not make sense keeping this in context.</p>
<p>Yeah, those folks would have to define “strength”. That could simply mean more faculty within the department or more courses offered in it at the state school which would make sense at Top state schools. However, this does not measure difficulty. Some departments here, like psychology, get unexpectedly rough due to a heavier than normal integration of the more natural/hard science based aspects into nearly all of the courses (this is what makes the neuroscience major really hard, you have to go through pre-med weeders, hard classes in nbb, and some tougher psyche/anthropology/biology electives. The major is not a joke). Plus this department has many profs. that don’t believe in the sky high grade inflation, so while they adjust the grading scale against the standard, they design exams tough enough to achieve almost an even distribution across all letter ranges. With Dr. David Edwards (maybe try to look him up lol) perhaps being the most notorious for such methods, though I will admit he is an amazing professor, and still very accessible even though his class had a little over 100 students in it. The accessibility has been high in nearly all of my courses here, even the larger courses (honestly, our weeders like organic chem. and bio don’t normally exceed 95 per section and most profs. get upset when the class performs poorly, so they want to see students using resources such as office hours). I have established close relationships with many professors here. Ann Arbor, for example is really solid. I have a friend who goes here with me from the town, and thus knows and adores the school (her dad is involved there as a researcher), but I don’t know how good it is on the “accessibility” front. I also don’t know how hard it is, I’d imagine it would be reasonably difficult. However, I won’t claim it’s more difficult because some of the departments are known to be “stronger” (vague). That would be a leap of faith. I don’t go there and haven’t seen the work. How could I know?</p>
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<p>Nicely put, herandhisMom. Here’s an analogy:</p>
<p>Your student ran Cross-Country in HS, and the coach was a drill sergeant. Lots of demands, dictated workouts, supervision to be sure all the runners were complying. Being a star runner, your student has now been invited to train at the Olympic Training Center. There it’s perhaps not so directive. The runners are all self-motivated. They all have similar goals are the coaches are more facilitators than task masters.</p>
<p>An onlooker might look at the teaching style of the HS coach and the Olympic Center and say “wow - the work’s not as hard at the Olympic Center as it was before.” But would the runner say that it’s easier to keep up with the pack of the Olympic prospects than the HS teammates? Would s/he have to not run as hard or as often? Can s/he slack off on occasion as easily as in HS Cross-Country?</p>
<p>Does this question take into account the Honors programs offered at the state schools or other schools without the same top reputations?</p>
<p>Is there a list out there for hardest schools-or hardest schools by major? I know many families will be faced with a tough decision soon about which college their children will attend. Academic rigor is certainly a major concern-but at what price?</p>
<p>To date, I have taken undergraduate courses at:
one HYPSM peer LAC
one non-selective LAC
two community colleges in two different states (different centuries too for that matter)
one large not-particularly-selective public U
one HYPSM peer U</p>
<p>I’ve also taken graduate coursework at those two Us, and through a distance ed program at a third not-hideously selective private U.</p>
<p>The two mind-blowingly difficult classes that I’ve had were Classical Greek at the HYPSM peer LAC, and Foundations of Education at one of the community colleges. Yup, one was a course in Education at a community college. The instructor was competent, but the textbook was rife with publishing errors (I think the wrong proof must have been sent to press), and the sheer volume of material to be covered meant that the grading system was entirely dependent on multiple choice exams. We essentially needed to memorize each chapter in order to pass the exams.</p>
<p>Closest third place would have to be a tie between two distance ed. graduate courses for which the professors were new to the program, and spent the entire term figuring out how to communicate with the students. We had no idea what they expected from us until the course was completely over and we’d turned in the last assignment.</p>
<p>Comparisons with Chicago math:
Co-worker was a math major at our local flagship. Only had to take one semester of abstract algebra and one semester of analysis. S1 had to take three quarters of each. Coworker never had to take a topography class. S took one second year. We have heard from a number of people that Chicago’s UG math is comparable to many graduate programs. </p>
<p>The top folks from S1’s HS who attended the flagship generally were in graduate classes by soph year. The resources and in-depth classes are available at the flagship, it’s just that they are at the upper-division/grad level.</p>
<p>S1’s nominal equivalent of AP Physics C had MV/DiffEq as a pre-req and used the same textbooks as the flagship’s honors physics sequence for physics majors. Literally half the class made the USAPhO semifinalist level just on what was taught in class and with no outside studying.</p>
<p>At a certain point, you are comparing apples to oranges.</p>
<p>^^^ or possibly comparing apples to tollbooths!</p>
<p>I think another point to make is that workload is not the same thing as rigor. You might assume that an English course on the novel in which you read 10 novels and wrote three papers would be “harder” than one in which you only read 5 novels and wrote two papers. But it might be harder only in the sense of workload. As others have indicated, if the other students in the second class are all top English students who write well, that class may be significantly more “rigorous.”</p>
<p>To put it simply No prestige does not correlate with difficulty. Harvard classes are easier to get A’s in than classes in Cal Berkeley. Why? Lets just say you pay for what you get and Harvard doesnt want to flunk out their trust fund children.</p>
<p>Form elsewhere on CC:</p>
<p>“I transferred to Harvard after two years of classes at Bryn Mawr/Haverford. The workload in similar fields was similar, but the standard of writing expected in humanities and social science classes at Harvard was far higher. I got an A in my full-year freshman writing class at Bryn Mawr. But as a Harvard junior taking a Core English class in a section full of freshmen, I wasn’t able to get better than an A-minus despite working much, much harder on my papers than I had at Bryn Mawr. You will not be an A student at Harvard without being an excellent writer.”</p>
<p>A statement like this makes far more sense to me. You put the biggest type A personalities on the planet all in the same place, tell them that, though a lot of them will get into Harvard Law school, etc, a good number of them will not, and you think these people are just all relaxed about everything, despite the path of their whole prior lives? I don’t believe it.</p>
<p>Maybe they can be all relaxed about their course load to the extent they are capable of producing Harvard-caliber work while being relaxed. That doesn’t mean that you would be relaxed there, or the work you produce will garner those same grades there.</p>
<p>I personally doubt that courses at Brown are easy either. One can drop courses seemingly any time there, that’s a different matter which may impact grades there. But not course difficulty/level or work standards.</p>
<p>ranka, I don’t think that is true. What makes Harvard less intense (personal opinion) is that the collective student body has decided that out-of-classroom activities are just as important as in-class work. Now <em>that’s</em> practical intelligence at work. They’ve all boycotted super intensity.</p>
<p>I doubt it. Chemistry is chemistry.</p>
<p>Studying mechanical engineering at Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX much harder than studying International Relations at Princeton. Invariably, courses that are common in both places must be compared.</p>
<p>I bet a fair number of people studying mechanical engineering at Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX would be crawling along the bottom of the class if they were studying International relations at Princeton.</p>
<p>In my experience, both selective and less selective schools are hard–but in different ways. Selective schools assume that you belong there, and generally don’t make an active attempt to weed you out. But the students surrounding you are high achievers and the level of the coursework is high. The less selective schools that I’ve attended were not as challenging academically, but had more assignments and exams and were more geared towards making you prove yourself.</p>
<p>I will grant that this is far from a perfect comparison, but decades ago I got my bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at Georgia Tech and both the rigor and the difficulty of the math and physics classes that my daughter took as a freshman at Harvard last year blew away anything that I went through. ChE was considered the toughest major when I was there and they weeded us out heavily (250 started my freshman year and 35 of us got the diploma in ChE four years later). The material in math and physics (freshman level) has not changed over the years, but the difficulty of the problems my daughter had to solve and the speed with which they covered the material was far greater than my experience. She did take the highest level of freshman physics, but only a middle level of freshman math. I took the highest level that was available to me.</p>
<p>Citdad, question. At Tech, wouldn’t higher level maths not be as hard/weedout (in terms of grading at least) as intro? I mean, Tech is known for having awfully difficult Calc./physics 1 and 2 series (4 horsemen of Calc. 2 for example). However, so are most schools with any type of engineering school I guess. However, I could definitely see upper/intermediate level courses at Harvard being tougher. If we compared intro. level, that could be up for grabs, but I won’t know until you answer.<br>
One thing I found weird is that I checked MIT’s open courseware thing one time, and noticed that the organic chemistry course section displayed there were similar if not less difficult in some ways than half of the sections here at Emory. Maybe that’s just a notoriously difficult course here. Biology used to be like that here, but it seems to be varying in difficulty each year now. And even then, it never compared to MIT’s biology which gives really long, tough free response exams, while most Emory profs. punked out and migrated toward multiple choice. MIT’s gen. chem seemed similar to my surprise though. They tended to emphasize more mathematical concepts (they put the same types of problems as those on our test, but MIT would have a whole test composed of nothing but those), while ours tended to focus on some more theory. It’s not worth talking about Physics and math here because we clearly don’t teach those intro. courses correctly lol.</p>