<p>
Agreed. When I was an undergrad classics major, I was curious about how homework loads stacked up, so I consulted with some fellow classics majors at other universities about the number of lines they typically translated for homework each night. I found that Harvard, Princeton, and Duke students had the lengthiest homework assignments, trailed by Penn, Brown, Texas, Chicago, and a couple of others. The big surprise was seeing the huge range – students at one elite university were doing about half as many lines per week in advanced Greek as some of the rest of us! (Note: This was several years ago at this point, so the current picture may look very different. The exact order isn’t relevant, however.)</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that if you picked another department at random (e.g. neuroscience), the “most rigorous” schools would be totally different. </p>
<p>In fact, rigor can vary immensely even from one professor to another within the same department. I’ve TAed one class 7 times with 4 different professors, and each of them taught the class completely differently with tests and paper assignments ranging from very easy to pretty demanding. </p>
<p>One thing I’ve noticed on CC over the years is that how students react to their workloads can be heavily influenced by their colleges. Students at some colleges act collected and nonchalant about their workloads while working like mad behind the scenes to get everything done (the so-called “duck syndrome”). At other colleges, it’s considered normal to complain vocally about the amount of work one needs to do, either as one-upmanship or simply group commiseration. I’m not sure student reports about workload as necessarily always accurate, though they’re often taken at face value. Is a college with lots of student complaints about workload or grades actually incredibly rigorous – or is that simply the campus culture? It can be difficult to tell.</p>