<p>What are the most rigorous LACs? Which round out your top 10?</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd
Swarthmore
The service academies </p>
<p>should be in that list.</p>
<p>As defined how?</p>
<p>[College</a> Rankings 2012: Most Rigorous Schools (Photos) - Newsweek and The Daily Beast](<a href=“http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/galleries/2012/08/05/college-rankings-2012-most-rigorous-schools-photos.html#slide_25]College”>http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/galleries/2012/08/05/college-rankings-2012-most-rigorous-schools-photos.html#slide_25) Here’s a random ranking of the top 25 ‘most rigorous’ - you can run through and pick out the LACs. Whether the methodology means anything or not is your call.</p>
<p>Mmm, that list doesn’t look very good to me. Looks like they were going for things like geographic diversity over rigor. Sorry, but putting Davidson in the top 5 just isn’t going to cut it.</p>
<p>I am actually with RML: Swat and Harvey Mudd lead the list. I am pretty sure Amherst and Williams would be in the top 10. Although its USNWR ranking is low (because they don’t send in info, don’t “play the game”), Reed is very rigorous.</p>
<p>Swarthmore
Reed
Harvey Mudd</p>
<p>Haverford
Wellesley
Williams
Pomona</p>
<p>I don’t know about the others. Amherst has the open curriculum. Nothing wrong with that, but it won’t make the most rigorous list in my book because it allows you to easily avoid pain. Swarthmore, Reed and Harvey Mudd are in a class by themselves.</p>
<p>
Davidson’s academic rigor and [lower</a> grades](<a href=“http://www.davidsonian.com/2.10989/davidson-gpa-lower-than-peers-1.1531109#.UOb8-46UHfA]lower”>http://www.davidsonian.com/2.10989/davidson-gpa-lower-than-peers-1.1531109#.UOb8-46UHfA) relative to its peers are well-known. I am not sure it would make the top 5 of all colleges in the US, but it would certainly make my top 10 for LACs.</p>
<p>Anecdotally, I don’t think I’ll ever forget my Chicago alum interview. My interviewer was a Davidson professor, and he commented that Davidson compared favorably for academic rigor but had the better social scene. He also enthusiastically recommended Swarthmore, as I recall.</p>
<p>I don’t really have any knowledge of Davidson other than name, location, and SAT ranges. I guess because we have been in the college hunting process for about five years, D2 is looking for the most rigorous experience (her list has several of the colleges always discussed on it), and Davidson has never come up in a discussion online or via review of books like Fiske as a “most rigorous” place. As Fiske says, “Davidson’s academic requirement is rigorous, but not grueling.”. You would be hard pressed to describe Swat or Harvey Mudd as anything less than grueling. So maybe your are right, it is top 10, but not top 5.</p>
<p>The National Survey of Student Engagement examines factors such as average reading loads and the number of 5-/10-/20-page papers per term at participating colleges. Unfortunately, not too many of the most selective schools have participated. For those schools that have, it is difficult to find and compare the data. I think this kind of information is what it would take to make a good comparison, although a few schools do have distinctive features that sound pretty rigorous. For example, Reed requires a senior thesis, followed by an oral exam that can cover not only the thesis but also any course previously taken. Swarthmore has oral exams, too, but only for honors students.</p>
<p>Agree with ClassicRockerDad except on Amherst. I’d add Carleton, Amherst, and possibly St. John’s in Annapolis. Davidson was stronger when it was all men.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Does it adjust for the material in the reading? Reading 20 pages of Walter Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis may take considerably more time than reading 20 pages of something else (even many other math books).</p>
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<p>Ah… so women brought DOWN the level of academic rigor? Sure doesn’t match with current metrics of women’s GPAs. Or maybe you mean something else?</p>
<p>Pomona’s “grade inflation” (average GPA 3.5) belie it’s difficulty. I struggled so much in all of my classes and at times even my best work (or what I felt was my best) would get nothing better than a B. Academics take up a huge amount of time and account for the biggest student stress factor. I got a really horrible grade on my first midterm in linear algebra. 50-100 pages of reading a day are common. It’s really the determination of Pomona students to succeed that accounts for the high GPA. People get their act together and put in all their effort to make up for low grades- in my case, I took linear a lot more seriously after that and pulled off a B+ in the class overall. A’s are notoriously hard to get, but so is anything below a C+, because professors do all they can to help their students out. </p>
<p>My friends at Williams, Swarthmore, and Amherst say the same things, so I would guess all four are equally as intense.</p>
<p>I think Carleton’s intensity comes partly from being on the trimester system. You only get 10 weeks to master concepts, research and write papers or whatever else the course requires.</p>
<p>Rigor may also be affected by breadth or core requirements. At a school with extensive breadth or core requirements (particularly when “easier courses for non-majors” are not offered), student may find that the required courses in their weaker areas contribute to higher course rigor than at a school where students can avoid courses in their weaker areas.</p>
<p>@ M’s Mom Is Colgate really that rigorous?</p>
<p>^ Colgate ranked 1241of 1259 schools in C<em>llegePr</em>wler’s “Most Manageable Workloads” list. This (and its selectivity) appears to be what got it onto the Daily Beast’s “Most Rigorous” list.</p>
<p>The CP ranking is at least partly based on student surveys. So what does it really mean to have a “less manageable workload”? Does it mean Colgate’s courses are especially hard? Or does it mean Colgate students for some other reasons believe they have trouble managing their work?</p>
<p>Most rigorous: Swarthmore, Reed, Haverford, Harvey Mudd, St. John’s</p>
<p>Others: Middlebury, Wheaton, Williams, Amherst, Oberlin, Grinnell, Hamilton, College of Wooster</p>
<p>^A lot of those are puzzling, but the one I wonder about the most is why Wooster?</p>
<p>I’ve heard Colgate is rigorous. The most rigourous LAC is generally said to be Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Why is that? Of the two people I’ve asked from Pomona who’ve done semesters at Swarthmore, they said it wasn’t any harder than Pomona.</p>
<p>3.53 was the mean GPA in recent years, among the highest of any LAC- this doesn’t suggest grade inflation, but rather academically committed students. That holds true for all top LACs. Swarthmore=Amherst=Pomona=Williams=Carleton=Bowdoin=etc. in difficulty these days.</p>