<p>I don't have any hard data on this. </p>
<p>From things I've heard the hardest to get good grades in are: MIT, Caltech, Chicago</p>
<p>and the easiest are: Pomona, Brown and Harvard.</p>
<p>And I don't know anything about the other 44</p>
<p>As I said, these are just things I've heard. I seem to remember that somewhere on cc there may be a Boalt Hall data sheet which provides some information about how hard it is to get grades at various colleges.</p>
<p>Pomona is definitely not easy.</p>
<p>LACs tend to be harder. I would say of LACs the most rigorous are Reed, Grinnell, Swarthmore, Macalester, Wesleyan and Carleton.</p>
<p>Brown has the highest mean gpa: 3.6.</p>
<p>In my day, Harvard could be easy or hard - it really depended on the courses you took. I suspect it’s still that way. You don’t have to take Math 55, you don’t have to take the French course that makes you read a volume of Proust every single week.</p>
<p>All schools can be easy or hard. Brown Applied math majors or comp sci majors aren’t getting A’s with ease… </p>
<p>may I ask why do you care?</p>
<p>Years ago it used to be said that “Harvard is impossible to get into and hard to flunk out of”;“UC Berkeley is easier to get into but harder to graduate from”</p>
<p>Just curious…why is this question worthy of an answer??</p>
<p>if you’ve got a merit scholarship based on a certain gpa it’s
important information. Babson College average gpa 2.7</p>
<p>Last I checked, Babson was not in the top 50 schools (great school, but not top 50). Once you’re in the top 50 schools, you’re going to be working to keep your GPA up. I can’t see why it’s important to know which is easier and which is harder, unless you plan to be a slacker.</p>
<p>About 99% of us who went to any of them only went to one of them. And years ago! How we would know?</p>
<p>“once you’re in the top 50 schools, you’re going to be working to keep
your GPA up.” Not sure that’s really true, although they certainly worked
hard to get there. Are the students at the 51st ranked school then,
not working hard or as hard? Why does it matter if it’s important information,
probably 90% of the posts on cc are unimportant, but as long as they are
of interest to someone, why spoil their fun?</p>
<p>How can anyone possibly evaluate this?</p>
<p>Hardest: MIT, Olin, Reed, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, Harvard, Middlebury, UChicago, Swarthmore, Davidson, Williams, Haverford, Princeton, any military academy</p>
<p>Easiest: Any state school except Michigan, Virginia, UC-Berkeley, UCLA</p>
<p>This is very hard to evaluate, because once you are looking at highly selective schools, you are also looking at students who are smart, capable, and mostly highly motivated. A large percentage of them will work hard and do well whether they have to or not.</p>
<p>^^^ Correct take on the issue from Hunt. Many people will point to very high graduation rates and high median GPAs and assume grade inflation. But at highly selective schools, you’re looking at entire populations of students who, in the vast majority of cases, have never made a C in their lives. Once they get into a campus culture in which that kind of dedication is the norm and a strong work ethic is the expectation of their peers, there’s no reason to think that they’d suddenly begin making Cs. But that doesn’t mean they’re not working hard for their good grades.</p>
<p>
Babson isn’t ranked.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are schools, and programs within schools, where it certainly <em>is</em> common for this same caliber of students to get Cs. More than one out of nine students in my intro freshman physics class at MIT failed the first time they took it.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that people aren’t correct that these are strong students who are working hard for the good grades that they get. But the caliber of the students doesn’t mean that they’ll necessarily continue to get great grades anymore than it necessarily means that their grades will plunge.</p>
<p>But why did those students fail freshman physics at MIT? Was it because they were unprepared? Because the class was poorly taught? Because they were lazy and didn’t do the work? Or was the class curved so that somebody HAD to fail? I guess the answer to these questions might tell you that some top colleges really do make it harder to get top grades.</p>
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</p>
<p>Based on my observations, each of the above applied to some of the people who failed (and in some cases, more than one of the above applied).</p>
<p>This didn’t just apply to first-semester physics. I saw plenty of people fail sophomore-level classes, the first time they attempted them, in the fields in which they went on to be successful professionals or grad students (for example, a PhD student in physics who failed waves & vibrations, an electrical engineer for a prestigious company who failed circuits & systems, a bio PhD student and winner of a major nationally-competitive fellowship who failed organic chem). Of course, I also saw plenty of people who never failed anything, and even some who got straight As or close to it. So it’s not as though it’s impossible, or nearly-impossible, to get good grades - it’s just that being smart, or even smart and hardworking, doesn’t <em>assure</em> it. By definition, half the people are going to be in the bottom half of the class, and it’s not like the bottom half of the class just gets handed Bs for effort.</p>
<p>But again, I’m not sure why a person who is smart and hardworking would fail a class in his own discipline–unless he didn’t work hard that time around. If the person was smart and hard working, but the class was “too hard,” that doesn’t say much about MIT’s placement system.</p>