Once you're in, what are the toughest and easiest of the top fifty colleges?

Parents Forum
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<p>Sometimes it takes longer for material to “click” for some people (all of these people passed on their second try). Sometimes there’s something about the structure of the class that doesn’t mesh well for some people. Sometimes people have things going on in other areas of their lives that are hurting their performance. Sometimes - many times - you get people who are brilliant compared to most of the population - that’s how they got in - but in fact below average in ability in their class.</p>

<p>Professors generally want to write exams and problem sets that will give a nice wide range of grades, and that are challenging. They want to actually differentiate between the performance of different people in the class, rather than simply give them all a cookie for being smart. When there is a nice wide range of grades, some people are going to be nearer the bottom of that nice wide range, relatively speaking.</p>

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<p>When I was teaching a college course, I really didn’t want anybody to fail, unless they didn’t do the work, or absolutely couldn’t do it. I felt that it was my job as a teacher to help the students master the material. I used a grading rubric that was based on degree of mastery of the material, and didn’t worry about a curve. Why should I be interested in differentiating among the students?</p>

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<p>Exactly! That’s the point of getting into and going to a highly selective college/university. The courses should be much more difficult, thorough, and challenging. It puzzles me that anyone would think that once students pass the ‘gatekeepers’ at the top schools and are admitted, that they all - or even almost all - will be A or B students.</p>

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<p>Again, why wouldn’t most of them be A or B students? Why do you conceive of a top university as a ranking mechanism, rather than as a teaching mechanism?</p>

<p>If you were recruiting for the Olympic soccer team, would it trouble you if all of your recruits performed at an “A” level?</p>

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<p>It’s not a good system if not-quite-perfect students are getting into schools they can’t handle, when they could excel somewhere else.</p>

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Because it is exactly as you state, a TEACHING mechanism - albeit at a much more rigorous level given the highly selective institutions’ students’ prior academic preparation. Therefore, not everyone will be an A or B student.</p>

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I suspect this is where SAT coaching, high school grade inflation, resume building/padding, and college admissions consultants might come into play.</p>

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Again, you’re suggesting that the college should be a ranking mechanism. I think you (and a lot of people) have this idea of what an “A student” is. But is an “A student” one of the top students in the school, or is she a student who has achieved a high level of mastery of the material? If it’s the latter, I see no reason why a highly selective school shouldn’t have mostly A students.</p>

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<p>Hunt, it’s a different pedagogical philosophy. A good education consists of much more than mastery. Mastery, for high caliber students, is relatively easy to achieve. The demonstrated ability to apply that mastery in novel situations consisting of challenging parameters is more of a true measure of the value of the education obtained. That’s an opinion, though, and you and others might believe differently.</p>

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<p>Erm…</p>

<p>I’ll just guess at the hardest, since a Sociology major at Dartmouth is generally going to have a much easier time than a Chemical Engineering major at the University of Florida, making any ranking of easiest kind of useless.</p>

<p>Hardest is probably Caltech. Only 80% graduate within four years or something like that. The fact that they evaluate applicants based only on who can pass the Core instead of taking athleticism or ethnicity into account should indicate how hard this school is. </p>

<p>Next is MIT. It’s just an intense place and very individual-driven. At least at Caltech they strongly encourage group work; at MIT, the idea is that you get it done yourself, from what I understand. Low GPAs doesn’t mean no top graduate school, though. Far from it.</p>

<p>I’ll go with University of Chicago next. This anecdote from a current student should be enough: “There was this student, a star of the Middle Eastern Studies department. Absolutely excellent, truly brilliant. He had a bunch of things published to his name already, he had done tons of research. His entire student evaluation from his professor said one word-- ‘Satisfactory.’” </p>

<p>After that is probably Princeton, which is hard to judge, partly because of the grade deflation, and partly because everyone who goes there is so damn smaht that it’s going to unfairly inflate the deflated GPAs a little bit, if you follow. But it’s a very requirement heavy school with brutal curves and a nice, epic Thesis Paper waiting for you (yes, you) at the end of it.</p>

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<p>I absolutely agree, Hunt, and when I teach, I approach it the same way. Any system which presupposes that only some students can excel, is, to me, a flawed system.</p>

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<p>To poke at this, I enjoy the self-selective bias evident in responses. </p>

<p>One can say kids work hard because they’re motivated but many don’t work hard no matter which school they’re at. Many slack or don’t care about a class they have to take or get involved in outside class stuff or play a lot of video games or drink or care more about a girl/boy or spend all their time working on the stuff they love or don’t adjust well to college style lectures or don’t use their time well. If a school’s average is a B+, then you have to perform only average work and the assumption that you have to work hard to be average in that peer group is a conclusion based on one’s own belief in one’s superiority. </p>

<p>BTW, average GPA at Chicago is not low so how hard do you have to work? Oh, right, we then fall into the self-selection trap that the kids at Chicago are so bright they work extra hard. But if they’re so bright, maybe they aren’t working hard to get an average grade - meaning about a B+. On the Yale board, kids say, “It’s hard to get an A at Yale” or “It’s hard to get a 3.85.” What they mean is it’s relatively easy to get a B+ or an A- but hard to get a lot of straight A’s, which makes sense because the divider is that half grade now when it used to be a full grade or even two full grades. Think what a 3.85 is … get an A- and your GPA goes down and that minor difference is then the hurdle that distinguishes those who work hard. </p>

<p>Is the idea that somehow the material at Chicago is harder? So that then means the material at Yale must even be harder - because Yale is ranked higher - and that the material at Virginia must be easier and the material at Bowdoin easier? If the material is the same, then maybe it’s easier to do well at Chicago because the kids are ranked brighter than at Virginia and thus easier even to do well at Yale because the material then should be easy. </p>

<p>Then people say, “But all those kids are so bright, they fall into a narrower distribution and deserve all those lumped together grades.” Really? Ever seen papers at Yale or Brown? (I have.) And all those special admits function at the same high level as the super-achievers who got in? Gee, maybe it’s grade inflation.</p>

<p>Beyond that, go to any good school, ones not ranked particularly high, and you’ll find high school GPA’s averaged above 3.5. Even when the SAT’s averages are lower, you find high average GPA’s. Aren’t GPA’s more an indicator of work and work ethic than SAT’s? Then look at life: notice that many people who achieve a tremendous amount didn’t have great test scores but worked their butts off and that many went to no-name schools. So a kid who busts his butt at Providence College and then busts his butt to go to law school at night and who then becomes a big shot is what? </p>

<p>So where do kids work harder? Engineering schools because there are a ton of classes with lots of problem sets that eat time. Any art school because, believe it or not, studio art eats more time than anything else. Some students work hard only in certain areas in their programs: film students may not do much for class but they spend days on end editing and all their free time filming and producing. </p>

<p>I love the idea that we can draw a line at 50 and say “This group works harder.” It reminds me of Jesse Jackson’s speech at the 1988 (?) Democratic Convention when he talked about how hard poor people work. He was countering the idea that poor people sit around collecting welfare. I remember him saying, “Poor people take the early bus,” which is true - take the early bus or train and you find yourself riding with blue collar workers who bust their tails for low pay all day. Or ask the guy who brought my oven yesterday; his first stop was 5AM and he’d been on the road continuously for 9 hours. Do you think people in office jobs work harder? </p>

<p>Some people may not have as much ability. They may have personal problems - and believe me, you find personal and family issues at every level and every school. But why say, “The top 50 work hard”? Besides the sheer obvious artificiality of the line - why not top 100? top 18? - a basic idea of college admissions is somehow that you’ll be in a group of peers, so the people at number 123 would need to work just as hard in their peer group as the peer group at number 32.</p>

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<p>Hunt:</p>

<p>A better analogy than soccer players is to think of MIT students more like top athletes recruited based on a variety of skills and now asked to compete in a decathlon. Some are very good at running a sprint some as middle distance oe long distance runners, some at jumping some a throwing the javelin… The high jumper may not be a great sprinter or long distance runner. A javelin thrower may not be able to even pass the starting high jump height without a lot of training. This is somewhat analogous to what might happen at MIT. Everybody is talented but not in the same areas. The starting level in each area is already set quite high, and you can’t assume you will pass the bar without extensive preparation. It is also very easy to overload one’s schedule as each class is very intense. Take more an 4 or 5 classes a semester and you are virtually assured you will not achieve top performance in all subjects. MIT is also pretty lax with pre-requisites. You want to take biochem freshman year otr quantum mechanics, go ahead! Just don’t expect miracles.</p>

<p>My D is typical example. She is premed and excels at bio and chem. She struggled somewhat in math at MIT even though she breezed through multivariable calculus in high school had a 5 on AP Calc BC, just because the bar is set very high. Even organic chem, which she should be good at, she found quite hard and had to fight for a B. You could know the entire textbook by heart and still easily fail a final, because MIT does not test on memorized content but on application of concepts to new situations. </p>

<p>As a matter of official policy, MIT is one of the few schools that has abandonned grading on a curve in favor of setting predefined targets for what constitutes an A, a B etc… This does mean that in some classes many As are issued, sometimes half of the class. Actually, A is the MODAL grade for most classes at MIT. But what is expected of a student to get an A is generally set at a very high level, and B level work would easily get an A at most other colleges. There is no such thing as getting a B or even a C for effort. If you don’t take a class seriously you can easily flunk it.</p>

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<p>Hunt: I sure hope my D’s professors are like you.</p>

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<p>Let me give an example from what I teach most often: Freshman Comp. I have an idea of what I think an “A” level paper is. I strive to teach the skills and critical thinking that go into one. Students come into my class from a variety of backgrounds, and ability levels, and some are not going to reach that level. Normally, most will not. I’ve had classes where no one got an A (unusual, but it happens.) I taught a class one semester where almost half the class got an A. (Even more unusual.) If I’d graded on a curve, than I’d be unduly rewarding students in the first type of class, and unfairly punishing students in the second. Why would I do that?</p>

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Thanks. I should say that I gave some dismally low grades, including some to students who were clearly smart and understood the material. They didn’t turn in their work, though, despite a rubric that explained the impact of failing to turn in work.</p>

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<p>Didn’t law schools used to have some kind of formula they used to add or subtract weight based on undergrad grade inflation? I don’t think they do that anymore, but I seem to remember seeing a whole list based on this at one time.</p>

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<p>There’s a subtle difference between working harder and working more. Difficulty is a subjective measure which varies by student, like the decathalon example above. Math may be relatively harder for one student than another. This means that one student will struggle more to master the same material than a peer. Thus if both are to obtain the same grade (assuming the grade reflects the degree of mastery) in the same course, then one student will have to dedicate more time/ effort/ thought to the subejct. However, that same student may decide not to work more and accept a lower grade. If merely passing is the goal, then the course is equally easy/difficult, for both people. The same principle applies to colleges too. </p>

<p>Some courses simply require a greater time investment than others. There will be a minimum time commitment that is necessary to succeed–regardless of the ability of the student. This will be an objectively harder course than one with fewer research papers, problem sets, or pages of reading. Beyond the minimum time commitment, though, one student might need additional time to achieve the same grade resutls as his peer. That difference can add a subjective measure of difficulty to the course.</p>

<p>At some colleges, there are more of these difficult-in-terms-of-time-required courses than at others. I know for a fact that I worked longer hours at my LAC than my friends did at state schools, even though we majored in the same subject. If they had 5 novels to read in their English class per semester, I had 12. For this reason, I’d say my LAC was objectively harder. But I was better at English than my friends, so if I had attended their school, I might have worked less. </p>

<p>In general, I think that the students who are gaining admission to top schools have probably worked more than their peers did in high school. In our high school, it is a fact that honors and AP classes require more time and often more intellectual power than basic level classes. When these AP scholars head off to college, they will begin their college education at a higher difficulty level than their peers. At our local flagship and CC, many students must take remedial classes before they can even begin the college curriculum. In contrast, top students are skipping those basic classes. It stands to reason that top students at top schools will have to work harder. But the culture at some top schools entails more work per course than at others. This difference might be what the OP is trying to determine.</p>

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<p>Amadeuic, you’re wrong about MIT. Many of the hands-on projects are designed to be done in a team; some of them absolutely couldn’t be done alone. I have never heard of a course there being taught with the idea that you get it done yourself… proper formatting of research and lab projects, papers, inventions, etc. all require documenting and giving credit to the people whose contributions made the work possible. </p>

<p>In class tests are to be done by yourself; take homes are to be done by yourself unless the professor specifies that collaboration is permitted or encouraged. Otherwise, most of the work is group/project oriented.</p>

<p>Nobody is going to cure cancer working by his or herself in a lab. It will be an intense, global collaboration of scientists working across disciplines and decades.</p>

<p>How this contributes to the original question baffles me… but then the original question baffles me still.</p>

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Yes. Boalt Law created a sort of ranking of the most difficult colleges based on GPA and LSAT.</p>

<p>Swarthmore 89.5
Williams 89.0
Duke 88.5
Carleton 88.0
Colgate 88.0
J. Hopkins 87.5
Chicago 87.0
Dartmouth 87.0
Wesleyan 87.0
Cornell 86.5
Harvard 86.5
Middlebury 86.0
Princeton 86.0
Bates 85.5
MIT 85.5
Haverford 85.0
Pomona 85.0
Virginia 85.0
Amherst 84.5
Reed 84.5
Vanderbilt 84.5
Wm & Mary 84.5
Bowdoin 83.5
Tufts 83.5
Vassar 83.5
Bryn Mawr 83.0
Hamilton 83.0
Oberlin 83.0
Rice 83.0
U. Pennsylvania 83.0
Clrmt. McK. 82.5
Yale 82.5
Brandeis 82.0
Northwestern 82.0
Colby 81.5
Michigan 81.5
Notre Dame 81.5
Wash. U. 81.0
Barnard 80.5
Columbia 80.5
Stanford 80.5
Brown 80.0
Georgetown 80.0
Smith 80.0
Wellesley 80.0
Emory 79.5
U. North Carolina 79.5
Whitman C. 79.5
Rochester 79.0
UC Berkeley 78.5
UC San Diego 78.5
Illinois 78.0
SUNY Bing 78.0
Texas 78.0
Trinity U. 77.5
Boston College 77.0
UC S. Barbara 77.0
Wisconsin 77.0
Florida 76.5
U. Washington 76.5
Santa Clara 76.0
Geo. Wash. 75.5
UC Davis 75.5
UCLA 75.5
Colorado 75.0
Michigan State 75.0
Boston University 74.5
Cal Poly SLO 74.5
Massachusetts 74.0
Penn State 74.0
Iowa 73.5
Purdue 73.5
SMU 73.5
SUNY Albany 73.5
BYU 73.0
Minnesota 73.0
Ohio State 73.0
Oregon 73.0
UC Irvine 73.0
Indiana 72.5
NYU 72.0
SUNY Buff 72.0
SUNY Stony 72.0
Mills 71.5
American 71.0
Arizona 71.0
Loyola Mary. 71.0
Maryland 71.0
Fordham 70.5
Kansas 70.0
Syracuse 70.0
USC 70.0
Arizona St. 69.5
CS San Diego 69.5
Catholic U. 69.5
Oklahoma 69.5
Pacific 69.5
Hofstra 69.0
UC Riverside 68.5
Utah 68.5
CS Chico 68.5
Miami 68.0
New Mexico 68.0
San Diego 68.0
CS Northridge 67.0
Pepperdine 67.0
CS San Fran. 66.0
CS Sacramento 65.0
Hawaii 64.5
Denver 63.5
CS Fullerton 63.0
CS Hayward 63.0
CS Long Beach 63.0
CS San Jose 63.0
CS Fresno 62.5
St. Mary’s 61.5
CCNY 59.0
CS LA 58.5
Howard 57.5
San Francisco 57.5</p>

<p>(List courtesy of proud2bherdad)</p>

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<p>I assume Caltech doesn’t graduate enough future lawyers for meaningful data.</p>