Interesting that I didn’t see this…comparing workload and GPA is tricky as different schools and the departments within them achieve “rigor” in different ways as I have reiterated over and over again, and typically the course material speaks for itself. I have seen selective schools where the majority of instructors in a dept appear to give more standard level workloads and exam types, but don’t curve at all (because average is already at or above the expected norm) and many schools that have many STEM instructors that write harsh exams and then curve them to some norm (Harvard is actually one such school…I WOULD NOT underestimate STEM coursework there. Content and in terms of intellectual intensity, it and MIT and any near peers are not much different and for some courses it appears more intense. The primary difference is that typically courses are always curved to at least a solid B whereas maybe B- is more typical at MIT and most selective schools in the south). The schools with notorious chemistry sequences also use the “really hard exams, curve” model. If you attend such a school where typically it is the physical sciences following such a model, then it isn’t about relying on the curve so much as actually beating the curve which can be hard in such environments, because beating the curve involves being able to perform well on fairly difficult problem types that you may not have seen before.
You have to be good at “making it up” or deriving new strategies. So it is more about the ability to handle intellectual rigor vs. a high workload. Often a high workload, if you manage it can help buffer mediocre exam performances. Schools with higher workloads (minus STEM schools) tend to have higher GPAs (like those LACs known to pile on the work) which makes sense considering that exams and quizzes are not the only portion of the grade. There is also the nuance that more effective instructors may be using the higher workload (graded or not) as a tool to prepare you for high level exams that they want to give. Many instructors will basically just make students use the TA’s and TF’s to fend for themselves.
Biology departments also vary with better ones having many courses and instructors that focus on problem solving and research in the field whereas some have a great majority stick to textbook and more regurgitation and recall as the emphasis in their courses (but will throw TONS of content at the students). Schools like MIT and Harvard (and their peers) seem to have more of the former and of course this means lower averages and likely curved distributions because even the talented students they get are not, in mass, exposed to learning biology like that. They are used to the latter situation. I stumbled across Harvard’s life sciences 1a website before and the means of exams were consistently low and mid 70s and occasionally a high 60%. I’m fairly sure this wouldn’t be the case if the exams did not involve the high level of material and problem solving that they did. It was quite a bit different and more difficult than other selective schools not considered in Harvard’s tier (I would say Chicago, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and Caltech…and it was even different from most of theirs but in comparison to most other selective schools, looked more like an advanced or intermediate molecular cell/biochemistry course. In fact, I would argue it is tougher than those courses at most other schools).
Looking at GPA and “workload” only scratches the surface when comparing among selective schools. Some of them just run their departments differently and some have managed to have a more uniform level of teaching and academic rigor (and type of rigor) even between instructors. At some schools, when a course offers multiple sections at once or 1 each semester, taking one instructor over another reveals a night and day difference in terms of how hard the students have to work or think.