^^ How can you tell if Harvard’s “moderate” workload wouldn’t be a very heavy workload for an average student from some other school?
“A-/B+” is rather imprecise.
Wouldn’t that cover most of the selective colleges represented on gradeinflation.com?
Notice that the numbers listed for individual colleges often are years out of date.
Selective colleges that have a reputation for piling on work include Swarthmore, Reed, Carleton, and UChicago. Those reputations probably are very influenced by anecdotal reports from students/alumni, who may have an interest in playing up how “hard” their schools are. Students at some other selective colleges may like to play up how brilliant they are and how little they need to study. Transfer students would be a good information source for school-to-school comparisons (but transfer rates tend to be very low at selective colleges.)
I suspect that differences across peer colleges are less significant than within-college differences among majors, courses, and professors. College professors cherish academic freedom; I doubt many selective colleges set and enforce strict campus-wide grading or workload standards.
If it were possible to compare GPAs and workloads across selective colleges precisely and reliably, wouldn’t med school admission committees be aware of these differences? Wouldn’t they adjust their evaluations accordingly?