<p>Why is it that a lot of the absolute most prestigious colleges have low workloads and grade inflation? (ex: harvard, pomona, etc.)</p>
<p>Do you know any other top schools with low workloads?</p>
<p>People say that top schools have low workloads, but that’d a total load of crap. Do they have a ton more? Not really - the workload is pretty much the exact same you see at any decent school. Workload doesn’t make a school great.</p>
<p>I don’t know if anybody thinks Harvard’s workload is light…there are plenty who say there is grade inflation, but that’s not the same thing as having a light workload. </p>
<p>One thing that is seldom discussed on collegeconfidential is that at some good colleges the typical workload is 4 classes per semester, and at others it’s 5 classes. I’m not sure if the classes at the 4-per-semester schools are supposed to be geared to be more intense than the ones at the 5-per-semester schools.</p>
<p>I think the workload will vary among students even at the same college, depending on major, work ethic, and course selection in a given academic term.</p>
<p>indiya, what is your basis for saying that a lot of the absolute most prestigious colleges have low workloads? We do have some public data on grade inflation at the gradeinflation.com site. I’m not aware of any similar comparative data on workloads. How would you even measure it for purposes of comparison?</p>
<p>What schools are you including among the “absolute most prestigious”? Since you refer to “a lot” of schools, you must be referring to others besides Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford. If so, I’d say several of them seem to have reputations for fairly demanding workloads. Examples: JHU, Chicago, CalTech, MIT, Swarthmore. Princeton too, for that matter.</p>
<p>^ Yes. It really depends on what you define as “top” and “prestigious” indiya. Also, keep in mind, different colleges have different philosophies towards education which affects the way in which their curricula are delivered and tested. </p>
<p>It’s not as if the “non-prestigious” colleges are any more demanding than the “prestigious” ones. I, in fact can’t think of any colleges that would have demanding curricula but aren’t considered “top” or "prestigious; the two are correlated, but yes not in all cases. Ergo, all “prestigious” colleges don’t have demanding curricula/grade deflation but all colleges with demanding curricula/grade deflation are “prestigious”.</p>