How selective is SLE? How do they determine who gets in? Do they look at your Stanford application? Do they look at your test scores? Do they give priorities to students with an interest in humanities? How hard is SLE? How prepared should you be for these classes?
Thanks.
I would say that if you express a genuine interest in SLE (e.g., you email the coordinators to ask questions or sit in on a section during a campus visit, and put it as your top choice, you likely will get in). It’s a fair amount of work, but it’s fairly manageable. SLE satisfies both your PWR 1 and PWR 2 writing classes and a bunch of Gen Ed requirements, but it limits the number of classes you can take as a freshman. I doubt they look at your test scores or Common App.
For context: I was in SLE.
IIRC, SLE has about a 50% “acceptance rate” i.e., twice as many people express interest in doing the program as they have room for. I personally just ranked it as a first choice, didn’t do anything else, and was “accepted.” AFAIK, the way to almost guarantee admission is to email one of faculty members who run the program (Greg Watkins, Josh Landy) expressing interest in addition to ranking it as a first choice. I think that they try to create a microcosm of the class i.e., they try to get people with a wide range of interests. This is borne out by the results: about half of the people in SLE during my year were engineers. I think that they get this data from your Approaching Stanford forms; I doubt that they read your Common Application.
SLE is a lot of work until you know how to hack it. At first, you try to do all of the reading, but you soon find out that that is almost impossible (especially since the reading increases with each quarter). In fact, one of my SLE section leaders told us that we shouldn’t try to do all of the reading. You learn as time goes on to read strategically. I think that the median grade is an A- because SLE wants people to not worry about grades. As is the case with many humanities classes at Stanford, it’s hard to get an A or an A+, but it’s also hard to get less than a B+. In fact, the lowest grade that I’ve ever heard of someone getting in SLE is a B, and this is only one person.
Protip if you end up doing SLE: read both Homer’s Odyssey and Plato’s Republic before you set foot in class Autumn Quarter.