<p>How demanding the classes are/how stressed out the students are...</p>
<p>Honestly . . . do you really think there’s anyone in the world who’s attended all 8 Ivies and would know this?</p>
<p>Obviously people would go by reputation and word on the street…thanks for the excellent contribution to the thread.</p>
<p>Princeton sciences are really hard, I hear.</p>
<p>haha, OK, I’ll play the game – from hardest to less hard:</p>
<ul>
<li>Princeton (all) / Cornell Engineering / Columbia Engineering</li>
<li>Yale/Columbia</li>
<li>Cornell/Dartmouth/Penn</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Brown</li>
</ul>
<p>I have nothing to sustantiate this, just a gestalt of impressions formed over three years reading these threads.</p>
<p>Bumpity bump</p>
<p>I think workload correlates more with major than the specific school. I cannot speak for the university as a whole, but I can report that my daughter (happily) works her butt off in physics at Harvard. I think it is reasonable to assume that a physics student at any of the other ivies (or top tech schools, etc.) works just as hard.</p>
<p>^ Yes. Exact same story from my Princeton physics son. Works very hard and loves it.</p>
<p>a better measure, IMO, is mean gpa upon graduation. (Of course, Engineering is brutal everywhere.)</p>
<p>Since Brown has the highest mean gpa, and Yale is next…</p>
<p>In my opinion, Cornell is the hardest and Brown is the easiest.</p>
<p>I question using mean GPA as a proxy for workload. First of all, different departments, let alone universities, have different grading policies. Secondly, such a proxy would assume that the students only work hard enough to get an A and I don’t believe that this is generally true of the student population at the top schools. These schools are filled with Type A kids are that are truly driven and who will work very hard in general. Therefore, these schools can require a heavy workload regardless of their grading policy.</p>
<p>cltdad:</p>
<p>At this level, since they are ALL type A, they become interchangeable students. The fact is that even with the “heavy workload”, students at Brown and Yale receive more A’s (and fewer C’s or worse) than similar students at other similar colleges. And, more A’s (and fewer bad grades) will make life a little less “stressful”, a little less “demanding”, would you not agree? </p>
<p>IMO, since the OP asked for an overall ranking of stress and demands - not workload, school gpa totals do just fine in that regard.</p>
<p>i’d say dunnin’s list is spot on, I would add Penn engineering to Cornell and Columbia engineering. and in general workload varies more by major than by which ivy you go to. physics chem and bio are brutal at most of the schools.</p>
<p>"- Princeton (all) / Cornell Engineering / Columbia Engineering
- Yale/Columbia
- Cornell/Dartmouth/Penn
- Harvard
- Brown"</p>
<p>Based on what people I know have said, it goes like this (hardest to easiest):
Princeton and Cornell
Columbia
Dartmouth, Yale, and Penn
Harvard
Brown</p>
<p>“…in general workload varies more by major than by which ivy you go to. physics chem and bio are brutal at most of the schools.”</p>
<p>I don’t know if “brutal” is the right term, perhaps “challenging”, or “difficult”. but in general the spirit of this seems likely to be the case IMO.</p>
<p>Cornell has relatively a lot of science oriented majors, is all, IMO. D2 is there now, as a liberal arts major. she’s working quite hard, but not as hard as I did as a science major there. And frankly I doubt her workload is any different than for similar majors at most other schools of high academic repute. Her first three semesters she took several courses at Columbia, and said that the workload was essentially the same.</p>
<p>It depends on the major-</p>
<p>Brown Engineering is extremely hard, but Princeton psychology is probably easy.</p>
<p>Brown does engineering?</p>
<p>Princeton - school has grade-deflation policy</p>
<p>Dartmouth -transcripts show median grade for each course, making it harder for the professor to inflate</p>
<p>Columbia - transcripts show average grade for each course</p>
<p>Harvard,Yale, UPenn, Cornell - not sure, have similar GPA around 3.4?</p>
<p>Brown - GPA 3.56?</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Useless thread. Brown is a rather easy school if you make it one. I’d imagine so is Harvard, Yale, etc. Brown is also an incredibly challenging school if you make it one (i.e. taking grad-level Algebra as a sophomore, taking the honors-track classes, etc.)</p></li>
<li><p>Brown doesn’t have a GPA. Unless you want to figure out how S*, S’s and NC’s (which you get in graded classes) correlate to a point-scale, AND you want to argue the point that stress over grades -> difficulty, then you’ve got no argument to stand on.</p></li>
<li><p>I’m not confident that schools with higher GPAs don’t do it partially by encouraging collaboration. Examples: classes without a strict curve tend to grade based on “clumps”: this encourages students to study/work together, so that a higher % understand the material. Example: honors physics, we had a professor who held 4+ study sessions a week, and assigned at least a few problems each week that ~90% of the class couldn’t solve without working on solutions with other people. Classes that grade on a strict curve, however, give a perverse incentive to students to NOT help their classmates when they understand the material better.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>
Not necessarily. For me I’d put a lot less time into my classes if I knew I’d probably get somewhere from a C to a B in all of them. Aka once things are that low I really wouldn’t care as much about putting in that extra effort to bump my grade a percent or two. But when you have a 4.0 (or close) then you’ll naturally try really hard to maintain that. A B ruins a 4.0, but a C doesn’t ruin a 3.0, if you catch my drift. It’s stressful to have to maintain such perfection. </p>
<p>When I was getting Bs freshman year in high school, there were weeks on end I would half-a** homework or just not do it at all (I was getting Bs because I just wasn’t smart back then- I’m a late bloomer). I just didn’t see the point of trying when I was going to get a B anyways. Naturally things were super chill then. But then when classes got easier for me junior/senior year and I realized I could get As, I put in SO much more work and stressed myself out a bit.</p>