<p>[Let</a> the Groaning Begin: Daily Beast’s 2011 Most Stressed College List > Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, stress, this is why people hate the ivy league, Yale | IvyGate](<a href=“http://www.ivygateblog.com/2011/04/let-the-groaning-begin-daily-beasts-2011-most-stressed-college-list/]Let”>http://www.ivygateblog.com/2011/04/let-the-groaning-begin-daily-beasts-2011-most-stressed-college-list/)</p>
<p>(and yes, I know that the methodology is even worse than for your garden-variety college rankings)</p>
<p>Haha. Is it bad that it’s sort of a relief?
My friends are all teasing me because of Brown’s reputation as the laid back ivy and because it, apparently, has the highest average GPA of the ivies (~3.6, i think?).</p>
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<p>This information is correct, in a sense. Brown doesn’t compute GPA, so such a comparison doesn’t necessarily have meaning, although certainly most students do compute GPA. Ignoring classes taken S/NC, though, this is the average GPA that one would get, based on the numbers that the Office of Institutional Research provide. (Despite this, though, Brown doesn’t have large numbers of students with A’s in every class, and apparently no one in my year has 24 or 25 As through 5 semesters, so I wouldn’t call Brown easy. We don’t have the grade deflation of Princeton, though.)</p>
<p>Also, the fact that we don’t have +/- I assume skews the GPAs a little bit towards an integer since your averages are composed of 2s, 3s, and 4s only.</p>
<p>Yeah, I think a lot of the “inflation” has to do with the lack of +/-'s.</p>
<p>Lest this turn into a discussion of grade inflation, let me remind the masses of two things:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Admissions standards (and, in theory, the quality of the student body) have risen tremendously as college has become an option for more and more brilliant but disadvantaged students. The recent release of Harvard Law’s historical exam bank, for example, demonstrates just how much academic standards in institutions of higher education have changed over the years. Technological advances in research and word processing have vastly improved the quality of the work produced by college students. The claim – advanced by some “grade inflation” opponents – that grades have gone up without a concomitant increase in the quality of work is ludicrous.</p></li>
<li><p>Colleges are not, and should not be, in the business of acting as outsourced HR departments for private firms. When people argue that universities should grade deflate to help employers differentiate from among their graduates, it makes me cringe. What that sort of grade deflation does is to hurt some percentage of graduates without any real benefit to those at the top (since, from a place like Brown, they’re going to get hired anyway).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Let me assure you that Brown is anything but easy; I’ve had to work a good amount to earn my A’s!</p>
<p>Oh I’m definitely not expecting it to be easy. It’s just a relief that it’s not going to be extremely cutthroat or stressful. I’m looking forward to the academic atmosphere.</p>
<p>My daughter is a senior and studied mostly humanities. I would say that experiencing and reacting to stress is a personality trait. She experienced more stress during her four years at Brown than I have experienced in all my years since graduating from college. She took her fair share of classes S/NC (P/F) and worked just as hard at those classes as she did for traditional grades. She loved Brown, but stress-free? Hardly. It was intense, difficult, challenging, brilliant, wonderful, at times seemingly impossible, in short everything that school is anywhere. This was true for her and for all of her friends whom I met. I really don’t think Brown is laid-back, fun, easy, stress-free at all. For her, it was the right school. She was surrounded by curious, interested, interesting and very smart people. They were diverse in every way. But all laid-back hipsters? No. I wish that current Brown students would do more to dispel these unfortunate stereotypes.</p>
<p>I’ve had ridiculously difficult problem sets and hundreds of pages of readings that continuously pile up. I’ve had midterms that just make you go “…what just happened?” once you’re outside the room. I’ve definitely had weeks so hellish that I wondered why I wasn’t just free-riding my way through four years at an easier school. No, Brown is absolutely not easy and stress-free. You’ll work harder than you ever did in high school. I didn’t know that when I came here last fall. I was one of those annoying kids who succeeded in high school without ever doing much work, and I soon realized that Brown was the real, hard, occasionally painful deal.</p>
<p>But having said that, I’ve often had these introspective moments (especially during particularly bad weeks) when I wonder if I’d have chosen another school if I knew that Brown would entail this much effort. The answer is always a resounding NO. There is no other place that I’d want to be so challenged at. I have amazing support networks, both in terms of friends and academic/advising resources. I can make those fiendish problem sets much less terrible by working in a study group – doing math while listening to Lady Gaga and discussing politics is a thoroughly enjoyable experience :). The hell weeks all feel like they’re worth it once you actually finish your work, and have Spring Weekend to look forward to :D.</p>
<p>I went to a high school that was, in some ways, more challenging than Brown. This sentiment is shared by most graduates, many of whom go on to Ivies, top LACs, MIT/Stanford, and other schools of that caliber.</p>
<p>That being said, I find Brown difficult. For me, it’s less about the difficulty of the work (although many of my classes are downright hard), but also the balance between work and everything else I do. I have a few jobs, I do a few extracurriculars, I have friends, and I need sleep. In high school, my life was neatly sectioned into a block of time between 8-3, maybe two hours after school for extracurriculars, homework, and some social life on the weekends. Here everything blends together, and I had to prioritize my life in a completely different way. I think everyone struggles with this problem just as much as they do with more challenging work when they get to Brown.</p>
<p>Also, to second franglish, we really need to do away with the misconception that Brown is stress-free and laid back. A lot of people go to Psych Services here, and still more should. Plenty of kids take leaves of absence each year because they can’t deal with the workload/stress/transition/whatever. I don’t think that the numbers at Brown are atypical when compared to other schools; college is a hard time for everyone, and no matter where you are, there will be frustration and stress.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, Brown is still a wonderful school for many people, myself included. There have been weeks when stress has gotten to me, but I don’t regret coming here in the slightest.</p>
<p>I think the reason people say it’s laid-back is because there isn’t a layer of stress to outdo your peers that exists at a lot of other schools, and that the high points at Brown are higher than most other schools. When I didn’t have a midterm or paper looming, I just felt so good, regardless of how much I needed to do.</p>
<p>^I pretty much agree. We have stress and difficulty, but it’s not so much a competitive sort of stress (oh, look at THIS person. Why are THEY doing better than ME? I need to catch up!) Rather, it’s more an “Oh shoot, we ALL have a major project due in two days, let’s get together and work on it for 12 straight hours and see how far we can get.” This means there’s stress, but you also have friends flinging ideas at you constantly (whether for PSETs or projects or papers) so that the end result for everyone is way better than if you hadn’t that camaraderie.</p>