<p>The service academies are certainly boot camps overall but they hardly kick your butt academically. It is the combination of academics, athletics and military training that makes it hard.</p>
<p>With all due respect, Harvard does not kick anybody’s butt. With rampant grade inflation and over half the class graduating with honors, it is Club Med compared to its neighbor up the street. It is no accident that many MIT premeds take organic chemistry at Harvard in order to pad their GPA. </p>
<p>Most surveys would show a toss-up between Caltech and MIT as to which school will kick your butt the most. At both schools, it is easy to flunk a class. This could of course be said of other tech schools such GTech or Carnegie Mellon. What makes it especially hard at MIT and Caltech is the very high average level of the class. You may have been a star in high school but now you are just average or even below average. Tests are not given to assess mastery of the material: that is what p-sets are for and they are mostly not graded. Tests are designed to stretch the very best students. This makes them nearly impossible to complete in time. Getting a C takes hard work, getting a B outstanding work and to get an A you have to compete with a bunch of IMO, IPhO and Intel finalists! You learn to be humble real fast as there is always a number of people better than you. </p>
<p>I must say I am partial to MIT: not too many schools engrave on their class ring: IHTFP (I hate this f*** place).</p>