<p>My daughter is 6 weeks into her freshman year .I keep hearing this statement that getting in is the toughest part-really? I'd like to hear from some of the Harvard audience out there in CC land .Everything seems to be going great for her: I'm just curious to hear from the audience.</p>
<p>My FIL and BIL, both Harvard Business School grads say that getting in was the hardest part.</p>
<p>I thought Harvard was much less work than my prep school. I ended up graduating with honors.</p>
<p>True. ten char.</p>
<p>So then which schools are the most rigorous and demanding?</p>
<p>glido-what do you mean, “10 char” ?</p>
<p>Swarthmore, and a few others of course, but that’s the one I am most familiar with.</p>
<p>Our S has found Harvard to be plenty challenging, especially advanced econ courses and pre-med track courses.</p>
<p>^Harvard can be very challenging if you take the right courses. I did not take Math 55 for example!</p>
<p>Ivy’s are often much harder to get into than actually perform well at. Grade inflation is a huge problem, but Harvard has cut down on it in the last few years. That said, no Ivy education is ever easy and if you want to be challenged, the brightest minds in the world are around you to do so.</p>
<p>I’m sure the difficulty depends very much upon your choice of concentration and specific courses just like any other school. My daughter is a sophomore physics concentrator and she finds her physics courses both wonderful and very challenging. This semester she is taking three p-set classes, a gen ed, doing research and dancing in three different performing arts ensembles. In my opinion, this is not an easy schedule. However, this is what she wants and she is thriving on it. Of course, between the Q guide and shopping for classes, a student could arrange to take a much easier schedule. Life is all about the choices you make and you can get as much or as little out of your time at Harvard as you wish.</p>
<p>Depends on what you mean by “hard.” If you mean your statistical odds of success, then I’d agree the statement is true. Getting in, in general, is far less likely - “harder” if you will, than graduating once you are in. The vast majority of applicants are not admitted, but the vast majority of admitted students do graduate.</p>
<p>But if you mean what is most intellectually difficult, then I’d say it’s FAR harder to say earn a summa cum laude degree in Theoretical Physics or get an A in Math 55 at Harvard than it is to get admitted to the college.</p>
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<p>Apparently you haven’t heard of Princeton’s official grade deflation, which began in '05. </p>
<p>Your statement is a gross overgeneralization.</p>
<p>Princeton is hard to get into, and can be every bit as hard, if not harder, to excel in, depending on the classes you take and the level of excellence among the students in those particular classes. (Since grade deflation is also linked with class curves.)</p>
<p>(The plural of a noun generally has no apostrophe. ;))</p>
<p>True. By far.</p>
<p>Harvard takes about 3% of unhooked applicants and it keeps going down. Almost impossible without being from an underrepresented state and having a truly exceptional EC.</p>
<p>By “hard,” do you mean “difficult” or “demanding?”</p>
<p>Difficult would be a relative term. For the Harvard undergraduate student body, it probably takes more challenge to approach the label of “difficult” than for just about any group of people on the planet. They’ve been uniformly successful at whatever they’ve attempted throughout their educational career.</p>
<p>But I’d suggest that from the accounts I’ve received, most coursework at Harvard is quite demanding. Much more reading and more extensive written assignments are required than would be reasonable for the median American college student. And unlike the median student, a Harvard undergrad isn’t likely to attempt to go to class without having completed assigned readings. Their fellow company is too fast to make catching up feasible after falling behind.</p>