<p>I'm just curious..</p>
<p>Wharton is the hardest by far.</p>
<p>Nursing is the easiest (or so I've heard).</p>
<p>Everything else is in between.</p>
<p>I've heard CAS is also quite hard..</p>
<p>Penn is hard for everybody.</p>
<p>Don't think about taking a backdoor...</p>
<p>But nursing's the easiest...and I'm sure you know which the hardest is! :)</p>
<p>Haha, yeah</p>
<p>Transfers between colleges (especially Wharton) is very competitive.</p>
<p>This is a pretty ridiculous question when each school looks for different things in their applicants. Someone with minimal science courses or community service could get rejected from Nursing but get into Wharton with their other strengths.</p>
<p>True. But in factoring popularity of each school's program, the amount of applicants and the acceptance rates, you can differentiate the schools based on the difficulty of gaining admissions.</p>
<p>Lucky98, I feel that's a very superficial way of looking at things, as numbers and %'s can only give a ballpark value. Its impossible to argue that a Wharton student worked harder than a College/Nursing/Engineering student to get into Penn, or that a student in one of the latter schools couldn't make it into Wharton.</p>
<p>Just look at the list below and you'll find some interesting names:</p>
<p>USNews.com:</a> America's Best Colleges 2008: Lowest acceptance rates</p>
<p>Wharton kids insist that there is a major difference in difficulty of admissions. SAS students insist there is zero difference. The truth is inevitably someplace in between. Is wharton harder to get into? Probably. Is it anywhere near harder enough to justify the worst of wharton chauvinism? Definitely not. I certainly beat them on the SATs that's for sure</p>
<p>It shouldn't be about which is hardest. There is 1 school at Penn that should be what you are applying for. Compare apples to apples. Compare Penn SEAS to engineering schools. Compare Wharton to stern and business schools. Compare SAS to Columbia, Dartmouth, etc.</p>
<p>"SAS students insist there is zero difference. "</p>
<p>Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.</p>
<p>"The truth is inevitably someplace in between. Is wharton harder to get into? Probably. "</p>
<p>I'd say definitely. Probably implies that there is some chance that this is not true. You can argue HOW MUCH harder (most guesstimates say that Wh. admit rate is maybe 1/2 of Col - circa 9 -10 % vs. 16-18 for Col.) but not what direction it falls in.</p>
<p>Is it anywhere near harder enough to justify the worst of wharton chauvinism? Definitely not. I certainly beat them on the SATs that's for sure.</p>
<p>There is definitely a large overlap in the students - the smartest CAS student is smarter than the dumbest (or even the average) Wh. student. But on the whole Wh. (nowadays) attracts a slightly more select group. Does this justify chauvinism? No, but facts is facts. </p>
<p>"Just look at the list (of lowest acceptance rates) below and you'll find some interesting names:"</p>
<p>If you look at the places that are ahead of Penn it makes perfect sense. You have some highly specialized small schools that only take a handful of candidates (Julliard, Curtis Music). You have the top Ivies and LACs that you'd expect. And then you have the places that are tuition free- the service academies, Cooper Union, Col. of the Ozarks.</p>
<p>Hardest definitely Wharton.</p>
<p>Especially if you're applying to programs like Huntsman and Jerome Fisher.</p>
<p>Wharton is hard to get into because a lot of spots are practically given away to recruited athletes. Because there are fewer spots than say the College, this makes Wharton very competitive. I would not necessarily say that this implies that it has the best students. In my experience, in Wharton you will find a grab bag: everything from dumb as bricks athletes to overachievers strung out on speed. It seems that the College has both the smartest and the dumbest students in the whole school. Pretty much everyone in Engineering is smart. Nursing is probably an even mix of every kind of student.</p>
<p>Crashingwaves - the original question was not who is the smartest but which school is the hardest to get into. I think the answer is pretty clear that Wharton is the hardest to get into (if by "hardest" you mean the odds of getting in are the lowest).</p>
<p>Well, I was actually responding to your post Percy, when you brought smarts into the matter!</p>
<p>Isn't your reasoning a bit flawed? The reason Wharton's % is low (if you look at % only) if because more kids apply....if less people applied, then its % would be higher. I'm sure the # of seats is the same each year.....</p>
<p>Wharton has the least number of seats. The number of applicants to the College is much larger than that of Wharton. The difference is that the College has ~1200 seats whereas Wharton has ~500. That is what the percentage difference comes out of.</p>