My alma mater, Swarthmore, is about as academically challenging as they come. You get more work than you can possibly do, which I was told is done on purpose to force a student to prioritize as best he/she can.
In many of my classes, NO ONE got an "A". A prof once told me that an "A" is for extra special work only, and rarely given. We even had t-shirts that said, "Anywhere Else It Would Have Been An "A". This is at a school where the median SAT is well over 1450, and where everyone was a big cheese in their high school/ prep school.
Class size is tiny, and you definitely can't run and can't hide. After the intro classes, my class size ranged from 7 to 15, all taught exclusively by a prof -- not one damn TA on the entire campus.
True fact -- they had to close the library down at 6pm on Saturday nights to FORCE the students out into some kind of personal life.
I was friends with a girl who had transferred from Princeton. She said Princeton undergrad was a joke compared to Swarthmore. She said there was easily a one and a half grade difference in grade inflation between the two, ie, an "A" at Princeton was a "C+" at Swarthmore.
In my freshman year, I roomed next to a sophomore who had a strong interest in Archaeology. Swarthmore is a small school, 900 total students then, about 1,200 now, so there was only a combined Sociology/Anthropology department. We have a co-operative arrangement with our sister schools, Haverford and Bryn Mawr, as well as with the University of Pennsylvania (Ivy league) so that students can take courses at any of the schools. My friend and I were both taking the intro Soc/Anthro 101 at Swarthmore, while he was simultaneously taking a GRADUATE LEVEL Anthro course at Penn.
Now, folks, this isn't a third hand story. I saw this with my own eyes. He handed in the same term paper for both courses. He got an "A" for the grad level course at Penn, and a "C" for the same paper in the intro undergrad course at Swarthmore! He also said that the Penn course's final exam was a joke, with mostly true/false and fill in the blank questions. At Swarthmore, I never once had any exam that had even a single true/false or fill in the blank question in my entire time there!
In fact, somewhere I still have the final exam for that Soc/Anthor 101 intro course. It was taught by a team of three professors, all of which contributed essay questions to the exam. I have it because of Prof. Steven Piker. We all knew which question was his. This is no lie!!!! The question itself was 4/5ths of a page long, single effing spaced. That's right, just the question!! This was an INTRO course, friends!! Some day, when I find it again, I'll transcribe it here for your own personal astoundment!!
One last story: Due to school district consolidation, I went to a really rough and tumble high school my last two years. 2,200 kids in three grades. ALL the bathrooms except the two nearest the principle's office and main entrance were permanently locked by the time I got there, because they's been physically destroyed and because too many poor bastards had had the sh@t beaten out of them in one. There was a fight in school or on the grounds just about every day, no exaggeration.
Ridley High. Our big claim to fame was that our football and our wrestling teams never lost. I once watched as our wrestling coach went up into the stands at an away meet and THREW a heckler down off the bleachers and then started to beat the sh@t out of him before we pulled him off. Other schools in the area hated us with a passion. 15,000 people would show up for the Thanksgiving football game. I, personally, never went to ONE.
At Swarthmore College at the time, our football team never won. Consequently, only about 15-25 fans would show up at any one game. I went to every single home game, and we had a gas. We even had an intellectual football cheer: Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball!
Thank you, and good night.
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