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<p>I could give you anecdotal evidence based on my college workload vs that of my friends at these schools, but I have something even better:</p>
<p>Two-thirds of the grades Yale awarded to undergraduates last year were As or A-s. Harvard’s average GPA is above 3.5.</p>
<p>This speaks to an environment where hard work is not always instrumental to academic success, as grade distribution is determined by instructors and administrators (mostly) independently of student performance. And before you trot out the flawed argument that Harvard and Yale students are so superior to everyone else that they all deserve As, MIT and Princeton students have similar SAT scores but far lower college GPAs. Hmmm.</p>
<p>Please note that I said nothing about the productivity of these schools’ respective student bodies, which are indeed known for very active and effective extracurricular engagement. And a lot of Harvard/Yale grads go on to excel in academia, which presupposes great dedication to one’s studies. None of this, however, means that Harvard and Yale students study a lot on average, or need to do so in order to get good grades.</p>
<p>And SAT ranges are hardly indicative of intellectualism. Neither is PhD production rate, really. There is no single statistic you can point to and seriously say, “This proves X is an intellectual place,” as intellectualism is a vaguely defined attitude, not a commonly tracked outcome.</p>