Does UChicago live up to its "extremely hard" reputation?

uchicagoalum2
Fri, 03 Apr 2015 23:53:32 +0000

While it is true that elite colleges have far more in common than this website and guidebooks would want you to believe, it is also true that the modal UChicago collegiate experience is a substantively different one than that found at Penn, Duke, Yale, Hopkins and a few other facially similar institutions. It is mostly structural in my view, and far less cultural than the “life of the mind” and “where fun comes to die” monikers make it out to be. I lay out the structural case below, since saying Chicago is very academically challenging because a good proportion of the students are more intellectually inclined than their selective college peers only does partial justice to what makes the place unique:

1. The quarter system. First, professors are strong armed to offer at least two major assessments before the required final. That means that over the course of a ten to eleven week quarter you spend three weeks or so in a live-in-the-library, quasi all nighter study mode to get competitive marks.

Also as a function of the quarter system, exams are not preceded by any type of meaningful study period. It is not uncommon to have a final class session on a Friday be dedicated to review and discussion of potential exam topics, and in turn have the actual evaluation on a Monday. In contrast, in a semester system it is the norm to get an entire week in advance of finals with no courses.

There is also a pedagogical element: textbooks, domains of knowledge / competency, professors’ expectations from their own time as students are anchored to the semester system, which means you will hit plenty of single quarter syllabi that are semester classes in disguise.

2. As offshoot of the quarter system is the three vs. four class enrollment issue. Assuming you don’t voluntarily max out with four courses each term to fulfill ambitions of a double major, proceed to graduate school early, get your intellectual fill, etc. then by the rules you need to take three courses half the time and four for the remainder. Admittedly, some students are very good at optimizing (e.g., pairing a honors math course with two soft classes), but usually the best laid plans go to hell and you end up taking what you need to take in a given quarter to get from point X to point Y as the registrar has not made it amendable to do otherwise.

My general take was that four courses felt like a recurring marathon past the core (especially if one or more classes was a graduate course), while taking three never really resulted in materially better performance and only really changed the number of days each week where you had to wake up at 8:00 to trudge through the snow to class.

3. Curved grading vs. objective grading. Chicago, along with about half of the other selective colleges in the US, follows a distribution based grading approach. In any course, not all students can make an ‘A.’ If everyone genuinely does well throughout the term, grades will be spread between an A to a C+ with a peak around a B+/B (core courses are more likely to be a A-/B+). While I never found this to create much competition between students, it does create a certain amount of internal struggling by students with themselves. Few want to be the person consistently at the bottom of the pack gradewise, with the implications that would have for graduate admissions, employment options, etc.

It also means that about half the student body (rough justice) is composed of very dedicated students, since the grades (and ultimately intellectual achievement) you make in a given course is a function of the time you put in both outright and relative to your peers. I repeat: the only limit to how hard you can work is yourself. All the being said, the vast majority of graduate programs and selective employers take up Chicago graduates in good numbers, suggesting that the benefits in terms of perceived / actual rigor the grading scheme imparts outweighs any deleterious, longer term career outcomes. Side note: the case against curved grading is that all selective colleges are treated equal at the end of the day, and hence those schools that hand out A’s like Halloween candy will have better employment and graduate school outcomes.

Back on point, for a subset of students who are used to being at the top of the heap in high school, a slew of B’s can sting and weigh on morale even if it means you could very well end up graduating with honors. Unfortunately, I do believe students / parents are really in a position to know how they will take emotionally to the challenge that rigorous college grading presents until the first report card comes due.

4. The focus on graduate school not so quietly pervades the College. Chicago – along with Caltech, MIT and Hopkins – is one of a few schools where roughly 75% of students go to graduate studies within five years of receiving their undergraduate degree. The immediate consequence is there are fewer students floating aimlessly through courses, and far more who have some type of (often ever changing but nonetheless perceived) intellectual journey that they are on. This raises the commitment of students to mastering domains of knowledge and grappling with hard questions appreciably in my view (particularly within their majors). It is in the DNA of the institution, and very much impacts how professors teach undergraduates (both in terms of course content and assessment standards).

5. Many upper division undergraduate courses are actually cross listed graduate courses. This is most common in the social sciences and humanities, but also holds in selected STEM majors (e.g., statistics). Simply put, these courses are harder than your stock college junior / senior classes since the professor builds the course with an eye to the MA / MS / PhD students and lets UG’s along the for the ride. One also has to consider that graduate students at Chicago are generally very strong, in many disciplines stronger than the undergraduates.