<p>My understanding is that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Penn have similar courseloads to Brown’s (on the other hand, my friend at WUSTL has 6 courses, though he seems to find them pretty easy on the whole). If you find that 4 courses isn’t enough to be challenging, you can either add more clubs/activities or take 5 courses here, so you can always do more to better match your expectations. I’ve heard the story of the occasional person who takes 5 classes and sits in on a 6th course, requesting that the professor write a course evaluation report for them even though they can’t officially get credit. I’ve found 5 courses to be a satisfactory and sufficiently challenging workload for me, but I do few activities; if I were to be active in clubs, 4 would be quite enough for me. It really varies by the course, professor, and you.</p>
<p>Edit: I was slightly off on Yale - they require 5 courses in a couple of terms.</p>