@gapyearapplicant Yes, but if you are overly concerned about performing, then a selective school should be off the table. You should believe that you can perform in such environments and just “do it”…There is really no need to be concerned unless you are attending the selective engineering schools. It should not be the first thing to come to mind when choosing among schools, you know what I am saying. Go in with the confidence that you can get that part down almost anywhere you are considering and consider the fact that most privates, even so called “stringent grading” ones, have a solid level of inflation through various means. Let that be a concern once admitted somewhere and then think about how you will work efficiently to do well without sacrificing the quality of education you receive. STEM grading across most non-engineering privates (even most selective) is fairly uniform, and you’ll generally have to work to stay afloat, but that should be okay. I’m just saying don’t go into the search process with your future GPA in mind. If you do the work and don’t overload your schedule with overly rigorous courses and a mixture of intensive ECs, you should be able to perform if you do the work.
If you can tolerate a scaled back party scene or the simple existence of an “escape” through partying, Oxford or main should be acceptable.
Weeding happens in many shapes and forms in STEM and is unavoidable. If not the INQ classes at Oxford, then the chemistry courses at Emory which are great, but rough (or physics, where they just give you research faculty who could care less). Again, if you are worried about this, you should cross LACs off, because good LACs are going to have that type of INQ curriculum (those courses were run like that before the INQ designation came along and I have seen syllabi and course material for other known LACs, and they stick to a similar style. A lot more graded work than most R-1s). And it also depends on how you define rigor. If I am a pre-med (I wasn’t), I would rather have the INQ style rigor than Emory main’s rigor because at least your grades are more evenly distributed and do not ride on a few high stakes quizzes and exams PLUS, in cases like biology, you get to technically learn more skills helpful for the MCAT (like reading primary lit as a freshmen). All types of additional rigor are not bad. On main, you are more likely to run into professors that write extremely tough exams for a subject and most of your grade rides on that. They teach well and you may learn to problem solve, but the preparation for the problem solving is not graded so you sort of do things on your own with little feedback as you go along. At Oxford it looks like they get a lot more graded work in some courses, but it is educationally meaningful and is not followed by insane exams in most cases. You shouldn’t be worried about raw rigor and having to do deeper thinking so much as your grades. I would argue they are roughly the same across lower division and intermediate STEM courses at both schools. In that case, it is probably more beneficial to take the “richer” experience which may involve more graded assignments. When you take the best instructors on main, you are often basically riding a curve and are in less control of your fate.
It depends on how you learn. Generally people learn and keep up better in difficult courses with more accountability (several types assessments and not just tests and quizzes). Without that, students tend to struggle with time management, fall behind, and get screwed. This happens a lot on main campus despite the lower graded workload.
Again, you won’t find significant differences in grading across private schools and lower division STEM courses, those have remained pretty stable.
Also, don’t assume all STEM courses and instructors are rigorous. Some aren’t (even if they should be). Some departments and instructors tend to focus on high school level memorization but with more content (some biology teachers have this approach virtually anyway), Most high achieving students are used to this so do not find it particularly hard. If you got this, plus additional workload, this probably adds to the chance of a high grade (like in HS where many instructors may weight non-test/quiz components highly).