Question to present and past Wharton students regarding program difficulty

WoodrowWilsonJR
Tue, 24 May 2011 16:34:47 +0000

The math at Wharton is not that hard. The hardest math will be in MATH104, which is the only required math course. It’s comparable to(but harder than) BC Calc. What Wharton requires of you is not so much math ability as it is quantitative reasoning. You need to do sophisticated thinking that involves numbers, but there won’t be many mathematical techniques needed. For example, I’ve seen math whizzes who aced Math240 in their freshman fall get to Stat101 the next semester and earn a B. Meanwhile, I know a girl who doesn’t like math and struggled to earn a B in Math104 who took Stat101 and earned an A+ because stat101 wasn’t testing math skills. Like most wharton classes, it was testing general reasoning that just happened to involve numbers.

conclusion: you don’t need to be a math genius to go to Wharton, but you need to be very comfortable with numbers. if you don’t like high school stats/physics/econ because you are wary of numbers, stay away from wharton because it’s all numbers based.