<p>In which top liberal arts colleges do students experience a lot of stress from academic pressure?</p>
<p>Reed, Swarthmore, Haverford…</p>
<p>All of them. It’s the nature of college to experience stress twice per semester: mid-terms week and finals week. This is true for every college and university, including your local community college.</p>
<p>Swarthmore … when you are a freshmen they take your grades Pass/Fail, so if you try and transfer the Pass grades end up being C’s and D’s when they calculate your GPA for the new institution on your transcript</p>
<p>Well, that’s a bit misleading. </p>
<p>Swarthmore has a pass/fail first semester freshman year specifically to reduce academic pressure and provide a transition period from high school level work to college level work. It is a very good policy and one that is in place at several top colleges and universities. You would be hard pressed to find many Swarthmore students who object to the first semester pass/fail policy.</p>
<p>Although Swarthmore does not have a lot of transfers after freshman year (the freshman retention rate is quite high), the students I know about who transfered had absolutely no problem transfering to other top colleges.</p>
<p>At Reed, students are not told what their grades are, neither for papers (which do receive extensive written comments) nor classes, unless they ask to see them, but students are specifically told if their work is not satisfactory (corresponding to C- or below). For comparison, the average GPA for all students in 200506 was 3.1 on a 4.0 scale.</p>
<p>The above may help to reduce stress, but Reed is clearly stressful. The “stress culture” is our D’s only complaint about Reed.</p>
<p>I’ve always been wary of schools like MIT that come up with imaginative grading systems “to relieve the stress”.</p>
<p>I have heard that Swartmore and Cornell can be especially stressful.</p>
<p>I’d bet that UChicago is a lot of work.</p>