Swarthmore vs. Penn

interesteddad
Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:57:40 +0000

The way my daughter dealt with the workload was to plan out her time. So for a given end of semester reading period and exam week, she’d lay out what had to be done (two papers, a take-home exam, learn 500 paintings for an art history exam, etc.) and allocate available nights for each project, mixing them up so she might do art history flash cards and work on a social science paper one night, just for variety. Then, she just stick to her schedule. If she had allocated three nights for a paper, she turned in a “three-night” paper and that was that.

She also seemed to develop a feel for professors and whether incrementally more time invested in a paper would produce any measurable difference. She reached the point of knowing, with some professors, exactly what her grade would be on a paper before she even started writing it and, that spending three weeks instead of three nights, wouldn’t make any difference.

I think it’s a very healthy approach to Swarthmore. It’s not the kind of school where you want to beat yourself up trying to achieve perfection with every assignment.

In fairness to the Professors, Swarthmore is very demanding academically, but the entire College understands that and is looking to help students be successful, not break them down. I’m not sure the tales of “misery poker” accurately convey how supportive the academic culture is under the hard exterior.