<p>As for a class being “hard”, the definition tends to vary a lot at Mudd. Some teach very difficult material and some just give out a lot of work. </p>
<p>The hardest courses in core tend to be “Baby STEMS” and Electricity & Magnetism. These courses are taken sophomore year (so I haven’t had any direct experience with them yet). From what I hear, the material in E&M is difficult (the profs that teach it are GREAT, I’ve had several of them already), but you’ll find that at any college. E&M just isn’t intuitive and you have to think about it a lot to understand it. To remedy this, i’d recommend getting some exposure to E&M before you take the course, even if you teach yourself. As for STEMS, I hear that the class is a lot of work, but the material is invaluable for any scientist or engineer (Fourier Analysis!!!). </p>
<p>As for the frosh core classes, some are definitely harder than others. Both Prob/Stats and Energetics (the hardest and most complained-about Frosh courses) will be Pass/Fail next fall. Prob/Stats has a lot of difficult hw problems, and energetics is Thermo and Electrochem. In terms of the grading scale, you just have to remember that you aren’t in high school anymore. The threshold for an “A” is 90 in most departments (85 in physics), and it’s hard to get that high of a grade. Aiming for a 4.0 GPA isn’t a healthy expectation at Mudd. Even if you’re at the bottom of your graduating class, you’re at the bottom of the top 1% of the country. Mudd isn’t like Harvard where 91% of the graduating class graduates with honors. Like with many other tech schools, it’s an honor just to graduate, and a 3.5+ GPA will carry a lot of weight with graduate schools and employers.</p>