<p>Here is the average GPA at Harvard for the period 1990-2006. After a slowdown and even small reversal in early 2000, grade inflation has accelerated over recent years.</p>
<p>In regards to the honors awarded, a stunning 91% of Harvard students graduated with summa, magna or cum laude in 2001. This compares to 51% at Yale and 44% at Princeton. MIT awards no honors. </p>
What you say is true to some degree but the core curriculum at the academies makes the academics more rigorous than you portray (or perhaps you believe). </p>
<p>And the survey question which was used to derive the list in the original post used this as the criterion set:
<p>cellardweller - I was was not speaking about Harvard overall, as I was only referring to the physics and math work that I have seen my daughter do. A sample size of one student is insufficient for me to make sweeping generalizations about the entire college. But I will say that the difficulty level of the physics and math work would likely be on a par with any other of the most difficult science and technology schools. After all, Math 55 at Harvard is regarded as the most difficult freshman math class in the country. The main issue to me in this thread is difficulty, not grades.</p>
<p>That is according to the Harvard math department and would be hard to prove (no pun intended)! MIT has 18.100B and 18.100C where the content is of the same level of difficulty as Math 55 at Harvard (and the drop-out rate just as high). It is also not unusual for MIT freshmen to take graduate level math classes which would be significantly harder than Math 55. </p>
<p>I would argue that 18.S34, an intense math problem solving seminar that MIT freshmen take and which is considered the ultimate bootcamp for the Putnam Mathematics Competition is inherently tougher from a competitive level standpoint. Most students are IMO and USAMO finalists. In the past decade, MIT students has taken around 40% of the Putnam Fellow Awards (top 5) as well as 40% of the Honorable Mentions (top 50).</p>
<p>If we use the Putnam Competition results as a measure of the strength of a college’s math department, I don’t believe it makes a case for Harvard’s superiority:</p>
<p>For the past ten years, there have been exactly 52 Putnam Fellows (generally the top 5 individual winners). These are the stars and are indicative of the STRENGTH of a math department. Probably, the most famous Putnam Fellow was Richard Feynman. </p>
<p>Harvard has won 13 or 25% of all Putnam Fellow Awards since 2000.
MIT has won 22 or 42.3% of all Putnam Fellow Awards since 2000.</p>
<p>The next category are the next 20 individuals who get a cash award. There have 198 recipients in the same period (2000-2009).
Harvard won 41 or 20.7%.
MIT won 52 or 26.3%</p>
<p>Finally are those students who get honorable mention (most recently the next 40-50 individuals). There have been 464 recipients in the past ten years. This is generally a good indication of DEPTH of a math department.
Harvard has won 56 or 12.1%
MIT has won 127 or 27.4%</p>
<p>Both in depth and strength of its math department, MIT out-competes Harvard at the Putnam by a nearly 2/1 ratio. </p>
<p>The Putnam Team award is a meaningless metric as measure of a math department strength. You just need to look at 2000 when Duke won without a single team member being a Putnam Fellow while Harvard and MIT had 2 Putnam Fellows each that same year. A college team score is just the combined ranks (not scores) of three individuals designated before the competition as “official” team members. It is NOT the combined score of the top three scorers of a particular college which would be much more meaningful. Teams like MIT and Harvard have just too many strong members to know in advance who will be the top scorers. In 2000, neither of the two Harvard Putnam Fellows were even on the Harvard "official’ team and only one of the two MIT Putnam Fellows was on the MIT team. Had both teams done a better job picking their “official” members, Harvard and MIT would have easily beaten Duke in the team award.</p>
<p>I really did not mean to sidetrack this thread into one about the Putnam, but given the statistics you spouted about it, do you still stand by your statement in post 17 that “With all due respect, Harvard does not kick anybody’s butt.”? My only point in my earlier post was that the rigor that I have seen in my daughter’s physics and math classes are sufficient to “kick most peoples’ butts”.</p>
<p>This isn’t true - Math 55 is supposed to cover Abstract and Linear Algebra and Real and Complex Analysis while 18.100B/C is just Real Analysis. Also I don’t think 18.100B/C by itself is really that difficult compared to Math 55. But this isn’t really relevant since such a small number of people take Math 55 anyways.</p>
<p>And I feel like a lot of people like to put down Harvard because it’s so prestigious or for whatever reason. I highly doubt it’s as easy as people on CC seem to make it out to be. Maybe there is grade inflation (though I thought they made steps to stop this?) but I don’t think most students consider it really easy.</p>
<p>But I think out of all the schools I know about, CalTech surprises me the most in their core requirements. They require real analysis to graduate, something which I don’t think any other school in the nation can do.</p>
<p>"It’s not the material, it’s the degree of difficulty of the problems you are expected to be able to do that makes all the difference. "</p>
<p>Actually I think it’s the material too, it may be taught at a higher level. I recall perusing a text used at MIT for intro physics, it was used in the Honors course in that subject at Cornell. As I recall it utilized a more advanced level of calculus than the “regular” course for engineers at Cornell, which used Halliday & Resnick.</p>
<p>This may even out more in higher level courses, I don’t know.</p>
<p>But this is a course that everyone at MIT has to take, whereas at Cornell the same level seems to be reserved for aspiring physical science majors and some well-prepared engineers.</p>
<p>The original article (on a CC competing site) also published the top ten, but don’t take it too seriously: no data source or methodology is given.</p>
<p>In alphabetical order:</p>
<p>California Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon University
Columbia University
Harvard University
Johns Hopkins University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Reed College
Swarthmore College
University of Chicago
University of Pennsylvania</p>