Reply to Few days to decide: U of Virginia or U of Chicago?

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[quote=Anonymous]9-12 hours is a significant underestimation of how much time STEM majors spend in class at UChicago.  DC’S courses have lectures + lab + discussion section.  Weekly problem sets, multiple midterms, project and/or final exam.  Language and arts classes have also met for 5 hours per week rather than 3.  Humanities courses seem to have same number of essays as we had in a semester.

The comments about relentless pace aren’t coming from people who expect their kids to devote no more than 20 hours total/week to academics.  They’re coming from the Dean and from people like me who have studied and taught at other elite institutions whose semester systems enabled us spend time doing more than what was required and gave us the opportunity to process/synthesize/reflect upon what we’d learned over the course of the whole term rather than just move on to the next thing and do the best we could before the thing after that became urgent.

And none of this is about grade inflation.  It’s about being given the time and space to do your best vs being forced to settle for “good enough” — defined not be degree of mastery of the material but by location on the curve.  I’ve seen 90%+ performances get Bs and cumulative averages of 60% or less get A-s.  More of the latter than the former, actually.  [/quote]

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