- #1
Pengwuino
Gold Member
- 5,112
- 20
Comparing "toughness" of physics grad schools
I was wondering if anyone knows any good ways of finding out how one's courses (specifically grad classes) stacks up against other universities? My undergrad courses were probably a 5 on a 1-10 scale of what i can imagine would be the typical difficulties you'd see in an American university. Now I enter into my grad first semester QM course and a friend of mine who already received his MS tells me and a couple friends that this professor who teaches the course attempts to put the difficulty at what you'd see at a place like MIT or Princeton. I thought "yah, right, whatever". I start the semester off thinking that hey, it's grad school, it's going to be a new ballgame, a step up, etc etc. From the get-go this class has been like a shotgun blast to the face yet I'm achieving better grades on assignments than ever before (our midterm we just took, I may have been the only one to finish). Thus, I'm really wondering if my friend was right and now I'm looking to see if there's a way to actually compare my program or at least my course with courses at top universities. I highly doubt universities publish their grad course homeworks/test/lectures...
The thinking behind my professor bumping up the difficulty is supposedly so that since you can only get a MS at my university, they want to produce students that are of the caliber of students entering into any PhD program in the country and wouldn't have to play catchup.
I was wondering if anyone knows any good ways of finding out how one's courses (specifically grad classes) stacks up against other universities? My undergrad courses were probably a 5 on a 1-10 scale of what i can imagine would be the typical difficulties you'd see in an American university. Now I enter into my grad first semester QM course and a friend of mine who already received his MS tells me and a couple friends that this professor who teaches the course attempts to put the difficulty at what you'd see at a place like MIT or Princeton. I thought "yah, right, whatever". I start the semester off thinking that hey, it's grad school, it's going to be a new ballgame, a step up, etc etc. From the get-go this class has been like a shotgun blast to the face yet I'm achieving better grades on assignments than ever before (our midterm we just took, I may have been the only one to finish). Thus, I'm really wondering if my friend was right and now I'm looking to see if there's a way to actually compare my program or at least my course with courses at top universities. I highly doubt universities publish their grad course homeworks/test/lectures...
The thinking behind my professor bumping up the difficulty is supposedly so that since you can only get a MS at my university, they want to produce students that are of the caliber of students entering into any PhD program in the country and wouldn't have to play catchup.