[porknubbins]

My experience doing a huge number of MOOCs at Ivys or equivalent level CS programs is that the programming assignments are no harder than other good CS programs, but I assume the grading is more competitive. For example most OS courses make you write a memory allocator, which isn’t easy anywhere but maybe you have to optimize more at Ivies vs just making it work. That said I’ve noticed MIT expects a higher math level than anywhere else, and Stanford leans toward a kindler gentler approach, at least its MOOCs, vs the East coast competitiveness.