Since a school's primary goal is (or should be) to educate students, one must examine the academics in order to properly evaluate the school. As you will soon see, The School fails here as well.
I consider myself a pretty bright guy. I've been programming since I was 5, I've always been good at math and I know how to learn on my own. So you would expect that I could maintain a relatively high GPA at college as long as I applied myself. Wrong. In my first semester of The School's engineering program I barely scraped by with a high enough GPA to stay enrolled in school. I worked my butt off during this time and had more or less nothing to show for it.
The School's primary goal seems to be to crush everyone academically in the name of maintaining their reputation as a "tough" school. Some professors are nice and care about you but they are all required to buy into The School's policy of avoiding "grade inflation."
Let me tell you what grade inflation is. It is the trend over time of schools to "inflate" their students grades and raise the average GPA in order to look better than other schools. The School tries very hard to avoid falling into this trap. Sure it seems like good intentions on the outside but consider the consequences. Because The School is so small and in such a remote location it is often mistaken for a community college by prospective employers and friends back home. Therefore, when employers see The School's name on your resume and see your "below-average" GPA they will automatically assume you are stupid. Interestingly enough, that low GPA may be equivalent to a much higher GPA (+0.5 to +1.0) at another school where they artifically inflate grades in order to make their program look better.
Case in point: there was a mechanical engineer who went to this school and had a ~2.5 GPA after her first year. She decided to transfer to a major school with a big tech program and is now maintaining a ~3.8 GPA with ease. I wish all schools could be as "tough" as The School but unfortunately they are not. The end result is that you the student get the short end of the stick and end up gasping for breath in the pool of your job-seeking peers.
The major problem with all of this is that it becomes almost impossible to find
a job after graduation if you want to leave the area. Nobody has heard of The School
and everybody sees your low GPA so they ignore you without a second thought. Even
companies in the area who know that students from The School are smart are not allowed
to hire many of us because of minimum GPA requirements. These companies have complained
to The School about the grades they give us (!!!) because they want to hire us
but HR doesn't permit them to, no exceptions. How pathetic is that? Seriously...
Want to live in block housing? Prepare to jump through 82398 hoops.