LOL Mudd was the only other school who awarded that bumper sticker. At that time, it was rated above MIT in undergrad chemistry.. Remember J. Arthur Campbell? How about Bill Sly? That old fart was so tough I don't think I'll ever be so proud of a c-minus.
MIT then had Professor Walter Thorson (PhD CalTech), who later went on to the University of Alberta.
All Chem and Bio majors were required to take Thorson’s Physical Chemistry (Thermodynamics) course (then numbered 5.61). That course was so tough that many received Ds and Fs. The Chemistry ombudsman, Prof Avery Allen Ashdown, had to intervene to fix the situation, or else large numbers of Chem and Bio majors would not graduate. (MIT’s graduate dorm is named for Prof. Ashdown, who was a true gentleman.)
I (a Bio major) received a B—without any intervention from Ashdown. I was VERY surprised, because I only got a C in Differential Equations, which was prerequisite to Physical Chemistry. Chemistry people were very jealous of my B—just as jealous as they had been of my highest As in Organic Chemistry! Perhaps my B was the highest grade in the class—I don’t know.
So that is the story. I highly doubt that anyone at Harvey Mudd was tougher than Thorson—CalTech’s “finest”.
By the way, my PhD thesis advisor at Harvard (in molecular biology) had been a PhD student of Linus Pauling at CalTech. At the end of my own thesis writing, he made me do a formal derivation of a formula for separation of proteins by glycerol gradient centrifugation.
I had to go to the MIT Engineering Library to get data on glycerol density, viscosity, etc., and then use the data to derive the formula. This ended up as a calculus problem, which I solved and successfully derived the formula. I used the formula in one of my published papers.
So CalTech affected me a lot, even though I never went there!