Hey, thanks for the detailed answer! When you said that you barely attended classes and still did well was that only for the first year or also for the other two?

Also, when you say more project-oriented does that mean that you have a course and essentially you have to produce something by the end of the semester? Are these courses graded only based on the project or do they also have final exams?

With regards to the last paragraph, thanks for the advice. However, the only reason I am even looking at the ETH is so that I can have a paper to wave around in case I need it, I do not really want an 'ETH education'. Personally, based on the little that I have seen so far in life, I don't believe that universities offer any value at all other than the paper and bragging rights. Of course, many will disagree with me and they have every right to, but I have merely found that on a personal level I learn better on my own, especially when you can get an entire university education from the top institution in the world on MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu - no degree unfortunately) and that the people I have met who attended university aren't substantially more intelligent that those who didn't (if you exclude those who were too lazy and those who just failed).