No problem, those are some really good questions. First, I failed to get a recommendation from Thomas in spite of the fact that he gave me an A in the course. He was always extremely pleasant but has not responded to either of 2 emails I sent this fall (the emails were two months apart from each other). I was banking on this as part of my application strategy-- major failure on that count. And 2580 down the drain (plus the expenses of living near Boston for a summer). As for number of lines, we were assigned Eclogues 1-6 and 9-10, as well as the entire Georgics. While I read all the Eclogues assigned (about 500-600 lines?), I only managed to read about half of Georgics Book I, half of Book II, 3/4 of III, and all of IV. For the final exam, he required only certain lines, although even these were substantial. However, my biggest complaint about the class is that we didn't read enough Latin during class. Whether you had read much of the assignment before class or not ended up not mattering. Too much time was spent on him putting other passages from Latin literature on the projector from his laptop and translating them at sight, showing off in front of us, and then commenting on how they related to what we were looking at in the Eclogues or Georgics. This, I hear, is the major weakness of ivy-league classics deparments-- pretending like everyone can read the Latin and Greek and spending lots of time on literary and interpretive questions. I heard Victor Davis Hanson say once that when he was still at UC Fresno he eventually grew tired of interviewing candidates for Classics jobs from Berkeley and Harvard who could not read Latin or Greek. Those were probably rare cases, but it goes to show what they emphasize these days-- PC scholarship rather than real language skills.
As for the paper, all he required was a 5-7 page essay without secondary sources. Most of the students were high school students and high school Latin teachers; I was the only grad student; there was one Harvard undergrad doing a Classics minor. So in short the paper requirements were totally pathetic. I nonetheless wrote a 15 pager with a few secondary source references and have been trying to spruce it up this fall with more secondary source material to serve as a writing sample. All in all, given the Latin required, the course was basically equivalent to a second-tier upper level Latin course (i.e. 300 level instead of 400) at the undergraduate level. That is my opinion, anyhow, whatever the actual course number was.
So if you've got the money to spend, it's fun to read Latin around Harvard during the summer and get to listen to a world-famous scholar-- but if you don't have a lot of expendable cash, then I wouldn't recommend it. Nevertheless, it might look good on your transcript to have studied Latin and Greek at Harvard-- in any case, that's one or two more upper level Latin courses.