<p>Oh, the reason I was going to post! S2’s pre-IB Alg II teacher had a “Bungee Cord Barbie” contest every year. Had to determine the number of rubber bands it would take to drop Barbie from the 3rd floor balcony without her head hitting the floor. She was generally nude. They had to do a bunch of math associated with this, too. This was started after the infamous “math is hard” Barbie was released, according to legend. </p>
<p>She and Ken should trade notes!</p>
<p>I found college to be a bit easier, I’d say, but not night and day. The big thing for me is that I have a super memory, and tend to get things after skimming them a couple times. I wasted a lot of time in high school doing chapter summaries, repetitive problem sets, and other sorts of busy work that tended to help students who really needed to drill material to get it. In college, most classes that I have taken have had no such requirements, so this is quite the boon for me.</p>
<p>Also, I find how good of a writer you are is a big determinant of how well you do well in humanities. Friends who weren’t as good of writers struggled a lot more than more talented writers with the same or even more effort. In high school, both might have received an A for meeting the requirements, but in college it can be a different scenario. I had an honors seminar my first semester and many of my classmates were absolutely crestfallen to find that not everything they produced was A work anymore.</p>
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<p>I agree with this. The time I spent studying in college was spent doing things that I thought would help me master the material, not what someone else thought would help me master the material.</p>
<p>I had a lot of lab classes, so would have to write up a lot of lab reports. Didn’t have many humanities papers, so I’m still not comfortable writing long papers.</p>
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<p>At our kids’ elem school, science fair was optional. One neighbor would no longer allow her kids to participate in the science fair because her kids did 100% of the display themselves, then they’d be embarrassed at school when all the other boards were done by craft-y moms.</p>
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<p>This.</p>
<p>I can’t wait for this.</p>
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<p>It baffles me that teachers aren’t more tuned-in to projects that are more the work of the parents than of the students. Are they dense? Don’t they think about whether the kid has previously shown the potential to produce something of such high quality? It angers me.</p>
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<p>The good teachers have figured this out I think, and make certain assignments ones to be worked on solely in class. </p>
<p>My husband once threatened to sent in a note to one of S1’s elementary school teachers telling her that that if she wanted to grade our S based on his parent’s work, he would be willing to send in his elementary school report card and she could copy those grades, because he wasn’t going to do S’s work.</p>
<p>We live in a public school district where, unfortunately, many parents have to be reminded to do things like read with their young kids, so my daughter’s teacher sometimes sends home “assignments” for the parents that are really just to ensure that learning is being reinforced at home. Since we do those things anyway, we usually ignore those assignments, and fortunately the teachers have been understanding and not given us any grief about it.</p>
<p>College is just different. I don’t remember finding it harder or easier than high school. My high school grades were higher, but that’s because I consciously tried very hard in high school whereas in college I kind of…didn’t care. (I cared enough to earn a 3.4, and that was good enough for me). I had more work in my public magnet high school than I had in my first two years of college, but my last two years of college (and especially the last year when I was writing my thesis) I had a lot more work than I had in high school, but I also had more time to complete it in.</p>
<p>Sure, college has more distractions, but I’m not really a joiner and I like to party but I always got my work done first. I prefer going without the spoonfeeding (actually, the spoonfeeding frustrates me) and work well independently. The work itself is at a higher level, of course, but if you haven taken appropriate courses in high school you should be prepared. My advisor told me not to take English 285 my freshman year because along with a required freshman writing-heavy class, the writing would be too intense and I wouldn’t do well. The “writing-heavy” class had us write three 5-page papers in one semester. Puh-leeze!</p>
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<p>Your H and I are on the same page.</p>
<p>IMO one way that college is easier is that you’re taking 3 or 4 classes, rather than 5 or 6. You can get into a subject and stay there for a while, and reduce the time and logistics of the switching-gears phase.</p>
<p>My son did not find college easier @RPI. My wife did not find college easier @RPI. And most certainly I did not find college easier @OSU.</p>
<p>I just got back from orientation at UC Berkeley with my daughter. It was great, but somewhat bubble-bursting when you realize all of the capable young people in the room just like your kid and with the heavy curve only few will get A’s; it is possible to get a 96 on a test and wind up with a C. No more over 90 is an A for everyone. Most of these kids have never seen a C since they learned the alphabet! Rude awakening in store for sure.</p>
<p>College was harder for D because the only thing that made high school at all hard was taking 18-20 hours of ballet a week; in the college the ballet dropped to four hours a week and it made a big difference.</p>
<p>Otoh, D hit college already being a pretty good writer and neither gave quarter nor expected any when she was one of three first-years in a class with extremely demanding writing requirements second semester.</p>
<p>Students whose prep in writing, in particular, wasn’t up to snuff in high school were left as walking wounded the first semester. Some of them knew they were under-prepped and for other it came as a big shock…they’d always gotten A’s, so what was the problem, right?</p>
<p>She consistently took 18-20 units when in residence, dropping off to 14-16 for her two semesters off-campus. Managed to do some EC’s, have fun, etc. But “easy”? No. Senior year left her on the verge of exhaustion for a good six months, not unlike a marathon runner who collapses and lets inertia carry him/her over the tape.</p>
<p>crzymom,
I remember the dean’s speech at my son’s matriculation ceremony at Emory a few years ago–“Look around. 90% of you were in the top 10% of your high school class. I can guarantee that 90% of you will not be in top 10% here. So remember you are here to get a great education and not just here to get grades.”</p>
<p>Some kids really did not do well with the stress of being with so many also extremely bright and hardworking students–they sort of hit the wall discovering that they were not really the best and the brightest when they hit the more competitive pond. Some kids who had worked really hard in high school just didn’t have another gear left. Some of the students who had not worked quite so hard in high school found that extra gear.</p>
<p>It takes a period of adjustment but most kids do just fine. They would not have been admitted if the school did not think they would do well.</p>
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<p>Absolutely true: the top students from our HS who attend HYPSM et al are working their tails off, while their buddies (a few % down in class rank) are cruising at the mid-tier UCs…Heck, several of them have higher GPAs at UCSB than they had in HS (but that could also be a change in work ethic)…</p>
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<p>If it’s a Frosh science class, the mean maybe 60…the curve is the curve, but just wanted your D to understand reality, crzymom.</p>
<p>@crzymom: I agree with bluebayou, no way that a 96 on a university science exam will be anything other than an A–unless it’s out of 200. The average scores in university science and math classes may be much lower than anyone has seen in high school, though. I recall an organic chem midterm second quarter where the mean score was in the 20’s and the mode was 4 (high of 89). Berkeley first-year physics, unless it’s changed, may have mean scores on some exams in the 40’s or 50’s. The nature of the tests is just different. The curves normally operate to the students’ benefit, relative to high-school % to grade conversions. But the mean score will not correspond to as high a grade as in high school, ordinarily.</p>
<p>I think they are different. I have a higher GPA (unweighted of course) at Stanford than in my high school, though my high school was an ultra-competitive suburban send 10 kids to top schools shtick. I was also one of those high test scores/not stellar (but good grades) students in high school who slacked (even more than I realized come to think of it) in high school. I am also studying engineering (the supposed kiss of death). All things considered, I don’t think college is exactly easier per se. I used to think so in the beginning, but I realized that I had to “find that extra gear” when I realized how quickly the courses were moving and how low averages could be on exams. Also, Stanford is on the quarter system which doesn’t make for fun times when midterms roll around so you had to really study a lot before an exam if you wanted to do well. Another thing I realized is how easy i</p>
<p>Our DS and DD’s experiences as freshmen this past year echo boysX3 story of matriculation at Emory. Both kids were excellent students in HS and use to working hard for grades. The reality that their LAC has shown them what grade deflation means has been an experience, to say the least. DD has always been an excellent writer, but Shakespeare prof. informed class he would make GOOD writers of students in his class. D was never so proud to receive a B+ for class and the complement indicating she had the POTENTIAL to be a fine writer. Six months before that, DD would have been shattered. </p>
<p>As I have posted elsewhere, perhaps biggest shock of all to our two was that a B- would place them below the 3.0 end of the GPA scale. For kids who had never had a C in their school career-what a wake-up call.</p>
<p>For me college was much harder than high school. I NEVER had to study in high school, it was that easy. In college I double majored in biology and classics and was in a general education honors program. It kicked my butt, but was so much more rewarding than high school. I also was in college marching band which required me to learn how to study very quickly.</p>