<p>I’ve heard some courses are pretty rigorous at UCLA. Can anyone talk a little about how much time you spend on schoolwork versus free time for socializing and relaxing?</p>
<p>I don’t spend all my time doing work, since I find it hard to continuously work without at least a little time to relax. Though, I also like doing extra problems for fun from my major classes or other areas of the field, but not everyone has that idea of “fun.” lol
In any case, no matter major or work ethic, I guarantee you there will be weeks where you’ll have to put forth a lot of time and effort, but no one said college was a walk in the park anyway. You’ll definitely have time to hangout or do whatever you do in your free time, but don’t let the coursework pile up; a great skill you’ll (hopefully) pick up is how to manage your time in order to get what you want out of your 4 years here.</p>
<p>Because it’s on the quarter system, it goes by pretty quickly, so you don’t have a lot of time to procrastinate or slack off.</p>
<p>Having said that, if you know how to manage your time (hard at first, but it comes, it comes) you not only want down time, you need it. Just think, everything in moderation, and it all works.</p>
<p>I see students in the Village evenings and weekends – lots of them – and they have a life outside of studying and classes.</p>
<p>Do try to do some spirit stuff – football and basketball games, even if you may not appreciate sports – it really is fun and let’s off steam. And tickets for students are CHEAP with good Den seating!</p>
<p>Depends on the class and major. South campus classes generally tend to be more competitive. Lower division math classes usually have no more than 25% within the “A” range and some Chemistry classes have as low as 10% in this range. Meanwhile in some GE classes, nearly 50% of students score in the A range. Regardless, you’ll have some free time each day to yourself. </p>
<p>As for the difficulty of content, I think it is comparable to that of other schools. When doing homework problems for math classes, I often find similar problems on websites for schools such as UCB, UCSD and even Stanford. At a big public school like this, don’t expect to be babysat. You won’t get notes sheets or handouts and the professor will seldom bother making slides for a lecture. </p>
<p>Don’t get intimidated though, usually a course will not have too much structured work. There may be up to 3 midterms/papers and a final as well as a weekly homework assignment or quiz that should take no more than 2 hours.</p>
<p>I’m north campus and every time the professors put up our grade distributions from midterms etc, there’s always around 10-20 people that fail out of 80 students or so.</p>
<p>Pretty sure all colleges has some of those really “rigorous courses”; college is no walk in the park, discipline yourself and learn to self study it’ll help a lot. Also bruinwalk is a great way to navigate away from those really “rigorous” teachers who teaches those “rigorous” courses. (I don’t understand why I’m emphasizing “rigorous” either :x)</p>
<p>There are going to be difficult classes and easy classes based off of your professor’s method of teaching and the grading scale they use at their discretion. There are some classes which will pretty much give half the class A’s while other classes will only give out 15% As and A-'s. Other than that, as a general rule of thumb (for south campus majors) scoring the median will net you a B- (50 percentile) one standard deviation above gets you an A-. As a biochemistry major I had plenty of free time for some weeks; however, there are often weeks where you’ll just have midterms and reports due and no free time at all. As long as you learn to manage your time you’ll be fine.</p>