<p>I’m a current student at UC Berkeley and I’ve taken classes at De Anza College. Just a caveat, I got into UC Berkeley as a freshman, so my experiences with De Anza is limited to summer session courses.</p>
<p>In my experience, community college courses are not as easy as they are made out to be. There are just different expectations from courses at CCC and those at 4-year universities. The CCC I went to expected me to regurgitate all the information I learned during an exam whereas my 4-year university expects me to apply them. I’m not a fan of regurgitating information, so I found CCC courses to be a nuisance, because it is time consuming to memorize all the material. I find applying concepts to new problems on exams much less annoying. Hence, the difficulty depends on the person.</p>
<p>Compared to the high school I attended, De Anza is definitely easier. The competition is not as stiff and the professors are more lenient than high school teachers. Of course, that’s not to say that there is no competition at CCC, I’ve seen my share of gung-ho students gunning for the A+'s when A’s would suffice. However, I think the difference is that the goals of community college students are different than those of high school students. At my high school, everyone was aiming for top 20 colleges, whereas most CCC students aim to transfer into a UC (which has a higher acceptance rate across all campuses).</p>
<p>As for your son, it doesn’t matter. Taking community college courses shows that he can handle college level classes as well as hold his own in a class where the majority of the class is more experienced than he is. It should be looked upon favorably.</p>