<p>Yup - you want to be in the right section, not the hardest section you can possibly manage to squeeze into. From what I see, a lot of the freshman year is spent getting everybody up to speed and into the college mode. A really hard high school course is just different in manner from an equally hard college course. Having much less class time can take considerable getting used to. Physics can be tricky too because basic physics courses can vary a great deal in terms of what topics are covered.
Math is similar - back when I rode my dinosaur to class , geometry was all about proofs, but I know that a lot of HS geo courses do very little proof work - but they cover material we didn’t.
Blackroses216 - I know first semester is p/f, but after that, can kids do p/f in courses generally? (Just wondering - I have no clue what my child would do.)</p>