<p>Is the summer school content more condensed? Besides attention span, to what extent do you lose out on content depth when you’re officially taking the same course that others would be during the regular school year?</p>
<p>I’m kind of curious, because I sat in at a CHEM 241 class (after having taken Chem 181 last spring – essentially an equivalent course), to refresh my memory on some of the material, and the course seemed to have skipped a lot of material that I remember being covered in the regular school year, or maybe the unit for arenes and polycyclics is organized differently from 181. </p>
<p>For those who have taken summer courses, would you say you learn less material from a summer school course than a regular school year course?</p>
<p>I think it depends on your teacher, but the material is definitely graded easier at least in my opinion. I took Math 312 over the summer, and I know I would not have done as well as I did during the regular school year. I don’t know that we covered less material or with less depth, but all of our tests were take home and since it was the only thing I had to worry about I found it much easier than my experience with Math 310 (which also had take home tests, but I had a whole load of credits to deal with in addition).
I also took an education class over the summer and we were outright told we had less assignments than during the regular year, but I believe we covered the same material (just more things grouped together for assessment).
As far as summer classes at other colleges, I took Calc 2 and 3 and Diff Eq at night or over the summer while I was in high school, and I know a lot of things done at UVA in Calc 3 I definitely never did. I don’t even have to start about community college classes, right? I’m taking one right now, Western Civ, and it overlaps with AP Euro a bit - my study guides from my high school peers are more detailed than the notes we get in class…</p>
<p>I thought it was easier, but not necessarily because the material was any easier or that we did not cover as much.</p>
<p>Before I started at UVA, I had taken a semester off. So in order to “catch up” so that I could graduate on time, plus have a slightly more relaxed 4th year, I took 20 credits in summer classes (7 cred./7 cred./6 cred.) – two classes each session. I thought it was really nice because I didn’t have a whole huge course load to manage. For a couple of the classes that were more reading intense, the reading was probably adjusted for the summer since professors realize you can’t read 200+ pgs a night every day (comparable to something like 200-250/week during the semester). I still wrote the same number of papers and took the same number of tests, but it just became necessary to start them a little earlier.</p>