<p>I myself take a lot of APs just like many on here. Do you find college academics a lot tougher then high school academics?</p>
<p>IMO, the biggest transition for most people is the level of writing required.</p>
<p>Also, the way your final grade is determined. If you get a D on a test in high school, you have 3 more quarters to fix it. In college, if you get a D on a test, you likely changed your max grade for the class from 100% to 80%. Very little margin for error.</p>
<p>it depends on the high school. i’ve seen my school’s alums at harvard say that the college work was easier. :)</p>
<p>I think the biggest transition is how much time you have to spend doing homework/studying outside of class. Also, I got by in high school with just listening to the lecture and I would understand everything. Now, I actually have to read the textbook and study it outside of class (about an hour or two for ever hour of lecture) to actually comprehend the material.</p>
<p>i find that its not necessarily harder, just different - it’s much more responsiblity placed on yourself to get your work done ontime and keep up w class (or go to class for that matter) bc nobody is standing over your shoulder collecting assignments or taking attendance - i learned the hard way after a few weeks of slacking off and then a few sleepless nights of cramming…cramming doesn’t really work as well in college as it did in HS…</p>
<ol>
<li>u have more freedom</li>
<li>everything goes by in seconds: what took a month in high school took an hour here. also, i’ve been submerged in the pile of work so that once i have time to think about life, it’s actually a lot of time just passed by. </li>
<li>it’s a place where people expect u to know what u need (or just expected) to know. if u dont know, u lose points or get punished.
example: some professors dont like students to connect dots with lines. some professors require students to connect dots with lines in graphs. and they have different reasons. we just have to figure out. </li>
<li>and yes, again. they tell u everything relatively briefly and u’ll have to figure most of the rest. they might give u a simple formula in class but give an exam with a convoluted question (yet can still be solved with the formula after rearranging some variables).</li>
<li>some people who’ve stayed at home all their lives complain that they have hard time studying, focusing, or sleeping (because of dorm environment or people inviting them to parties/ games, all sorts of distractions). colleges have dorms but they dont have study hall hours. if u cant study in ur bedroom, library or with friends around, don’t stay on campus–> stay in less social apartment so u can have ur own hours and place.</li>
<li>professors ask very often if we have any questions, but we are more likely to have no questions (because we just can’t catch up with the readings) until the last cramming minute before exams.</li>
<li>there’s no curfew. nobody cares if u dont sleep the whole night.</li>
<li>mandatory is a joke unless it comes to ur student bill, and sometimes urgent health issues. most of the things if u dont do it urself, it’s ONLY your problem.</li>
</ol>
<p>how to transition?
time management. period.</p>
<p>I teach at the college level. Sometime during college, those who will go on to grad school need to learn that they are potentially responsible for all the knowledge in their field of interest–courses will contribute to that knowledge but they only really open some doors and hint at some windows and it is up to you to look through and discover what you need to know, how to learn it and how to apply it. You are embarking on a journey for a lifetime. It’s not just about racking up credits and grades. Even for those who seek jobs directly after the B.A., college should give you a sense that education is more than courses where you have to please teachers. That transition can begin in the freshman year and should be well in progress by junior year.</p>
<p>Depends. I wasn’t ready for the transfer of being that smartest. Helping other kids out. Being the smartest. And then going to college and being one of the many smart. It hurts but the quicker you get over that the better you do. Also the whole time management and work motivation stuff. But you’ll learn that (eventually sometimes . . . ).</p>
<p>Adding on to Illini-- Going in thinking you’ll be at the top of your class isn’t the best plan. Confidence is good but back it up a little.</p>
<p>The biggest difference for me, that some have mentioned, is less busy work and more writing. In high school I had a large number of tests in many of my classes, giving me more opportunities to improve my grade. Now I may only have one or two tests for certain classes leaving less room for screwing up!</p>
<p>If you go to a regular state school you’ll be fine. If you go to a tough school with little to moderate grade inflation with a smart student body you will have to work. I went to a hard private school and got straight A’s junior and senior year(took 8 AP’s total) working on average maybe an hour a day(got mostly 5’s some 4’s). To do the same here, its on average six hours a day, and you have to be intuitive and apply what you know, lots of kids work as much as I do and do worse. In high school test questions are similar to what you’ve been doing in class. In some college classes, the questions will be nothing like you’ve ever seen before, you just have to figure it out with what you know.</p>
<p>I went to an Ivy League school for two years and even though I felt my high school education was not very good, the teaching was much better than I received from any Ivy prof. I eventually transfered to a smaller state school where the professors were, for the most part, better at teaching the finer details of the material. So the hardest transition for me was not being taught what I needed to know in order to complete my assignments, and that was my downfall. My other downfall was having exams that were much more difficult that the problem sets, and I had enough trouble understanding some of the problem sets. Most of my profs now are good teachers and they need to be because they don’t have the luxury of relying of teaching assistants. My engineering program isn’t large enough to provide TA’s.</p>
<p>Depends where you go to school. Good schools are very difficult, I went to a hard highschool and took diificult classes, and got A’s. In college I am a B student at best (I havent gotten an A on anything worth more than 5% of my grade yet) and I study 4 to 6 hours sunday throguh wednesday (Thursday we do a little drinkin, unless there is a midterm friday). </p>
<p>On the other hand, I have friends that I went to highschool with that think college is easier than highschool. So there really is no telling how hard classes will be until you know where you are going. (In this instance, I am comparing UW-Madison to UW-Eau Claire, I was amazed at how big a difference there really is)</p>
<p>However, as most the people already said, time management is key. Get a planner, write down everything you want to accomplish, and don’t take time off until it is all done, or you have scheduled a specific time to work on something, and then stick to that, NO MATTER WHAT, and you will pass all of your classes.</p>
<p>Self-discipline goes right up there with time management. One of my coworkers at my part-time on-campus job took a year off between high school and college to earn money to pay for his apartment and tuition. He has worked hard for many years and is no stranger to hard work to earn money. However, this on-campus job is the easiest job in the world and he has called off several times to stay home and hang out with his friends. In addition to that, he is failing all of his classes. He has not figured out that he is wasting his money by failing classes. If you are going to go to college and not go to class and do your assignments, you might as well not go to college in the first place. I never understood why students pay to go to school if they won’t do their work.</p>