<p>All of these questions are going to vary by university, but generally and in my experience:</p>
<p>Do you have 2 semesters, each divided into two terms?</p>
<p>Generally 2 semesters per year, not divided beyond that. A class will usually run from around August to December or from around January to May, with various small holidays in the middle.</p>
<p>Do you have 4 courses per semester and 8 in a total year?</p>
<p>The number of courses per semester depends on how heavy a load you want. To graduate in 4 years you generally need to average about 5 courses per semester, but if you have AP credit/take summer classes you don’t have to take as much, and it’s common to take less during your Freshman year and more during later years.</p>
<p>Are you marked on just exams or do you have assignments or essays?</p>
<p>Grading is entirely up the professors, but almost always there will be a final exam, one or more midterm exams, and homework assignments/quizzes/essays. The proportion of your grade that each of these makes up varies wildly: in some classes the final is a huge big deal, while in others you can get away with skipping the final completely if you are already doing well on the other things. So far I’ve never seen a class where formal exams were less than half of the grade.</p>
<p>How do you get your marks?</p>
<p>Again, depends on the professor. Unfortunately, this often means you have to hassle the professor to get your detailed grades if you want to know where you stand during the class. At the end of the semester after final exams all grades are officially entered into the records, after which you generally have a couple days to get any errors fixed becore they go on your permanent transcript.</p>
<p>How big are your classes?</p>
<p>In my case, around 80 for big freshman classes, dropping to 20-30 once you get into more advanced subjects, and dropping again to around 15 for upper-level major courses. That’s much smaller than most schools, though, from what I understand.</p>
<p>What is a 4.0 GPA? Is 80%+ an A or a 90%+?</p>
<p>A 4.0 means you got all A’s, or for schools with +/- grading maybe a B or two and a lot of A+'s. What exactly is an A, B, etc is entirely dependent on the class: I’ve had classes where it was anything over 90%, classes where it was the top 10% of the class regardless of score, and classes where the the professor chose the break point more or less arbitrarily.</p>
<p>How much do you have to study?</p>
<p>Depends on how intelligent you are, what classes you take, what professors you take, and how good grades you want. I’ve had classes where I literally never opened the textbook the entire semester and just reviewed the powerpoints briefly before each exam, and classes where I had to read 100s of pages each week just to keep up. Generally more important than studying is to take very good lecture notes for humanities courses and put in lots of hours actually working problems in math and science.</p>