<p>ee33ee:</p>
<p>The reason you are hearing so many stories is that it’s like the mob of blind men describing an elephant. It just depends what elephant part each guy grabs onto!</p>
<p>Every college student at every college, can make their academics as hard as they want to make them. Stick it out with a major (such as physics) when you don’t have any aptitude for college math, and yes…it’s going to be really, really hard. The kid in the next seat, who does math proofs for fun, is like a pig in mud…breezing through physics.</p>
<p>This kind of aptitude mismatch happens a lot in the sciences, where someone is just determined to be a pre-med with no aptitude for college science.</p>
<p>It’s hard to generalize, but my daughter went to Swarthmore from just a so-so public high school. Not a bad public high school, but not top of the heap. For example, she was only able to take two AP courses. The thing that worried her the most was relatively weak preparation in writing.</p>
<p>She found Swarthmore as advertized in that it required consistent work and good study habits. She did the first-year three-day study skills seminar (at the end of Winter Break) and got some useful tips from upperclass students, especially the advice to go to the library every night after dinner as a matter of habit. She and a group of friends went like clockwork and studied alternating with study breaks to make it fun. The other great piece of advice was to prepare for each class with at least one comment or question on the assigned reading material so that participation in the discussion is also a matter of routine. She also took the freshman writing course – not fun course, but a really good basic platform for three years of paper writing culminating in a senior thesis.</p>
<p>The only class that really kicked her butt in four years was the advanced calculus she placed into with a 5 on the Calc AB exam in high school. That advanced calc class kicked the butt of everyone she knows at every college – from Ga Tech to Dartmouth to Havard. I think she finally eeked out some kind of high C or low B or something and wanted to frame it for her wall. She found out that she prefers math with numbers and later aced statistics.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I don’t think she’s ever really sweated a grade at Swarthmore. She kind of knows after the first paper what’s realistic for her with each professor…some better than others. But, as long as you go to class, do most of the work, turn in the papers (preferable after getting them WA’d), grades take care of themselves. Also, she got great advice early on about how to balance a course load each semester. Don’t take four reading intensive courses or you’ll drown, don’t beat your head against the walll as a math major if college math doesn’t click for you, etc.</p>