<p>im having a hard time in my ap classes.
and i started worrying if i will be able to do good in actual college classes.
i will have to take calculus again.
so how hard is the actually college class compared to the high school ap classes?</p>
<p>Some AP teachers give a larger volume of work than you would have in a 100-level college course. AP U.S. History comes to mind. AP courses teach to a test in a way and teach a prescribed curriculum. If you will major in a science or engineering, you will probably repeat your calculus. If you major in the humanities, you may not want to repeat it if you go to a school that will give you credit for the score you get on the test. And even though the AP curriculum is somewhat dictated by College Board, there is a huge difference from school to school on how rigorous the class is.</p>
<p>I would say, that for me, the rigor between the AP classes I took in high school and the corresponding classes I am taking now at the university are comparable, with the university courses being mildly more challenging than their AP counterparts. But, certainly, the courseloads are comparable.</p>
<p>I thought my AP classes were a lot easier than my college ones. But my HS wasn’t particularly competitive.</p>
<p>AP was significantly harder than general survey college classes. I had to read about 100 pgs/week of dense material in AP, a similar class I took in college was a 30 page chapter of light material a week.</p>
<p>History by the way. AP for US history, college for European history. Don’t know about math/science.</p>
<p>I don’t know how legit my experiences are, because I chose to do math specifically for engineering/physics students, and my uni has 3 physics tracks, of which I chose the hardest, but I had to spend a lot more time and effort in my college classes than in HS. In HS I got a 5 on the AP BC exam, and a very high A in the class pretty much doing a total of 2 hours of hw/week, whereas about 3 hours of work/week got me barely scraping by with a B. It’s not just the amount of work, though. I completed all my assignments, but the conceptual difficulty ramped up. I actually don’t think I did enough hw or studying, and so I wouldn’t master a topic before moving on, and the fact that the whole grade depended on three tests changed the game (i.e. I wouldn’t study much except before tests).</p>
<p>It’s going to depend on you as an individual and on both schools. They can be comparable (like someone said above), or college can be a lot tougher. If you are taking the science, math track at college they will generally get into more depth than AP course do. How quickly you pick up math concepts has a huge amount to do with how hard you find it in college.<br>
The best advice I can give is to use your office hours opportunities if you don’t understand something. Having three profs in my family; they like it when students come in to talk during office hours, so meet with them. You may even get just a little bit of a break come grading time if they remember you having come to see them.</p>
<p>From my experience, in which I went to a very competitive high school, AP classes were significantly harder. Nevertheless, I can see how people don’t achieve the same or better grades taking college classes because of time management issues and such…</p>
<p>I thought AP classes in HS were pretty easy, with the exception of AP World History and AP Bio…I took like 9 AP exams and got 4’s or 5’s on all of them and remember Collegeboard graded them pretty easily (70% = 5) but college classes are a lot harder imo. </p>
<p>A lot depends on how difficult your college is and how hard your HS was…some HS AP teachers try to make things really difficult to get you ready for college, some college classes are easy (gen ed’s). I did ap calc AB and had to repeat it in college anyway. Don’t worry, you’ll remember most of it and do fine in the college calc class.</p>
<p>Personally I found AP Calc to be harder than the Calc classes at my University. I took BC in High School and retook Calc 2. And the math classes here are generally considered hard (atleast by people here, I don’t know how hard they are compared to other universities), and Calc 2 is the 2nd most failed class (or so I’ve heard) here. </p>
<p>I can tell you I spent in the range of about 15 hours a week studying + homework for my HS clac class, and got a C+ in the end. At my University I spent about 5-6 hours a week outside of class and got a B (though that was still my worst grade).</p>
<p>One thing I can say though is that the material is very different, and they way problems are approached is also very different.</p>
<p>I will honestly tell you that for me, AP classes were a LOT easier than the current college equivalents I’m in. I got a 5 on Calc AB but was surprised when I saw my roommate learning so many different things in Calc I here at my college…and the hw/exams were a lot harder than my Calc AB class. Now that I look back at it, the AP Calc AB exam was completely straightforward, students here need to know pretty much everything. </p>
<p>I also regret having gotten a 3 on both the Physics C exams. The Mechanics equivalent at this college is insane - we cover mechanics (the AP syllabus), heat, sound and dynamics. ALL OF THAT in a semester; if I got a 4/5 on the AP Physics C: Mechanics exam, I would’ve had the chance to skip this course. But no, I’m stuck learning about the additional stuff and its really annoying. I know kids in my AP Physics class who were just as smart as me and somehow got lucky on the exam by guessing multiple choices/making up stuff.
This is the biggest difference - the AP exams have lesser material; and that material that you’re tested on is harder than the problems you’d see in a college course. In a college equivalent, you’d just have more topics and need to analyze/think more.</p>
<p>Edit: Also, its just different at college. You don’t have 20-students size classes with teachers spoonfeeding you all the info. You’re on your own. Also, I didn’t do any homework or studied a thing for Calc AB, just went to class everytime, did the practice worksheets, handouts and all…ended up with a 5. Now in Calc II here, I studied 10-12 hrs a week and barely managed a B (would’ve been a C if I got 5 points lower)…imagine that.</p>
<p>I took a lot of APs when I was in high school and complained that my life sucked like a cow. Now I’d give up anything to go back to high school. High school compared to college is heaven;</p>
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<p>It really depends on your college and course choice, I think. Yeah, in my physics class we were expected to know more than was covered on the C: Mechanics test, but our homework and test problems were far more difficult than most AP test questions (but AP Physics C doesn’t exempt you from the intro courses). The problems (we used Kleppner & Kolenkow) in our book we were expected to collaborate on, because our professor didn’t feel that most of us would be able to figure them out on our own.</p>
<p>If you want to know how difficult a course is going to be, it’s likely that, if you pick up the textbook and look at the problems, as well as read some reviews of the text, you’ll get a feel for what’s expected.</p>
<p>Personally, my AP classes were much harder than the college classes. College is more about studying and my AP classes were more about grunge work which took forever. I also had to do a lot more conceptual thinking in my Calc & Physics AP classes than in college. Everything on tests here seems to be directly out of lectures/textbooks while my high school expected us to go beyond what was available to us. Overall, I took 8 AP classes in high school and am at the beginning of my junior year in college no. Much happier here… I guess the teaching style is the most important difference between AP and college courses (the ways the teachers lecture).</p>
<p>I’m in high school and I’m taking college and AP courses (AP courses online when necessary). At this point, 5 APs and 8 college classes. College classes here are a lot easier because the professors want to know if you understand the material. In my AP classes we’ve literally had over 200 assignments in each, and it’s just about annoying you with busywork until you die, although the material isn’t very difficult.</p>
<p>It seems that in college you can have a 3 day a week class and learn everything you learn in an AP class in half the time. It is definitely more up to you to learn more in depth, though. In an AP class they can give you tons of work to do, whereas in college you have to study and do work on your own to get to the level of understanding expected of you (with their work on top of that).</p>
<p>So, it is probably easier to skate through an equivalent college course than an AP course, but the possibilities in terms of learning are much greater.</p>
<p>I am currently attending a school where I am enrolled in college full time, but am still a high school Junior. I don’t want to get to into it, because most people just end up confused. However, to answer your question, AP classes are nothing like college classes. First off, in college you aren’t worried about the big huge AP exam that will determine if taking AP was worth your time, sure you have important finals but they aren’t as stressful as the AP exams. AP teachers tend to give a bunch of work, a lot of college classes have usually only have tests. You usually don’t have class everyday in college, it depends where you go and what you sign up for but in my case i have a 3 credit class that meets twice a week. You aren’t babied in college; you don’t have to show up if you don’t want to and so on. It’s a lot different. I would suggest taking a college class to see what it’s like for you. I’m sure there is some kind of dual enrollment you can do, talk to your guidance counselor. I would recommend taking like speech or sociology, you don’t want to overwhelm yourself.</p>
<p>Its really not that different- for me at least. You still have to grind through lectures (and assignments) and its a more “formal” setting so its a little more awkward to ask questions. Although you might not have daily assignments that are “busy work” assigned for a big grade- you should do the work if you want to know your material thoroughly. Some of my professors assign problem sets and quizzes every week that count for 1-2% of your grade. And you still have that huge final that counts for like 30% of your grade at the end of the course- which is sort of like the AP exam but less nerve racking.</p>