I feel like the AP and dual enrollment classes prepared my kids a lot better than me for how much and how you have study in college. I never used to hear anyone talk about doing research at school, so that’s a change. Now it’s expected to be in a club or two - we did a lot of intramural sports, but I don’t recall people feeling any pressure to join a club. I vaguely recall seeing signs about some of the engineering organizations like maybe ACM, but didn’t know anyone in them. Between intramurals, pool, ping pong, and reruns of MASH, who had time for that other stuff?
In 1976, I graduated third in my class of around 650, was awarded the prize for top English student, earned a 5 on the AP English exam, 99% SAT, and earned a scholarship to beauty school – my top choice. I took a break from beauty school to go to college (to help a friend) and endured a soul-sucking career in IT for 37 years but, now that I’m retired, I’m thinking it would be fun to work in a salon and get back to what I always wanted to do. I guess I just wasn’t “college material.”
Yes, and filling a large brown shopping bag full of the “chads,” slipping the open end under someone’s door, and jumping on the bag to blow a million pieces of confetti into the room. Good times. 
Keypunch here but not until grad school! I made a boat load of spending money typing papers in undergrad!
Key punch? Oh ya. I have kept a couple of complete program decks for all these years hoping that my kids would appreciate them and the stories they evoke in my memory. I gave my son (CS major deep into artificial intelligence) his deck as a Christmas gift. 120 cards of a FORTRAN 77 program. He shows it to his friends all the time - keeps it on his dorm room desk. I’m saving another for my daughter - when she gets to college.
There were no AP classes at my HS until the year after I graduated. I still managed to graduate in time, though.
Hah FORTRAN 77…Fortran 4 for me…and COBOL 3. I remember being so excited at the first “personal computer” station and learning basic. Wowser.
@momofthreeboys - remember booting up the computer?
You rich students had electric typewriters. I hate to write, placed into the Honors English Lit class- most freshmen took their “sophomore lit” courses as they placed out of “freshman composition”. Was usually late to the small class the day the paper was due- typing on my manual typewriter with whiteout. Used that for my senior honors thesis in Chemistry- on expensive bond paper (no whiteout allowed- had to redo a page) including pesky tables. Calculus without a scientific calculator… Still have a slide rule which we showed to a current grad student in science- he had no idea what it was.
AP courses were regional once upon a time in the early 1970’s. But- the east coast didn’t have it all. Big Ten U’s had whole computer science buildings while some on the east coast didn’t even have the CS major (source-meeting someone). NO INTERNET. period.
The top ten chemistry department had one Wang calculator in a lab. We did the around ten digit lab data punch card for only one P-chem lab- and one mistake meant going to get another single card. I sure hope they still have the P-chem glass blowing lab day- rumor had it the TA’s had fun laughing at our attempts.
Class registration was in person, getting paperwork at one end of campus, walking to all of the buildings to get approval from the departments and winding at the opposite end of a large, hilly campus to turn it in. At least you could get into a full section with your sob story sometimes (in my major, can’t…) talking to a TA. Cold in January. That precious paper Timetable was all important. Upper class standing is good for getting into classes and earlier registration, not necessarily meaningful in time to graduate.
When I was in school (all gazillion years) backpacks were not that common- they are so much more practical than book bags.
UW has the same dorm food service system, but we had cardboard cards worth $10 the cashier printed out remaining amount on we bought for one of three meal plan amounts. Now they have a plastic card to refill as needed- and no minimum required.
I don’t see high school kids as more experienced. More stressed out, with more pressure, yes. But these kids have not had the chance to just live and explore life. They are bogged down in AP classes, stuck on this relentless hamster wheel to do more and achieve more academics earlier, but they aren’t prepared for real life. It’s really sad. Has the college experience changed? I don’t know. If so, I hope for the better.
I went to a small Catholic high school in the late 1960’s. If there were AP exams at the time I never heard of them. But I do remember that in several courses we used college level textbooks.
My first few CS courses (Pascal & Assembler) in the early 1980s at CUNY were on punch cards. I transferred because of it to a school with dumb terminals. I couldn’t deal with data structures on punch cards. (I’m such a snowflake)
Actually, our Xerox Sigma 7 minicomputer broke down and we had to finish our assembler course by writing a paper about IBM’s assembler language as compared to Xerox (yes Xerox was a competitor of Digital and Prime).
My kids each have a nice hand built gaming rig, linux laptop, and android phone.
BR14
i think it was my senior year in college,1974, I got to use my first dumb terminal to write out programs. The instructor said that we could prep assignments on the terminal but would still have to do the keypunch cards so that we could get a printout to hand in. I guess the term “screen capture” and the “print screen” button hadn’t been invented yet.
Feeling very old right now. :((
I remember having to drag my IBM mainframe computer a half mile across campus through 3 feet of snow uphill - both ways!
Some of the interesting changes in college that I’ve noted from my son’s descriptions include:
- Lecture videos. Many of his key classes are videoed and available same-day. When I've asked if that means that many students skip the lecture, the answer is no. The video allows students to focus on listening to the lecture without taking notes - they can return to the video later to take notes and replay key sections.
- Academic support. Office hours and access to TAs is supplemented with class specific web pages and online Q&A threads.
- Computer access. Students have broad access to computers and even class specific assets like GPU clusters. Some classes distribute vouchers so students can utilize larger GPU clusters from Amazon and Google.
and there’s much more…
When I was an undergraduate studying business in the early 1970’s my marketing class had to do a group presentation for a fictitious company that we had developed. We took turns presenting our portion using an overhead projector. Apparently the marketing class still has the same requirement but the presentation is a bit more polished:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu3sOcc94lo&t=79s