<p>How do college science classes differ from high school?</p>
<p>In high school, you are expected to reproduce content or solve problems of a similar form to what was taught in class.</p>
<p>In college, you are expected to figure out how to apply content to new problems unlike those introduced in class.</p>
<p>Sounds a lot more difficult.</p>
<p>The biggest difference between high school and college is that in college you spend less time in class and more time learning on your own. In college the lectures prepare you for reading the textbook and understanding the material. Many college students think all they have to do is go to lecture and then take the test, but they’re actually missing most of the learning process.</p>
<p>Are tests ridiculously challenging even if you read the textbook and know the material?</p>
<p>If you:</p>
<ul>
<li>Read the book.</li>
<li>Go to class.</li>
<li>Do the assignments.</li>
<li>Do the labs.</li>
</ul>
<p>You will likely be in a good position to do well on the tests.</p>
<p>Note that labs in college courses tend to be scheduled in larger chunks (like 3-4 hour sessions), so that larger lab assignments can be given than in high school.</p>
<p>College courses will typically go more in-depth than high school courses, or will cover more advanced material. For physics specifically, college physics courses for physics and engineering majors will use calculus which high school physics courses typically do not use (because few high school students take calculus).</p>
<p>College courses also move at a faster rate, so you must be able to keep up, otherwise you WILL fall behind. Do all pre-labs well before the actual lab. Do not wait a day before the lab to do your pre-lab.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses.</p>
<p>If someone was equally good at everything, which subjects’ intro class would be hardest: Biology, Chemistry, or Physics? </p>
<p>My guess is chem., but what’s your experience.</p>
<p>It depends on the student.</p>
<p>A student who is good at math may find physics the easiest, but a student who is not good at math may find physics to be the most difficult.</p>
<p>Note that biology and physics may have prerequisites or corequisites of other college level courses – organic chemistry for biology and calculus for physics. Chemistry likely has no prerequisites except perhaps high school chemistry.</p>
<p>I took Gen Chem with a lab my first semester because in high school I got straight A’s in Chem without even trying.</p>
<p>In college, you get through a chapter in like two or three days instead of a week or two in high school. You’re expected to teach yourself the details and you get long problem sets every night that really help you learn, but they are also pretty time consuming. I don’t feel like I learned much at all, but I managed a B for my final grade.</p>
<p>As far as Chem Lab goes, it is a lot more intense than high school. In my high school, we would do two labs a week at about an hour long and you got step-by-step instructions and already made charts to fill out. In college, my labs were once a week, but very long and you absolutely had to get the whole lab done in one session. You only had time to actually get the data, so then for the rest of the week you’d work on calculating results and writing about your conclusions. I remember most of my time being used to work on my Chem lab. Somehow, I pulled an A- although I felt exhausted afterward haha.</p>
<p>Don’t let me scare you away from the classes, just be prepared to do a lot more work outside of class.</p>
<p>I’ve found that many successful high school / AP chemistry students tend to get through with fairly poor conceptual understanding. That will not fly in college.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Can you give an example?</p>
<p>I’ll try to think of something specific…generally, I think high school courses tend to make quantitative questions conceptually easy. In my college chem course, figuring out which equations to use in a quantitative problem usually required you to have a good conceptual grasp on the chemistry taking place.</p>
<p>I got lost after Bronsted reactions, redox, and such. I did quite well when it came to Quantum Theory, and the physics portion of Chemistry since I enjoy theoretical physics/astrophysics. But everything else was like trying to translate the Assyrian language.</p>
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</p>
<p>One example of this that I encountered recently was a student who knew that the ideal gas law is used for working with a gas at one condition, and the combined gas law is used for dealing with a gas at two different conditions, but had no idea that they’re essentially a rearrangement of the same equation. She was stymied if you kept P, V, and T constant but changed the number of moles, since you need the combined gas law for dealing with two conditions, but the number of moles doesn’t appear in the combined gas law. I showed her that if you just use PV=nRT for each condition and take a ratio</p>
<h2>P1V1 = n1RT1</h2>
<p>P2V2 = n2RT2</p>
<p>everything that is held constant cancels out, leaving you with whatever variable you need to solve for. She also thought that when using the combined gas law the PV units always had to be atmospheres and liters. When a problem gave her pascals and mL, she did a lot of unnecessary additional calculations.</p>
<p>This isn’t a stupid student – she was waitlisted at Harvard and accepted to Cambridge, and she’s a very quick learner. The problem is that she’s learning chemistry from the equations instead of from the concepts. In this case she had two different equations for one concept, and it ended up confusing her.</p>
<p>Spdf, that is the same way I got confused. The professor I had didn’t explain it thoroughly enough, and I tried to laern the stuff on my own and with a tutor. But then with the Professor saying do it this way, and the tutor saying it another way, I got extremely confused.</p>
<p>This is all very interesting and helpful. Thanks a lot.</p>
<p>I will concur with other posters: the pace is much faster, the material more condensed per class than in high school. It’s not a good idea to fall behind, as it’s more difficult to catch up.</p>
<p>Conceptual understanding is key as well. A mistake that often occurs with chemistry and bio is to think that it’s all about memorization. It’s not. Trying to remember all the different chemical compounds in o-chem, for example, is practically impossible, but if you understand the rules on how the C, H and O atoms can bind together in a molecule, it’s much easier. Same with physics and math. The minute you stop thinking about particular equations to memorize, and start understanding in terms of rates of change, physical concepts become much clearer. Logarithmic functions were a really weird thing to deal with in pre-calculus, but once you properly grasp the concept of functions, they become a powerful tool, no longer a weird “y is the inverse of an exponential of x” curve.</p>
<p>And a piece of advice on that front: to really understand concepts, you need to practice. Don’t just read and copy the notes and do the assignments. Do more on your own. And don’t ask your prof “do you have extra/suggested exercises from the textbook (or elsewhere)?”, you can find that out by yourself.</p>