<p>@Vctory, you are a minor (I assume) so your parents are responsible for your health and well-being. </p>
<p>@mathyone Turned 18 earlier this year. Senior in high school. Never held back or anything like that; I was born 3 months after the Class of 2017 deadline. </p>
<p>Honestly, I could get all of my homework done and sleep 6-7 hours if I wanted to, but that would come at great cost to my social/work life. Between my EC’s (captain of the quiz bowl team, NHS VP, Exec. @ Student 2 Student club, mock trial head lawyer, model un delegate/member of dias @ local conferences, varsity swim team [actually something I cut out so I could have more time], among many others) and work (managed, met advertisers, wrote/signed/reviewed contracts, did a bunch of stuff for online business utilizing YouTube and other social media in video production; worked as a lifeguard for 20 hours/week in the beginning of this year to pay for a car, insurance, gas, and occasionally food; research I’m doing on the Nordic model and its viability in a globalized society), it gets a bit difficult. </p>
<p>I could either drop my social life (girlfriend, friends, the occasional party), the items above (I did stop swimming competitively), or sleep. I chose to drop sleep. My situation’s not too uncommon among the more…involved…students in my high school. The only person I know who gets 6-8 hours of sleep is our valedictorian (a good friend of mine), who doesn’t have a job or do too many time consuming EC’s. I don’t know how he does it tbh, but I don’t think he allots much time to going out with friends (lunches, movies, football games, etc). </p>
<p>Re: sleep</p>
<p>I average 5-8 hours of sleep, depending on the day and how busy I am. My parents aren’t “nowhere to be found” or anything like that. Until about 8th grade, I was in bed by a certain time. Now that I’m older, they feel that I’m old enough to make smart enough decisions on my own. To be honest, even if they told me to go to bed at x time, they can’t physically make me, especially if I still have homework to do.</p>
<p>I don’t like, mathyone, that you’re insinuating we have bad parents. Is it unhealthy to get so little sleep, yeah, but we’ll survive, and we all know that kids are on their own in college, and the same thing will happen (with alcohol!). </p>
<p>I don’t know enough about college classes to comprehensively debate that, but I know that college profs assume that any prerequisite knowledge is already mastered, introduce new material in all lectures(barring maybe one before the midterm/one before the final), and that year-long AP courses equate to semester/quarter long college classes (caveat is that 5-6 is about the upper limit of these classes whereas we are discussing 7-8 AP courses).</p>
<p>From a combination of what I have heard and seen, high school teachers need students to succeed (NLCB) and consequently lessen the difficulty of the course/harshness of the grading whereas college profs do not.</p>
<p>Since personal anecdote seems to be quite welcome here, my AP Stats teacher (prereq is BC calc) tried to teach calculus-based statistics at first, but more than 80% of the class failed (60% or lower) the first test, so it was removed from the gradebooks, and he forewent the calculus-based approach. However, about half the class still regularly failed tests at the pace at which he taught (he wanted to finish AP Stats w/o calculus in one semester—at local CC, it is taught in one quarter) so he slowed down further. In addition to the slow pace, he needed to reteach probability and function transformations (which are parts of Algebra II).</p>