<p>I’ll add my voice to others: blanket aspersions on CCs are just ignorant. I went to a CC for my first 1.75 years, now I’m at a state flagship engineering college. And I’ve talked to a lot of people who were both at CC with me and at Big State School. The general consensus is that the quality of teaching for things like the calc series, diffy qs, linear algebra, intro physics, etc. is much much better at CC. The thing that makes “real college” calc, diffy qs, linear algebra, intro physics, etc. so much “harder” is that these classes are badly taught, often by grad students, in huge classes. You have to put more effort into it BECAUSE the teaching is so obtuse.</p>
<p>At CC I enjoyed small class sizes and professors who knew their stuff and knew how to teach it (for the most part, there was one exception), and my fellow students were no stupider than my classmates at “real college.” At CC, all of my class mates in the classes that mattered (physics, math) were going on to STEM at a four-year college anyway, not a bunch of yahoos looking for a high school after high school. My discrete math teacher showed his exams to people teaching the same class at Big State School and they all said they were appropriate. My calc iv teacher said the teachers at Big State School thought his final exams were too hard!</p>
<p>Switching to “real college” the quality of teaching hit the floor, and the easiness of the classes went up because huge class sizes virtually necessitate all exams being multiple-choice, grading being based on things like attendance and little quizzes given here and there. It wasn’t until this quarter when I started taking the intermediate Newtonian sequence teaching went back to CC-quality.</p>