<p>I would probably suggest withdrawing from your most difficult classes, and focusing on the ones that seem doable. But first, talk to an adviser.</p>
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<p>@ futuremystudent. Hey, look at it this way. Say its curved, then you’ll probably get a C, which is fine because if you get perfect on everything else, then you’ll get an A. Thats what I do all the time. Last year, I failed a E&M lab exam. I talked to my professor and he told me that I needed to get a perfect on the final to get an A-. That kinda sucked because I knew that I was going to go through hell. Basically, I isolated myself for days, used caffine stimulants, and got very little sleep. I did all the past exams timed. All the homework. Derived every formula. Read and re-read the notes. Went to every single office hour. And guess what? I got my A-. But that made me change my major from physics to math lol. But seriously, if you studied for 48hrs, you shouldn’t have scored that low. How did you study? Sometimes for social science classes, I would make short summaries about the chapter. The shorter the summary the better. Why because if I can write a summary of what the book is talking about, then I know that I know what the book is talking about. Then I would use flash cards and go over every term. Throwing out any card that I already recognize. What works even better is to get ahold of past exams and do them timed. It doesn’t really have to be from your professor, any past exam will do. Just get ahold of like 6-7 of them. After taking each exam, look at the mistakes and go into your econ text book and highlight or jot what you did wrong and try to understand why. But in order to do this most effectively, you have to be about a week ahead of class, which doesn’t really help for your case since you crammed. But for the future, if you have a whole week, just to prep, you’ll be in good shape. So far, I found that this way, albeit excessive, is the best if you want to ensure a perfect score.</p>
<p>@Quantmechanic; sure the OP is at caltech. But I don’t see why her case is so special. Sure shes at one of the most difficult schools in the nation. But since she is good enough to get in, the courseload and material shouldn’t be way over her head. For example, her calculus class uses Apostol, which is a fairly difficult into to analysis book. But it should be up to her level because she should have mastered basic calculus just to get in. Other universites uses stewert. Its all computation and no thinking. Yet its used at most univerities. If the OP had gotten into any one of these universities, she probably would have earned straight A’s. Be the fact is, her level as a student is beyond these universities. She would be better served if she took a course more commensurate to her abilities. But its not like other students from else where don’t face as much stress. They to have to take courses(yes the easier no thinking based calc) that are commensurate to their abilities. So there shouldn’t be a huge deviation in the amount of time spent on homework. Basically other universities are easier, but the students are less intelligent( in the academic sense) so they should have to spend around the same amount of time to earn similar grades.</p>
<p>student14x, that sounds crazy. The time you put into studying for one final is about the same amount of time I put into one semester.</p>
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<p>Yes, because at most universities kids don’t take real analysis as a freshman.</p>
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<p>Thats what you have to do if you didn’t study before hand.</p>
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<p>and most caltech students would find it too easy to go over basic calculus again.</p>
<p>^^student14x,</p>
<p>Your idea that the level of challenge is matched, to some extent, to the level of the student is true, up to a point. The OP wouldn’t have been admitted to Caltech if the work were too much.</p>
<p>That being said, I don’t agree that the same effort will yield the same results at different universities. The classes at Caltech are designed for students who are both extremely bright and extremely committed.</p>
<p>I was responding mainly to umaineguy in #11, maya mah in #19, and (to a lesser extent) to nontraditional in #20.</p>
<p>The ideas that if you go to the library and study for a solid couple of hours a day, it will be enough, or that you could work 9-5 on the weekdays and have weekends free just do not apply to Caltech students (with the possible exception of fewer than 10 true geniuses). The idea that “if you really can’t handle the introductory classes, it might be time to consider that college isn’t for you” is possibly true, but not at all applicable to the OP’s circumstances, since she took the introductory college classes pre-college, and is now taking courses that would be higher-level most other places. The idea that 2 hours a day is more than enough . . . well, not at Caltech, not for anyone I ever knew who went there, not even if it’s 2 hours a day per class. </p>
<p>Nontraditional’s statement that if you are in class for 3 hours a week, you’re generally expected to put in 6 hours outside of class is a standard expectation that you may find in course catalogs, and it would apply to some courses in math and science at most large universities (but in other courses, that wouldn’t be enough time). At Caltech, I really doubt that the 2 hours out for 1 in would work at all.</p>