<p>Wow, Thanks for the reply!</p>
<p>Btw,in my high school, I am taking 7 classes(45 minutes long) every day.( 5 AP classes)…</p>
<p>I am pretty sure you took many AP classes when you were in high school…</p>
<p>So, do you think college is not much harder(or easier) than high school?</p>
<p>It varies from person to person. A course may be “AP,” but this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the same as a college course. I find Brown to be a little easier than high school, but more work. On the other hand, one of my friends who went to my school and did equally well there finds Brown more difficult. It depends on your courseload, learning style, how hard the adjustment to living away from home is, how much more time you end up spending on social and extracurricular activities, and so on. In high school, you likely didn’t have courses with hundreds of people. Learning in a lecture setting may give you trouble, or you may find it very easy. I know some people who coasted through high school who find Brown a lot harder. I know some people who find Brown to be easy. I’m sure anyone who answers this question will have a different answer for themselves. Brown has some devices to lower stress compared to other top colleges, but having talked to friends at other Ivy League and top schools, I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the work itself at Brown is easy in comparison.</p>
<p>What concentrations (major) are you interested in? I think if you tell us that we may give you better advice on what to expect… </p>
<p>Ex-computer scientist concentrator here (moving to something kind of different… but not really, it is in the humanities)</p>
<p>In general I found computer science to be a lot of work and a lot of thinking. Much harder than high school, because you have to 1st) understand the concept 2nd) apply it to the project 3rd) do the project (try doing all of this while partying, dealing with other assignments, dealing with people, going to your friend’s spoke word concert.) So you couldn’t do what you can get away in highschool and understand the concept the night before the assignment is due and expect a decent grade…</p>
<p>College will be harder if you are extremely social, or extremely anti social (you will probably feel lonely)</p>
<p>Honestly don’t worry about this much everyone has a unique way of learning so.</p>
<p>Computer Science is one of the fields that is very challenging at Brown, even when compared to Princeton and Harvard (friends are blown away when I describe projects we have in our low level classes). It’s completely reasonable to expect to spend 20+ hours on a programming assignment. Math is a mixed bag. I’ve heard horror stories about Math 35 from people who go on to do quiet well in upper level courses. On the other hand, courses like 10 and 17 (depending on the professor - 17 my freshman year was completely insane, based on the problems they were given) are not any more challenging than the high school equivalents, although the professors may not hold your hand as much. College is about independence, and this also transfers to your studies. You need to know when to get help and when to study and what to study. Languages go faster than at most/all high schools (5 years of German credit typically places you into 5th semester, for instance; I know people with 4-5 years who placed into 3rd semester), but the work likely isn’t more challenging. I’m not qualified to talk about the social sciences, but in the Humanities, I’ve found my the essays to be graded a bit more strictly than they were in high school, but not by a whole lot. You’ll likely have more reading for such classes, as well.</p>
<p>Finally, there are intangibles. Going into an auditorium with hundreds of people to take an exam worth a sizable portion of your grade can be nerve-wracking. You might not have had that experience before. As arapollo said, don’t worry about it much, and I agree with the comment on sociality correlating to college difficulty.</p>
<p>I went to a high school much like Uroogla’s (whom I believe went to Andover…?) where by sophomore year we could expect upwards of five or six hours of work each night, and grade deflation was rampant. Work-wise, my first semester at Brown felt easier than any semester in high school, but the work was different. Like other posters, I took a math course that was far more challenging than anything I’d done before, and although I had fewer major assignments, they were worth a much larger percentage of my grade than I was accustomed to. The adjustment itself was the hardest part. Balancing social life with academic work and a job was more difficult than I’d expected: all my friends lived within ten minutes of me, things were going on at all hours, and classes didn’t start until 9 am, so initially, I had very little to keep me in check. Everyone figured out what worked for them sooner or later, though.</p>
<p>SAT2350: In general, college students are expected to do more work outside the classroom than high school students. (This may be different at some extremely rigorous high schools.) For example, compare an English class in high school and in college. In high school, you might take a month or two to read and study “Hamlet” or “Tale of Two Cities.” In college, you are expected to read a book a week – so an English class could go through 10-12 books a semester. If you take a lot of classes with heavy reading loads, this could mean reading three or more 300-500 page books per week, plus other scholarly research articles. Not to mention the regular papers to write.</p>
<p>Some people can easily handle the independent nature of the workload; others can’t and procrastinate and socialize instead of reading 1500 pages/week.</p>
<p>I’ve known high school students to scoff at the college workload, because they think having 4-5 classes compared to the 7-8 in high school will be easy. A year later, I get great amusement reading their Facebook status updates about how deluged they are with work and they’ve never worked so hard in their life, etc.</p>