<p>Some of you are saying that CAP won’t prepare you for UT. The fact is, if you got a CAP offer, there is a good chance that you are a fairly bright student. Unfortunately the Top 10% rule (now slightly revised) keeps some awesome students out and allows some mediocre students in. Don’t think that CAP is ill preparing you for UT. Its not. Your freshmen and first part of your sophomore year is probably the most useless time, academically, at UT Austin. The classes are huge. I had a calculus class with 400 people in it. A history class with almost 600 people in it. Other classes of insanely similar size. My calculus 1 professor was from China. My calculus 2 professor was from Russia. Both of them could barely speak English. My TA happened to be the same guy for both classes. He was a stoner. I basically learned calculus on my own with the assigned text book and learning center videos. There is zero personal attention. All the tests are either scantron or graded by TAs. A lot of people actually do a full load of classes over the summer at ACC because they can’t stand the mayhem of a class with so many people at UT. Its not really till you are entering your junior year and you’re on your major track that you start to see why UT is such a good school. If you think that taking a calculus class with 400 people is any better than acing the same class over at UTSA, you’re wrong.</p>
<p>If you are in CAPs, you are probably at a slight advantage over some of your peers at UT. There are a lot of people that f*** up their first year because they are away from home for the first time and are not as determined or motivated as they were at mom and dad’s house. I went to UT. Its a really fun place and there are tons of things to do other than study. It was ranked recently by Playboy as the #1 party school in the country for a reason. The CAP program ensures that you can’t completely go off the rails in your first year by mandating a minimum GPA for you to transfer. Thats motivation enough to keep a decent head on your shoulders.</p>
<p>@LonghornDan, what classes did you take, were you an honors student? Just out of nothing but pure curiosity because I was a student at UTSA(2009-2010) too.</p>
<p>I took:
US History 1 & 2
Politics US & TX
Freshman comp 1 & 2
Psych
Pre Cal
Calculus
Microeconomics</p>
<p>I wasn’t an honors student. I didn’t realize my SAT was high enough to join going into the fall. They sent me an email about joining the honors college as well as a honors section of calculus between semester, but the class didn’t fit into my schedule and I would have had to move 2 classes to fit it. I really wish had done honors though.</p>
<p>Yeah the honors college was actually a good experience for me, I’m sure I would have really hated UTSA if I wasn’t a part of it lol. But congrats on your grades, that’s awesome, and good luck at UT!</p>
<p>I don’t think that a 3.2 in introductory Freshman classes determines any type of preparation for upper level classes at UT Austin. Especially if the 3.2 comes from a satellite school, which is inherently easier than the flagship campus, and the average student at the flagship campus probably makes higher than a 3.2 in their freshman year</p>
<p>Actually @AlexlinFTW the average at UTSA for the freshman year is somewhere around a 2.75. I can only name like 3 (non-Honors/CAP) freshman which had a GPA above a 3.0. I had many CAP friends who didn’t make the 3.2 cut. To be in the Honors College you only had to maintain a 3.0…so that shows what the expectations are for everyone else. Also, you may have heard stories about UTSA’s classes being easy but UTSA is actually in the process of making the curriculum harder and subsequently cutting the acceptance of the large amount of people who aren’t ready to be in college. So what you’ve heard about the classes not being hard is going to increasingly become irrelevant. I’m interested to find out the real difference in between a satellite school’s curriculum and UT’s curriculum. It’s kind of contentious to talk about something when you haven’t experienced both sides of the spectrum.</p>
<p>I agree with UT201012 on this. Did you actually do CAP, Alexlin? Because I ran into very few students at UTSA who made very good grades and were not CAP students. Obviously it is a fairly large student body and I don’t know everyone, but from what I can tell, I find it hard to believe that the average non-CAP freshmen got a 3.2 last semester. This isn’t to say they are all idiots, I knew some very smart kids who were going there because of economic reasons, but generally, the non-CAP students I knew didn’t do that well and were less motivated.</p>
<p>I too am curious to see how much tougher the UT curriculum is than UTSA. Part of me thinks that a big part of the reason that it is considered tougher has to do with the higher quality of students which leads to tougher competition for grades. Not necessarily that all of the classes and tests are just going to be 100 times harder, although this could be the case too. It is probably a mix of the both, I am interested to see what Aali has to say about this.</p>
<p>IMO, what makes UT “tougher” than UTSA depends on one’s situation going into UT, what I mean is that it all depends on what college you’re going into, what your major is, and how much you know about UT to begin with.</p>
<p>What made my transition tougher is the fact that when I went to orientation I was forced to sign up for classes I didn’t want to take (e.g. Astronomy 301) due to financial aid reasons. Another element to this is that the advisers I encountered at UT didn’t really want to be their with us during the summer and were less then entusiastic to help us transfer students out.</p>
<p>Apart from that, to answer your question, UT classes are tougher in part because most of the professors I encountered (other then my philosophy professor) were researchers who would much rather be in a lab or at home finishing their book or research paper.</p>
<p>Classes are HUGE, especially classes such as microeconomics and classes such as Calculus are weed-outs and most of the professors who teach them are foreign and are teaching at UT as part of a research program or whatever, some of them are Asian and its hard to understand their thick accents.</p>
<p>Basically, what I got out of UT was that you have to teach yourselves everything and figure your own way to understand the material, but this could be because of the classes and professors I took/got stuck with.</p>
<p>Maybe you may not feel this but when I took classes at UT I could tell and “feel” that the ciriculum is tougher and some classes were designed with the goal of weeding people out.</p>
<p>I often wonder what upper-division classes at UTSA are like when compared to UT as this would be a better guage in deciding which schools courses are “tougher”.</p>
<p>“The fact is, if you got a CAP offer, there is a good chance that you are a fairly bright student”</p>
<p>More like there is a good chance that you are a living person. Almost everyone gets offered CAP. I think there are certain minimum requirements that you now have to meet in order to get the offer (couldn’t find them, but I think I’ve read it somewhere), but I think they are pretty low. </p>
<p>UTSA should continue to allow everyone in. To do otherwise would be RACIST. And that is totally unacceptable. Racism is the worst thing in the world. I am pretty sure that a great number of students who “aren’t ready for college” are of a certain socially constructed “race” (not that such a thing really exists). It’s not the fault of the students, it’s the teachers fault, as they are obviously not helping these disadvantaged students learn.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to sound pretentious and I’m not a CAP student, and I’m sorry about the confusing syntax in my post. I meant to say that the average freshman GPA at UT Austin. (This is assumption, of course) I went to UTD for my freshman year, and most of the kids I know have upwards of 3.7. (And I mean most as in > 50% of the kids in my classes and that I hang out with) Although that might be because UTD has some sort of GPA inflation.</p>
<p>^
Could be some grade inflation there. Also,entering students SAT scores are quite high(even higher than UT-Austin, if I’m not mistaken) at UTD, which could lead to a false impression. UTSA student quality is lower.</p>
<p>Really? If UTSA wants to advance and become a quality institution then they need to stop accepting so many students. As for disadvantaged kids, community colleges are a great way to jump start your college career, and lets not forget that schools such as UT Austin go out of their way to recruit and attract minorities and disadvantaged students.</p>
<p>I don’t understand how rejecting certain students would make UTSA racist? Also, its not always the teachers fault sometimes these students could give a $hit about their education.</p>
<p>someone would file a lawsuit, UTSA cant just beef up admission standards in 1 years. This would be something that they would have to spread out over maybe 4-5 years. A university cant be a CC one day and a harvard the next.</p>
<p>Okay since none of you even go to UTSA, I will tell you the scoop. The organizations I was in and job I had at UTSA allowed me to witness firsthand what is going on, but it’s not a secret. President Romo himself will tell you that they are in the process of trying to make UTSA a Tier 1 school and to do so they must make it harder to get into. My Honors College professor explained UTSA’s plan in depth to our class and they are indeed raising the bar for the qualifications to get into UTSA, you have to have a higher GPA, rank, and test scores than even just the year before. </p>
<p>@antiracist, Disadvantaged students aren’t the teachers responsibility, it’s actually the family’s fault. It is the job of a parent to make sure they provide their child with the skills to succeed in school. Disadvantaged kids usually do not make it because they have no support. Also, how is that racist? Other schools have acceptance rates of 50% and lower and UTSA’s is still sitting in the 90% range. The top 8% rule is a part of Texas’ affirmative action laws, so of course it is in place at UTSA. So the argument that it’s racist is invalid as long as the top 8% is in place.</p>
<p>@AlexlinFTW I see where you are coming from. At UTSA we don’t have A-,A+, and etc. Instead an A is an A, so that doesn’t allow for our GPA to be inflated at all. This is paired with the fact that a lot of students at UTSA just aren’t that smart since as I stated the acceptance rate is still in the 90 percentile range. I mean at other schools to be in the Honor Societies you’d need a 3.5+, but at UTSA all you need is a 3.2. But I totally misread your post, and thought you were talking about UTSA and not UT lol…sorry about that :p</p>
<p>@UT what honors society are you part of that only requires a 3.2? Maybe you meant honors college?</p>
<p>Also, the assumption that UTSA restricting their admissions would be racist is ludicrous. You are assuming that this would automatically knock out minorities. It also ignores the fact that many other universities have stricter acceptance standards.</p>
<p>@LonghornDan lol no it’s not the Honors college…here is the actual email that was sent to me…I never joined the fraternity/society(it has brothers and sisters in it?) though.</p>
<p>"Dear Prospective Member of Phi Sigma Pi,</p>
<p>Congratulations! Due to your outstanding academic achievement the Epsilon Mu Chapter of Phi Sigma Pi National Honor Fraternity would like to invite you to attend our spring rush! </p>
<p>…Eligible students will have at least 12 credit hours, a cumulative G.P.A. of 3.0 and 3 remaining semesters at the University."</p>
<p>so i misquoted it, it was actually a 3.0…I also got one from the Honors Alliance…same 3.0 GPA requirement…</p>