Perhaps being organized helps more in college than it does in high school. If I had a paper to write, I organized it in my head while doing other things. I’m not so sure I could do that now. I’m taking a class to keep my license up to date this fall, so I guess I’ll find out.
I went to a mediocre public high school where a fair number of students didn’t go to college (I didn’t want to myself, but I ended up deciding it was better than a lifetime of menial labor). Even though I didn’t necessarily enjoy most of my classes, the quality of teaching was much better.
I would say that high school was harder overall. Three differences:
My HS courses were generally not curved (with a couple of exceptions). If I bombed a test, it counted. Most of my engineering profs curved fairly generously, and my classmates kindly filled in the bottom tail.
I had several serious extracurricular commitments in HS that I did not continue in college. Huge increase in my free time.
Finals weeks do not compare to the stress and work of AP testing season junior/senior years. I do fondly look back on those times as some of my most productive.
On the other hand, job applications are much more stressful than college apps.
I went to a state flagship in Engineering…at the time they had to fail 60% of the freshman class in order to keep the total number of students in check. It was a rude awakening for me.
I think college is easier than High School - for many of the reasons people have mentioned:
Less busy work (unlike AP HS classes where you had to do unnecessary time wasting projects),
fewer classes at a time (so you can focus on them),
only classes you have an interest in (except maybe some required classes),
professors generally curve - almost all finals are curved (or do things like drop the lowest quiz grade),
assignments for the entire term clearly defined in a syllabus given out the first day of class (no surprises - no unexpected work),
very clear grading rubrics for assignments,
professors have flexible office hours to answer questions,
professors offer review sessions for finals and tests - often provide study guides and copies of tests from previous years(unlike HS teachers who sometimes don’t allow tests to go home let alone let you see prior tests)
@mstomper - How many STEM classes, that would “count” towards a STEM degree, did you take for your gen eds?
Those are the classes where frazzled kids usually saw the curves, typically in the intro classes but sometimes in upper-level or grad level classes as well. I would ask them how they thought they did on an exam, and the answer would be that their grade would depend on the curve. Occasionally a grade of 50% or even lower could still be an “A.”
Frazzled2thecore, I was a Political Science and History major, with a Master’s in library science. I nearly flunked Algebra 2 in high school with a tutor. My older son, who Is know is ours because I was there for the birth, had already finished calculus at the age when I was struggling with algebra 2. No curve would have helped me in STEM classes.
Tutor didn’t cost anything; she was another teacher at my high school. The problem with algebra was that I could never tell if I understood or not. In any other class I could tell within 5 points what my score would be after completing a test. In that class I would think I might have gotten an 80 and end up with a 20. The quality of instruction certainly wasn’t the best, but my aptitude was also low.
“The problem with algebra was that I could never tell if I understood or not”
-Easy. If you could do many problems correctly based on the concept that being explained, then you understood. Math is much easier than any other classes to figure out if concept is understood or not. The same goes for Physics, General Chem. Now, Organic chemistry, Bio are all different story. You actually need to memorize for these classes and the only way to figure out if material is understood is to ask questions that have to be constructed very carefully to cover every single fact in material. Math has problems to be pulled from any resources (textbooks, internet) to check understanding.
Math is just another language that is used in hard sciences and applied math to describe the relationships between several variables. We are not talking here even about Math major in UG, after all we are talking about American HS Algebra that is taught to 12 y o kids in other countries. There is NOTHING complicated there,
The fact is that somebody has built a wall in your head by telling you that you are not capable of doing math, so you just have to destroy it. However, you need to have a desire to do so. If desire is not there, then you are stuck with the notion that you have a “low aptitude” for math. There is no such thing for this low level of math, but many thousands are told that and it is very sad story. In fact learning language is much more complicated process. If a 3 y o is capable of learning language (aside from the ones that are not fully mentally functional, we are not discussing this condition here), then any 12 y o is fully capable of learning Algebra, guarantee!
This is the last time I’m going to address the topic of my travails with Algebra in high school. I was actually told constantly that I could do it. I was actually pretty good at arithmetic, and could do it in my head. As a librarian, one thing I teach my students is the difference between fact and opinion. There seems to be some confusion here; in your post I see several opinions being stated as if they were facts. I’ve had a successful career despite my lack of success in my high school math classes (by the way, pulling problems from the Internet was not an option during the 1980-81 school year). “Low aptitude” is, of course, relative. My mathematical/quantitative skills are not in the same league as my verbal/analytical skills. It was the latter two that got me through college and grad school. If my livelihood depended on learning second year Algebra I’m sure I could do it. However, it doesn’t. My sons have had no problems with it. My oldest son just finished taking Discrete Math as a junior and is planning on majoring in math when he goes to college.
In another thread, someone mentioned a high school calculus AB course that required 20 hours per week of time over a year (1 hour in class and 3 hours of homework every day). A comparable content college calculus 1 course is 12 hours per week over a semester.
Students at high schools which have a busywork problem like the one described will find college to be less work.
Sometime busy work means texting constantly or staring to the computer screen. If I see my kid doing AB calc. for 3 hrs, I would offer help. I can actually help here as calc requires no memory and all material in their textbook, done it (few times that D. asked and the same goes for Physics). I pulled her many times from her English papers when the time spent on it was excessive. But you can work forever on English paper getting it closer and closer to perfect (standard that is established by a student herself). Math problem is either correct or incorrect. If it is incorrect, then go back to the textbook and study material and do it again. Repeat for each problem. It should not be 3 hours, unless there is a cell phone sitting at the same table - then remove it.
I do not see at all how college would be easier for someone who spends 3 hrs on AB calc in HS. Working hard is NOT the same as working long. Efficiency is the goal. My kid had her share of very hard (for HER) classes in HS, but college was much much harder for her and everybody around her. Many HS valedictorians were derailed from their original track at college right after the first semester. At least they did not waste a lot of time, since the program was designed correctly with the weed out killer class being in the first semester of the freshman year.
I will also add that even small colleges are a bigger world than most secondary schools. Kids develop reputations and teachers can often have preconceptions about them. While this isn’t true in subjects where the grade is purely quantitative, it can be in others. I was justifiably perceived as an underachieving slacker in high school. had trouble getting teachers to acknowledge when I had put serious effort into papers later on. This was not an issue in college, where professors judged my work based on quality alone, with no consideration of how much time and effort I had dedicated to it.
…agree. Even going from the one of top HSs in your state to your in-state public college will require a huge adjustment up in academic efforts and grades may still suffer.