What are your new college students saying about the difficulty of their classes?

[cathmom]

My son says they are in general easier than what he did in homeschooling.

[periwinkle]

He reports Calculus and Physics are easy:001_huh:

 

The only class he is saying is challenging at all is the general education class, a mix of history and English, which requires a good bit of reading (and some papers later in the semester).

[Gwen in VA]

Wow! My dd1 found her freshman year quite challenging.

 

She was told that if she did 2 hours of work per day on chemistry, she would get an A. Well, she did nearly that -- and she did end up with an A, but she found the course quite difficult.

 

Physics was easy for her -- she had taken AP pysics B -- but that was her "easy" course both semesters of freshman year.

 

She found art history challenging both semesters -- all the memorization of painters and dates and schools and places.........

 

I think I will not share with her the fact that others are finding their freshman courses easy! :)

 

Ds thinks his classes are all easy, but since he has only had two days of classes, I'm waiting to see how he feels in a week.

[Anna]

My oldest is in her second year at a private college... in their Honors Program. She tells me that in general, she's been able to keep up just fine. Some of her friends who were in the best ps's in our area, not so. Several of them are doing well but really struggling to maintain decent gpa's.

[Miss Marple]

My son is seeing the differences in various schools. He took concurrent university classes locally at a university that is under the same board as the big state university he is at now. He says that the classes at the big school are more difficult but he thinks it has to do with the number of students per class. He says that the professors aren't personally involved with their students (in chemistry and calculus) whereas the smaller branch offered so much more individual instruction.

 

What I noticed was that there was so much hand-holding in his concurrent courses. In most of his classes he had over a 100% average - how is that possible??? There was always extra credit (for showing up at a concert, turning in homework all the time, etc.). And he did take difficult courses concurrently, but they just seemed easier to him.

 

So, while he is finding it a little more difficult, I don't think it is the course content itself as much as the type of instruction. And he is still not happy about the Asian TA in chemistry who speaks English but doesn't understand questions.

 

Personally, I always felt that the concurrent courses he was taking were probably more on the level with Honors or AP high school courses.

[periwinkle]

Wow! My dd1 found her freshman year quite challenging.

 

I think I will not share with her the fact that others are finding their freshman courses easy! :)

 

Ds thinks his classes are all easy, but since he has only had two days of classes, I'm waiting to see how he feels in a week.

 

Yeah, well, we will see what ds's grades are like at the end of the semester! He is a natural at maths/sciences and tends to be pretty laid-back about most things. Plus, he had calculus and physics courses in high school, so most of the content so far has been review. I'm pretty sure things will get tougher soon:D

[laughing lioness]

My ds is surprised at how easy the classes are (all humanitites type). She is also surprised at the amount of busy work required and how many of her classemates have figured out just how many classes they can miss and not affect their grade.

[Alyce]

But she's a dance major and two of her classes are dance classes. She loves her Japanese class and thinks she'll have no problem there. She's really proud of herself in her College Algebra class. She thanked me for using MUS. Said it made her better prepared than most of her class. The only class she can't get a handle on is her Arts & Society class (It's like a Dance, theater history course). She says she can't get a good handle on what the teacher wants or how to approach the class but she'd only had 2 classes so far.

[Quiver0f10]

So far my DS thinks all his classes are fairly easy and is adjusting well.

[Jenny in Florida]

. . . I happen to have her on the phone right now. So, I asked her to refresh my memory of her experiences last year.

 

She confirmed what I remembered, that the actual content wasn't particularly challenging. Her biggest hurdle was learning to manage the workload. Of course, she carried a lot of credits, which probably had something to do with that.

[Guest Katia]

I don't think dd is far enough along yet to make a really informed decision, but in general she feels very well prepared for all her classes. The content is not difficult at all so far, and she is loving all the in-class discussions, but her main concern seems to be managing the homework work-load along with scheduling work and instrument practice, and figuring out what each individual professor wants.

 

Case in point: History. She says she is really frightened of this professor. He is very......I don't know how to describe him. One day he assigned 90 pages of reading for the next day. The next assignment was 3 pages. He says don't come to class if you are not prepared, so dd studies diligently. One day he gives a pop quiz. She has studied all the assigned pages very hard, she 'thinks', then discovers the quiz is on the two illustrated maps in the assigned reading, which, you guessed it, she had never even considered studying. sigh. She feels she can't win in that class and already has a defeated attitude, which the prof has intentionally fostered. I really don't like people like that.

 

Otherwise, she seems to be finding the work interesting and stimulating. Not too hard, not too easy, and just adjusting to a different way of doing 'school'.

[Laura Corin]

The only class she can't get a handle on is her Arts & Society class (It's like a Dance, theater history course). She says she can't get a good handle on what the teacher wants or how to approach the class but she'd only had 2 classes so far.

 

My first few months studying drama were hard - the point of view is so different from studying drama-as-literature, or arts-as-history.

 

Best wishes

 

Laura

[Michelle in GA]

My ds says his math classes have been pretty rough going...2 hours a day outside work, no calculators on tests...OTOH, his humanities based classes have been fairly easy, much easier than what he did at home, he tells me.