The past four years of my life, I've constantly heard "I'm preparing you for college." Unfortunately, high school didn't quite prepare me for college like they believed they were, including the AP courses I took. Having been in college for four weeks now I have noticed immense academic differences between high and college, here are five of them.
1. Class Sizes.
This is probably the most obvious one, but the class sizes is one of the biggest differences between a high school course and a college course. A pretty average class size for every single class in high school is between 18 and 28 students. That isn't the case for college, class size is solely dependent on the type of class you are taking. For example, I have a lecture class with hundreds of people (over 600 to be exact, yikes) but then I have a more personal class with only 23 students. Although they are both introductory courses, one is a more common class among every major whereas my small class is major-specific.
2. Quizzes and Tests
Yes, sadly there are many quizzes and tests in college (boooo). But, in college they are definitely more frequent. In more than one of my five courses I have a weekly quiz due every week. In high school, my teacher would tell us about a quiz about a week ahead of time so that if we were being good students, we could study a whole week ahead of time to prepare for it. As I just mentioned, I take many weekly quizzes, yet they're all online and can be done wherever and whenever as long as it's submitted by the deadline. I never took an online quiz in high school.
3. Reading Assignments
Don't get me wrong, I did a lot of reading for a few of my high school courses, but nothing compared to the amount of reading I have had to do in the short four weeks I have been here. More common than not the homework from my college courses is not one, but two or three chapters of reading due by the next class, and then probably accompanied by an online quiz or some sort of graded assignment.
4. Grade Drop Opportunities
After reading each of my course's syllabus, (advice: read the syllabuses) I've noticed that a lot of my professors have noted that they'll drop the lowest quiz grade, graded assignment, clicker question set, etc. Whenever we tried to convince a teacher in high school to drop an assignment they pretty much always said no. But, then again I didn't have as many opportunities to screw up a quiz or assignment in my high school courses like I do in my college courses (aka show up to class without your clicker for graded questions).
5. No Busy Work
There were times in high school where I actually did enjoy the busy work we did because sometimes it was actually interesting (or helped boost my grade), but "busy work" is basically non-existent in college courses. Most of my courses include the professor presenting a lecture, class ends and then in an ideal world we do the homework right after class. If the course is more interactive with the students, then it usually involves discussions between the professor and students rather than worksheets completed by individuals.
Y'all, I can honestly say I have done more work in the past four weeks than I did in my four years of high school. Studying is more prominent and necessary in college and those who don't usually start to struggle. The good news is that I truly enjoy 99% of my college courses and am "happy" (saying this word very loosely) to complete the assignments.
