All college students can understand the struggle: suffering through four years of high school while being told that it's all that horrible "just to prepare them for college." We can all recite our teachers verbatim with things along the line of "college professors being so much stricter," or "this kind of work not passing in a college classroom." We've been there. We've done that. Now we're actually on a college campus, and this is what I have to say about those things.
High school said: "College professors are so much stricter."
If anything, my professors have been so much more lenient since I've gotten here. Being an English major, I've noticed this specifically when it comes to writing essays -- if we're given a guideline on how to do an assignment, my professor is pretty willing to let me stray from the structure if need be. For the most part, I've noticed that if I have a good idea for an assignment that may not be exactly what my professors are asking for, they'll let me roll with it as long as I've got a solid grip on it. Definitely less strict with prompt-following than my high school teachers were.
High school said: "These crappy notes won't pass in a college classroom."
I've only been here for about a month and a half and I've already tested several different note-taking strategies to figure out what works for me. Professors don't actually care how you write down information, as long as you do end up retaining it -- so whether you type your notes, or hand-write them, or record them, the bottom line is that whatever helps you learn best is acceptable. There's no set way to take notes in any college classroom.
High school said: "You're going to be left with so much more free time than you had here."
This is absolutely false, at least from my experience. I have very little (if any) down time during the school week, when I had plenty of time to sit and watch Netflix after a "long" day in high school. All of my time not in classes in spent doing homework, studying, or attending late-night club meetings. (Man, I'd take those long days back more than anything right about now -- hello, midterm week.)
High school said: "Attendance doesn't matter in college classes."
Attendance does matter (at least at Fordham), even more so than it did in high school. Since college classes are only a semester (aka half a year) long, I'm only permitted to have three absences max in all of my classes without having my final grade suffer. In high school, I was allowed to have thirty absences (fifteen for half-year classes) without losing any sort of credit. So if anything, attendance is definitely much more crucial here. I know at some schools there are professors who don't mind kids missing classes as long as they get the materials they missed, but I'm actually held up to a much stricter standard at Fordham University than I was in high school.
High school said: "You need to actually do the reading."
You don't, actually. My high school teachers should have rephrased and instead said that you actually need to do the reading if you want to do well in class. But the bottom line is, there's no professor standing over your shoulder every morning making sure you did your homework the night before and that you read the chapters you were assigned. They're counting on you to be an adult and do what you were told to, but they won't harp on you if you don't. It'll just be your fault if you fail a pop quiz or get a D on a paper, not theirs.
High school said: "College professors don't help you, you're expected to do everything on your own."
You definitely have a degree of freedom in college when it comes to doing your work, but from personal experience, my professors are always available when I need them. If I have a question about an assignment, they'll either help me after class or email me back fairly quickly, even if it's late at night. If I have a big paper or something that I need guidance on, office hours are a godsend, and they're always willing to look over my work and guide me in the right direction if I'm feeling lost.
So, that's just my opinion on some things that I was told in high school about college that ended up being totally untrue. Now that basically all of my predisposed knowledge on this system ending up failing me before I got here, it's time to work my way through the rest of my first semester while finding out how things work on my own. I'm fairly confident in my abilities, so that shouldn't be too much of a struggle.
...I just wish I'd learned these things before leaving high school.
