Key Point: Much depends upon the student's high school experience. Students from many elite private prep schools (both boarding & day) are accustomed to such workloads and intellectual challenges. |
Very common comment regarding students from elite prep boarding schools who attend top 10 colleges and universities. Some LACs, such as Swarthmore and Harvey Mudd, seem to take pride in loading up students with work. Happens at CMU, Princeton, and Georgia Tech also. More common to be stressed out over college/university workload for engineering majors than for most other majors. |
Unrelated to wear anyone went to high school, but an English class at a SLAC will be more like 10-12 books per semester. so,if you are taking 2-3 of them, it can be a lot of reading. Ideally students figure out how to mix their classes so that they aren’t taking 4-5 resding/writing intensive courses each semester. My DCs are humanities majors but have take a reasonable number of STEM classes. Those with labs are certainly time consuming in terms of class time and require study, but not as time consuming as English/sociology/history classes. But they aren’t taking the super tough chem courses to be fair! |
So they should live like hermits for 8 years to be prepared for "life". I disagree. I think there can be balance and that social life is very important for teens mental well being. |
here we are generalizing again on this site. It depends greatly on the teachers and the specific APs and the school. |
A STEM class is MUCH more time consuming than English/sociology/history, get outta here with that nonsense. |
[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I like to shove a stick up the a$$ of every poster who says they worked harder at their “big 3” than they did at an elite college. Do they really think that public school kids at elite colleges just waltzed in after not doing shit in high school? Those kids worked equally hard if not harder, taking a dozen AP classes or more in order to stand out among the hundreds of kids in their class. They didn’t have the benefit of a (ridiculously named) “Big 3” to back up their applications so they hard to work harder.
Just STFU already. You’re not special. You’re privileged. There’s a difference. [/quote] But if they don’t maintain their Big 3 branding, then it will all be for nothing. The more they publicly talk about how intense it is…share notes, groan… the more the brand cements itself in the public sphere…and the AO’s will (hopefully) sweep their kids in… [/quote] But being at big 3 doesn’t mean you’re an intellectual powerhouse. More often than not it means your parents donated a ton of money and ran the auction in preschool or your K-8 before you got in. Money talks at the Big 3 and it doesn’t work as well for college unless your parents are going to give 7 figures. [/quote] What it means is that your education isn’t at the whims of the county school board, who care far more about promoting equity than rigor. That isn’t the fault of the students or teachers who are being shortchanged by the Board of Ed. |
I was an English major at a top 5 SLAC and then a graduate student in Literature (and TA) at a top university and we (and later my students) never read 10-12 books in an semester long course. |
I assume unless there are some institutional restrictions there is probably nothing stopping Professor A from assigning 20 books and Professor B assigning 5 books for essentially the same class. |
DP Please take your own advice. |
This was my own experience at UMich- not SLAC but it a lot of highly ranked schools are like this. Plus the dreaded bell curve where you feel like a failure after each exam only to find out that a 50% is a B. What was the point of that? Do colleges still do that? Seemed like Academic ego by profs. |
The bell curve was only dreaded when my buddy who was a Chemistry major was one of the ones helping set the curve at a 97 (out of 100) for organic chemistry, which perhaps dashed the hopes of many a pre-med major. The 50% curves were fine. |
I went to one of those schools back in the dark ages. But my experience was that most of my fellow students were in a similar situation to your daughter. I did two things that made my workload a lot less than my peers.
1) Read a book on speed reading and then implement those techniques. I was reading nearly twice as fast as most of my peers, and I have found that to be a valuable skill throughout my life. 2) First week of the semester, I would look ahead on the syllabus for all the papers that were due, and I would create at least a basic outline for each one. Then when you are reading and come across a quote or a study or whatever that you want to include in the paper, immediately add it to the existing outline/citation document. Then when it is time to write the paper almost all of the work is already done, you just need to edit. |
That sounds amazing. Ah, I want to go back to college! Do young people even appreciate the opportunities they have? |
Im PP - we knew by word of mouth....I suspect you did too? |