Reply to Did your child find college to be more academically challenging than high school?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a college professor. If you go to every class meeting, even if you do almost nothing else besides turn in required assignments, you should be able to make a C. If you go to class and keep up with the reading and turn in your work, you should be making Bs.

For a bright kid with a strong academic background, there is nothing that would make college academics particularly difficult, unless the school somehow allows people to skip prerequisites.

What is hard is getting yourself out of bed every day and going to class. I can't tell you how many students I've seen waste 30K+ of someone's money to rarely show up and end up on academic probation.

If they know their job is to go to class, even if they don't feel like it, and even if they haven't done the reading, they will be fine.[/quote]

I am a college professor too - and that's a way oversimplified view.

I taught at a USNWR top 20 school and at a school with an 80% admission acceptance rate.  It's all about the competition.  As a prof, you shoot for the median grade to be a "B" - well, at Top 20 that exam is going to have to be way harder than regional state U.

In fact, if somebody asks me about the number one difference between colleges - it isn't buildings or faculty or special programs.  It's the daily grind of the competition - just how motivated and how many brain cells does the average kid at the place have.[/quote]

I've taught at colleges at every level. The entire student body is selected for the level of the school. A bright kid with a strong high school background, as I specified above, will not have difficulty passing his/her classes if he goes to them. I stand by that. If they want to be high-flyers, then they need to work for it.[/quote]

[Quoting to keep all the professor comments together]. When I taught at Hopkins in the Humanities I noticed that many of my most academically prepared students were excellent technical writers and understood that you need to show up and do the work, but they weren't willing (I assume they were able) to the work of demonstrating intellectual curiosity and independent thought. An intellectually exciting but rough paper and a technically adept but rote paper both get a B.[/quote]

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