I don't see it. I feel like my workload is actually fairly similar to what I had in high school (minus the late nights at school hunched over Adobe InDesign for yearbook work). It's just the kind of work that differs.
My workload by class breaks down something like this:
- Japanese (in class MTWTF, an hour a day): Roughly a half hour to forty minutes of kanji, grammar, vocab, and/or worksheets. If there's a project to do, I might spend up to an hour and a half on this subject. This doesn't include the once-weekly required conversation practice or time spent at the Japanese table during lunch.
- History (in class MWF, an hour a day): Roughly two hours of reading, broken up into "What's Due Monday" done over the weekend and "What's Due Wednesday or Friday" done on Tuesday or Thursday. This involves highlighting, annotating, and thinking up questions for our class discussion. Coming up with good discussion questions has been rather absurdly easy; I think of what a research question for a history IA would be. If I have a project due in class, I might spend an extra hour or two on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but so far, we haven't had a major hours-in-the-library research paper yet.
- Economics (in class MW, an hour and fifteen minutes a day): Roughly an hour of reading, plus the "problem sets" (perhaps two hours each) that are due every week or so. Also, I spend fifteen minutes or so rereading my notes from the previous classes.
- "First-Year Seminar" (in class MW, an hour and fifteen minutes a day): Two hours of reading, give or take, with discussion questions/notes/annotations involved in that. The papers that I've had to write so far have taken me three to four hours to finish.
- SexCo (in class Wednesdays, two hours a week): Two to three hours of reading, plus the counseling-training sessions that usually last about an hour a week.
I credit IB with making a good deal of this seem easier than I expected. I know how to skim readings, how to go back and find the important bits, how to recognize key names and take good notes. I'm not afraid to find people and ask for help. For a first-year college student, my writing is clear and decent. Because I spent my last two years of high school in a high-pressure environment, I already know how I study most effectively, when I'm at my best for writing papers, and during what times I'm most useless (1:30-2:30 PM and anytime after 2 AM, for reference. Knowing these times means that I can schedule my homework and such more efficiently.)
What I'm finding is that I'm not having trouble with the same things I did in high school - I'm not overscheduled (yet) and so I do all the readings for my classes on time and thoroughly. I spend time reviewing and discussing outside class for reasons other than frantic last-minute scrambles at the lunch table.
Instead, the class that I'm having trouble in is the one I expected to be easy. The Japanese curriculum is different here, with a greater emphasis placed on casual language. I'm not comfortable speaking casually, so I'm feeling a little stilted when I try to speak. The class also moves at a much more rapid pace, to the point where there is a quiz every day or so, and the kanji/vocabulary we're assigned comes in larger quantities. I feel bad about wasting so many index cards on my obsessive flash-card making (I cut them into fourths to minimize my impact).
It's a strange feeling, the classic "little fish in a big pond" scenario. Everyone here is quite intelligent, and the impact of the whole "beginning-a-language-in-college" thing is pretty obvious. I've decided that the biggest difference between high school and college so far is the pace at which this language class moves; the people who took their first year of Japanese here seem to have no trouble keeping up. To put this in perspective, I took four years of Japanese in high school and was placed into a 201 class here. My high school classes feel like they were being played in slow motion in comparison.
In high school, I led our Japanese club and was asked to be the student speaker at the Japanese National Honor Society induction. It's safe to say that I thought I was good at this! Now that I'm here, seeing little notes like "ii desu!" ("it's good!") on my tests is killing me, because all I see is the mistakes marked in red Xs.
Effectively, I'm learning firsthand what so many people say about college - you will be challenged, even at things that used to come easily to you. It's starting to get a little disheartening, because I admit it's difficult to be knocked down a peg or two regarding your favorite subject, but it's also kind of motivating. The structure of the language class is similar in effect, although not in pace, to high school; I'm not finding this to be the case with my other classes.
In many (perhaps even most) high schools/high school classes, grading is heavily weighted toward daily homework. In most of my classes senior year, daily homework "completeness points" or "stamp points" made up about forty to fifty percent of the grade you received. Larger projects accounted for another twenty percent, a midterm and final five to ten percent each, and, depending on the teacher, perhaps some other category would be thrown in.
A college grade schematic tends toward a breakdown of homework at 20%, one or two midterms at 20% each, and a final at perhaps 40%. Actual figures can waver according to the class itself, and occasionally there will be another category (my history class actually does consider "participation" as a grading point), but this is pretty average as far as I can tell.
The homework for my econ class, which has the exact figures listed above, is given as seven "problem sets" over the course of the semester; they're usually five or six problems long. What that means is that thirty-five to fifty problems will determine twenty percent of my grade. Thirty-five to fifty problems in high school is sometimes only two or three days' worth of homework. Each problem matters more.
What this means is that it's far easier to do poorly in college than in high school; I feel grade pressure here a bit more than I did in high school because my undergraduate GPA will determine my grad school prospects. However, at this point I'm just trying to keep in mind that no one will be perfect during their first semester of college, and that some adjustment is necessary as well as normal.
My advice? I see my roommate struggling with subjects she's not fond of because she wanted to get distribution requirements out of the way early. I agree to a certain extent with that philosophy (if you're writing your honors thesis in history in your fourth year and also taking a boring physics class, for example, I would assume that those two would conflict and one would suffer), but at the same time, I knew that coming to college would require an adjustment on my part and chose classes that I would enjoy. This meant a really social-science heavy first semester, but it's also things that I'm comfortable with.
It's like choosing what clothes to bring to college: a little reinvention of your personal style is totally fine, and even a good thing, but if you go from jeans to formalwear, you likely won't be comfortable in the new duds. Having the familiarity of favorite subjects is somewhat reassuring when so much else in your life is changing.
What I'm finding is that I'm not having trouble with the same things I did in high school - I'm not overscheduled (yet) and so I do all the readings for my classes on time and thoroughly. I spend time reviewing and discussing outside class for reasons other than frantic last-minute scrambles at the lunch table.
Instead, the class that I'm having trouble in is the one I expected to be easy. The Japanese curriculum is different here, with a greater emphasis placed on casual language. I'm not comfortable speaking casually, so I'm feeling a little stilted when I try to speak. The class also moves at a much more rapid pace, to the point where there is a quiz every day or so, and the kanji/vocabulary we're assigned comes in larger quantities. I feel bad about wasting so many index cards on my obsessive flash-card making (I cut them into fourths to minimize my impact).
It's a strange feeling, the classic "little fish in a big pond" scenario. Everyone here is quite intelligent, and the impact of the whole "beginning-a-language-in-college" thing is pretty obvious. I've decided that the biggest difference between high school and college so far is the pace at which this language class moves; the people who took their first year of Japanese here seem to have no trouble keeping up. To put this in perspective, I took four years of Japanese in high school and was placed into a 201 class here. My high school classes feel like they were being played in slow motion in comparison.
In high school, I led our Japanese club and was asked to be the student speaker at the Japanese National Honor Society induction. It's safe to say that I thought I was good at this! Now that I'm here, seeing little notes like "ii desu!" ("it's good!") on my tests is killing me, because all I see is the mistakes marked in red Xs.
Effectively, I'm learning firsthand what so many people say about college - you will be challenged, even at things that used to come easily to you. It's starting to get a little disheartening, because I admit it's difficult to be knocked down a peg or two regarding your favorite subject, but it's also kind of motivating. The structure of the language class is similar in effect, although not in pace, to high school; I'm not finding this to be the case with my other classes.
In many (perhaps even most) high schools/high school classes, grading is heavily weighted toward daily homework. In most of my classes senior year, daily homework "completeness points" or "stamp points" made up about forty to fifty percent of the grade you received. Larger projects accounted for another twenty percent, a midterm and final five to ten percent each, and, depending on the teacher, perhaps some other category would be thrown in.
A college grade schematic tends toward a breakdown of homework at 20%, one or two midterms at 20% each, and a final at perhaps 40%. Actual figures can waver according to the class itself, and occasionally there will be another category (my history class actually does consider "participation" as a grading point), but this is pretty average as far as I can tell.
The homework for my econ class, which has the exact figures listed above, is given as seven "problem sets" over the course of the semester; they're usually five or six problems long. What that means is that thirty-five to fifty problems will determine twenty percent of my grade. Thirty-five to fifty problems in high school is sometimes only two or three days' worth of homework. Each problem matters more.
What this means is that it's far easier to do poorly in college than in high school; I feel grade pressure here a bit more than I did in high school because my undergraduate GPA will determine my grad school prospects. However, at this point I'm just trying to keep in mind that no one will be perfect during their first semester of college, and that some adjustment is necessary as well as normal.
My advice? I see my roommate struggling with subjects she's not fond of because she wanted to get distribution requirements out of the way early. I agree to a certain extent with that philosophy (if you're writing your honors thesis in history in your fourth year and also taking a boring physics class, for example, I would assume that those two would conflict and one would suffer), but at the same time, I knew that coming to college would require an adjustment on my part and chose classes that I would enjoy. This meant a really social-science heavy first semester, but it's also things that I'm comfortable with.
It's like choosing what clothes to bring to college: a little reinvention of your personal style is totally fine, and even a good thing, but if you go from jeans to formalwear, you likely won't be comfortable in the new duds. Having the familiarity of favorite subjects is somewhat reassuring when so much else in your life is changing.
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