[QUOTE="kakkarott23"] ya....no. I am doing a vocation that I like but it is 10 times as stressful as high school could have ever imagined to be. What they say is true about the 2 hours outside of class for every hour in class. Even more so for junior and senior level courses. Professors tend to be evil and u will have an exam for every class in the same week. Now those are stressful weeks.Optical_Order
hmm...how about having 5 tests on the same day? (not finals). In high school, I've had days where 6 tests are scheduled on the same day...it's not that bad... I live. High school tests are nothing like college tests. Back in high school I aced most of my exams by doing nothing more than taking notes and then reading over said notes about 2-5 minutes before the exam. I enjoyed taking tests back in K-12 because they saved me from the boredom of having to sit through class doing pointless assignments and listening to a teacher drone on and on about the same subject.
In college exams are much more difficult and thus far I have actually needed to study for them. For my hardest classes I have to study nonstop for days in order to get even a decent score. Add to that the fact that each exam in a class is equal to about 25-50% of your grade on average and there's really no room for error. In high school you can bomb tests left and right and still come out with an A. In college if you bomb a test you often lose a letter grade because of it. As a result, the stress factor for tests goes way up in college. If you've ever taken an AP exam you've probably found them to be the most stressful exams besides the SAT right? Well, in college every exam is as stressful as an AP exam.
I agree completely, school has gotten harder for students these past few years. The world is a darker place now than it was in the 90's, and with the increase in unemployment, there is an increase in competition. High School Students must be extremely well-rounded to get into the college that they want, because most colleges that I know of don't accept someone who did well in school but did nothing else. Balancing all of these extra-curriculars and keeping a good GPA while doing well on the ACT and SAT is a pain, but I think I'm doing alright. It's not easy, but the best advice I can give is to have some fun. Don't stress out a lot, I stressed out freshman year and, while I didn't do bad per se, I did worse than I would have liked. I tried to keep things under control sophmore and junior year, and so far it's going really well. I'm halfway through Junior year and I've done better this year than any other year, so my strategy of not stressing too much has worked for me, but everyone's different. I agree with you completely though, things have changed since the 90's. WINDWAKER1
Please, none of that is terribly difficult compared to their college counterparts. I mean, first of all, extracurriculars only matter if you're applying to a selective school. Even then they won't make or break your application unless you're trying to apply to a top 25 school. Furthermore, if you're complaining about "all of these extracurriculars" you're doing it wrong. Colleges only want to see you with a couple of EC's that you've really achieved something important in. Anyone can be a member of a few dozen clubs and activities.
Anyway, to give you an idea of why I'm not sympathetic, I'm a neuroscience major in college and I'm hoping to go to grad school for my Ph.D. after I get my B.S. All of my classes are upper level science classes, and in order to get into grad school (even the crappy ones) I need to have A's in all of them. Anything below a 3.7 makes life hard for applications and anything below a 3.5 is a kiss of death. I also work long hours in a research lab (we're talking 40-50 hour work weeks here, no pay, on top of my schedule as a full time student). And I also have to study for the GRE which is like the SAT on steroids (aside from having the difficulty ratched up for a college student, the test is also computerized and makes itself harder for every question you answer correctly).
See, unlike undergraduate college, grad and professional schools are all extremely selective. Your average med school, for example, is as selective as Harvard's undergrad admissions (ie an acceptance rate of 8-10%). This is because for a lot of grad and professional programs you have 400-800 people applying for only 6-12 slots. It's not uncommon for kids with 4.0 GPAs and high GRE scores to get rejected by every program they apply to. Contrast this to college where most universities have acceptance rates above 40%, there's hundreds if not thousands of openings, and there's plenty of schools for every caliber of student which means that if you want a college education you will get one.
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