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What are the exact differences between high school and college when it comes to get a straight A (GPA 4.0) ?
What are the exact differences between high school and college
- Thread starter tennisball80
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More harder work.
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More time on your hands. Everyone kept telling me this, but I just didn't believe them. You only spend about 15 - 19 hours actually in class a week compared to the 35 hours a week you spent in high school. That means it's a lot easier to procrastinate. Even though you have so much free time, keep in mind what MilkmanAl said - the courseload is usually harder. True, professors aren't going to assign homework as much as your high school teachers. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't study outside of class. Do practice problems. Assign yourself homework.
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I think the real difference is that you don't have the homework assignments to buffer your grade. Your entire grade is based on like 3 exams and that's it. And those three exams are about a month or so apart. A month seems like a long time so you wait until the week of to study. Whereas in high school you have an assignment every night and a quiz every week. I really wouldn't say it is that much more difficult, you have more time to do everything, you have more control over things. Just remember: even though you don't HAVE to go to class, if you want to get an A, you probably should.
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You will also be introduced to the concept of a curve, which can be your best friend or your worst enemy. How you do will not only depend on you, but also on your classmates. You won't be home and have someone make you breakfast/lunch/dinner, tell you where to go and when. It's up to you to manage your time and stay healthy. You'll need to find your own balance between your schoolwork, your EC's, and your social life. Studying on weekends sucks a lot more when you're not home with your parents but on a college campus where drunken loud people are outside your window and your non-prehealth friends are trying to convince you to go out. Classes ARE harder: instead of a bunch of 1-2 page essays, you'll have 30-page papers, which will require you to do much more in-depth research than google or wikipedia. And for the big classes at least, no one cares that you were sick or that you were upset about something- the work has to get done when it has to get done, regardless of how hungover you were on sunday. Because there are more people at lecture, you might choose not to go to class, ever, which works for some people and it really doesn't for others.
It's really just much more about personal responsibility. No one is going to tell your parents if you're not doing well. It's up to you to sacrifice some things in order to get to where you want to go. And it's really not easy to make those sacrifices.
It's really just much more about personal responsibility. No one is going to tell your parents if you're not doing well. It's up to you to sacrifice some things in order to get to where you want to go. And it's really not easy to make those sacrifices.
In high school you could pretty much get A's in certain classes without even trying. Thats not the case in college because you really have to work your ass off in order to get that A and sometimes its even impossible because certain professors want to limit the amount of A's and make it so that only a few get an A.
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i'm surprised no one mentioned the fact that you dont have AP courses to boost your GPA. That means if you ever get anything below an A, its impossible for you to get a 4.0. You can't get a 5.0 for your A in AP Bio or AP Chemistry...... You want to get a 4.0, you literally have to be PERFECT your entire 4 years of college.
Another reason why 4.0s don't come along very often in college is because an A- is a 3.7 GPA....its not like high school where an A- is equialent to an A in terms of the grade point.
At my high school it worked like this:
100-90: 4.0
89-80: 3.0
79-70: 2.0
So, even though the A- showed up on the transcript, it still counted as a 4.0.
In most colleges it works like this:
100-94 (A): 4.0
93-90 (A-): 3.7
89-87 (B+): 3.3
86-84 (B): 3.0
83-80 (B-): 2.7
Each school and each course will be different in terms of what is the cutoff for an A- (Ive had classes where anything lower than a 95% was an A-), but thats the way the system works as far as grades and points earned, and thats how AMCAS will caclulate your GPA as well.
Those two reasons alone make it incredibly hard to get a 4.0. Forget the fact that courses are going to much harder and require much more work (for most people).
Another reason why 4.0s don't come along very often in college is because an A- is a 3.7 GPA....its not like high school where an A- is equialent to an A in terms of the grade point.
At my high school it worked like this:
100-90: 4.0
89-80: 3.0
79-70: 2.0
So, even though the A- showed up on the transcript, it still counted as a 4.0.
In most colleges it works like this:
100-94 (A): 4.0
93-90 (A-): 3.7
89-87 (B+): 3.3
86-84 (B): 3.0
83-80 (B-): 2.7
Each school and each course will be different in terms of what is the cutoff for an A- (Ive had classes where anything lower than a 95% was an A-), but thats the way the system works as far as grades and points earned, and thats how AMCAS will caclulate your GPA as well.
Those two reasons alone make it incredibly hard to get a 4.0. Forget the fact that courses are going to much harder and require much more work (for most people).
My high school works on an A- being 3.7, etc. scale. Honors and AP courses (if you take 5 a year) let you have a 5.0 GPA, but a lot of undergrad's look at your unweighted GPA, which doesn't take that into account if I'm correct.
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Yea, ive heard of high schools that do that, but its definitely not the norm. I dunno if it changed since I applied to college, but the weighted GPA was the thing they cared the most about. The unweighted GPA was still there, but it didnt really matter much.
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This whole weighted/unweighted thing is really annoying me. This year my school changed it so Honors classes get an extra .5 on their GPA, but of course they didn't tell us about this before they did it, so I took regular Pre-Cal instead of Honors. Also the honors classes I took in 9th and 10th grade will not be weighted, so these little freshmen get a nice little cushion that we didn't. Teachers keep saying that it won't really matter in terms of class rank and all that, but it still would have looked nice for colleges.
Anyways, my point is I think AP and Honors should be weighted the same everywhere and on the same scale. That way we don't have all of this fuss about scales and a 90 A, vs. a 93 A-/B+ and controversy over who gets a 4.+ and for what.
Haha, okay, rant over.
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That's a stupid rant. Why should the person (like you) who took the "regular" precalc instead of the honors one be ranked equally to you? If they took a harder class and got a 90, its equivalent to your 94.
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Interesting. My high school didn't weight the GPA at all, regardless of the course difficulty, AP, etc.
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Oh no, I don't mean that. I totally agree that a harder class should be weighted more. My problem is the reason I took regular Pre-Cal was I thought it would be weighted the same as Honors. If I had taken Honors I would have been doing harder class work without weight. The school, however, did not tell us that they would begin weighting Honors an extra .5, therefore I took the easier class.
Sorry I didn't make that clearer before.
