High school was pretty easy for me. l could always count on raw smarts to compensate for disorganization, lack of focus, etc. l've definitely been paying the price for that, even now.

Interesting question.

I was an A student in HS, but I also studied (a lot) more than my classmates. Unfortunately, my HS did not fully prepare me for college level classes, so I struggled through my freshman year just to catch up and keep up. Luckily I already had good study habits so my grades steadily improved.

I think the best college students are the ones who learn good study habits early on and who actually want to do well in college.

That being said not every student can do equally well in all subjects, no matter how hard they try. God I hate chemistry!!

I'm another one of those "easy A" high school students who struggled more in college. My first semester my grades dropped one full point from my high school average - and that doesn't include the course I took an incomplete in. They improved for the next couple of semesters, then I went through a period of severe "academic indigestion" (love-life problems, didn't care for the courses, etc.) My last two years I finally got my head on straight (plus had the interesting senior-level courses) and carried a high-B/low-A average. All of this was in a competitive engineering school.

There is an interesting side-light to your question that occurs in engineering curricula. All accredited engineering programs require some sort of 'capstone' design experience in the senior year. This means they are presented with an "open-ended" problem to solve that may or may not be completely defined. Furthermore, this project should require the students to draw on material from throughout their studies, rather than just material from a specific course.

What often happens in this course is that the 'better' students have a harder time with the project than the 'run-of-the-mill' students. Good students are used to being given a well-defined problem, determining the appropriate equation to apply, and generating a solution. They are not used to dealing with ambiquity. The weaker students have generally been "in a fog" throughout their studies, not quite sure what's going on. This project is therefore SOP for them. They've learned to muddle through and somehow get to an answer.

This doesn't mean that the weaker students produced better results than their 'brighter' colleagues, just that they were able to function better in these projects.


Second side note: A quote I once heard - "Be kind to your 'A' students, for they will someday be your colleagues. Be kinder to your 'C' students, for they will some day create their own businesses and fund your new buildings."

quote:<HR>Originally posted by rlemert:
Second side note: A quote I once heard - "Be kind to your 'A' students, for they will someday be your colleagues. Be kinder to your 'C' students, for they will some day create their own businesses and fund your new buildings."<HR>

My HS math teacher once said that 'C' math students often made better math teachers specifically because they better understood the pitfalls and struggles of learning math, i.e., they could appreciate how/why a specific concept could be confusing. 'A' students, OTOH, seemed to easily "get" the concepts but could not appreciate how/why others did not understand.

I noticed actually this happen to a lot of my classmates - I went to MIT, and a lot of folks were valedictorians without any trouble and had a lot of difficulty adjusting. Luckily, MIT is Pass/Fail the first year so the transition is a bit easier.

I was a good student in highschool without doing any work, but barely top 10% since I was so skewed (A's in math, some science, B's in everything else) so at least I didn't struggle psychologically with getting B's in college like some people I knew did.

And I spent college basically on acid and pot, so the B's seemed just fine to me. In retrospect, I wonder what would have occurred if I had actually applied myself at any time (highschool or college) but eh, I had fun.

I've had some experience in this phenomenon. I was one of those HS students who always got the "Tends to coast on natural ability" comments from the teachers. Turns out I didn't really care for what I had to do in HS. Once I got to university, I was able to chose my own path, take the courses I wanted to take, and finally had something I wanted to apply myself towards. My GPA went up noticeably after I started in university. It helped that I had never had a huge part of my identity tied to being the smartest kid in class.
My GF when I started university had the opposite experience. She was very invested in being the best and smartest kid in class. She worked really hard throughout HS, and got better marks than I did. Not hugely better, but better. When she got to university, the same level of hard work produced less return, and she wasn't able to keep her GPA at the same level. All kinds of problems followed.
My summary: To make the transition from HS to university, you have to have a certain reservoir of natural ability, tied with a willingness to do hard work. The best university students combine the two.

It's hard to say. I struggled throughout school and even though college was challenging, I still managed to do well. However, my kids have always been all-honors, high achievers and in advanced classes so I believe they are better prepared than I was. I have a feeling they will breeze through college because they're accustomed to AP classes already. There is a difference. I know they are smarter than me because school isn't as difficult for them as it was for me and this is despite their higher level course work.