A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill freshman says that his college classes are easier than his AP classes in high school:
http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2851Challenge Me: A student at UNC-Chapel Hill is surprised to find that his freshman courses were less rigorous than many high school classes.
By Alex Thomas
May 26, 2013
[C]ollege is not as hard as it used to be—or as it should be. German class turned out to be easier than my AP classes in high school; the workload was nothing compared to that of my AP US History course. We had small assignments, but there wasn’t any outlining, and the homework was simple compared to that of the AP curriculum. How could this be? After all, weren’t those AP classes proclaimed to be college-level courses? I immediately thought that this was a fluke, a rare occurrence in higher education.
My next class was a Geology 101 lecture. It was in a lecture hall that could seat a hundred people easily. I thought for sure this had to be the course that would force me to study for hours on end with teachers who knew no limits. But it wasn’t. In fact, it was only slightly harder than my German class, with a workload significantly less than that of my advanced classes in high school. (However, I would personally like to state for the record that I did not enjoy learning about rocks.)
The rest of my classes followed a similar pattern to the previous two: they required very little effort compared to my AP classes. Even a history course, American History after 1865, needed no extra effort on my part in order to pass the class. The course only required two essays, neither of which was as difficult or as challenging as those I wrote in my high school AP History class.
Reflecting back on this experience, I believe that the classes I took my in my first semester at UNC were less difficult than my AP courses. My high school teachers used better and more efficient methods of teaching than those I saw in my first year of college. The amount of work they gave me proved to be more challenging and more time consuming than my UNC workload. If I knew what I know now back in high school, I would have put less effort into preparing for Carolina. It would have been demotivating to know that an elite institution such as Carolina is less challenging than a good high school curriculum.
