Is College Hard?

Studying toward a high school diploma or for a GED is totally different from how students are expected to learn in college. Everything is set totally differently than it is in K-12.

College students are generally expected to spend some 2 to 3 hours out of the classroom for every single hour they’re spending inside a classroom on homework, self-study, tutoring, and so on.

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And because a full classroom study load is usually 15 credit hours in semester systems, students will need to work some 30 to 45 hours outside of their classrooms and some 45–60 hours in total.

And when you’ve earned a GED®, it might be a bit harder for you to keep on working and studying in a very disciplined way, wouldn’t you think?

Are all college students spending this sort of hours for all classes? Well, the answer, of course, is no. And if they would, that’s no guarantee as well that’s sufficient for them to be successful in a class either.

There are students who may be successful by studying maybe 12 or 16 hours for some exam, even when the class is hard for them.

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Well, hard work isn’t always resulting in its own reward, yet on the other hand, nothing of serious value was certainly ever achieved without a lot of hard work.

But, of course, it’s not only the effort that counts. Efforts are great, but they’re just beginnings. Suppose you’ve worked on a paper or a project for ten hours in one single sitting.

Well, that’s definitely hard work, but it has nothing to do with discipline. With discipline, I mean working, for example, two hours per night for five consecutive nights.

Self-Discipline is Hard To Learn

For most students, discipline is pretty hard to learn, generally because most students are younger than 25 years of age, and their prefrontal cortex hasn’t come to full growth yet.

Yes, the brain keeps on growing, forming, and changing, and the prefrontal cortex is the section that relates to judgment.

By studying disciplined,  you will feel less pressure, and you probably will end up with a better grade as well without running the risk of failing a class in college.

Well, the first year in college may be pretty overwhelming. Going from classes of 15 to 25 students to lecture halls that are packed with hundreds of students may cause some difficulty for you to focus.

It may surely seem much more work for you to deal with the responsibility of keeping up with your homework by yourself.  You need to check the course syllabus on a daily basis, and you’re required to work independently using textbooks outside of lectures.

Much More Freedom

All this is so different from dealing with your day-to-day routine, like doing worksheets for high school. Then again, the beauty of college is that you’ve got so much more freedom to attend classes that you’re really interested in.

You can find it well worth putting extra effort into these classes, and some assignments may, therefore, not feel like a lot of work because it genuinely relates to more interesting assignments, and you’ll learn more 1n your specific academic field.

There are people who say that college is so much harder than studying for a high school or GED diploma. They’ll be warning you to brace yourself and avoid bad grades, and they’ll tell you about very late nights that you’ll be studying!

But there’s absolutely no need to stress about the difficulty level of college classes!

The fact of the matter is that everybody has some sort of different opinion. There are also quite a few people who say that their high school years were more difficult than their freshman years of college.

Your difficulty level experience is obviously also depending on which classes you took in high school and which classes you’ve chosen to take for your college education.

Don’t Procrastinate

Then there are quite a few students who just never seem to be able to get rid of their procrastination tendency. Often, these students are still keeping up with their favorite Netflix series, will not forget to take their usual afternoon nap, or never look into their textbooks until a few days before an exam.

Well, sure, it’s totally fine and even recommendable to take a break every once in a while to engage in something fun; students should really keep a sharp focus in college and keep up with their classes.

There will be times that it’s hard to stay focused on a lecture, especially when your professor is hard to understand or boring. In those cases, students may well be tempted to switch to Facebook or play a game on their phones.

The fact of the matter is that, unfortunately, you’ll have professors or classes that are less interesting for you than others. Many students ask us if the GED allows for a college education, and the answer is simply yes. The GED is equivalent to a common high school diploma!

Keep in mind that when your textbooks are well-written or when you’re good at finding study material online, you may very well be able to learn all by yourself about academic concepts by following online intro-level academic courses.

Keep Up with Homework

Ensure to keep up regularly with homework and class readings, though, and don’t shy away from collaborating with peers and/or friends or asking for help when needed. This will definitely help you to earn your bachelor’s degree in a timely manner!

How difficult your college class is will depend, for a large part, on the professor who’s teaching it. If you have a professor who’s writing tests that are generally impossible to score well on, then there isn’t that much you can do if you are preparing for his or her tests.

You just make sure you know the material as well as you can without stressing if you miss out on something in the test since chances are that most other students also wouldn’t know the correct answer or solution.

So, in general, you may say that college classes are harder than the classes you took in high school. The topics are far more complicated, the learning processes are faster and more complex, and the self-teaching and self-learning expectations are far higher.

On the other hand, college classes don’t necessarily need to be harder to perform well in. You need to get used to the right mindset and learn to study effectively and independently, and develop your time-management skills.

There’s absolutely no need to get sleep-deprived during nights leading up to an exam, and it is important to keep a positive, constructive attitude and utilize your school’s resources.

Sure, you’ll need to put in more effort at college than you were used to in high school, but if you work hard, you’ll soon get accustomed to the study schedules required in college, and you may very well even feel less stressful than you did in high school!