Bob wasn’t describing that 21 like it was one of the highest scores in the class.
How many of those have you ever met?
I’ve heard of people having that problem because they are not educationally prepared. But people who are smart enough and aren’t coming in behind everyone else, don’t often have that problem. At least I don’t think they do.
To be clear, this is a different category from failsons, who know going in that their actual college achievement is irrelevant.
I really think it is actually exactly this.
No one knowing the implications would put that on there.
I actually doubt this. Plenty of women (and men, too) who are obsessed with their weight are nowhere near fat. And I’m not talking about people with eating disorders. However, I suppose it is hard to tease out the difference between a high-functioning individual with a mild eating disorder and someone who is just very concerned with their appearance.
I got a marginal score on the control systems test. The guy who wrote it wasn’t keen on letting it slide so my advisor had to do some dealing to get me in. They made me take an advanced class with the requirement I get at least a B. Got an A and hated controls even more.
I put myself in that category. I could not have been less interested in actually succeeding and found all the smart people working really hard super annoying. I remember how psyched I was to learn that they’d actually let me switch my major to English (I was originally in a 3+2 BA/JD program) because it meant I’d never have to do any of what I considered “real” work.
I am probably letting my own experience weigh too heavily on how I view this.
You can’t really be in that category if you think this:
If above is true, the problem is not that you went to school with a bunch of really smart, motivated people. If changing that (i.e. going to UMASS*) doesn’t change the outcome, then it’s not the problem.
*no disrespect to UMASS, just using the example that was given
FWIW, I absolutely bombed Calc II but then somehow math got a lot more interesting and easier for me and I breezed through the rest of the math classes I took.
I think this is pretty common because in high school you have to actually show up every day, so it’s practical for you to learn it there. Also, it’s easier to figure out what you should spend time learning and what you don’t really need to know.
The biggest difference is that in college, you don’t actually have to go. If you actually show up to class every day, I think the “studying” you need to do is minimal (obviously there are subjects in which this less true, but it holds as a rough generalization).
Education in the US is kind of a weird.
My brother dropped out of HS continuation school and, after a fairly long and difficult path, makes a very good living as a software engineer. In HS (and before) he was into death metal, drugs, and was socially awkward. People could tell he was smart like the 15% of the time he applied himself, but he usually torpedoed himself.
He did manual labor painting houses for like 6-8 years, got married, took the GED at like 26. My mom always had a “deal” where she would pay for 4 years of college. So he found jesus and went to a JC at like 28, then a (very) local state school in computer science at like 30. (TBF, he was programming on an Atari 800 at like 12 y/o).
He did well at the state school and got a pretty shitty comp sci job, got a masters while working (same state school), and did good work. Now he’s a relatively senior programmer at Raytheon. He basically just started applying himself and impressed people, mainly because his sense of responsibility stabilized, and at heart he’s a serious programmer. So much of careerism is people trying to fake or signal competency, and his signals were mainly negative. However, he lives and breathes programming, worked hard, and has impressed people who recognize ability.
If his story has a moral, it’s that people should be allowed to fail until they’re 30, long after society has stopped investing in them (basically need family help for this, and you’ve probably burned bridges if you’re still screwing around in your late 20s). Other moral is: if you are genuinely smart, even if somewhat autistic, do something that is legitimately difficult (weeds out the competition).
I went to a “top 10” law school and make less than my brother (though I work a lot less).
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I think I never learned how to do college because I jumped straight into a bunch of second year stuff and took almost no classes with other incoming freshmen. Looking back, I think that’s where it all went wrong for me. I never made connections with people, partly because I didn’t have those shared experiences with my peers.
I was also extremely lazy. I had the idea that I was okay with getting an easy B in o-chem because I didn’t want to work as hard as neurotic pre-med students.
I guess I wouldn’t know. I pretty much never went. There were a couple of the classes where the profs were really good so I actually looked forward to going. But there were a lot, where I doubt the prof could have picked me out of a lineup at the end of the semester. And some of these were pretty small higher level engineering classes.
I did go to labs though. There really wasn’t a way out of that.
Part of my conclusion is based on the fact that there was a pretty high correlation between class attendance and how well people did in the class. But it could have been that those people were more serious about the whole thing and also studied more outside of class.
i entered university with all sorts of math competitions and teams, and scholarships, sat ii 800s, etc. by end of sophomore year i was failing both abstract analysis and abstract algebra.
I have a math MSc and I can confidently day that undergraduate math, especially calculus, is often so badly taught that I am not surprised that perfectly intelligent people do poorly.
i never had any issues with calculus. i went to a good university, good profs were present. i spent too much time playing chess, and chasing some semblance of social life. i thought those two classes i failed would work out with minimal actual study. tdf they were both honors and i was just woefully unprepared
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I had a similar experience. I can confirm that it’s a real thing. I think it was made more difficult by the fact that I’m just very introverted in general, so having those natural connections are huge. I know someone more extroverted who did something similar and had no such issues.
My calc 3 class prof was worthless. Hated the guy. He was some lazy ass guy I could barely understand with a German accent so thick I couldn’t pick up what was going on. My friend and I just studied together. His class was at 8am (which apparently was full of the smarter people, he hated getting up that early)
We got exactly the same score on our exams. He got a B- and I got an A because they curved based on what section you were in.
That was so dumb.
I don’t think you need connections with people. I had always told myself I’d try hard when I got to college (was probably barely in the top 1/3 of HS class GPA-wise and that because of some “automatic” A’s from passing AP classes). Got into UCLA but didn’t go there.
I got like a 3.2 in the first two quarters in college and had a “you said you’d go 100% in college” talk with myself and did actually buckle down the next four years and got like 3.85 the rest of the way. My issue is I never really knew what I wanted to do other than academia. I tried grad school and life as prof seemed damn hard, where you hope to finally get tenure at 40 and have to depend on state funding from GOP governors and legislators. I also hate doing work for work’s sake. I took the MCAT and still wonder if I would have been happier going to med school, but I was interested in neuroscience/psychology and did not relish the prospect of dealing with miserable people all the time, especially when psychiatry was in the thrall of Freud for much of its history.
My attitude in big bio and o-chem classes was: I’m sorry all you diligent kids from nice families that value education, but some of this work takes smarts and I’m here to kick ass and memorize nomenclature.
This could be true, although it’s hard to judge if you weren’t poorly taught. You tend to take it for granted that it’s easy and assume it should be easy for everybody. I ran insanely good with teaching all the way through undergrad. All good to GOAT level with only a handful of exceptions.
Life seems pretty meaningless without connections with people.
Let me explain how fucked up I am. I literally have zero friends from high school or college. Maybe that explains why I post the way I do here.
How did I fail so fucking bad at learning to be human and do I still have a chance to do so?
Complete opposite here, didn’t take anything above basic algebra/trig in high school but finished with a math minor. No idea how I managed that