How would you rate your highschool classes against your college classes? -- particularly math classes.

My sister, a sophomore in highschool, is taking Algebra 2 and has a 98 or 99 or some extremely good grade. I'm taking college Algebra and have a C and my mother keeps comparing me to my sister and insists I should try harder and be more like her.

I'm very proud of my sister for her hard work and effort, but I dont think my mom has the right to compare highschool algebra with college algebra. How different is the difficulty among these two courses? In highschool, I took four years of math and did very well in each of the courses. Why am I doing so poorly in college and why must my mother make me feel so darn stupid???

I'd say it's pretty close to each other. I think got about a D in both my statistics class in college and my pre-algebra class in high school. The math classes in college do seem considerably more technical since you know a lot from high school and so I think that would make it a good bit harder. How your teachers teach may also have an influence on you. Is the teacher less focused on helping you all understand and more on just explaining it to you? I'm going to a small 2 year school so the teachers here are a lot like those in high school.

Perhaps you're mom is just looking at it next to the level of your acheivement. You're in college and have been through all the other math, so maybe she's thinking you can do better since you've gained that extra strength of knowledge. Of course, just because she thinks you can do better doesn't mean anything. Do your best of course and you'll definitely be on the right track. I find math pretty tough in the first place. The grading scale is different two. My college F is actually lower than it was for my high school. Probably different for you. Anyway, hey, you have final exames coming up, too? Good luck on those if so.

The material covered is the material covered, whether it be math,science,languages...whatever.
What differentiates high school from college is the rate at which it is covered. One semester of university math may take a high school course a year or more. I have found in regard to language, that a year of college is now almost four years of HS.

ah yeah, I definitely agree with the rate change too. Forgot about that.

You don't say so, but I infer that you are taking college algebra IN college, rather than in high school. In addition to what Juan says about the pace, the class population more than likely consists of more motivated and advanced students than the average in high school. I'm sure that many of your classmates took it, and analytic geometry and calculus in high school advanced placement classes, that certainly would affect the curve.

First of all, I don't think your mom is being particularly fair in comparing you to your sister or anyone else. Secondly, I barely got through my high school math classes yet scored a 33 on my ACT in math. The problem I found is that in HS they were less concerned with the correct answer than they were with the method with which you came up with your answer. Creativity and "coloring outside the lines" were very much discouraged. That has always been my problem with "conventional" math. There is no room to think outside the box. Unless you want to be ridiculed for years until you are proven correct.

I agree with TC, the comparison is unfair to begin with.

As to the difficulty of the class, I don't think any of us can say - some of my college classes were easier than any of my high school ones and some were far more difficult. You're being compared to a different peer group (which will vary with the particular high school and college) on a different time scale and, more likely than not, with different information being taught whether or not the title of the course is the same.