Just a general question...seems most people who've been admitted to Mac had 80-90 averages in high school. Did any of you find the material difficult? Were you naturally gifted in academia, or did you have to work for your marks?

Myself..I'll be honest...I'm a type B person naturally and school hasn't really come all that easily for me. I slacked off big time in high school taking so called "easy" courses and have just recently upgraded all the "hard" credits I never had in an adult education centre (non-private school, didn't pay for grades).

It sucks to admit it, but I've never been one of those people who can study material I've never seen the night before a test and do reasonably to exceptionally well...

How about you guys?

Good thread first of all . Secondly, I was the type of person who slacked from Grade 9-11 and just "got by". Grade 12 came, and I was like "oh shi-, I need to get to university!" So, I started working really harded in semester 1 of Grade 12 but started to slack near the end and ended up with a 79.67% average. I was heartbroken that I was so close, yet so far, from getting Honors that semester. Second semester came with apparently the more harder courses of my selection (Calc&Vect,Phys,E&S), but I managed to get an 87%~ average or so that semester. Overall, I'm happy I ended up accepting my offer to McMaster University, I can't imagine nor will I imagine myself being at another university in my program.

got branded as gifted, went to highschool early, stopped trying, got the 90 avg in semester one in gr12, realized I only needed an 80 avg to get in, stopped trying entirely

High school was hard for me. I came from one of the hardest high schools is Hamilton. My calc teacher was so picky in high school that she deducted marks for people who wrote “and plug it in…” instead of writing “and sub it in…”. That’s just one example. Her tests were brutal. After I wrote my first calc test here at Mac I was like “why did she have to torture us?”…..my point is high school was hard for me, I definitely worked hard. My high school teachers enjoyed giving us bad marks .

To be honest, it doesn’t matter what average you got in high school, as long as u work hard here you’ll be fine. If someone got a 90% in grade 12, it doesn’t mean he/she will get a higher gpa than someone who got an 83%. The harder you work, the higher you will get…that’s just how I see it.

You mentioned “naturally gifted people”...well to be honest I don’t think such people exist, I mean some people might just get it faster than others, but they still have to work hard in university. As I said earlier, no matter who you were in high school, you have to work hard here at Mac.

Worked pretty hard in high school. Probably do the same amount of work here. Doing reasonably well.

It's sad to see people from presumably 'easy' high schools (must have been easy as they got the 80%+ to come here) with really poor study habits suffer in university.

High school was an absolute joke. I barely had to put in any work. I did the basic homework real quick, it all came to me very easily. I pretty much just regurgitated everything that was fed to me. I took all of the difficult courses, AP bio, chem, physics, math. Grade 12 I did even less work, and I still got good grades. I also went to one of the best high schools in my area.

I don't know how I did it then, but I'm no hot shot in uni now when it comes down to academics.

I pretty much did assignments in high school the night before and only studied for exams for four years. I was in the gifted program and we were specifically being groomed for university. We were writing APA/MLA sourced essays from scholarly works in grade 9. They sure didn't spoon feed us or hand out grades but we were definitely given advantageous resources and support cause we were in the flagship program at an experimental school and we were expected to represent it well.

Back when I was there though we still had OAC's and they were all that mattered for university. Everyone in the gifted program and advanced classes messed around until the OAC year. Since I went to Westmount, I did OAC Law in 5 weeks and still got an A but OAC accounting took me and extra four weeks and I still only got a B. Same problem then that I have now. Don't like it, do bad. Like it, do good.

I put more effort into one class at Mac than I did in a semester at high school. My marks have actually gone up about 10% while most drop 10%. Amazing what a little effort can do sometimes.

I wouldn't say it was a joke, but it wasn't that hard either. I did the homework, barely studied for tests (unless I felt like I really needed to...which wasn't until gr 12 physics), didn't study for some exams and my final average every year was 85+ (came from a school that had semestered and non semestered classes, I had mostly non semestered though).

Back to the studying though, I'm not one of those people that just can sit down and study for hours. That's probably why I didn't study much. Even now, I really can't focus/get my mind to study for finals. No idea how I got good grades in high school.

At the time it seemed like a sizeable amount of work.

Looking back that amount of work wasn't much and it was extremely straightforward, but at the time it was the most I'd ever had and enough to keep me occupied.

Originally Posted by jim1

You mentioned “naturally gifted people”...well to be honest I don’t think such people exist, I mean some people might just get it faster than others, but they still have to work hard in university. As I said earlier, no matter who you were in high school, you have to work hard here at Mac.

LOL, working hard at uni/Mac. 24/7 slacking nets solid grades still. Try first year, cruise every other year-- a strong foundation makes life easier.

I found high school to be challenging at the time. I worked hard on assignments and kept up well with my work. That way when it came to tests/exams I didn't have to study too much. I cannot sit studying for more than like an hour but I think if you are on top of your work and really try to use class time to absorb the information you can reduce your studying time greatly.

Ended up with an 86% average, just made the cutoff for my program thankfully because I love it and can't imagine doing anything else.

Been slacking ever since I left the womb, yet people think I'm 'smart'. Highschool was so great I stayed an extra year.

compared to uni highschool was a joke, but at the same time i realize now that i had better work habits then than i do now which is weird

This is a fair question. I graduated with an 87% average but I by no means found high school easy. I realize now that I had much better study habits then than I do now. I should work on that. Anyway, we had IB at my hs and although I wasn't in IB, most of the grade 12 teachers also taught the IB program and so... the students in academic really got just as much work as the IBs and were graded as difficultly, too. Most of the teachers were young (between 25 and 30), and so had recently graduated, which meant that they were much more attuned to the new way of teaching as opposed to the older teachers. They were tough graders. Ironically, most of my teachers were McMaster grads, too. I still loved my highschool days.

I never tried in high school unless it was a subject I found interesting, and even then my work habits were still pretty bad.

To be blunt, I had better things to do.