Wasn't so much the difficulty as the sheer quantity of homework combined with lots of unbroken butt-in-seat hours, most of which weren't very useful. A start time so early I had to wake up at like 6:45 didn't help, either. Throw in lots of classrooms with no or insufficient windows, and certainly none in the hallways. Thanks for causing me to develop seasonal depression it took me more than a decade to get over, high school. Thanks a whole bunch.

But yeah, coulda CLEP'd out of at least a year of college if I'd known better. No-one told me that and I didn't figure it out until it was too late. Never even occurred to me that I could knock out all those credit hours on the cheap with some very, very light studying over a summer. I mean college is supposed to be really hard, right, otherwise what's the point? eyeroll

> Throw in lots of classrooms with no or insufficient windows, and certainly none in the hallways.

This is one of most baffling aspects about the US, that is that you can have classrooms with no windows. I didn’t personally grow up as a kid in the best social-economic regime (an Eastern-European communist country in the ‘80s) but fortunately for little kid me the regime’s architects and urban planners put great emphasis on all classrooms having lots of windows, as big as possible. I later in my life became quite interested in the history of architecture and urban planning and I was able to find this idea (i.e. big windows are good for schools) in architectural magazines published way back in the 1950s.

For all of the Eastern bloc's problems, education was phenomenal by global standards.

I suspect that's a natural consequence of good people being held down in poverty by tyrannical government.

It's an energy thing. These schools were built in the 70s with 70s tech. Big windows meant lots of energy lost in heating and cooling. Or you got a school built in the 40s that did have big windows, but no AC that was sweltering for the first and last weeks/months of school.

Unfortunately this happens en masse to Asian American students. The discrimination adcoms use against them force them to attend schools that are far too easy for them. This has positives and negatives. They can coast to a great GPA in the most competitive majors and land top jobs as a result, but they also are left feeling unchallenged.

It's a problem throughout American education, which follows the universal, comprehensive model because of cultural and political values. Primary, secondary, and even tertiary American educational systems all underchallenge advanced students.

You’re not judgmental at all, aren’t you?