I remember two breakdowns while going through Computer Science and Engineering at UTA ( far from a top-tier school, we liked to call it "UT Almost" ) in the late 90s

1. a student in physics broke down sobbing during the final, like uncontrolled wailing. The TA helped her get up and walk out

2. in the discreet structures course a student got up, walked to the front of the room in tears, tore up their final in front of the class and prof, and then walked out.

3. not sure if it counts but in that same physics class from #1 another student threw up all over themselves but sat there in it and finished the final. maybe just sick idk

a lot of students are hotshit in HS and then get to college and find out they're not as smart as they thought. heh i came from rural TX armed with Algebra II and didn't even own a computer. Fortunately for me, i somehow ended up with a handful of upper classmen friends who seemed to make it a mission that i get through it. I owe them so much.

EDIT: Professionally, i've been on plenty of conference calls where peers break down in tears. There's only so much pressure a person can bear before nerves just give way.

I once met an engineering statistics professor under social circumstances. Said professor proceeded to brag about never having a student get an A on his final, along with other similar comments. Later, I took a class from a history instructor who started the first class by going around the room mocking the students individually. (I dropped that sucker so damn fast...)

Some teachers specifically not to teach, but to take power trips over students. They are simply bad. Others are there because it's a paycheck; they're not very good. Some others are confused and loopy. They're not great.

But most of the university and college teachers I've met were interested in teaching students---they're typically teaching something related to the field they've spent their lives on, right? Most were middling good, some were spectacular.

This reminds of my DS class at a normal state uni. We started with about 30 students, 7 showed up for the final exam. 2 walked out during the exam.

Unless you were planning to graduate in 3 years or less, I've personally never seen anyone experience this.

Advisors should have worked with you to make sure your semester workload floats at around 40-50 hours a week, 60 hours at most during a bad semester. Some people actually care about retaining the material they're learning - taking 4 engineering classes a semester is a waste of time and likely detrimental to learning. It's usually 2-3 engineering classes plus a few easy blow off classes a semester to get all done in 4 years.

It was absolutely detrimental to learning and retention.

We were on a quarter system (really trimesters, since one quarter is the summer quarter), with 48 classes required to graduate from engineering, which is 4 classes per quarter for 4 years assuming you don't have any AP credits. Only a handful of the 48 are allowed to be non-engineering, econ, or math.

Most classes that would be a 14 weeks in a semester system were not broken up differently - they were crammed into 10 weeks to fit into the quarter system.

This situation probably did not happen overnight. It was probably a long process driven by feedback loops. Some students started cheating, so profs made classes harder or assigned more work to ensure that students learn enough to get jobs/scholarships/grad school admissions.

More students started cheating. Profs responded the same way because of organizational pressure. Ten years later, courses involve obscene amounts of work.