Were you a high GPA student?

[abaris]

Jealous. My religious studies 'teachers' made me wake up at night screaming ._.

Well, that guy taught us when we were between 15 and 18.

In primary school I had the same experiences as you.

[SteelCurtain]

I was (am!) a good student.

Most of you know I have some compulsive tendencies. One of them is doing everything I care about with an annoying amount of effort.

I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to go to USNA. Gotta have good grades/SATs/EC's in order to go. So I graduated with a 4.2GPA, got a 1530 on my SATs, and was a varsity football player/student council VP.

Like I said, annoying amount of effort. Even I hate me a little here.

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

This thread has inspired me to study for my test tomorrow.Thank you guys

Me, i don't usually study for tests.I go to the test and make stuff up right then and there: in mathematics,physics,chemistry and programming.I'm not big on studying and memorizing equations and formulas.I like to just use my logic and find the answers to questions.I'm not big on spending a huge amount of time memorizing other's works.
May be the reason why i like programming so much

[Alex K]

Jealous. My religious studies 'teachers' made me wake up at night screaming ._.

Oh the ones I had in elementary school were bigoted assholes. I'm talking 12th grade. I could have opted out then and done Ethics instead of Religious instruction, but the guy who did the Ethics course was a very unpleasant catholic asshat.

[Rev. Rye]

I didn't start out high, but as soon as I dropped Gym, my GPA went up a whole point. It got bigger when I got to College. I can't recall a time since I went to college where it was lower than 3.5.

[thehedglin]

Well, I was Valedictorian, but it was a small school. However, the point difference between me an the Salutatorian was Nearly an entire point(.8 of our GPA). I almost felt bad about it, honestly.

[KevinM1]

Hate to break it to you, pool, but you're going to have to learn other people's work if you want to become a programmer for real. The various sorting algorithms, searching algorithms, data structures, and design patterns you're going to have to employ on an everyday basis? Generally conceived of and refined by other people, and you will be expected to know them and be able to use them out of the gate rather than go through the process of inventing them again. Not only is time money, but knowing how they work and what their Big(O) values are will let you choose the most efficient (in terms of program execution) one to implement.

---

To get to the actual question, I started reading when I was two and a half, and went into the first grade when I was five. I remained a year ahead through high school, and was a perpetual honor roll student without much effort. Things changed when I went to UNH. I started off as an undeclared liberal arts student with the idea of following my oldest brother into law, but that changed when I realized I hate doing research, writing papers, and public speaking. So, I became a computer science student. I did okay until the assembly language course. I failed that fucker twice, and not for a lack of trying. I spent a ton of hours in the computer lab to no avail. I also failed physics a couple times. Turns out I simply don't 'get' physics. I had a hard time visualizing the problems, and a lot of it just seemed counterintuitive to me.

So, I transferred back to liberal arts with communication as my new major. I rattled off a string of 4.0 semesters to bring my cumulative GPA back up to 3.something. I also took and aced a couple of web development courses so I could graduate with dual minors, one in computer information and technology, the other in music (I had to take something to keep me sane during the CS/physics/calculus+ days).

Ultimately, I learned that I COULD be a decent programmer, just that it takes me longer than what the pace at a university will allow for me to grasp some of the concepts, that I suck outright with physics, that my success in math is largely dependent on the teacher/professor I have, and that I have a natural aptitude for liberal arts subjects.

Most importantly, failing brought me down a couple pegs, which was ultimately to my benefit. Success came easy to me before then, and over time I became a smug, entitled prick. I needed to get kicked in the ass a few times to reevaluate who I was and to make changes.

[Whateverist]

To understand me and my GPA, you'd have to have been there when I brought some paper home from school with a "C" on it and my mother immediately put it on the refrigerator.  She did not mean this as a slight.  She, a high school drop out, was proud of me.  So rule out pressure from home.

Through high school and the next year at a local JC, my grades were very mediocre.  My M.O. was to start each course off at a B level and gradually let that sink to a low C or D.  Basically, at that time I never made any effort outside of class.  However, when I went to class I was always very focused even if I didn't take notes.  I think I probably test better than I deserve.  I never did any prep for the SAT tests but earned scholarship based on those since I had C average in high school.

Then in my late twenties after reading a lot of psychology and philosophy on my own I got accepted to UC Berkeley as 2nd year transfer student majoring in philosophy.  I was very strict with myself.  All papers had to be finished in time for me to re-read them and revise before submitting.  First quarter I had an above 4.0 average because of Fred Dretski a visiting professor who taught the introductory Theory of Knowledge class I took.  I didn't expect to enjoy the class, seeing myself as more of an ethics minded guy.  But I think my writing has always benefited from having an instructor I respected.  Since he gave me an A+, a friend who was a graduate student there encouraged me to ask for a letter of recommendation.  It was very supportive and I remember being surprised that he described the papers I'd written as being at least the equal of all the graduate students taking the course.  At the time I was a little insecure about my writing so that really made a difference for me.

I finished my undergraduate degree with a GPA a little under 4, mostly because I took a couple graduate courses at the urging of this same graduate student, Paul Loeb who despite talking dismissively about the value of philosophy the whole time I was there went on to become a professor of philosophy himself somewhere in the northwest.

[Clueless Morgan]

I'm in England, so we don't have GPA we just get results in each subject from A to F at school.

To get a GPA off the A to F system you "translate" the grades into a pointage system and then take an average. So if you took 10 classes and got eight As (4 "points"), one B (3 "points) and one C (2 "points) then your GPA would be 3.7 (4x8)+(3x1)+(2x1)=37/10=3.7


I was an A/B student and tended to be in the 3.5 to 3.75 GPA range from seventh grade to twelfth. Something clicked in me in seventh grade was I was bombing math (okay, I was getting, like, a C, but I didn't think that was acceptable) and I had this "What am I doing? I can do better than this!" moment and brought all my grades up to As and Bs. I got one of those stupid "give everyone an award" awards for being the hardest working math student that year.

Math was definitely my worst subject. It was the only one that would make me cry when I would do my homework because I would just get so frustrated with it. I have no idea how I made it through pre-calc.

When I got into architecture school, though, I really enjoyed my statics classes, which was basically the physics of static (unmoving) bodies using trigonometry, which I weirdly enjoyed. Then I figured out that math, when it's applied to something I thought was interesting, was kinda fun. But when you're learning it for the sake of learning it and you have no idea how it applies to anything and it seems completely devoid of usefulness or application, then it's the worst possible subject on the face of the planet to make me sit through.

[downbeatplumb]

Since I'm not American and finished school some 33 years ago, I don't fall into the same category.

But math, physics and chemistry used to drag me down. That's why I always keep saying I'm an idiot when it comes to natural sciences. I had high grades in every other class. History, German, english, french, latin, but I just managed to scrape by in the natural science classes.

I left school 31 years ago so we are of an age you and I. Come gather ye round and we shall shoot the breeze, with tales of the cubes of rubic and shitty American programmes like Starsky and Hutch and wonder woman.