alt Hacker News"Freshmen courses generally mitigate this somewhat to help ease in students"
Interesting, that's not my observation at all. Instead freshman classes were the most grueling experiences, intentionally weed-out classes to try to detect and, well, weed-out early those who wouldn't have the combination of grit, intelligence and organization skills to make it to the end of the degree.
I speak somewhat hyperbolically, it was never _unfair_, but the classes absolutely were paced and had homework/exam loads that you would simply be unable to cope with if you were trying to half-ass it. At my college, Calc I and Physics 1 were the big freshman showstoppers. I tested out of calc 1, but my IB HL was chemistry and as such I had a chemist's disdain (and begrudging respect) for the more academic science of physics, and while the actual topics weren't difficult, there was a LOT of homework and the exams left no stone unturned.
Comparatively, jr+ classes tended to be much more relaxed, focused more on learning the material than ensuring you are willing to do 8-10 hours of physics homework per week.
Every college is different though, I suppose.
This was a few decades ago but we had 2 tiers of weed outs. The first was the intro classes that most everyone took their freshman year. Then there was another wave that was major specific and tended to show up 2nd semester of sophomore year into 1st semester of junior year, essentially the point where coursework was shifting almost entirely to be major specific.
So for instance, one of the notorious freshman weed out classes was a class that *every* engineering student took. But then each individual engineering major had their own handful of pain in the ass classes that showed up as the engineering curriculum diverged.