The class, Univ 150: Writing for College Success was very helpful in my first year of college. During this class I was able to identify all of the mistakes that I was making in my writing and learned how to fix them. Even though this class was mandatory for me to take, I still found it extremely helpful.

I feel if I did not take this class before taking the English composition classes, I would have had a very hard time in those classes. I would not have known what I was doing wrong in my writing. Even in high school, whenever I would receive a bad grade on a paper, I thought it was because of the content in the paper and not because of the structural errors I was making. Also, before taking this class,  I never had a teacher sit down with me and tell me what I was doing wrong in my writing.

I am happy that I did take this class because now I know that all of the mistakes that I was making in my writing were things that can be easily fixed. I have always struggled with writing, but because of this class i believe that it will come easier to me now. I hope that now I will succeed in any future writing assignments and courses that come my way.

All students expect their high school teachers to prepare him or her for college. Once they graduate from high school, these students do believe that all 12 years of their schooling have prepared them for college. But in my own personal experiences, I do not believe that my teachers throughout middle and high school have prepared me for this experience. In high school, my teachers were mostly concerned about the our CAPT scores, they would reteach us skills that we had already mastered, and they were more worried about our admission to college and not our performance once we get to college.

Most of my teachers in my freshman and sophomore years were more focused on giving us the skills to pass the CAPT test. The CAPT test is the standardized test in the state of Connecticut that all high school sophomores have to take and my high school had a rule that we had to pass it in order to graduate. If we did not pass this test our sophomore year, there was another chance to take it junior year. I remember most of those years our teachers were telling us what material would be on this test. These teachers were more worried about how our CAPT scores would come out and how it would reflect on the town as to what type of students and teachers the town had. Because of that they pushed us so hard and drilled these skills into our heads so much that we ended up getting the highest CPT scores out of all the school in the state. But throughout all of the practicing for the CAPT test, none of the skills would be used in college. Because of how the teachers taught us in high school, it was one of the reasons I felt so unprepared for college in my first semester.

After the CAPT testing was over, all the teachers started teaching us basic skills that we had learned a long time ago, and we would relearn every year. My junior year of high school, I had this one teacher who did teach us all new skills that we had never learned before. Before I had this teacher, I had to do a research paper before, but I did not know how to research for it or how to write it. This teacher walked us through the steps that it takes to write a good research paper and how to get good information and how to cite it too. We got lots of practice with these new skills with writing two research papers and having to do a research power point too. I wish I had more teachers like this one because he had taught us so many more skills then any other teacher in high school. I am happy that he did teach us these skills because I had to write a research paper, and if I did had him, then I would not know how to go about writing a research paper. I feel as if he was one of the only teachers who had prepared me for college by teaching me skills that I will use in college and throughout college and my lifetime.

Another teacher I had in high school was a professor at a college in New Haven, and he was one of the only other people who did prepare me for college. Whenever we had an essay due in his English class, he would grade our essays like he would grade his college students’ essays. I found this very helpful because I was learning how my college professors would be grading my papers and what they would look for in my writing too. Along with looking at our essays the way a college professor would, he would also look over our college application essays. This was one of the very helpful teachers I had my senior year of high school because by this point I was really focused on college.

The last reason that I was not prepared for college when I got to ODU was my teachers were more worried about their students getting into colleges and not as much about the academic college. They had made classes easy, and that is what allowed us get such good grades in so many classes. I wish that my teachers had pushed us academically so that I would be more prepared. If teachers knew what their students would be facing when they got to college, they could probably prepare them, but since they only know about the admission process, that is the only thing that they can prepare the students.

In conclusion, high school did not prepared me for college. Most of my teachers in high school were focused on preparing us for the CAPT test, would reteach us skills we already knew, and were more worried about our admission into college. If my high school teachers pushed us like college professors are pushing their students, I would have been more prepared for college.

University 150: Writing for College Success is one of the courses that I took during my second semester during my first year. This class had helped me with my writing more then I had exited it to. This course did help me to learn how to fix and avoid errors that I would make all the time in my writing that I would be submitting to my professors. If I had known how helpful this course would have ben, I would have signed up to take this class during my first semester at Old Dominion.