How Difficult Will College Be If You Can’t Remember What You Learned In High School? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last week, I was clearing my desk after final exams, a half-eaten lemon cookie from the senior bake sale sitting next to a lukewarm mug of coffee, when Mia knocked on my door. She’d gotten accepted to our state university’s pre-biology program back in March, and her mom followed behind her, a spiral notebook labeled “Mia Fall 2024 Prep” peeking out of her tote bag. Mia twisted the strap of her canvas backpack, pulled out a crumpled chemistry final review sheet, and got straight to the point: “I can’t remember how to do stoichiometry. I learned that in 10th grade, and I just stared at this question for 10 minutes yesterday. If I can’t remember most of what I learned in high school, how hard is college actually going to be?”
Her mom jumped in next, saying she’d quizzed Mia on algebra II over Mother’s Day weekend, and Mia couldn’t remember how to graph a quadratic function. They’d already gotten an email for a $1,200 6-week pre-college refresh bootcamp, and she was half-ready to sign her up, even wondering if they should defer admission for a year to let Mia re-do key high school classes.
I’ve been teaching 12th grade in a public high school for 12 years, and this conversation plays out almost every May. Last year it was a boy heading into engineering who couldn’t remember basic trig identities. Two years ago, it was an English major who couldn’t list the core themes of any of the novels she’d studied for AP Lit. I always start the same way: I tell them about last month, when I tried to help my 15-year-old niece with her geometry proof, and I couldn’t remember how the whole congruent triangles rule worked. I’ve got a teaching degree, I’ve graded hundreds of geometry tests, and I still forgot. That’s just how memory works.
Our brains don’t hold onto every fact we memorize for a final exam or an AP test if we don’t use it regularly. If you haven’t had to balance a chemical equation in 18 months, your brain shoves that information to the back of the storage closet, or dumps it entirely to make room for other stuff that matters more right now—like prom plans, college move-in logistics, your part-time job schedule. That’s not a failure of learning, that’s how our brains are supposed to work.
So how hard will college actually be? It depends, but it’s almost never as bad as you’re imagining right now. Most intro college classes are built for students who’ve forgotten most of their high school prereq material. I’ve checked syllabi for dozens of intro college courses over the years, and almost every single one devotes the first two to three weeks to reviewing core high school material that’s needed for the rest of the semester. The professors don’t expect you to remember everything off the top of your head. They just expect you to be willing to re-learn what you need, when you need it.
That said, it can be a little bumpier if you don’t do a tiny bit of prep before you start. I didn’t tell Mia and her mom to do nothing, I just told them to skip the $1,200 bootcamp and do three specific things instead. First, go to the university’s biology department website, pull up the syllabus for the intro bio class Mia is registered for, which is posted there two months before classes start. Only look at the first three weeks of topics. Write down any that you don’t remember at all. For Mia, that was stoichiometry, atomic bonding, and quadratic graphing for lab calculations. That’s three topics, not three years of high school. Second, Google “[class name] free prerequisite review” and you’ll almost always find a free 10-15 page review sheet the college’s tutoring center put together, or a free 3-hour YouTube series from the department that covers exactly what you need. Mia found a 20-page review from her uni’s academic support center in 5 minutes. Third, if you get to class and you’re still confused, go to office hours in the first week, not after you flunk your first quiz. Most profs will point you to a free 30-minute one-on-one review at the tutoring center, no extra cost needed.
I thought of Jake, a former student who graduated five years ago. He got into a good engineering program, but he couldn’t remember a single thing from his high school physics class when he graduated—he’d had a chaotic senior year, worked 20 hours a week, and let all that physics slip after he turned in his final. He followed that same advice: pulled the syllabus, brushed up the four core topics he needed for the first month, went to tutoring once a week for the first six weeks. Last I heard, he’s working as a civil engineer now, building roads up north. He still doesn’t remember half of what he learned in high school physics, but that never stopped him.
Mia left my classroom that day, the free review sheet printed out and tucked into her folder, and she decided to skip the bootcamp. She’s going to spend an hour a week for the next two months brushing up those three topics, and put the $1,200 toward her textbooks and a new bike for campus. I don’t have a crystal ball to say how her first semester will go. College is always hard, no matter how much you remember from high school. There’s going to be adjustment, there might be a bad test grade early on that she has to bounce back from. But forgetting high school content doesn’t mean she’s not ready. It just means she’s normal. Most of us are in the same boat, and almost all of us figure it out as we go.
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