Ok, rant time...

Consider this situation:
A week before your midterm exam, you are told in class what format the exam will take: it will be an in-class essay covering everything we have discussed in class up to this point, specifically focusing on the issues of social justice. Two days before the exam, you are given the actual assignment as well as the grading scale, so that you can prepare an outline to bring to class for the midterm to aid you in writing your essay. After the midterms are graded, you are shocked to find out how low your grade is. In class, the teacher discusses how a good deal of the class failed to fully answer the questions in their essays.

This actually happened in a class I'm in, and my fellow students' reactions disgusted me for the most part, and I barely kept my comments civil as I mentioned how much time and preparation we were allowed to have versus what we would get in, say, an English class. I am willing to bet that 90% of my classmates did poorly because of one of the following reasons:
1) They do not take the class seriously at all because it's one of the few academic classes we must take through the dance department and therefore is low priority against academic classes from other divisions. Thus, they do not do the reading assignments, half-ass the few assignments we are given, and did not prepare at all for the exam because they expected it to be easy.
2) They do not take the class seriously because the teacher is a little scatterbrained and they have a hard time following her lines of thought. Rather than ask the teacher for clarification if they did not understand the midterm assignment questions, they decided to interpret it their own way and figure she won't care because she is an "easy" teacher.
3) They did not fully read or understand the directions for the essay and did not bother to listen when the teacher explained the assignment in class on several occasions.

Instead, this is what one of them claimed: "I'm not good at in-class essays because I can't organize my thoughts in the small amount of time given." So, I commented that we were given a week to contemplate the topic, and 2 full days to compose an outline to bring to class to allow us to base our essay off of.

Another claimed: "Well, maybe that works for you, but I can't write a good outline so it didn't help me, and what you said sounds confrontational because not all of us are like you." Hello, girls... this is COLLEGE, not elementary school. We're all adults, and expected to take responsibility of our own actions as responsible adults. This means, if we do not know how to do something that may help us succeed, we can blame no one but ourselves if we don't figure out a way to learn that thing. Frankly, I can't write a "proper" outline to save my life... my outline was broken down into 3 sections, one for each person I covered, and had bullet notes beneath it in no particular order just to keep my facts available and to make sure I covered everything the assignment asked for. No one says you have to do your notes/outline in a certain way, just do it in a way that helps you. If your outline doesn't help you, then it is your own fault for making it that way.

Also, if what I said can be construed in any way to be confrontational, then it is because you are so insecure in yourself that you take everything to be a confrontation. I know I am one of the least confrontational people I know... I do just about everything I can, go very out of my way to avoid any sort of confrontation. 99.9% of the time I'd rather keep my mouth shut and work around the issue on my own than to speak up and bring the issue to light if I believe it will cause an argument.

So basically, if you're in college and do not take the steps to learn things from your classes, then maybe you should reconsider why you're really in college in the first place. If you cannot ask questions or get help when you need it, you need to learn to speak up. If you have to blame everyone but yourself for getting a poor grade when given preparation time and allowed notes, then you need to learn to take personal responsibility seriously. And if you just cannot fathom doing any of the above steps, you need to go back to middle school, because really, even most high schoolers are more mature than you have been.

I have grown so completely annoyed and disgusted by the lack of common sense, closed mindedness, and immaturity displayed by such a large group of students at this school that I seriously have to wonder at how far the promise of youth has fallen in the past century. Frankly, the levels of maturity and forethought shown by students at this school is below that of even the podunk community colleges I've attended. If this is what I have to look forward to in the professional world, then I'll go it alone, thank you very much.