I graduated high school 5th in my class out of 273 people. I made a 29 on the ACT and a 99 on the ASVAB (twice). Having said that, I found Naval Nuclear Power school extremely challenging. I was in class for 8 hours a day, minus time for a short lunch and only a 5 minute break between subjects/classes to go to the bathroom and go to the next class. The instructors lectured page after page of new information every day and rarely spent much time covering any one particular subject. At night we received homework problem samples from the new material, and the next day we moved on to new topics of equal difficulty. We would take pages and pages of notes.
At the end of each week we were tested on new information and were expected to be able to regurgitate it all back onto paper in essay form. Our answers had to be almost verbatim to the "key words and tricky phrases" used by the instructors. It was an enormous volume of information. While being tested at the end of each week, if even a few of the words in our responses were wrong our scores would be low or failing, and we might have received a GCE which stood for Gross Conceptual Error.
The subjects we were learning we're no joke. We were learning things like physics on an atomic level, reactor theory, electrical theory and more. The grading scale was 4.0 with anything below a 2.5 being a failing grade. This is where the term "2.5 stay alive" came from. Failure was not an option. This was military school not high school or college. We were essentially ordered to learn this stuff and perform at a satisfactory level, and if we were failing that opened up a whole new can of worms such as possible dereliction of duty.
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