Beitrag auf Quora:

Ich selbst hatte anfangs Schwierigkeiten, mich vom Schulalltag auf den Unialltag einzustellen und nicht die besten Leistungen im ersten Jahr. Zum Glück habe ich mich dann daran gewöhnt und doch recht ordentlich abgeschlossen. Manche bekommen den Wechsel gar nicht hin. Und in der Zwischenprüfung in Geschichte - man wurde in Alter, Mittelalterlicher und Neuer Geschichte geprüft und musste alle drei Prüfungen bestehen (bekam aber keine Note - es ging nur um bestanden oder nicht bestanden), lagen die durchschnittlichen Durchfallquoten bei 70%, 50% und 30%. Ein Professor für Neuere Geschichte meinte, die Durchfallquoten seien mit 30% in seinem Bereich noch viel zu gering...

Why are German universities so unpleasant?

I know just what you mean. Whenever I visit a German university, I marvel at just how uneasy they make me feel, and it took me years to identify why that is.

These days, I lean toward the explanation that German universities simply exude an extraordinary spirit of indifference, even arrogance, toward the individual. It’s you against the intellectual universe when you’re in there, and no one cares if you sink or swim.

In a way, this is a remnant of Socrates’ original concept of “the university” as a meeting place of intellectual peers for the sake of discussion.

In other words, a German university is not a school, and does not extend itself to the student; it understands itself instead as a platform on which those who decide to take on the challenge are welcome to prove they’ve got what it takes to claim their place in society as academics. Only the mature, capable, and dedicated will make it through, and since the funding is governmental, without tuition fees factoring in significant ways, nobody cares how many fail. The exams are the filters that protect society from underachievers, and it is part of the calculation that a good part of the original entrants are not going to make it.

On the upside, anyone is welcome to sit in any lecture of their choosing, even if they aren’t registered as students. These are public events, and the lecturer knows no one, performs his or her lecture, and leaves.

On one occasion I remember to this day, the dean of the school of medicine at the university of Heidelberg greeted the freshmen with the words “ten years from now, 80% of you won’t be doctors.”

No one even flinched.

Had he said this where I have studied, in the US, Great Britain, and Canada, I have an inkling the rest of the speech would have been drowned out in a pandemonium requiring security to facilitate safe evacuation of the premises.