I've always enjoyed my classes here. Enjoyed probably isn't a strong enough word-- I've loved everything I've learned. Although I'm a Lit major, my anthropology, sociology, theatre, and psychology classes have also been fascinating.
The only class in which the professor didn't know all of our names was my psychology lecture, which I took in my very first semester. That was the only class I had in one of the few lecture halls on campus-- since then, all of my classes have had fewer than thirty students. I've always been amazed by how much my professors remember about our past work and class participation off the tops of their heads. None of them seem like they teach out of obligation-- they all seem excited to share their knowledge with us, and explain things clearly and interestingly.
My favorite class that I took here... well, that would be impossible to answer. One of the best was probably the Literary Imagination, in which we read recent works of literature and wrote creative works inspired by the readings. Occasionally, the others even came by to speak with the class. Another favorite was Transformations of Shakespeare. Unlike most Shakespeare classes, we discussed his plays as performance material, not just literature. We saw five local productions of Shakespeare plays-- all very different in tone-- and discussed them, as well as how we would direct or perform them if given the chance. I would never have been so passionate about Shakespeare if it wasn't for that course.
My University College seminar class on the Nature of Evil is the most fascinating course I've ever taken, though very heavy subject matter-- fittingly, the next semester, I picked a college writing course on Humor. That was an awesome class, too. Really, all of them were. I've taken two classes on sex and gender, an area I really knew nothing about, and both have changed my world view and the way I think of other people.
Even my least-favorite class was still interesting-- Great Ideas in Mathematics. Math was a university requirement, and I was horrified, because I am incredibly terrible at math. This class, however, was different. It was more conceptual and creative, and many of our exercises used logical reasoning rather than actual numbers. The whole class yelled 'WHOA!' on more than five occasions as the professor blew our minds with unbelievable concepts like multiple infinities and dimensions, which our class activities helped us grasp. We ended up learning very high-level mathematical theory, without having to do high-level arithmetic. The only reason why it was my least favorite is because math has always been difficult for me, so I struggled academically with the class. If it had been Pass/Fail, I probably would have loved it.
My friends always seem to discuss their classes and assignments, and most seem generally interested in their majors. I've never met anyone who really seemed apathetic about school, although many are very quiet in class. It's often the same people participating in every class, which you could say of any school, but most people here seem intellectually voracious. I've never heard anyone talk about cheating on assignments. I have seen people sleeping in class, though given how busy my friends tend to be, I don't blame them.
I understand that AU's changing the way their Gen-Ed curriculum is set up. I don't know much about what it will look like in the future, but right now, you need two college writing classes, a math class, and two classes from five different categories: creative arts, Traditions that Shape the Western World, Global and Multicultural Perspectives, Social Institutions and Behavior, and Natural Sciences. I was exempt from several of the categories because of the AP classes that I took in high school, but the courses that I took all taught me a lot about areas that had previously been mysteries.
Most students here have a minor or double-major. I'm only going for a major, in the hopes that I'll graduate early, but I find the requirements for a major or minor pretty fair. It is aggravating how quickly classes fill up at registration-- a commitment to small class sizes means most students don't get the classes they want, and some classes that are major requirements only have one section, which doesn't make sense to me. I think part of it is because Lit is a fairly small department, so there aren't usually a huge number of courses offered outside college writing. So far, this hasn't been a problem for me, although I know one student who worries he'll have to stay an extra semester because there was no room for him in the one class he needed to graduate.