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Bottom line: no matter what your grades in high school, you are going to have to work much harder to pull the same grades in college. Even if you think you are working as hard as you possibly can - it probably won't cut it.
I went to an extremely academically rigorous private school, and pretty much never studied except for finals. If I paid close attention in class and did my homework, I was fine. This is basically never the case for college. You may not be going to classes eight hours a day, every day, but you should fill up the majority of that new free time with schoolwork. I wanted a 4.0 this semester, and I had to sacrifice a lot to get it, even though I graduated with a 4.35.
Something that helped me was choosing one night of the weekend to stay in and catch up on work. Only if I honestly had no work to do would I go out both nights of the weekend. Did I miss a few fun times? Sure, but now the girls who went out almost every night of the week are on academic probation and people are annoyed with them for bringing down our chapter GPA.
You need to go in with the mindset that you will have to step it up a notch with your study habits. I would say this even if you were the valedictorian or skipped five grades or what-have-you - and if that's not the case, you will have to work that much harder.
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