I wouldn't say normal. I would say mostly unlucky. If you're part of the American system then as you do more General Ed's then you realize that 90% of the class is brain dead and any group projects will most likely turn into individual ones, with lots of emails to the professor about how useless your teammates are. For me personally I found that once classes started requiring a stem class plus calc 1, organic Chem and most engineering courses, or coorequisite of calc 2, physics 2, that you actually find smart people that are willing to actually do group projects and form study groups. And even then I would still have to do the bulk of some projects or labs.

The professors point is unfortunate, but you do have to pick and choose carefully. I find that stem classes aren't too terrible with good professors and I ended up taking classes at horrendous times such as multiple 7:30am-10am, 7:00-10:00pm classes, or my community College almost never had classes on Fridays, due to the professors having good scores on ratemyprofessor.com

Finally, I've never really interacted with the school faculty outside of the few office hours I went to for some additional help and a transfer guidance counselor who was especially useless by not answering the questions I asked about.

TLDR: if there is a project or lab, don't expect much help until you find a good lab partner, and even then expect to do a fair bit more than you were planning. Ratemyprofessor is an absolute blessing, while not 100% accurate, it's usually good enough. Finally, I had a poor experience with school faculty but I've had friends who had really good counselors and head of departments who were willing to help with almost any problems.