Is it normal for everyone in circuits lecture to look completely checked out?

Both things are happening in that room, and you can't tell them apart by looking, which is why it's bugging you. Some of those laptop people are taking notes in LaTeX or OneNote and following along fine. Some are doing homework for another class and are about to get wrecked. And a decent chunk already saw this material in high school physics or from messing with electronics as a hobby, so the first few weeks of nodal analysis genuinely are review for them. That group shrinks fast once you hit dependent sources and then again when AC steady state shows up with phasors and complex numbers. That's ussually where the attrition happens.

Here's what I'd tell you about your own studying, because your instinct that something is off is partially right. Watching a professor work derivations and copying them down feels like learning, but it isn't the same as being able to do it cold. Circuits is a class where the lecture mostly gives you the recipe and the actual skill gets built in the problem sets. If you can work the homework without looking at your notes, you're fine regardless of what anyone else is doing. If you can't, more scribbling in lecture won't fix it.

One trick that helped me: before each lecture, spend twenty minutes skimming the section so the derivation isn't the first time you're seeing the moves. Then lecture becomes confirmation instead of transcription, and you can actually afford to ask a question now and then. The silence in your room isn't understanding, by the way. It's usually nobody wanting to be the first to admit they're lost, plus the laptop crowd not paying attention at all.

As for the midterm flattening people, some will get flattened, that's just how these courses work. But their fate has zero effect on yours, so don't calibrate your effort against theirs. Compare yourself to the homework solutions and to whether you can set up a circuit from a blank page.

I was the scribbler in my circuits class too and it nearly did me in, because I could copy every derivation and still bomb the practice problems. What finally made it click was a circuit simulator I played with at home. I'd build the same little resistor network from the homework, guess the currents first, then run it and see where my intuition died. After a few weeks of that, nodal analysis stopped being symbols on a board and started being something I could actually picture. The laptop crowd might be fine, but if you can't predict what a circuit does before you solve it, the simulator will show you real quick.

I'm not an EE major, I'm mech taking circuits as an elective, so maybe I read the room wrong too, but I had a similar moment in my thermodynamics class. Everyone looked bored and I felt behind, then I found out two of them had allready failed it once. That changed how I felt about the silence real quick.

Something I'd ask though, is it wierd to ask one of the laptop people to compare homework answers? I keep wanting to but they seem so locked in I'd feel like I'm interrupting.

Thirty years in the trade and I'll tell you what I saw back in my day too. The guys who coasted on high school physics usually looked sharpest right up untill three-phase and transformers showed up, then half of them changed majors by junior year. The scribblers like you were the ones still standing at graduation.

One thing I'd add: find out if your department has old exams on file in the library. We used to dig the yellowed past papers out of a filing cabinet and work them against the clock. Nothing calibrates you faster than realizing you can't finish in the time given, while there's still time to fix it.

And get friendly with the lab tech. Half my practical knowledge came from that man, not any lecture.

I run design reviews at my job and the pattern follows you straight out of school. We sit down weekly to go over schematics, and the person sitting quietly through the whole meeting is almost never the one who understands it best. Our most junior engineer asked what seemed like a dumb question about a resistor value two months back and it turned out the part was underspecified. Asking the professor to back up mid-derivation costs you ten seconds of looking confused. It also tells him half the room is lost, which changes the whole pace of the class.