Grad school in the sciences. The only class anyone is really expected to get less than an A in was statistics. I got one A- because it was that kind of professor, but most give an A with minimal effort. Grades don’t matter. That certainly doesn’t make it easy, it’s pretty difficult at times. All that is in your thesis/dissertation, research, etc.
You can be forced out, say with what I call a “pity Master’s” instead of a PhD. But you have to work very hard to get poor grades, it’s usually because of your research effort.
In my opinion, graduate school divides between programs where you are simply taking courses and have a final comprehensive exam or required number of courses, and those that require some type of original product. By original product, I mean a thesis, capstone project, dissertation ect. The pressure to complete that original product is incredibly stressful and students can simply fail to do so. Even though the final comprehensive exam may be difficult or stressful, it is by nature less self-directed and from my observations, possible to retake.
Is dropping out of grad school equated with flunking out in this thread? I would imagine it was not that rare for someone to start at grad school, but then a life crisis came up and he or she had to leave. A medical crisis, family obligations, etc.
Medical school is anything but easy, but I can count on both hands the number of people I know who started med school and didn’t go on to become physicians, and half of those quit on their own for reasons other than grades.
Motivation tends to be very high, partially because it requires a lot of motivation to get in, and partially because even a single year of med school means an enormous amount of debt (not counting anything left from undergrad) and anything short of graduation from med school doesn’t really qualify you to do anything. Most schools tend to intervene early and offer help to people who are struggling.
The big barrier in med school is the step exams, typically taken after the second year and during the fourth year. My own school had tough grades and gave difficult subject tests during clinical rotations, so anyone who was going to fail the step exams was probably going to have issues far earlier and would have a chance to catch up. The school I work with most often now stresses the practical experience over the academic learning, which is fine as far as it goes but it’s not unusual to have students get all As in their clinical rotations and then have a lot of trouble passing the steps. Most of them pass, eventually.
As for residency (the training after med school), I know of two people who started residency and weren’t able to finish it, one during my own training and one while I’ve been faculty. In both cases it was a huge deal and not one taken lightly.
So for medical training, I’d say that it’s not difficult to flunk out, but very few people do it.
I failed one class while study math and Vanderbilt. I know of two people who actually failed two classes, and thereby legitimately flunked out. The math classes for beginning graduate students are intended to be difficult. The qualifying exams are as well.
This is a really good point. Any program that requires you to incur a substantial amount of debt is going to serve as an excellent motivator to finish. I’m willing to bet that when people are at their breaking point, having that debt hanging over them is a huge deterrent to flunking out. (I’m sure the thought of all that debt and no degree kept my ass going a time or two.)
I would consider a “forced” or “coerced” dropout, or a “stalemate” situation, to be similar to a flunk out. That is, if the student is faced with an impossible(or nearly so) hurdle to complete the degree (e.g. they have a 2.1 GPA and they have to get it to 3.5 within one semester or else be expelled/flunked out, and getting that 3.5 is either mathematically impossible or require a straight 4.0 that the student has never achieved in their life, I could consider that equivalent to being flunked out). If the student just caves in to stress and, because of that, makes a free choice that the best solution for their life would be to drop out, I would not consider that equivalent to being flunked out.
In that case, I would say that grad school (in the sciences, research program, with thesis) is more difficult to “flunk out of” i.e. be kicked out because of grades than undergrad. But this is simply because in my program (and many or most similar programs) grades “don’t matter.” You’re expected to get an A or B, and pretty much everyone does. By that point you’re only taking a few (1-3) classes per semester, they’re all in a field you’re becoming an expert in, and now that you’ve been in school for 17 or 18 years you’re pretty damn good at taking tests. Therefore it was MUCH more uncommon for someone in my grad program to get a “C” in a class than it was for someone to get a solid “F” in undergrad. It hardly ever happened. You needed an A/B in classes X,Y, and Z in order to fulfill the obligations necessary for your degree, so you got an A/B in X,Y, and Z. If/when anyone was “forced out” of my program, it was invariably because they were a poor researcher/scientist, grades never really entered the picture.
I am a PHD student in genetics at a UC. It is by no means easy. How is grades different from undergrad? Well for one, no A no fellowship which means no stipend, health insurance and tuition. Is it easier to get an A? No!!! But when your paycheck depends on it, then you best be getting an A. And you need to be getting As while working 40+ hours a week in the lab. In my program you cant have anything less than an A-. There’s the annual reviews and dissertation committe meetings. And then there’s the dreaded qualifying exams (written and oral), if you don’t pass you are OUT!! 30 page proposal, Two days 8 hours each of written exams, and 3 hour oral examination. At any point in time your PI can kick you out of you do not perform well. I’ve seen half the people who came in my year not make it to even take their quals, so ya not easy.
For a Master’s Degree, I think it really depends on the school and requirements. I went to Johns Hopkins part-time program (ie, I went at night) and got my master’s in Computer Science. You didn’t have to do a thesis or a final exam. You just had to take 10 courses in your major. For some instructors, if you at least tried to do the work, you would pass. There was incentive for the school not to flunk people (if they were too hard, people wouldn’t go to the school), though my job would make me re-pay them for a course if I got a C. It was pretty stressful and exhausting because I was working at the same time (and I didn’t want to get a C), but in my opinion, you had to make a major effort to fail.
I’d say pretty hard, unless you’re completely lazy or a dummy. But if you were either you probably wouldn’t make it to grad school on the first place. The key, I believe, to succeeding in grad school is keeping the lines of communication open between you and your professor. I visited my professors in their offices weekly to touch base on what I was doing with my projects and what their expectations were.
If your program is heavily geared towards writing (as most are, I assume) it helps to know what makes your professors tick. Tell em what they want hear and they will reward you with higher points.
I have a JD and a PhD in engineering. I would say that the two are not really comparable on almost any dimension on how “hard” they are. The JD required a lot more reading, and one exam per semester per class on which your whole grade was based. I had to do one “independent” paper (not part of a class) in order to graduate, which is one more than most programs have in my understanding. So your degree really is about your grades. Classes were mostly B-curved, I think, and did not really feel that different from my undergraduate classes in how “hard” they were, although my grades were not as good as they were in engineering (mostly because I was holding down a half-time job while getting my JD). For my PhD, I would have had to really bomb a class to get lower than a B, but most of the value of the degree has nothing to do with my grades or my classes. I spent about two years going to classes close to full-time, and five years in the lab (partly because I was slow and had extracurriculars going on, and partly because my dissertation subject sucked rocks). I have never had anyone have the slightest interest in my GPA from my PhD, but they were definitely interested in my grades in law school.
So I would say that there is no monolithic “grad school” that you can draw conclusions from. I struggled more in my PhD program than in undergrad, but I think that was more for personal reasons than because it was harder. Law school would have been harder to get straight A’s in, but was a breeze to pass. The big hurdle for law students is not really the JD, it’s the bar exam.
In my LL.B., from what I was told, about half of the people who started did not finish it. That surprised me when I learned it and I’m still not sure it’s true. I could see the classrooms becoming sparser but didn’t know if it was caused by attrition or by the fact that latter courses are more numerous and optional (thereby dividing the student body into more classrooms).
The bar exam is indeed a big hurdle. Something like 25% don’t pass it.
I don’t know what it was like for you Nugent but the thing that stressed us in our bar class was that it was difficult to understand how something was going to be graded. You’d gain or lose points in ways that were very difficult to comprehend; sometimes the grading was ridiculously nitpicky and at other times an answer that was little more than some-random-bullshit-because-I-don’t-know-what-to-answer could net you the points.
I cannot easily assess my own competence but I know that some very good law students got bad marks. I myself passed in large part because I got good marks in criminal procedure which is laughable.
We didn’t get detailed scores on the bar exam in either state in which I have taken it - just a “pass” or “fail.” I passed it the first time each time, after a review course.
I went to a very highly-ranked law school - it is very possible that things are different at the more run-of-the-mill ones. Or maybe I didn’t know about people dropping out.
My law school class lost about a third of our number from start to finish. Some of those were probably for non-academic reasons, but quite a few flunked courses. Including a good friend of mine who didn’t graduate with the rest of us because she failed a course in the last semester. She’d have been eligible to retake the course (or another one) to get enough credits to graduate, but I moved back to the South and lost contact with her, so I don’t know if she ever did.
Like most Commonwealth people outside of N America, my first law degree was an undergraduate one, an LLB Hons from University of London. It was not a breeze by any means, but I distinctly recall that I was less stressed than I had been for my A Levels. The first eighteen months all I did was party, I was 18, mum and dad were far far away. For Bar Course (which is a graduate progarmme in England and Wales). Well of my undergraduate year of about 200 students, 4 were advised that we had grades good enough to even apply, of which 2 were accepted. That was a cull right there. the course itself was crazy. What I recall was that I was always doing something. I had assessments all the time, classes which I had to attend, assignments which I had to complete, feedbacks to complete, optional seminars on a variety of topics which were not optional at all and usually gave me a headache (and started at 6 30 pm to boot). we literally had to make time for other activities. I remember that me and a few other students took a trip to Edinburgh, and on the train trip we all
did a lot of reading and work. The joke used to be that Bar students gave and received the best blow jobs, we did not have time for anything else.
I later did a research LLM, part time while being a full time lawyer. I don’t know how I finished it.
To the OP. Flunking is difficult. It is very easy to do badly enough that you have few prospects once you leave the program. It was the fear of having wasted your time and money which was the
motivator. I know of a one girl who did not complete the course ( I am sure there were others I did not know about). She was hit by a bus. I know several who have since kept the field as their performance was not good enough to get pupilage or a place in chambers.
I would agree that my MBA program was a lot easier than my engineering undergrad. And having the mathmatics background from my engineering BS helped me ace all of my quant classes in business school while some of my softer classmates struggled.
I was under the impression that working at a law firm was similar to working in consulting firms in that if you didn’t bill so many hours every year, you were at risk of being “counselled out” of the firm (fired).