Cool! My dad taught there in the 60s and 70s. My hometown was Latham NY and you can see the Latham water tower from the RPI campus. And my house at 114 Latham Ridge Road was right next to it (well, that was before they put in Route 7; in my day there was nothing but an open field between my house and the water tower ). Later, he transferred to the RPI Hartford CT campus so we moved to West Hartford.
My sister taught Geography at UT Austin and Southwest Texas State (now Texas State San Marcos). I’m asking her if there were any weed out classes in those departments.
She said no but she guesses that it’s possibly due to majors being impacted. Which, at UCSB, engineering was impacted, while geography at UT and SWTSU was not.
My undergrad was in the then-nascent field of Computer Science. My roomie for the undergrad years was pre-med. Which was sort of a general bio-sciences track, not a specific degree called “pre med”.
Anyhow, Organic Chem (Chem-201) was the Great Filter for the wannabe docs. Whether modern doctoring really needs that much scientific fundamentals as a base is an open question. But that course kicked a LOT of people off the medical track. Fortunately we were a generalist university with lots of other degree options.
He squeaked through that OC class and after quite a lot of adventures did get his MD and was still practicing last I checked a few years ago. Haven’t talked to him in probably 30 years.
I had breezed through high school and the first year of university, but I had a second year Linear Algebra class where everyone failed the mid-term exam (I got a 48). That was a bit of a wake-up call when it came to mathematics. Fortunately we had the option of using the final exam for 100% of our grade.
The closest I came to this was a human physiology class. The tests were multiple choice, but not the usual A through E. Instead they were A through J. F was usually A and C. G was B and D. H was A, B, and C. I was all of the above. J was none of the above. The highest grade in the class on the first exam was a 64, but the professor added 36 points to everyone’s score.
I was an EE student but was required to take general chemistry and an organic chem class and they murdered me.
I always found chemistry in general difficult because they’re so… disconnected from any other discipline. You move up in your calc classes and physics classes and there’s often a synergistic relationship between the two that makes learning one of them provide a benefit to the other. Sometimes, it’s almost like getting two courses for the effort of one as calc is covering principles while physics is covering applications.
Chem though… it’s just off to the side doing its own thing and none of your other classes are going to help you with it.
Definitely not, but I went to a state university rather than an elite school and they weren’t in the business of trying to pull only the best and brightest. As a primarily undergrad-oriented school that only offered Masters-level degrees at the graduate level (well, they had a solitary Ed.D. program), they just wanted to educate the people good enough to get in. There were pre-med folks (not many but a few, there was no med school attached to campus) and at my school they self-weeded by just being insanely competitive because getting into a decent med school is no easy task.
I explicitly remember one cluelessly annoying guy who was well known in the department having attended as an undergrad. He had technically good enough but unspectacular grades and was having trouble getting admitted as a Master’s student in the biology department because he was notorious (just poor social skills). Finally he got in because one professor agreed to take him into his lab. When I asked in privately about this a little later over beers the professor said ‘well somebody had to do it’ like it was a moral obligation of sorts. Education before gate-keeping as it were.
I went to an elite school. The admissions process was the general pre-screen and the majors evaluated student performance in intro classes to decide admission to the major, but there were no weed-out courses.
I’ve mentioned this class in the past. Real Analysis (which is considerably more difficult than the class I took before it, Complex Analysis), the last class I needed to graduate. There was probably 15 people in the class, all of us failed except for two people. One got a D and was thrilled, the other got an A, but he was in high school, so I’m calling that an anomaly.
I wasn’t the only person that had to spend the summer semester, after graduation, redoing that class.
And, at least IMO, this was truly a failing of not just the teacher but the department as well. This teacher must’ve had some type of clout at the school. He was dismissive to the students (do we really need to keep being told that this is a 100 or 200 level class in his country while we’re struggling with it) and just kind of a prick in general. A lot of us asked other teachers for help with the class and some of the other teachers would refuse because they didn’t want to get on his bad side. One teacher would meet students off campus to help them with it.
I even went all the way up to the dean of students, who initially seemed like he was going to help us, but ghosted me when I told them which teacher it was. Stop replying to emails, ignored phone messages I left etc. I did, however, enjoy throwing the school’s mission statement back in their face. Something about not letting anyone fall through the cracks while they’re letting an entire class fall through the cracks. That mission statement disappeared from their website a few days later.
Seems like everyone I’ve ever talked to had problems with the statistics course. It can be deadly boring and nearly incomprehensible if you have a poor teacher, much like Econ 101. I was lucky to have a stat teacher who made things interesting and I enjoyed it.
I didn’t take stats until my doctorate. It was well-taught, associated with the work we’d be doing*, and terrific. I have been known to write poetry incorporating the class content.
*A) Easier in a grad class where everyone has the same major.
B) Relevant to our student experience as well, including calculations related to our Cheetos vs. gasoline expenses on our drive to campus.
I went to University in a very different time and place: UK in late 60s/early 70s.
At that time only a rather small percentage of people went to University (about 5%, I think). There was no concept of ‘breadth’ or ‘weeding out’ at University level then. That had all been done at secondary (high) school level. At age 15 or so one took ‘O Levels’: up to 10 subjects which covered ‘breadth’. Then in the next 2 years the academic track pupils went on to do ‘A levels’, which were focussed on your expected major in University; usually 3 rather closely related subjects. (Chemistry, physics and math in my case)… it was assumed that you knew which ‘track’ you were on by that time.
Getting a good grade on A-levels was essentially the weed-out mechanism. And once you got to University there was none of this jigsaw-puzzling of selecting prerequisite courses. You’re an EE major: right, here’s your class schedule.
Call me an old fogey, but I think the idea that ‘everyone should have a College degree’ is silly. It has resulted in the devaluing of an undergrad degree to about the level of having good high school A-levels, I think.
As you said, ‘College’ has become a requirement’. But perhaps not because ‘jobs have gotten more complex, requiring a greater intellectual, or at least mental, component’? Maybe more it’s an easy tickbox for recruiters. I’m not sure that a lot of the majors offered promote intellectual capacity: a lot seem to be feelgood bullshit. I won’t give examples as a Description Might Offend…
I suspect you are right that quality of secondary education has absolutely cratered in the US, though I don’t have any quantitative evidence. Our kids went through the US school system in the US and came out OK, but of course they had a home environment with literate and numerate parents. I can’t speak with any knowledge about the UK educational system these days.
Fluid Mechanics was the dividing course for BSME. Pass, and you could become a senior. Fail? Change to another degree if you want to graduate on time, because the course won’t be offered until next year, and you cannot take any of the senior level courses until you pass Fluid Mechanics.
I don’t know if they were officially “flunkouts” but when I went to St. Louis University the lowest freshman beginning biology and organic chemistry courses were exceptionally difficult for your average freshman who just wanted to get the science requirement out of the way. Word among the students was that they were designed to weed out both the nursing and pre-med students.
OTOH I worked with a Cornell grad who said he got through his science requirements thanks to a course known around campus as “Physics for Poets”. And when my daughter was college shopping, the chair of one English department assured her there was an environmental science course “without math,” so I guess it goes both ways.
