My mom is convinced that state universities have so-called flunk out classes where they weed out a lot of the freshman class. I didn’t find this to be true, none of the required classes were particularly difficult. Still, she’s insistent that classes like the mandatory English composition classes are designed to fail a percentage of the students who got in with just a certain GPA and SAT score.
Now, I can certainly understand if you get an F in Calculus I, it might be time to reconsider that engineering major, but I don’t think the school would have you out on your ass the day after finals. But, the required calculus and statistics courses were certainly reasonable for non STEM
majors and I doubt anyone failed that showed up to class sober.
It was my opinion that the freshman English classes could be passed by anyone who could fog a mirror. In fact, in the second composition class, I was allowed to skip the last paper because I already had gotten A’s on every other paper so that would be my dropped paper.
What’s been your experience? My guess is that my mom really struggled with freshman English and math and is still sore about it to this day.
My college did. There were no options besides engineering. They took a bunch of kids who were A students and freshman chemistry averaged a 60% on the first test. In fact their goal for for the freshman class across chemistry, physics, and calculus was basically a D. Then they would see about a 60% drop out rate freshman year.
Not everyone fails and in my graduating class of 2005 my department graduated the first person ever who graduated with a 4.0 in 100+ years. The teachers and staff were pissed and went after all of us to try to make sure he didn’t get a 4.0. Since a 4.0 means you were perfect and there is no such thing as a perfect student.
Back in the antediluvian days of the early 1950’s, I went to the an engineering college with the delightful name of the “Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy”. It was unofficially known that the flunk-out courses were freshman chemistry and sophomore physics. And they certainly were, too. Lots of aspiring engineers decided that engineering wasn’t for them after taking one of these classes.
Yep, I took about three weeks of orgo and just said, fuck this, med ain’t for me.(Got through calculus II & III and accelerated chemistry just fine, though. I just wasn’t in the right headspace for orgo my sophomore year. Physics also had a reputation as being a tough slog.)
There definitely were classes with a reputation as “weed outs” in the STEM fields. Students wouldn’t so much “flunk out” (like get a literal “F” and have it affect their GPA) as they would drop the class before the grade affected their academic record (I believe we had something like 6 weeks to drop a class.) Typically, the first major test of the semester (well, trimester/quarter in my case) was scheduled before the official drop deadline for this reason. Some teachers may sneak two in there before the drop deadline, depending on their testing philosophy (several smaller tests or two big tests.)
I can certainly say that in any hard science, most of the hardest classes are towards the beginning of the program, and that a lot of students do drop out (usually into easier majors) after them. Whether that’s the deliberate intention, I can’t say, but it’s certainly the effect.
They don’t have to be “flunk out” courses. In my university, we had pre-engineering classes in the freshman year then we applied to the various engineering colleges. In my year 110 students were admitted to sophomore engineering then 100 were allowed to actual become EE majors in our junior year.
Physics for engineering, calculus for engineering and chemistry for engineering were the weed out classes where students who didn’t have an aptitude for engineering would face reality.
In the “old” days people could retake classes again and again until they got a grade high enough to make the cut. The other departments got sick of marginal students clogging up the classes so they instituted a policy that a class could only be repeated once.
It depends on what classes are offered. My university has a lot of older students returning to study after a long break from high school. It might have been 8 to 10 years since graduation.
They need to retake their college prep courses in math and English. The university offered intro to Algebra and English Comp I & IIclasses when I attended.
Now the University refers the adult students to a two year school for those classes.
I’m not sure if it was actually a “flunk-out” class, but Organic Chemistry was certainly a “weed-out” class for pre-engineering and pre-med students when I was in school (University of Wisconsin, 1980s). In my experience, it created a lot of liberal arts majors.
Also, IME, what served as “flunk-out” classes were whatever classes that met early in the morning, especially on Fridays; those classes were good at identifying students who were in school primarily to party.
As an engineering student in the late 80’s, we had certain classes that “weeded out” students that should be in something less math-centric. The two 200-level physics, the 100 and 200 level calcs, and the 200 level engineering courses that were in your field (statics/dynamics for CEs, circuits for EE, etc). At least that is how we all felt at the time.
Freshman English?
That is not a difficult, “flunk-out” course.
It was (way back in the 1970’s for me) just a remedial class for people who had never written anything in their lives and had zero idea how to put together 3 paragraphs in coherent order.
I helped my roommate with it, and was appalled. I edited his first couple assignments. Then I started making excuses to avoid helping him, because it was too awkward…I would have had to tell him to his face how incompetent he was. He wrote like a 10 year old. But he still passed the course,
Now, there were a few courses which had a reputation as “flunk-out” courses.But they weren’t designed to be intentionally difficult—they were just a standard college course, which were often taken by sub-standard students
Organic chemistry was one such course. Lots of newly enrolled kids who thought it would be fun to be a rich doctor suddenly discovered that they had to change their plans. .
This part was also true at my school. A lot of the “weed out” courses met during the first period. And these were classes that you had to show up if you were going to pass.
True for my chemical engineering program, in the sense that the first ChemE course was a requirement before any of the other ChemE courses could be taken. The average scores on the exams were low, the eventual drop-out rate of the class was well over 50%.
That being said, I never felt that first class, while challenging, was substantially more difficult than a majority of the subsequent classes. My grade in that first class was on par with many of my grades in subsequent core ChemE classes (my grades were mediocre in college, generally). So I don’t think it was so much a “weeder” class as it was that my program was probably accepting too many people that they really shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Yeah, for me, Fall 1993, it was not a remedial course, but not a “flunk-out” course, either. It was required of all freshman in the college of arts and sciences to take it to fulfill a writing requirement. I believe its main purpose was to identify students who may need additional help in transitioning from high school to college and the level of writing and English proficiency expected of them but it was, in general, a fairly easy course if you have any semblance of basic writing and rhetorical skills.
The accelerated chemistry class I took was crazy. I remember after the first test being so bummed out and feeling I had taken the absolute worst test of my life, only to find out the next week that the curve was so high that anything over 40% on the test was an A. This teacher just ratcheted up the difficulty levels for the test so high that I don’t think any of his tests anyone scored higher than maybe 60%. It was impossible to get a sense of how well you did on the test, as every single test felt like failure, and would have been failure in a non-curved context. I finished that class with a B+, but, Christ, after that first test, I thought for sure I was going to fail the first class of my life (hell, I hadn’t gotten any grade less than a B in my life until that point.)
Another engineer checking in and I am going to agree with the masses. There were classes that were brick walls for some people but they certainly weren’t intentional flunk out classes. They were all more or less necessary to understand if you were going to be an engineer. Very few people who started out as freshman wanting to be engineers ended up getting an engineering degree. It’s just to damn difficult and way too much work for them or, in some cases, they found something that they enjoyed more. Mostly, they couldn’t hack it though no matter what they told you.
ETA: The is no way that Freshman English is a weed out class.
When I was a grad student in CS, I was a TA for a flunk out class, except we hardly flunked anyone. It was the first class CS majors took after CS101. Structured programming was new then, so we gave them an assignment in Pascal and graded the hell out of it. Two reasons - students who got scared by that were not likely to be good CS students, and this was an Assembly class, and if they didn’t write structured assembly code they’d get lost.
Grades for this program were low. We had a late drop date, so those who couldn’t hack it had ample time to drop.
We dropped this grade when computing the final grade, since if someone screwed up that program and learned from it, they shouldn’t be penalized.
Relatively few people failed the class, and they had to work at it.
I rather doubt ENGL101 or ENGL102 is anyone’s flunk out class unless someone’s writing ability is so abysmal that they can’t even pass that - then yes, they have no business being in college.
But fields like engineering are expensive, and medicine is high-stakes - patient’s lives depend on it. You can’t have any half-assed students in there. Either they can do it, or they can’t. You don’t want to waste time training engineering students who can’t hack the math, nor med students who are going to accidentally kill patients by not being up to par. The sooner you weed out the wannabes, the better.