Although not the same thing, I recall from James Herriot’s memoirs that he would often take new veterinarian students (or wannabe vets) out on visits with him to farms where they would see just how besmeared he became in foul cow feces, etc. in the course of his day’s work, as a way of weeding out all the people with a rose-tinted notion of what a vet’s job was like.
In forestry and natural resources every school I’ve seen has a dendrology/plant identification class early on. I assume the classes are all pretty similar and realistically boil down to memorization. You do learn a good amount valuable stuff but I really think they’re just testing your commitment. Are you willing to walk around with 90 flash cards and study them 3 or 4 times a day, if not, go home.
Some departments at some universities mount giant undergrad courses, taught by untenured instructors and grad students, to get large enrollment numbers, which let the department argue for more tenure track hires. These courses are often difficult and badly taught, or taught very impersonally and rigidly, to drive students out. That lets the tenured profs teach small upper level classes. It is, IME, and IMHO, very cynical and immoral. Looking at you, ECON 101!
I went to an arts and communications school; you had to really try hard to flunk out. But there was an honors program that was tough to get into for graduating high school students and incredibly demanding during freshman year, so much so that a significant percentage–at least ten, maybe twenty–dropped out of the program at the end of the first year. This meant there were openings for rising sophomores to apply, which was an incredibly sweet deal; it was much easier to get in and you skipped the hard work of that first year. Honors students got half off tuition every year they were in the program, so getting in as a sophomore was still a substantial discount, and a much better ratio of compensation to effort than those who got in as freshmen but dropped out. In retrospect, it kind of seems like a loophole that shouldn’t be there, but I was happy to take advantage of it at the time.
It’s also kind of an open secret that lower-tier law schools, at least in California, fully expect a third or more of their students to drop out after the first year. It’s pretty easy to predict which students will drop out based on their LSAT scores, which raises the question of whether the practice of admitting these students in the first place and collecting $40-60k in tuition is exploitative. Part of me thinks it is; part of me recognizes that there are a handful of folks out there with artificially low scores due to circumstances, or who are capable of more than you’d think due to sheer grit, who deserve the chance, and that the risk is theirs to take as adults.
I was a Computer Science prof. In the late 80s and 90s the demand among students to be a CS major grew at astonishing rates.
At one place I was at half of the incoming class said they wanted to get into the CS program. One wee problem, we didn’t have an undergrad program! PhD only. To handle a fraction of that number of students we would have to had at least 10 times as many faculty. And guess how hard it was to hire a ton of PhDs in CS at the time.
The one “big” place had a general rule: 50% drop out of the major first year. 60% drop out of the first course (Data Structures) in 2nd year.
And we still had way too many completely unqualified people reaching the upper division classes.
Out of 200 or so graduates per year, maybe about 40 of them know what was what. Of those less than 10 were actually good.
And yet they all got jobs right away. You want to know why there’s so much crap software out there? Not enough incompetent people getting strained out and the idiots at companies hiring them, sometimes despite explicit warnings. (We’ve even had companies complain about students. We just point out we warned them and they still hired them.)
We definitely had “weed-out” classes at my undergrad. Were they intentionally designed to winnow the wheat from the chaff? I don’t know. But they were hard enough for the average student to fill that role.
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If it weren’t for the EE, ME, and CE weed out classes the industrial engineering department would have had no students.
Having taught many, many sections of freshman English (at one state flagship university and two not-especially selective smaller universities, one private and one public), I can pretty much guarantee you that nobody is using freshman comp as a weed-out course. The pressure on faculty very much runs the other way, toward passing as many students as possible.
This does not mean it can’t be a difficult course. It often is, for students who have inadequate high school preparation and / or are unable to adjust to the amount of personal responsibility involved in being a college student. Both of these are common situations, since there are plenty of high schools where students have not been asked to do any significant amount of writing, and freshman comp tends to be a course that demands a lot of responsibility on the student’s part. Grades are primarily based on out-of-class work, so simply showing up for the exam isn’t good enough; students are expected to plan ahead and meet deadlines. Also, there’s usually a lot of group workshopping of papers involved, so the attendance policies tend to be stricter than other college courses. For a certain subset of students – the ones who have just realized nobody is going to MAKE them go to class, but haven’t yet realized this means THEY need to make themselves go to class – this means they can get sucked into a failure spiral very quickly.
But universities, in general, are not trying to weed out students from their student body as a whole. Why would they? More students usually means more revenue (even public universities are more tuition-driven than not these days, and besides, state funding formulas are usually based on enrollment). The university nearly always has an incentive to recruit and retain as many students as possible. Individual programs, on the other hand, sometimes do want to weed out students. If half of your incoming freshman class thinks they want to major in nursing, but you don’t have enough nursing faculty to teach them all, and besides your program’s reputation is based on how many of them are able to pass a standardized licensing exam, so you don’t want students who won’t be able to succeed – then it makes sense to have some fairly strict weeding-out courses early on in the program. But those courses aren’t going to include ones that are required for all students, like freshman comp. What the university wants is for all of those would-be nursing students to transfer to other majors, not flunk out of college altogether.
Oh, it wasn’t that bad.
On the other hand I am one of the the tiny minority who managed to get an M.D. degree despite nearly flunking Bio 101 in college (I managed a C only through intense cramming for the final).*
*it would’ve helped if I’d gone to class.
Back in the early 70s we had them; and unluckily for some people which was which changed now and then. Which meant graduating seniors got nailed in some intro-level class you almost couldn’t pass but where they needed the credits for distribution of studies requirements. 99% of the time those over the “rank” of sophomore knew which were what, often by the choice of professor, but every so often you had this massive withdrawal of upper class-men or a lot of petitions for credit/no entry.
I, on the other hand, as an ignorant freshman, ended up in one and nailed it. Which made me an instant Rising Star in the psych department.
When I went to college there was a freshman prerequisite science class that had a reputation that no freshman ever passes it on their first try, to the point multiple faculty and advisors told me to not take it my freshman year since I’d just have to retake it after.
Deciding to accept the challenge I went through the class and ended with a D. Wound up retaking it next semester with a B+. Honestly don’t know why it was so hard, I just found it super hard to concentrate since the material was so dry.
Oddly enough, the smartest guy in my organic chem class was not pre-med, but pre-chiropractic. He said it was the best career path because your patients never die, but they never get better either.
It was a funny curve in that class, we were a very small class, but had a full fifty percent who finished higher than the 85th percentile on the American Chemical Society final exam for Organic Chemistry II, and we also had two students whose final score on the ACS final (70 multiple choice questions) was worse than random.
lots of engineering students switch to an easier major after freshman year. My son went from Chem Eng to environmental science and graduated with honors. He could have stayed in Chem Eng grade wise but he did not like it. He took calculus , chemistry and physics 2nd semester freshman year - that weeds out a lot of Engineering kids.
I went to a large state university in the 1980s, and I didn’t get the impression any of the classes were deliberately designed to flunk students out of college. The university wanted their tuition money, and bouncing students out was not part of the game plan. There were some very difficult courses, but primarily in upper division classes. Organic chem wasn’t too hard for me, but physics could be a struggle, and a comparative anatomy and physiology course had the reputation of being one of the most difficult classes in the school, primarily because the prof was a hard ass and made the tests so difficult. He graded on a curve, though, and like a poster upstream mentioned, the percentage scores could be really low though the grade high. I got something like a 60% on the first test in comp A&P, and it was one of the highest in the class. I ended up getting a very very difficult B in the class.
Speaking as someone who’s been teaching at colleges and universities for the last 10 years, in the context your mom says this it’s absolutely not true.
Yes, within individual faculties (especially “professional programs”) there are “flunk out” courses like organic chemistry. Although in my experience they are not really “flunk out”, but rather grade threshold courses (“you must get over 80% to apply to med school”). The objective is to give the students a dose of reality and get the less bright students out early and have them transfer to a different major, not to flunk out.
This is true:
Fretful Porpentine
For every school I’ve been at the pressure is to pass students and limit the “flunk outs”. Schools do not want to have students “flunk out” of uni in first year and lose that revenue stream for the next 4 years. Universities and colleges are businesses, that makes absolutely no sense.
This is also a reason why schools “bell curve” grades. Where I’ve taught, this is done to limits “flunk outs” to 5% of the total class, regardless of actual marks earned. I’ve had students pass my course with an actual average of 27%, they were bell curved to a “D”.
I took general chemistry at a community college, with a tough but excellent teacher, and THAT weeded out a lot of pre-whatevers right there.
As for O-chem, which I took at a university, the lecture and half of the lab sessions were at 7:30AM.
Pharmacists too!
Over the decades, most of my colleagues who started out majoring in something other than pharmacy started out in pre-med (more likely women) or pre-engineering (more likely men) and found that, especially in the latter case, they just couldn’t handle the higher math needed for those majors. We did have to take a semester of calculus, but it was an “easier” version designed for people who needed to have calc under our belts but the “official” calculus wasn’t really needed later on.
University of California Davis certainly had weed out classes. Take Chemistry 1 with 500 classmates, labs often taught by folks with English as a 2nd language, and if you couldn’t hack that then it was obvious you shouldn’t take any science class that required Chemistry. And that wasn’t even the entry Chem class for science majors, which was a whole nother level. Ditto for calculus. These fundamental classes were to weed people out from being science majors.
There was also “bonehead” English class. You only got half credit, and if you couldn’t pass this or retake and pass, then you really shouldn’t be at the University of California. After my time, bonehead English was a zero credit course, in that you had to take if test scores, written test, whatever bar wasn’t good enough. And instead of 4 credits, it was zero and if you didn’t pass that was it for your time at a UC school. Not sure what the bar is now a few decades later.
Maybe a better way to characterize it as an “up or out” system. If one couldn’t go up the ladder towards graduation, then you were guided/forced out of the university. While harsh, I think you can argue for a “sink or swim” approach to State subsidized Universities. That said, it’s a world of difference to a nice private university where as long as you can pay tuition, there is a support group that’s trying to get you to graduation versus culling the herd. Freshman or sophomore year can be hard for multiple reasons, many of which are non academic, and with a non “up or out system”, many students can get over the hump and respectfully graduate.
MIT had a curve, and so did Illinois where I TA’ed. But I then went to a southern state school, where I was an instructor one term. I was teaching data structures, and gave a pretty hard test. The kids freaked out. They were used to absolute grades, and if I were grading that way, most of them would fail. The fault was mine, since I was testing on concepts not memorizable facts. I used a curve, and the next test i used some multiple choice.
The thing is, they needed the students not to drop out more than the other two schools. I think it might be tradition.
I was at university a long time ago. In the Engineering courses at the schools that were hard to get into, 3rd year was the toughest year. In some of the American schools at the time, it was common for students to plan to spread 3rd year out over 18 months: that wasn’t an option at Melbourne University.
Medicine was a bit different (as it always is). I don’t know which year was the toughest, but, in the two medical schools in my city, after first year there wasn’t much thinking involved. If you found thinking more difficult than studying, then perhaps 1st year would have been the toughest.
Anyway: referring to the quotation I’ve given: one of my professors studied engineering intake selection. Scores on any available test were not very good predictors of 4 year completion. On his numbers, the best predictor was by asking the students high-school teachers how they thought the student would go – and that prediction wasn’t improved by using any of the available tests.