I wonder how many students who take it as a prereq for some post-graduate program (e.g. med school) end up not applying. They don’t necessarily flunk out of the class or their major (if it requires organic).
I don’t think my school had anything with a high fail rate, but it’s hard to know how many people changed intended majors (we didn’t declare until the end of second year) or future plans.
I recall hearing one guy complaining that the CS department wouldn’t accept him because he hadn’t gotten an A in the intro CS class way back in his first semester. I get the impression it was a crowded department.
This is from 25 years ago, but at the school my brother was in as a freshman Computer Engineering student there was a push to increase the diversity of the student body, and they de-emphasized SAT scores and prioritized class rank. So that if you were #1 in your very bad high school, you got in, even with very modest SAT and even if you hadn’t taken the max AP math and science classes in high school.
By the time my brother was a senior they had put in some support programs to help the underprepared freshman. But it still seemed like a battle between Administration and faculty was raging.
The first year had a number of xxx for Engineering classes. By sophomore year the racial and socioeconomic diversity had been blown away, and the program was back to white and Asian students from relatively well off areas.
I took organic chemistry as an elective. I was what is now called a non-traditional student. I didn’t attend college out of high school, and wasn’t in what were college preparatory classes in high school, but a few years out of high school started taking college classes in my spare time, a class or two here and there.
I didn’t meet the prerequisites for general chemistry, so in order to take CHM 111 I had to take bonehead chemistry (CHM 103) with the nursing majors first. To the best of my knowledge I was the first student with credits in bonehead chemistry to finish two semesters of organic chemistry and quantitative analysis. I also got through two semesters of P-Chem but I had to go to a different college for that.
OH yes, but I say the weedout classes are in the math and science fields not English. When my daughter was on her college tour we stopped at Mich Tech for an appt with the Technical Writing dept, and the dept head expressed a little surprise we were there because all of the students in that program originated from the Engineering disciplines who couldn’t cut it and landed in tech writing.
Yeah, it should be stressed that nobody’s making courses difficult specifically to flunk out students. Differential equations and organic chemistry and the like are just inherently hard, but the students in the relevant programs still need to understand them. One way or another, a physics or math major is going to have to take DiffEQ eventually. The decision is just when to put that course in the sequence. If a lot of students are going to flunk out when they eventually take DiffEQ, then better for everyone if they do so early.
I don’t, however, think that time-of-day scheduling is done to weed out students. Scheduling is hard enough as it is, without adding extra unnecessary constraints. Some classes are just going to end up in annoying time slots, is all.
The worst timeslot I saw was for an astronomy class offered over the summer. The laboratory session was from 10 PM to midnight (it had to be that late, since Montana summers don’t get dark until that late, and part of the lab was observing), with the corresponding lecture at 8 AM the next day. I’m certain that that wasn’t done deliberately, and that course inherently couldn’t be a weed-out course (because it wasn’t required for anything specific).
Your mother is telling the truth. It is all about funding. What many of the colleges do, is they accept far more freshman than they will keep in their department. They use graduate assistants to handle the overload of courses with the intention to flunk those students out. Or they are told they don’t like how they are progressing and are encouraged to change their major to another part of the college that needs more students in that major. With the promise they will get a job in that field. This helps them keep the high enrollment and pushes that funding to another part of the college for the less popular majors. They also like getting that big influx of cash the first term of the year, and then do their best to channel it elsewhere. They need the enrollment, they just want it in other majors where they have more empty seats in those classrooms.
I know this, because I’ve had at least two friends tell me about this when they were graduate students at a major university and they were instructed to only teach specific freshman classes that would only be needed for the first term, because they were told many of those students would be flunked out. So they wouldn’t need them to teach the second part of those courses the next term. So the attitude was that they shouldn’t spend time trying to help those students because they weren’t going to be there the next term. At the time, both of them told me it didn’t really register in their heads what the college was doing, because they were young and not thinking about how funding works. This was definitely by design. It wasn’t some sort of Darwinism being practiced, it was a scheme by the college to increase their funding from tuition.
The prerequisite for CHM 111 was having taken and passed high school chemistry. I was not on a college trajectory in high school. I think that’s the best way to put it. In fact, when I graduated I was as surprised as anyone.
The grading scheme for English comp classes at Ball State was severe. We had to write two-page themes in class without notes or any references whatsoever. The “limiter system” worked like this- for the mechanics grade, one limiter (spelling, punctuation, or grammar mistake) meant one letter grade off, and BSU didn’t allow Ds in English classes. On my first paper, I made two “everyone…their” mistakes and used one Oxford comma the teacher didn’t like. That gave me an F on mechanics, which averaged with my C+ content grade to give me an F on that paper. Needless to say, I didn’t make those mechanics mistakes again.
I spoke with the English chair at BSU a few years ago, and things are less Draconian there now.
I want to be clear that for me a “flunk out” class is one where students are filtered out of the major and therefore into a major more suitable for them. Not for flunking out of college. All the places I am familiar with go to some lengths to help a failing student stay in school. You pretty much have to ignore/avoid all the help to flunk out of those colleges.
I don’t think it’s an intentional strategy of schools, no; I was mostly noting that early-morning classes did, IME, act as a de facto way to weed out the kids who weren’t particularly serious about their studies, and/or were overly partaking in the party experience.
A long time ago, in a white bricked university about 90 minutes away, in the Reagan years, I was dumped into a Physics class held in, if it had a movie screen, one of the largest theaters in Boston. Somewhere, down there, there was Dr. G, a refugee from the old country, don’t ask me which, who lectured with a soft, very soft voice, an accent that was thick as a lead reactors wall, and a major speech impediment.
After a few days of the hundreds of us giving one and another WTF? looks, we decamped en mass to the deans office to educate the dean on the uselessness of our professor. They, already having cashed our checks, didn’t give a bleep.
Thus began my displeasure with higher (?) education.
At one of the medical schools I was familiar with, it was true to say that they more than just didn’t care what students thought about scheduling. Doctors work shift work, and the opinion of the school and the doctors was that if students couldn’t handle early/late and Saturday classes to work around the availability of the teaching staff… then they weren’t cut out to be doctors anyway.
When I was at RMIT, which had a more diverse student body, the staff, in general, thought that it was their job to provide education, particularly to part-time and mature students, and those who were doing it tough. And at Monash Medical School, the staff thought that if the students didn’t learn something, then 5-10 years down the track it was going to be senior medical staff who had to fix up the mistakes.
But at Melbourne University Engineering, the faculty valued human beings on a scale of academic prowess. This had some good effects. I never knew them to actually get facts or ideas wrong: to do so would have made them feel like worthless sub-human beings. But Full Professors would have been first on the life rafts from a sinking ship, followed by readers, lecturers, tutors, PhD students, senior students… people failing first year were left to drown, because they don’t really count.
Some classes may act as weed-outs, but retention and graduation rates are too important to colleges. They won’t intentionally try to get rid of students.
I don’t think universities want students to fail. But there are standards, and these are more important in some programs. In particular, students may need to pass preliminary licensing exams or be expected to have a high level of aptitude. Not all students want to put in the required effort or have all the needed abilities. They may be happier finding this out sooner than later.
My first school was known for its tough programs. They marked on a curve and in a few courses claimed to fail about one third of the students. I know lots of smart folks who lost scholarships. But this was only one course (at a time) out of five or six. Most people who flunked the tough course and wanted to continue worked harder and passed the difficult courses next time round. Some courses were pretty hard to fail with minimal effort.
In retrospect, the toughest course was a partial summary of the entire four year degree and introduced some advanced concepts early.
Don’t academic advisors do that? Mine warned me about taking the intro to microeconomics and intro to macroeconomics classes simultaneously. I didn’t, but both classes seemed to be no more difficult than a typical survey class
I took Vascular Flora of Wisconsin in college because it sounded interesting and had a blast; it was a great course and if I could have handled the math I’d’ve switched to a Botany degree.
At UW- Madison we had to take placement tests unless, like some people I knew, they’d taken math there during high school. I tested out of English but was on the border between Math 99-100 which was meant for those who just couldn’t do math and Math 101. I chose 101 for self-esteem purposes and getting a B/C in it was a major accomplishment for me. Because I had the World’s Best TA. He actually got me to understand some concepts.
When I taught at U. Ill in the mid-60s, they were required to accept any Illinois HS graduate in the top half of their HS class. And they expected a lot of them to flunk out in the first year. But there was no particular class used for the purpose, just their overall GPA. But we were no chastised if a lot of students failed calc I.
Ha! Sounds like my Chaucer professor at UCLA. I had busted my butt on the first paper we had to do, and I got a B-. I was really disappointed. Practically a C! Then I found out I had the highest grade in the class. After that, though, I realized he was just a very tough grader. It’s not like the difficulty level was that much greater like yours was.
