Fuck my college

The BBQ Pit
1

Assholes, they just made it a requirement that to get a BS in chemistry you need honors organic lab. This requires a B or higher in organic lectures to get in. I have an A- in that class, but what pisses me off is that only about 1/2 the class can most likely get a B or higher and organic classes are already filled with pre-med students. So how many fucking chemistry students will not get their degree in the program because some fucking idiots changed a regulation? Under the old setup 90-95% of people who took organic got a C- and got into organic lab. Now only about 1/2 will get a B or higher and qualify for honors organic lab. Jesus christ this sucks. I should be fine with my current A- but still, I think i’ll look more seriously into one year programs at community college now. What assholes, now I bet alot of people will have to spend 5-6 years for a 4 year degree, retaking organic lectures I and II 2 or 3 times because of what these worthless idiots just did.

And yeah I know life isn’t fair and all that bullshit about weeding out the weak and sick. But fuck that, how many lives did the asshole who did this change dramatically?

2

There’s no grandfather clause?

3

If the administrators made the change applicable to current students, then yes, they are seriously stupid. It’s a good rule of thumb in curriculum administration that you don’t change the rules for students who have already made decisions that the rules are going to impact.

In other words, nobody who’s now taking or has already taken organic chemistry should be required to have a B or higher in the course to get into honors organic lab and thus to qualify for a BS in chemistry. The incoming students who are planning to take organic chemistry after this year have had fair warning.

4

What about the fact that only about 1/2 the students can get a B or higher? If everyone does better the curve will just go up and what was a B grade in the old organic will only qualify you for a C in the new organic? It went from 90-95% of the class being qualified to take organic lab to 50% of the class. I should be in that 50% who get a B or higher but who gives a fuck, they just fucked alot of people over and maybe ruined their own chemistry program with this bullshit, I have heard that as it is 50% of students drop out of college, now I bet with this bullshit and people having to take and retake organic chemistry I and II that chemistry will have closer to a 75% dropout rate. Fucking idiots, they’ve probably just dramatically increased the dropout rate and made a 4 year degree take 5-6 years for alot of people.

I do’nt agree with your views. Not everyone can move to a new city with a more competent academics program. The students should fight back against this. They won’t though.

5

Oh, I’m not trying to claim that the administrators necessarily made a good decision. I’m just saying that if they applied their decision retroactively to current students, it’s much more stupid and unfair than if they didn’t.

As for the decision itself, I don’t know enough about your school or its chemistry program to form an opinion on whether raising the bar so drastically for chemistry majors was a smart move or otherwise. I do sympathize with any students who will have trouble qualifying for the major under the new standards, but I don’t know enough about it to know whether the standards are indeed unreasonably high.

6

I started of college as a chemistry major, and luckily got out of it before I had to take orgo. That was the class that one of the smartest people I have ever known failed. But if you want to be a chemist, I would think that you should at least be able to pull a B in the class. It’s a basic part of chemistry, and one that most chemists will have to deal with to some extent.

7

I HATE grade-curving!

Don’t academics see how stupid it is to make your mark dependant on how smart or dumb the other people in the class are?

I’m really happy that they don’t do that here, even though it does mean things like 75% of a class failing a subject (happened last year in my course).

8

No but there is a Santa Clause. Word on MPSIMS is he just killed his wife though.

Silentgoldfish - It depends on the type of curve. I like the curve where those on the bottom get tons of points so mostly everyone passes. I dislike the curves where the highest grade becomes the new 100% though. I think the ones i’m talking about are called ‘bell curves’.

Anyway, this just angers me. In undergrad you need a C- to pass your classes and i’ve looked at websites that list the grades people get in classes. In most undergrad classes 90-95% of the class gets a C- or higher. That means if you attend lecture and try you will most likely pass. In graduate school you need a B and I have looked at graduate grades. Roughly 96-100% of people in graduate school get a B or higher. Is this a coincidence, shouldn’t the graduate grades be lower since the material is harder and shouldn’t only about 30% of graduate students be passing instead of 96-100%? Why do 90-95% of people in undergrad get a C- or higher while 96-100% in graduate school get a B or higher even though the material is harder than undergrad? Coincidence? No, it is a courtesy of academia. You show up and you try and you learn and you are rewarded with a passing grade. And this system has been in place for a long time and it has churned out competent undergraduate and graduate students.

Except chemistry of course. Fuck us, let 1/2 of us not get a ‘passing’ grade. Nevermind the people who will have to take out an additional 8-10k a year in loans to pay for more schooling to retake the damn classes, nevermind the people who just can’t ‘grasp’ the material well enough to beat half the class. In theory if everyone gets an 83% or higher w/o a curve then yeah, everyone will pass. But it depends alot on the professor. With my current professor class averages are 70-82% w/o a curve, with my younger brothers organic professor class averages were 40-60% w/o a curve. In a class with a shitty professor its not possible for people to make an 83% or higher, so half the class is fucked. On the other side the department is not ‘required’ to let 90-95% of the class pass, but by doing this they are ruining their own program and subjecting students to unnecessary stress and hardship. All they have to do is let anyone with a C- or higher into honors chemistry lab and this won’t even be an issue. I don’t know if they are doing that, I hope so but I am not sure right now.

As far as me I should be fine. There are 550 pts in organic chemistry. 3 quizzes worth 30 each, 3 exams worth 100 each and 1 final worth 160. I have scored 90, 89, 30 and 25 so far on the first 2 exams and quizzes and that is without a curve. Assuming I get an 80 on my 3rd exam (i’ll probably do better since i’ll study harder for this one but lets just assume 80%) and maybe a 26 on my next quiz so I should be fine in regards to my B or higher grade. We also have a curve at the end of the semester, the curve last year was something like 73-88 = B, 88-100 = A. So I should be fine and I assume roughly a 77% is the cutoff for a B or higher, but I’m not worried just about me, i’m worried about all the 19 year olds who are going to have to tell their parents they will need 6 years to do a 4 year degree.

As far as people getting informed, I doubt they’ll find out about this neat little ass raping until they are firmly set into this college, its not like this particular bit of info will be printed on the brochure or anything. And its not retroactive, it only applies to new students.

PS - I know its spelled Santa Claus but it wasn’t as funny that way.

9

There is a problem with that. I was reading an article about Chemistry students and grad school and it said roughly 50% of BS chemistry students wanted to get a doctorate in something (medicine, chemistry, pharmacy, dentistry, etc). You also have to consider that organic is needed for BS in biology or microbiology degree, which alot of pre-med people are taking.

So you are throwing chemistry students in with people who want to get doctorates and telling them to outscore 1/2 the class. It could be hard for some, it will be hard for at least 1/2 anyway.

10

These kind of requirements are designed to make people stay in school for five or six years when they should be finished in four. Suck as much money out of the kids as you can and all. Be glad you’re not going to be left behind.

I can see why a class would have this kind of requirement, in fact I think you should have to make a certain grade to pass, but not if you’re grading on a curve. But I think curving the grade is a stupid idea anyway. Just make all the chem majors take the same difficult standardized test and pass all the ones that get a certain amount of questions right. Curves are designed to make a certain amount of people fail, and I think it’s wrong for them to be used as a measure of who passes and who fails.

(Then again, I only passed college-level science because I was in a remedial class with a bunch of other liberal arts students and they curved the grade so we wouldn’t all fail. My final score of 78% was the second highest in the class! So, clearly, curving can have a good side too.)

11

Yeah that’s fucked up, Wes,

They always apply changes at my school to new students and never to the ones that have already started. For instance, I only have to fulfill the requirements from when I was a Freshman

12

That is serious bullshit. To have requirements that stringent for a specific course in order to simply major in chemistry is ridiculous. Especially when there’s a grading curve. Double especially when that course overlaps in any way with pre-meds, a species of student that has made grade-grubbing a true art form.

13

Meh. If you’re gonna be a chemistry major you damn well better be better then most of the class. Besides Organic chemistry really is NOT that hard, concept-wise. It simply requires (lots of)time, dedication and hard work. Something pre-med students have. That said I pulled C+'s. I was a lazy fucker.

14

I’m a doctoral student, and I just wanted to point out an error in your logic. At Madison, a C is failing (in graduate school - for undergrads, an F). While there are not many people that fail their classes (this is anecdotal, of course; and I doubt people would broadcast their C’s, anyway), there is a significant drop in numbers of master’s students and doctoral students. It varies by year, of course, but in the year I took my master’s exams, about four people (out of 14 or so) did not pass.
In other words, grad students are subject to other ‘weed outs’ than classes; and those of us that passed on to the doctoral program did so because we completely gave up any semblance we had of a ‘life’, not because of some ‘academic courtesy.’

15

But organic chemistry is just one of the 4 advanced chemistry fields (analytical, biochem, physical chem and inorganic chem) required for a BS in chemistry. There are also other advanced fields like Nuclear chemistry that are electives but not required.

Point is that organic chemistry in and of itself is not going to matter much if you are an inorganic chemist for example. Inorganic chemistry is more about electron movements while organic is about carbon based molecules. I excel at organic and suck at inorganic for example. Im sure some people are the opposite.

What really bothers me is what Giraffe said, this will create a bottleneck of students and that bothers the hell out of me. If the curve only allows 50-60% of the class to get a B or better, and if the class is largely made up of pre-doctoral students and highly intelligent people wanting science degrees then no matter what 40-50% of these highly intelligent and pre-doctoral students will get left behind. Maybe the 2nd or third time they’ll be in the top 50-60% but they’ve just wasted a full year of their lives by having to wait to take the course again.

aurelian - I agree, its kindof the same way in undergraduate. Alot of higher math and science courses have 20-25% drop rates, while I have read that over 1/2 of all doctoral students drop out and just take a masters degree. The point is that if you stick with it and keep trying the odds are very good in your favor that you’ll pass.

Why are so many people anti-curve?

16

Aurelian, I think you missed the point completely; he’s not saying that B’s are handed out gratis to grad students as a “courtesy”; he’s saying that colleges DO students the courtesy of grading them on the quality of their work, and not on their rank in class. He’s saying that it’s unfair that undergrads are graded by rank.

You, too have missed the point . If you’re going to require a letter grade as a prerequisite, then that letter grade should correspond to a particular level of mastery of the material. Where the hell is the sense in saying "the top half of the class can take the lab, regardless of the number of students who actually learned the material, and regardless of whether the so-called B students actually know anything. Some semesters, you get a roomfull of duds, but half of them still get B’s.

17

Because curves either wind up hurting people if they all do well (if everyone makes grades in the nineties, the poor guy who gets the ninety-one fails), or helping people who do poorly, as long as they’re in a class with other people who did just as bad (I got an A in my science class, but I really deserved a C). A well-designed test should produce a bell curve-type grading structure, but if that isn’t the case, the structure shouldn’t be imposed on the class. Sometimes you’ve just got kids who are all really smart or all really dumb, and you need to tweak the test to fit them, not the other way around.

I didn’t notice till now that you said you’re competing with pre-meds. That’s really fucked; I wouldn’t be surprised if someone called the school about it. This is definitely not a petty complaint.

18

Well no, I think we are referring to a different type of curve. What I am saying is that it is against school policy to give out more than x% of your grades as As, Bs or Cs. As a result most of the time about 35% are As, 30% Bs, 25% Cs and 10% Ds and Fs. Essentially only about 50% of the class will get the grade good enough to get into organic honors lab. In my experience curves don’t bring anyone down, they just bring people up.

Maybe its not the end of the world. I’m looking it up and I think Organic I and II are each offered 3x a year. Spring, Summer (either summer I or II) and fall. Maybe, at the very least I bet/hope they are offered at least 2x a year. If so then I guess it won’t be too bad but I still see alot of people taking one or both Organic lectures 2-4 times and spending an extra year or two in college.

Nametag - What I meant more was that if you show up and you try you will most likley earn a passing grade in college, at least that has been my experience. Granted their are other weeding out processes AEB fact that undergrad science courses have a 20% drop rate or doctoral degrees have a 50% rate of dropouts, but at the end of the day most people who show up, pay attention, study and try to learn the material still get to pass the class. Under the new setup even those who try may not get a good enough grade since they are competing against really intelligent people. Nametag has a closer idea, because no matter what only about 50% of the class will get a good enough grade no matter how well they master the material. Since only so many As and Bs can be given out people may do better, but those they are competing against will do better too and it will fuck them in the end.

19

I just sent an email to the chemisty advisor, got a reply and resent an email. S343 = honors lab for Organic I, S344 = Honors lab for Organic II. C341 = Organic I lectures (a prerequisite for organic I lab)

Me:
Do we biochem and chem students need S343 and S344 to graduate now? So I
take it we also need a B or higher in C341 and C342 in order to get into S343
and S344? B or B-?
Her:
Actually I was only told S343 was required for the BS majors. But I
would guess that if you wanted to do S344 you could. I do not think S344
is as critical. Also the grade requirement will need to be more
flexible. Of course doing at least a B- would be best to ensure you are
prepared for the next course (which is the case for any class). Does
that answer your question.

Me:
What I don’t get is that generally only 1/2 the class will score a B or higher
in C341, so are the chemistry students supposed to continually take and retake
C341 until they get a high enough grade to get into S343? I currently have an A-
in C341 so i’m not really worried about me I just don’t understand how this
will affect the other chemistry students.