And this is the type of stuff I hate. It’s just justifying being an asshole to people, pretending like it’s for their own good. You want to weed people out? Tell them ahead of time how hard you class is. Give them a chance to not wind up with an F on their report card or have so few hours that they wind up losing the scholarship. (Yes, that is what happened to me, albeit in another class.)
That doesn’t work though. If you’re talking about a class that’s a pre-requisite for med school, no amount of warning people is going to help. IME, kids who want to go to med school often have a rock-solid conviction that that’s where they are going, and nothing else will do. I think in many cases unfortunately their parents have drilled this into them from a young age.
Obviously some of them *can *handle it and will end up as doctors. But a significant number of them do not have the chops and they have to get weeded out somewhere. May as well be freshman year. Unfortunately incoming freshman very seldom have the ability to accurately judge their own skills and decide not to take courses that are beyond them, so even if they’re warned it won’t help and it will still be a weeder course. The only alternative is to seriously limit enrollment to only very elite students, but that doesn’t really work because high school performance is not that great of a predictor of how the student will fare when the shit hits the fan.
Just to be clear, are you saying that if the prof had told you on the first day that the class was hard, you would have dropped it? Did your college offer a way to drop classes partway into the semester and end up with an Incomplete or a Withdrawal on your transcript? If so, why didn’t you drop the course when you realized you were failing?
Not only that, but at any school with a significant number of pre-med students, organic chemistry is well known as THE killer class.
While my area of study is in the humanities, my grad school (Johns Hopkins) has one of the best-known and most highly respected med schools in the country, and quite a lot of Hopkins undergrads want to be doctors. I remember that, among the Hopkins undergrads, “orgo” was famous as a class that would completely kick your ass and leave you crying. It was, for the undergrads, a sort of metaphor for everything that was tough about pre-med, and about college in general. Even the student media would make references to it. Here’s the opening of an article from the student newspaper, from last year:
And it’s true, more generally, that you can warn your students about your expectations until you’re blue in the face, but there will always be some who think that they can skate through with little or no effort.
Some students also have expectations conditioned by one discipline, and find it difficult to take classes in another. I teach a class that is required for students in a different (but related) major, and a lot of them find it tough, not just because some of the ideas and methods are new, but also because i have pretty stringent requirements regarding things like reading and writing.
I expect them to read about 70 pages a week, which seems to me actually quite low for an upper-level history class, but they constantly complain about how it’s too much, and about how the readings are too hard. I also expect college juniors and seniors to be able to write coherent, grammatically-correct sentences, and yet my course evaluations constantly contain complaints about how “harsh” i am on their writing, and how it’s more like an English class than a history class, and how i should cut them some slack.
I have students in some of my classes that can barely put together a coherent sentence, and yet a check of their transcripts sometimes reveals a long string of A’s and A-'s in the other discipline. I don’t know if those people hand out A’s for just turning up, but i’m not going to do it, no matter how much the students complain.
I pursued a PhD and a career in academics because I wanted to impress Young Americans (all night). Cuz, you know, Americans are just so impressed by intelligence and whatnot.
I’m a philosopher and a logician, and I consider it a branch of mathematics.
Then again, I’m just showing off.