You live a charmed, sheltered, and naive life.
Actually this is an ignorant comment in reference to tolore’s comment. Aside from being a private tutor, both my parents are professors, so I have a wide sample set of student data. There are different kinds of colleges and different kinds of professors and students can choose classes that are too easy or are forced to take classes more advanced. In some classes students can do everything right and then fail the final which counts for most of their grade and fail the course. My father teaches computer related classes such as databases and security while my mother teaches all levels of mathematics. The fail rate for my mother’s class is around 20% while for my father’s it’s around 90%. Kids that fail and try I can understand, but I overhear so many kids (and by kids I mean 18-24) telling their friends they got A’s in the class when I graded their final and know they failed.
I had friends that failed out of MiT, NYU*POLY, Cornell, and the like and then went on to City College and Brooklyn College and got a 4.0 without doing anything.
Yea, if you’re having those kind of classes, you’re going to be doing a lot of homework, maybe even more. The people I mentioned said that the best thing about low level colleges like Baruch, City College, Brooklyn College, etc, is that your course load is almost nothing relative to good colleges so they easily got everything done while still having a life. Plus they’re really cheap as well.
Anyways, the bottom line is, do your best, don’t take classes you can’t handle and drop the class if you can afford it. As long as you try your best and aren’t retarded like the OP you should be fine.
Yeah my school was pretty rough, they straight up told us at the beginning ‘this is 5 years worth of courses crammed into 4’. We take enough math and physics that only 1 or 2 classes taken as electives give you a minor in either one.
The biggest complaint I had about it was some of the teachers were slow on grading, or the second half of the class was worth more credit(IE there’s only 1 or 2 assignments due in the first half and then 3-5 assignments + final due in the second half) so it was really hard to know where you stand come the final drop date. In a few of the classes I failed I definitely would have dropped had the mid term been graded before the drop date, the got better about it in the last few years(I believe the student association/dean was pressuring teachers to make sure people had grades BEFORE the drop date).
lol those tags are ruthless
I’m in Electrical Engineering right now, entering my last semester come this January. When I first started, we were told straight up that our program has one of the highest drop out rates in all of the college. In fact, very few people go on to finish my program.
Needless to say, I didn’t heed this warning. I thought it was going to be a breeze and didn’t go to class often. Instead, I spent a lot of time just chilling with friends or not even bothering to get up for classes early in the morning. I was kicked out of the program, due to the fact that I failed the majority of my classes. I tried another program the next semester(Networking) and hated it. I decided that I was going to give Electrical Engineering one more time, and take it seriously. So I went into Electrical Engineering the next semester yet again.
Needless to say here I am. I’m a TA right now for semester one and three labs, a place I never thought I would be and will hopefully graduate in April. If it’s one thing I have learned, it’s that you should never give up if you’re passionate about your program and feel that you belong. I may have had a shaky begining, but I took responsibility for it and the results show now.
Never failed a university course, although I did very poorly in one philosophy course. It might have had something to do with the fact that it was so insanely difficult and time consuming the the prof was fired for being a dick.
I failed 2 classes because of pretty much an emotional breakdown but I have yet to have a class that truly kicked my ass. Even the ones that I dropped because I wasn’t up to par (and I honestly should not have been in those classes) I could easily take down now.
I think one huge problem with college is the high school system. They do all of jack and shit to properly prepare you for anything. Having excellent reading skills just makes most of life easier. blah, I could probably ramble for days on the inadequacy of the education system.
Beguiled still looks like Keits cousin who smoked crack rock.
If you think it is impossible to fail college classes, you either went to an easy college or had an easy major. I went to an engineering school, and the calculus final was a department final that was really hard to pass. The TA I took recommended not taking the final if you had less than an 82 average because it typically dropped people around 10 points. My Organic Chem Class was used to weed out students, and failed about 50% of the students who took it. My major failed about half of the people who started in it. Granted, many people pick biology because they think premed is a cakewalk and they are going to be a surgeon and make 300k a year. Reality, you are a harsh mistress!
taking organic now. i think it’s an upper-level class for sure, but i don’t see why it should be ‘failing fifty percent of the students’-level material. that sounds like bad professorship to me.
I’ve talked to a few people who took O.Chem and maybe 2/10 said it’s just like any other class. These 2 people also had trouble with Statistics, something I found surprising - both Stats and O.Chem are brutal memorization, right? Any thoughts? I’m in Microbiology right now and have to take O.Chem eventually, so I’d like some feedback.
I honestly don’t know how people fail college classes. I skipped all the time, half assed most of my work. I would just spend two weeks figuring out what profs were looking for and go from there. By my sophomore year i wouldn’t even buy the books for half the classes once i knew i could just get by on lecture notes now and again.
I went to Drake, which is a hella overrated private school unless you shoot for the law section. So take that for what it’s worth.
i rarely went to class and ended up failing macro bcuz i didn’t have the right book for one of the tests and ended up failing so bad that i couldn’t bring my score up…ended up with 68.7 or something ridiculous and got a D…really stupid considering how easy macro is. the thing is this was arguably the biggest fuck up of my college (academic) career since by getting a D in macro the registrar auto-dropped me from econometrics and thus made it not really plausible for me to double major in economics.
technically i failed linear algebra, but i pretty much decided halfway through the semester that my professor was an impossible piece of shit (surly little hungarian guy that was always blacking out on people) and i was just gonna retake it the next semester so i took the F and then retook it (got a C+).
in general though, pretty much every bad grade i got was a direct result of me being irresponsible.
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i had an A in diff eq until i stayed up all night talking to this broad next door (she is/was fine as hell) and overslept my final, go to the classroom with only 1 hr out of 3 left and couldn’t finish. ended up with a C
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was taking operations research, somehow i thought the class started at 1020 the whole semester, so i stroll into the midterm at 1020 only to find out that the class had been starting at 10:00 and that’s why i always seemed late…also found out that the midterm was open book (of course i didn’t have my book), so i went to the “bathroom” and sprinted home to my dorm, grabbed my book and sprinted back. ended up with another C.
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i got C’s in a couple of other math classes simply bcuz i didn’t feel like going to class or doing the HW and relied purely on the tests to pass.
so yeah kids, if you’re majoring in math or a science, go to class…although ultimately it doesn’t matter unless you want to go to grad or med school bcuz when you tell someone that you majored in math or physics they typically assume you’re smart unless you’re a dick about it and most engineers i know had terrible grades in school and still had no problem getting jobs once they graduated.
oh and i was never on academic probation or close to getting kicked out, you have to really be fucking up hard to get kicked out of school (below 2.1 average at rutgers).
Honestly, O-chem is just a class you have to work on all semester. I did great in it, but I definitely spent several hours every week memorizing, reading and going over notes. Most students say it is really hard because it is your first taste of what upper level science classes, but it’s really about putting the work in. My example was a little extreme just because our professor didn’t give a shit and we got a new O-chem professor every 2 years or so. The school didn’t care enough to ever keep anyone good, they just wanted research grants, true story.
Honestly… I think O.chem is a class where you either get it or you don’t. This is the class that separates those who want to go into the health professions or those who were just dicking around.
Granted, I studied a lot for it. I know people that studied just as much as me but weren’t doing that great.
Yeah I have friends who laugh at me when I tell them I study for tests a week in advance, sometimes for 5 hours a day.
Engineering programs, and math/science based majors in general, are no freaking joke.
I’m taking Ochem right now. It’s not that bad. The material seems really overwhelming and mind boggling when the teacher first introduces it, but whenever I read the chapter and do all of the examples and problems, things become much more clear.
I just took my first test. For some reason, my brain fudged the fact that increasing polarity, results in increasing acidity.
I thought it was the other way around for some strange reason :(.
I aced everything else on the test. At least I think I did.
Never.
I´m smart.
gotten a few D’s from a jewish and korean professor. for some reason i have problems with foreign professors. they can’t fucken teach. i do better with white professors.
White power!!!
“brutal” and “statistics” have nothing to do with each other, at least not the type of statistics a non-stats major would be taking. stats class are huge jokes, doesn’t stop business majors from failing them horribly though lol
yeah, but the “real” statistics classes are brutal.
discrete probability kicked my ass all over the place. then when calculus was thrown in via continuous probability, it was even worse.