Hello, future peers! Are you as scared as I am about maintaining a high GPA to keep scholarships?? Cause I sure as heck already am!
It’s probably good that you have some apprehension about grades because that likely serves to motivate you to take your first semester classes seriously, which not all freshmen do.
That said, with the exception of some “student” athletes, if you got in, you are more than smart and capable enough to do well at Tech. The freshmen who usually get into trouble academically do so because they have never really had to study to do well and struggle to learn good study skills and time management habits, especially when they are no longer in the very structured high school environment. It can also be easy to get overly distracted by all the new social opportunities that when be available.
There is no one to tell you what to do in college, but if you attend class, do your problem sets/genuinely attempt to learn the material, and reach out for tutoring/help if you are struggling, you will almost always get at least a B and probably more often an A. In most classes 60-70% of the grades are either As or Bs, so if you just do what you’re supposed to, your GPA should work out just fine.
Plenty of kids work their tail off and do not get an A or B in a course. GT if anything has grade deflation. Bell curves are common. As they say losing Hope is liberating. Not that people cannot do well but gentlemen C’s are common.
@scubadive I’m not going to dispute that there are some who work hard and cannot achieve at least a B. Certainly this happens to a few students every semester, and I suppose you could say that makes it “common,” but situations like that are in the minority and usually the a result of a lack of understanding of prerequisite knowledge or poor study skills. It’s not uncommon for bright students to come to Tech without having learned how to study, since high school was so easy for them, and so they can fall into the trap of spinning their wheels with lots of “studying,” while not really learning the material.
All that said, if one looks at the grade distributions at Tech, only about 10% of grades are C’s, 2% are D’s, and 1% are F’s. 70+% are either an A or a B and the rest are S for those who took classes pass/fail or W for those who withdrew. After accounting for students who really didn’t try that hard, the fraction of hard working students getting C’s is less than 10% and likely significantly less. Not sure I would call that “common,” but yeah, it does happen.