Many of the classes which are weed-outs for “pre-meds” also happen to be weed-outs for aspiring natural science majors who aren’t pre-meds.
Two examples at one top 20 college(Tufts) are an older cousin(graduated in the early '80s) and a post-college roommate(graduated in the mid-'90s) ~ 10 years apart who found around 60% of their respective intro chem/bio class were “weeded out” with D or F grades* which meant they couldn’t continue in the major unless they took that very same course over again and passed it with a C or higher. Both of them were part of the ~40% who survived to continue in their respective majors to graduation.
One could have also be ill advised to take it to fulfill one’s science distribution credit though that’s rare as most non-pre-med/non-science majors wouldn’t go for that in the same way most STEM majors IME would avoid taking intermediate/advanced humanities/social science classes requiring heavy reading and writing loads**.
- Some courses openly post grades for the entire class in the department billboard area with student ID rather than explicitly identifying the students by name.
** Lost count of how many STEM majors whined about reading 100-300 pages a week or writing a “long” 5-8 page paper…workloads which are standard for most INTRO-level humanities/social science courses at my LAC and most respectable/elite colleges. I can just imagine how they’d react if they took one advanced undergrad seminar class which required an average reading load of 800-1000 pages a week, class participation which assumed you read the vast majority of it at the very least, and writing a 20-30 page in-depth final research paper which must be workshopped with the Prof & classmates in the course during the second-half of the semester…and that’s just one class.