My sister’s best friend in her dorm her freshman year of college died in a dorm fire. I remember my dad having to drive through a blizzard to bring her home. Her grades suffered a bit…but the profs let her make up work.
The other piece her is the rise of the Internet. I had friends at Michigan in 1981 and had no idea of the shooting that @intparent posted about. Now, the minute something happens on a campus we ALL know about it instantly.
You knew people with such issues. You just didn’t know it or wrongly attributed their academic problems to laziness, excessive partying, or poor fit.
So many things have changed:
We not only diagnose ADD, we diagnose Asperger’s and also allow extra time on tests for physical disabilities. Yes, often a parent has similar issues. Today’s education moves at a much faster pace; each subject has more depth at the HS level (Bio is molecular, Calc 2 and 3 instead of just Calc 1, E&M); data collection is no longer time consuming so assignments have more depth requiring more executive functioning and analysis skills at a younger age. There is definitely a larger spread in today’s entering classes. Today’s top students are much better prepared while students at much less competitive schools may not have chosen to attend college 25+ years ago with so many other options.
With advanced treatments extending the lives of terminally ill patients, it is almost impossible to avoid knowing families living with harsh treatment schedules and a declining parent. Yes, people put blinders on and choose to believe that if someone can attend an event, they and their children are not suffering. Tell me the place to move where no one looses a parent in college or high school…
There have been a few posters here on CC who list a litany of “excuses” and then ask if these excuses will be “good enough” to have the college adcoms overlook their bad test scores and/or GPA.
Sure. But we typically help them figure out if it is going to be considered valid by college admissions or not. I don’t mind the question. And try to help them see that realistically, most of the time they are going to end up at a college that matches their stats. If they are stubborn about it, then it gets annoying.
I think your premise is off base. There is not a majority or even a large minority of students or parents that come here with excuses. There are some, of course. But kids who know their bad grades are due to their own action (or inaction) are not going to post. And the vast majority of families and students do not even come on CC. Most students go to colleges that do not require a perfect transcript and do just fine in life.
Certainly, there are lot more LDs being diagnosed. I remember a boy in my grade that could not read. He was in my typing class in HS and was getting trouble for not typing. When I asked him why, he said he couldn’t read it anyway so why bother. He passed along each year. His parents ended up suing the school district because he couldn’t read. In all likelihood, he was dyslexic. If he were a student now, he likely would have gotten the help he needed.
A kid that has a major issue in their life could be expected to have a dip in grades. Nothing wrong with some explanation. The colleges have heard it all and would certainly be able to distinguish between a real hardship and a minor one.
Also if you read the “Academic Appeals” Posts you will see people with the lazy/party problem, mental health issues, family deaths and having to support the family, and even a few just cannot master the subject/classes issues.
I think that part of the OP’s issue is due to *support forum syndrome/i. People go online to find help for a problem they’ve encountered more than to post “things are going great here”. For example, there are a bazillion people using my programs but if you look at my support forum you’d think it was crappy software due to the amount of issues people report. Not so! Tens of thousands of people use the programs every day but only a handful report problems in a week (there are bugs in my code but most problems are external, due to antivirus programs blocking internet access, firewalls, etc.).
Having said that, I do think that there has been a proliferation of diagnoses that apply labels to people who deviate from the norm. I imagine that, today, I’d have some diagnosis for my disaster of an academic career. I wasn’t a partier, I wasn’t lazy, I was basically pathologically “stubborn” and didn’t do anything that I wasn’t interested in, regardless of the cost. I’n sure there’s a label for that type of person now (probably not official, just derogatory!).
I get tired of the excuses for bad grades, too. I got bad grades when I was in high school because I never studied. That seemed to be the common denominator for all of us who got bad grades. (Although somehow my SAT and ACT scores were pretty good.)
Well, if my kid were just lazy instead of sick, his grades wouldn’t have gone up substantially after Freshman year. He would have just been a plain old B student and gone to the kind of colleges such kids go to. I think relatively few kids drop nearly a point and then recover unless there was something odd about that year.
Worry more about your kid and less about everyone else’s.
Basic question: 25 years ago, was there any place where you would have interacted with thousands and thousands of high school kids and/or their parents? No. So it seems like more because 25 years ago, you wouldn’t have known that a random student 1500 miles away got a C because she was hospitalized with meningitis.
My mom essentially dropped out of high school when her junior precalc teacher wouldn’t work with her after she missed a few weeks of school for a horrific internal infection. She was hospitalized.
She was a straight A student who ended up with a D. It was demoralizing and since no one was pushing her to go to college, she just stopped trying. Had she been in my generation, there would have been support for her.
If I lived in my mom’s generation, I would likely not have earned a bachelor’s degree let alone go on to get several advanced degrees like I have.
As an instructor, I want to know if my students are struggling. Struggling and overwhelmed students I can work with. Lazy students are usually a lost cause.
But yes, most students get bad grades out of laziness or inability, not because of an acute or health incident. You don’t hear about them because there’s no reason to.
Just my opinion, but I think an “excuse” would work if the low performance was an outlier. A semester with Cs and Ds from an otherwise A student could be explained by a life event such as an illness, undiscovered learning issue, or death in the family. One class with a low grade could be explained by something not clicking with the student. But several semesters of several bad grades points to other issues.
The difference now as opposed to when I was in college 30 years ago is that it is much more difficult to gain admittance to top colleges and gain scholarship money for the others, and this is during time when college costs are outpacing income. Back in my day, I don’t think a bad semester would really affect most students.
Something similar happened to my mother, only she ended up with a C in a couple of classes. Her parents couldn’t have cared less because “girls don’t need college” was the prevailing thought at the time.
The thing is, these days, with families who are sophisticated about this sort of thing, intervention, testing and diagnosis, and accommodations should in theory, help AVOID a dip in grades. And the other option is a medical withdrawal to keep the transcript clean- which parents on this forum often suggest.
The kids who come on here for help with their appeals, generally do NOT come from families who are advocating for them in a knowledgeable way and many are actually even afraid to tell their parents.
Some of them have legitimate diagnosable problems that would merit support, accommodations or a medical withdrawal but without the advice of adults who know how things work, fail.
I personally think this is one of the strongest areas for this forum.
I remember a recent poster who was appealing a dismissal and after coming on the forum, got a medical withdrawal, a medical leave with certain requirements for reentry, and basically a better option than dismissal. Parents on here worked with the kid to understand that life plans have to be flexible and to use the time out to get help needed.
When people criticize CC, I think of this kind of thing. Many parents are willing to help and share what they have learned.