Adding to InigoMontoya’s comment, study groups, study groups, study groups! I got all the way to my junior year, before my poor study habits caught up to me. Getting into study groups really helps with learning the more difficult subjects and helps inforce better study habits (as you try to keep up with your peers).
I guess you can view UF’s 4 year grad rate as deceptive, but UF, and many other public universities, don’t really care about it’s 4 year graduation rate, it’s much more concerned with it’s 6th year rate. This can be seen in many of it’s policies, which make it fairly easy to pursue dual majors, double major, and switch majors (even as a junior/senior, if the major isn’t limited access/competitive and you can still graduate in 5 or even 6 years). I’m sure these other policies have far more impact on graduation rates than the required summer term.
The financial hardship waiver requires that the student has a FAFSA on file with the office of student affairs. I’m sure students that are awarded Pell Grants (for example) can get the waiver, but if your not being awarded any need based aid, you likely are not going to be approved for the waiver (I’m guessing here…).
Of course, while taking classes over the summer, the student can also work part time. I did, way back in the day, when I had to complete my summer requirement. Sometime I’ll have to share my “radioactive slush puppy” story…it deals with dead, frozen, radioactive test animals, and a power outage…it’s not pretty…
@boneh3ad “Look to your left, then look to your right. One of those people will no longer be in engineering at the end of the freshman year.” That’s just how engineering works.
Sure, faculty members and administrators may not admit that they are trying to weed students out, but the [intended] grade distribution (25% A, 35% B, everybody else C and below) shows that they are. Once you get to upper level courses, they might not aim to fail you (i.e., there will be very few grades of C- or below), but they won’t be increasing the distribution of A and B grades.
Your basic math and physics classes are meant to weed you out of the engineering school in general. If you can get past these, then that means there will be a major within the engineering school that you will be able to get through, but it won’t necessarily be your first choice. Then there are core courses within each engineering major that are meant to weed you out of that specific major. You may be changing majors as a result. Then there are upper level courses that are meant to weed you out of focus areas within your major. This tells you which focus areas you do and do not have the potential to succeed in if you pursue graduate school.
At my school, the only department that treats its students well [by giving high grades] is BME, and it is because the majority of students who choose that major have the intention of getting into a health professional school rather than work as an engineer, thus the department is helping them. A C grade or below is rarely given in a BME class. Most students in the BME department will end up having trouble finding a job though, even with the high GPAs.
I have had one faculty member admit to me that graduate schools and possibly even industries require that their potential applicants be ranked in all relevant courses, like it or not. Upper level undergraduate courses are considered relevant courses. Basically, they say that even in upper level courses the A grade loses its meaning if more than roughly 25% of the class gets some form of A. There are still fewer engineering jobs out there than there are people who graduate with an engineering degree, thus they have to do the ranking to separate out those who should be considered more competent vs those who should be considered not so competent.
Sure that look to your left and right line is commonly used to scare people, but it is hardly an indication that students are intentionally being made to fail in some sort of organized way. It is a substantially more complicated issue than that and varies quite a bit based on the type of school (i.e. public or private).
I also very much take issue with your claim about “intended” grade distributions. I know quite a few professors very well, having spent the better part of a decade at one university or another, and I can honestly say that none of them that I know well set out at the beginning of the class with a set number of each grade to assign at the end. Similarly, every one of them would love every student to ace the class and get an A if they’ve demonstrated the requisite mastery of the material. It just doesn’t happen that way in practice. Now, some of the extremely large early classes may well have a target number of each grade before the semester, but even then it is a lot less frequent than you make it out to be.
Basic math and physics courses are not “meant” to weed you out; they are meant to provide students with the required fundamental background to study engineering. Now, they end up weeding kids out for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that they are generally harder and much faster-paced than their high school counterparts and many students simply aren’t prepared for it academically and/or emotionally. Once you get into the core courses for a major, I promise you that professors are not trying to weed students out. At that point, every single professor I know tries to educate their students and would love to pass every single one of them. Do some people end up failing at that point? Yes. But it is a very, very small number compared to the people who drop out of the program during the math and physics sequence.
The idea that professors then try to weed kids out in the 400-level, upper-division, topic-specific courses is laughable. Professors generally have a passion for what they do, particularly on the research side of things. When it comes to those kinds of courses, the professors teaching them are the ones who do research in the subject and genuinely love it and would like nothing more than to pass on that enthusiasm to students. Now, of course it does not always work out, and a lot of professors don’t have the first idea how to actually accomplish this, but those are the courses that they actually generally do enjoy teaching the most outside of graduate courses. They are not trying to fail kids.
This statement here pretty much sums up where I think your opinions arise. Treating students well has nothing to do with “giving” good grades. Treating students well means educating them, and sometimes that learning process is painful. Further, generally speaking, departments have very little control over how an individual professor decides to grade their course. Shoot, as a graduate student, I taught a course (as the sole instructor) and had complete freedom to choose my own grading scale and other policies. If I, as a lowly Ph.D. student, had that level of autonomy, do you really think there is some departmental conspiracy forcing professors to artificially deflate grades? I guarantee you that there is not.
What on Earth does that even mean? Ranked in all relevant courses? I can tell you right now from personal experience that, at the very least, not all graduate schools care one bit about that sort of thing. They have a general idea of the level of rigor required at most schools across the country and don’t honestly care if there were 40 A’s in a class of 50 people if it is at a school with which they are familiar and know what that school expects their students to learn to get an A. I am reasonably sure that my own Ph.D. advisor didn’t look into my background anywhere near deep enough to know how large each of my classes was as an undergraduate at another institution.
Also, I am not sure where you get off saying there are fewer engineering jobs out there than those who graduate with a degree. The unemployment rate for engineering graduates is somewhere around 3.3% as of this time last year (latest data I could find quickly) and is likely lower than that now. That, to me, doesn’t indicate some massive shortage of jobs. I know there has been a fair bit of debate on that issue, but most STEM companies have been repeatedly saying they are having problems filling all of their positions with qualified applicants. The only real question is what these companies consider “qualified” in this context.
I can absolutely verify that professors (like me) would love to see all their students, particularly in the upper division courses, get A’s. I hate having to give low grades, and I particularly hate having to fail a student in a Senior level course.
There is absolutely no incentive these days to weed students out and have them not graduate from your university. Universities are held to account for these practices by ranking systems like USNWR where 6-year graduation rate and expected 6-year graduation rate are key metrics. Rather, we put pressure on our admissions office to admit students who are sure bets to graduate.
