bump!
But the real question was, what happens to failed classes at brown? do graduate schools care about them if they don’t appear on the official transcript?
This topic came up in the pre-med forum the other day actually. Apparently now AMCAS (the centralized med school application service) requires that applicants list any course that you ever enrolled in. I’m not even sure how that applies to shopped courses, let alone failed ones. Certainly grad schools that just look at your official transcript can’t care about failed courses because they won’t know you have them. You might need to explain why you only have a 3 classes on your transcript for a given semester but if you take 5 and fail one, I don’t know how they would have any idea.
I will not be applying to a graduate program that has a fixed evaluation scheme for gpa(that is, I’m not applying to law school or medical school).
However, while it doesn’t apply to me, I think that three courses for up to two semesters is within a normal range for a brown graduate(you need 30 courses to graduate, which allows for two semesters of three courses, within limits of two consecutive semesters of eight courses except for two seven-course consecutive semesters) so that needs no proper excuse.
Medical school also has a fixed evaluation scheme for GPA. I think the key question is whether these schools will ask for just “an official brown transcript” or will they ask for anything about your courses beyond that.
I know it’s allowed and won’t result in any sort of institutional action but 4 is clearly the standard course load for students - I imagine very few students graduate with fewer than 32 courses even though the requirement is 30. In fact I bet the mathematical mean for courses is above 32 since 5 class semesters are more common than 3.
3 courses is therefore a substandard course load and if I were on an admissions committee that had any real experience with Brown, I would wonder why a student took 3 courses. I might not assume it was due to failing (maybe the student engaged in some heavy extracurricular activity that semester that doesn’t get credit the way scientific research can be credited as a 4th class, maybe there was a health issue, maybe it was a withdrawal from a course after the add deadline for some other reason) but I would want to know why only 3 courses are listed when the standard is 4.
My dd did fail one class and dropped one at the end one semester. I think it was only freshman year. It didn’t affect grad school I don’t think, was just a bump in the road soon resolved, and was accepted to several grad schools in the 10-15 rank range.