<p>“I get the feeling they don’t really care if she fails out or not. Her advisor certainly doesn’t.”</p>
<p>This is the norm at most larger universities. They may view the student as an adult. From that point of view, SHE is the one who needs to care if she fails or not. They are there to provide help if she asks for it.</p>
<p>Not every student is right for that kind of school; an LAC will be a better fit for some.</p>
<p>^^Hanna: classof2015’s D is not at a large university…but one that does have the rep of a “sink or swim” type environment from what I hear from other students there…</p>
<p>I, too, am running into these types of issues with my rising sophomore daughter, albeit at a different level (lowish grades but nothing disastrous)…I am bookmarking this thread; she knows she needs to make some type of a change in her study habits/style and “says” she wants to deal with this in the fall; I will believe it when I see it, honestly…</p>
<p>It is almost harder when the grades are NOT disastrous, but just eh…</p>
<p>You’re right – the “sink or swim” philosophy isn’t perfectly correlated with school size. Once you’re in the OP’s situation, the important thing is to figure out how best to work with what the school offers. If it’s a “sink or swim” school, the advisors will want to see initiative and ownership from the student, and they may be quite unsympathetic if they don’t see it.</p>
<p>Of course, there can be bad apple advisors anywhere, in which case the student needs to seek out different assistance. Sometimes a kind upperclassman can be a better resource than anyone paid by the school.</p>
<p>My oldest son went to the school where Classof 2015’s daughter is attending. it is a very high pressure academic environment, a lot of very hard working high achieving students. There is also a work hard/study hard/party hard environment that sucks in a lot of first year students…after first year my son found it diminished greatly. I believe this description would apply to a lot of colleges.</p>
<p>I remember my son’s matriculation, where the college president asked all of the students who had been in the top 10% of their high school class to stand…and virtually all of the students did. He then pointed out that 90% of the students would not be graduating in the top 10% of the class from college. And that that was ok.</p>
<p>If your student is truly struggling, ask if you can take a look at her work. Can she access any papers to show you? A paper with grades/comments would be good for you to look at together, but even a paper pulled off her computer would be good.</p>
<p>Ask her if she has used the writing center on campus…it’s very good, and the advice from there carries over into writing effective responses on exams. Most of the students on campus are capable of writing sophisticated, analytical, well written scholarly papers. </p>
<p>Your daughter may be doing the work (readings, etc,) but her output may suffer in comparison to some of her classmates …she may honestly be doing what she should be doing, but what she is doing is not yet at the level of quality she needs to get the grades she would like. A good grade in an AP English class or a good score on an AP test does not really translate well to the level and extent of writing that may be common on the campus.</p>
<p>On my son’s very first college paper (12 pages) he received a C-. My Mr. Straight A was shocked. He took the paper in to the professor during office hours, and she ripped it apart. It wasn’t so much that what he had done was bad…it’s that it wasn’t sufficient. He re-wrote the paper for her review (she does not change grades) to put her criticisms into practice and learned immensely from the exercise. And he carried her criticism into all of his other writing assignments. He learned that he had to finish a paper a few days early, let it sit, and then critique it honestly…</p>
<p>He also learned to make good use of all the help available on campus…the writing lab, the language lab, the math lab, office hours, the TA, older friends/other students in has classes or major…</p>
<p>My son earned below a 2.0 second semester freshman year. I figured why wait for things to get worse, so I told him we’d develop a plan over the summer to ensure problems got corrected. We created an Academic Improvement Plan together based on the information I found at luc.edu (he does not attend there, but they have great online info for advising) and a few other sites, namely ones that talked about the PLRS learning system, which his U advised. </p>
<p>It was quite stressful and there were some speed bumps first semester sophomore year, but nothing devastating. He did realize, after talking to his advisor during the semester, that he wanted to change his major. Second semester he was back to a 3.0 semester and really happy.</p>
<p>This self-assessment proved to be one of the most valuable tools. It takes all the guess work out of the problem diagnosis. I encouraged him with the idea that he had nothing to lose in being brutally honest with himself. He gained immensely, of course, because each problem on the assessment had a specific solution that we incorporated into the academic improvement plan.
<a href=“http://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/firstandsecondyearadvising/pdfs/self__assessment_academic_improvement_form.pdf[/url]”>http://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/firstandsecondyearadvising/pdfs/self__assessment_academic_improvement_form.pdf</a></p>
<p>Great next step for developing an improvement plan…
[First</a> and Second Year Advising:Loyola University Chicago](<a href=“First and Second Year Advising | First and Second Year Advising: Loyola University Chicago”>First and Second Year Advising | First and Second Year Advising: Loyola University Chicago)</p>
<p>Did your son use AP credits to bypass lower-level classes? Sometimes that really pulls kids up short; they’re really not prepared for the higher level university courses. </p>
<p>I’d agree that trying to understand the fundamental issues is the key to figuring out next steps. Have you asked your son for access to an online grading portal (if the school has one) so you can see whether he’s gotten crummy grades on assignments/tests/papers, or whether his crummy grades are more the result of simply not turning work in?</p>
<p>thanks boysx3 – that helps. I definitely think the freedom and parties were a big distraction, plus she was doing a sport year round (which was like taking another class as far as time commitment). And she got injured, and she’s anemic. </p>
<p>I will encourage her to seek out more help – I didn’t realize they actually had resources for students. Another problem was course selection – she took advanced level classes that in my mind, should have required a pre-requisite “intro” class first (which I chalk up to poor advising). She’s taking a science w/lab this summer at a local CC based on the idea that taking it during the school year will displace available time for other courses (since it has the lab component). She’s going to pick out her classes more carefully. I really hope she turns it around. She loves it there.</p>
<p>I posted originally in here after freshman son came home with less than stellar grades after telling us “Everything is fine…”</p>
<p>We went around the block with him discussing if this was the right program for him, ways he could shore up the academic support over the summer, earn money this summer towards expenses because he lost his scholarship until he brings up the GPA from 2.23 to at least a 3.00 (not a 4.0 but he’s in an extremely demanding engineering program).</p>
<p>And we have settled that he’s going back in the fall, he was put on academic probation (ouch, that hurts to even type but they will be watching him like a mother for the entire semester), and he will give it his all…</p>
<p>I will be on pins and needles for the entire three months…it’s not easy when your child falls down like this…good luck</p>
<p>" he was put on academic probation (ouch, that hurts to even type but they will be watching him like a mother for the entire semester)"… don’t count on that. It would depend on the college and policies.</p>
<p>Classof2015, pm me if you want to discuss privately.</p>
<p>I really think that sometimes it takes a year for some students to get used to the demands of college. At some schools, where all of the students are stellar achievers, it is a shock to suddenly be average or not even that. </p>
<p>Sometimes a student is very capable, but needs to learn to do the work at the necessary standard–it can be a quantum leap from what was considered excellent in high school at virtually any college, and if your student is suddenly competing against a cohort of academic superstars, it can be even more daunting. And a stumble on an exam or paper
hurts a lot more than it did in high school because there are no points for all kinds of things like homework and posters and little quizzes etc…eg., all the little things that can pad grades in high school</p>
<p>Time management is also difficult to learn. It’s hard to plan out how much time to study/sleep/socialize/practice/party etc. especially when you don’t really have an idea of how you need to study (definitely different than in high school…) or how long it will take to research and/or write a paper. </p>
<p>It is also an adjustment to learn to make your own schedule your priority…and that everyone else on campus has their own schedules too. It’s not high school where everyone has the same schedule as everyone else. </p>
<p>So a friend might want to go do something on a given evening because she has only one class the next day, and just finished a paper in one class and an exam in another, and she wants to come up for air and take a break and do something fun…while you have two classes and a lab to prepare for the next day, and an exam two days away and a big paper due at the end of the week. And your roomie likes to stay up/come in late every night because her first class is at 10, and you have practice every morning at 7…</p>
<p>So I think that sometimes it just takes a while for some kids to figure it all out. There are some kids who do well from the beginning, obviously, but a lot of students just take a bit longer to get with the program. And of course there are also those who just party way too hard all the time, etc…but that doesn’t seem to be the students who are being discussed in this thread.</p>