<p>Same thing happened to my DD. Her GPA (as a senior) is 3.2 in engineering. She had 15 quarter credits of organic chemistry C’s. Did a number on her gpa. But she got the C and that stands for COMPLETE.</p>
<p>You absolutely CAN flunk out of Dartmouth. It’s not something they want to see happen and they do quite a bit to support students in academic difficulty. BUT kids DO flunk out of Dartmouth…every year (family members currently attending say this has happened to kids they know).</p>
<p>What did he mean by this? Is that to say that there’s something wrong with Pittsburgh? I ask because my son has applied to Pitt, and I’m interested in what he might expect if he attends.</p>
<p>mantori.suzuki: I think this reflects the fact the Pittsburgh is public and way less money than U of Scranton. Therefore, it would make no sense to apply to an expensive private that the student liked less.</p>
<p>Scoutmom9: What schools did your student like except Pittsburgh being okay?</p>
<p>Tufts and Fordham. I left the Fordham tour right after the showed us the dorms, which looked run down and awful, and they showed us where the daily mass was held in the dorm. A wee bit too Catholic for me.</p>
<p>Tufts I liked on the tour, and then my mother and I slowly liked it less and less as the hours ticked by. When it got to time to do the application and the supplement was annoying, I dropped it applied to Dartmouth instead (since I was writing two of my friend’s peer evaluations anyway).</p>
<p>I actually support the difficulty of failing, especially in top schools. Those students aren’t prone to failure. It’s not that it shouldn’t happen to them but, like others have mentioned, it’s probably an underlying problem. Either it’s a subject that the student just can’t grasp and needs the extra help with, or there’s a studying issue, etc. Plus, you’re paying $50,000 a year for that kind of heavy academic support. However, I would prefer a system not where the grading is easy but instead where the resources are plentiful and even pushed upon students.</p>
<p>University of Richmond: She liked it, but didn’t love it, and said “not every school on my list can be a YES!” Also, decided that it was too small. The other thing that was very odd was that it was move in day on the day that we visited and there was no energy on the campus at all. </p>
<p>Northwestern: After spending 5 weeks there this summer as a Cherub, she was positive that she did not want to go there! This was a big disappointment to me because her plan before her summer stint was to apply there early decision! She is an east coast girl and absolutely felt like the midwest was not for her. Also, she was cold all summer and couldn’t imagine what the winters would be like.</p>
<p>Muhlenberg: Yes, that changed to a no. She liked it because it was one of her early visits and enjoyed the friendliness and warmth of all the people that she met, but after seeing bigger schools, she decided that it was too small.</p>
<p>Emerson: NO WAY!! Too weird. No campus and the only people that ventured outside to get fresh air were smoking! The campus was a vertical building, dark, very few windows. Just yuck.</p>
<p>Skidmore: Another NO WAY!!! Too artsy and the campus was dead – ghost town on the weekend. Also, she felt like the buildings were unattractive…beautiful background, but the beauty didn’t extend to the campus.</p>
<p>Yes List so far includes: William and Mary, UVA, Bucknell, Boston U. and Boston College</p>
<p>Northwestern offers a summer enrichment program called the National High School Institute. They have 6 programs and the students are referred to as “Cherubs”. It is the oldest university based summer program. The programs include Theatre Arts, Journalism, Film & Production, Debate, Speech and Music. 150 kids are accepted into each program. We heard great things about it and had heard that if you participate in the program it would increase your chances of getting into NU. My daughter loved the program, but she just couldn’t see herself going to college there.</p>
<p>I disagree about flunking courses. I think the very elite schools just send off warning bells, and that kids drop the courses before they flunk them.</p>
<p>Both of my kids had this experience (flunking courses), and these were courses they were each working VERY hard at. One was music theory, the other Ancient Greek. And each has yet to earn a C in anything else – just A’s and B’s. I am sure there are other classes they could have flunked too, LOL.</p>
<p>At one school D pulled the plug, and allowed an underload for one semester and one semester only. Since this was first semester frosh year it was kind of scary.</p>
<p>S got called to dean’s office and dean pulled the plug. He was also allowed to have unload; I don’t think the duration of the under load was specified. He is a junior now with no repeat so we are starting to breathe easy there, too.</p>
<p>I doubt the slacker types that are just trying to skate through are signing up for Ancient Greek or music theory or anything else that’s obviously difficult (organic chemistry).</p>
<p>No, not slackers at all. I am just saying that they <em>could</em> fail classes and they weren’t going to be passed along with “the gentleman’s C.” F’s were in the offing.</p>
<p>And each tried something s/he desperately wanted to master, found out s/he couldn’t and moved on to something else that became loved and cherished.</p>
<p>Still, if they’d planned it right (just kidding) I can see the possibility of many F’s.</p>
<p>Pretty sure I could have failed a whole bunch of engineering courses wherever I’d gone. LOL.</p>
<p>Once S2 had a good sense of what he wanted (and S1, to a lesser degree), he began weighing colleges by whether he’d pick it over the flagship. There were some schools where HE felt the value for money was not worth the higher price tag. (As for the Bank of Mom and Dad, we’ll do what needs to be done, wherever he chooses. We both feel there are some drawbacks to the flagship for him personally.)</p>
<p>mythmom, your post is a little disturbing, and makes me see the wisdom of Brown’s pass/fail grading option. I would like to think that any kid who is smart enough to get into these elite schools could at least pass classes in music theory or ancient greek even without any prior background in these topics. (I’m assuming, of course, that they are intro level classes; jumping cold into upper level classes in these areas would be a whole different story). Not that these are easy subjects; to the contrary. But I would expect the courses to be challenging, not impossible.</p>
<p>One of the main selling points of top LACs is that they encourage bright kids to get outside their comfort zones and try something new. That’s a hollow offer if even intro level classes require significant prior exposure in order to pass, or force bright, hard-working kids to drop courses they find interesting, though difficult, in order to protect their GPAs. </p>
<p>Or maybe, like you suggest, it’s just a question of the aptitude of a particular kid for a particular topic. Intro chemistry stopped my science career cold! :)</p>
<p>The Music Theory class was level three. Levels one and two passed with B’s. I think, not to be too sexist, Level three separates the men from the boys. It let my kid know he couldn’t master the discipline at the level that a graduate from HIS school would have to. I asked him to look at the option of transferring if music was that important to him. It wasn’t. So all was fine. He is doing really well in Level One Ancient Greek.</p>
<p>The other child who was failing Ancient Greek had never taken Latin which everyone else in the class had. Since it wasn’t a prerequisite for the class, it was a disappointing result. I had begged her to start with Latin. She did not go back to do that. Showed her that Classics weren’t her passion as she thought and she found something she liked much better, but it was hairy for a little while.</p>
<p>By the way, the kid who was flunking music theory did fine in an upper level physics course and astronomy.</p>
<p>Perhaps he just doesn’t have the auditory skills. I don’t know. He could never explain it to me.</p>
<p>I am not bellyaching, just explaining. We’re all fine. They’re fine. I’m fine. Their schools are fine, and they found majors they loved without a hit to their GPA’s. I’m not sure it’s much different from Pass/Fail except they didn’t get the credit for the semester. Well Pass/Fail wouldn’t either.</p>
<p>There’s no denying that at an “easier” school each might have passed these courses, but eventually I’m pretty sure they’d each hit a ceiling.</p>
<p>S was terrified of Ancient Greek because of sister’s experience, but Latin teacher encouraged him, and he did fine.</p>
<p>“Perhaps he just doesn’t have the auditory skills. I don’t know. He could never explain it to me.”
DD is currently working on her performance MM . Last week her high school cousin called me “not sure” if she wants a music major. I told her to call DD and ask her about the fourth year of music theory and see if she still thinks music is an option. Cousin is now looking into Biology.</p>
<p>musicamusica: Thanks. To be clear, I am totally okay with how things worked out. My only point is that colleges do give F’s and there is not a “pass them through with a C” mentality going.</p>
<p>I am thrilled for your daughter. That’s a lot of success.</p>
<p>I had PRECISELY the same experience with Ancient Greek in college. Ancient Greek is really, really hard. It requires a LOT of brute memorization. When you combine that with a class that assumes prior mastery of an inflected language, the results can be disastrous.</p>
<p>“I would like to think that any kid who is smart enough to get into these elite schools could at least pass classes in music theory or ancient greek even without any prior background in these topics.”</p>
<p>Eh. They’re human. Even people with pretty broad academic skills can hit a brick wall in one subject or another. I did well in calculus, linguistics, Chinese, etc…but I never took computer science. I’m not at all sure I could have passed. It scared me to death.</p>