Just a perspective from the other side. D is a TA for an intro STEM course that is a requirement for both a premed and engineering track at a well known highly ranked flagship. According to her, the students who are falling out are the ones that do not time manage and likely skated by in HS one way or another. She routinely gets requests to extend deadlines (problem sets and even exams) and often from students who did not show up for class, her sections or her office hours. Worse yet, some brazenly ask her to individually “work through the problem set” with them. After each exam she gets bombarded with requests to “adjust” grades. There have also been a number of instances where answers are suspiciously similar. It is such a large class that the TA’s split the questions rather than whole exams. It makes a lot of sense in that each TA becomes “expert” in the solution and possible methods to get there and it eliminates the problem of the “easy” vs “hard” grader as each test will be graded by an equal blend of graders. It also makes it easier to catch cheating. To her knowledge, the school is not trying to “weed” out students by setting a “cut” line. The students do it themselves by being unprepared, many of whom were helicoptered through HS through grade inflation and questionable study habits, or worse.
^^^THIS!
Both my daughters were STEM TAs for multiple years in undergrad (Calc 2-3, linear analysis, PChem, Biochem, Acoustics) and experienced the same thing. Students who failed were either the ones who didn’t put the time & effort into it, or who completely lacked any aptitude for the material no matter how much help they received.
Both girls also worked for the university’s tutoring centers and had reputations/ratings as being good teachers. D at one uni said she liked tutoring the athletes because they showed up on time for their session with most of their work completed. They got right down to work, listened to explanations and tried what she suggested. Her sister at another uni said the same about the NROTC students she tutored.
Thank you everyone for sharing your insights and your/your kids’ experiences.
This is so helpful to better imagine what my D’s experience might be like next year.
So for UC’s that admit to a “pre-major” status like Berkeley (I believe they do this?), the requirements to declare the major are likely the “weeder” classes? Whereas the direct admit UC’s may have the same course requirements, but since the students are already accepted to the major, there is less stress when taking those classes?
Thanks again everyone this is a very interesting convo!
+1 with @BKSquared & @WayOutWestMom’s experience. We also have 2 gradschoolkids atm who are finding the same thing. They are astonished, as the entry bar to get into their universities is so high that you would expect more from the students.
Wow, this is so eye-opening! How frustrating for your D!
Your and @WayOutWestMom’s and @collegemom3717’s kids’ experiences really confirm what the others are describing above regarding kids preparedness for the college level classes affecting their performance.
I’m trying to prepare my D for this too. As she and the other seniors are getting decisions now and I know she’ll have many disappointing results (mixed in with good!), I try to remind her that her hard work will pay off even if not admitted to her top choice schools, because it’s (hopefully) preparing her to handle the work wherever she ends up.
UCB College of Engineering does direct admission to major for the most part. UCB College of Letters and Science admits undeclared. Some popular L&S majors are high demand and have admission requirements higher than C grades or 2.0 GPA in the prerequisites (usually, the requirements are a significantly higher GPA in the prerequisites, such as 3.0 for economics, 3.2 for psychology, and 3.3 for L&S CS, although art practice also requires a portfolio).
Where a student gets direct admission, there should be less stress in trying to get the highest grade possible for admission to major (unless, as with some direct admit nursing majors or engineering majors at Wisconsin, there is a high GPA requirement to stay in the major).
Note that some UCs and their majors do mainly direct admission, but may admit some students to the campus but not their desired major. An example is UCSD CS, where some CS applicants get admitted undeclared; if they enroll at UCSD, it will be very difficult for them to enter the CS major.
This is the reputation of these majors that I’ve been afraid of. So great they cleared that up at orientation. What a great experience it sounds like your D had!
Wow, that is so tough. Can I ask what school he’s at?
You mentioned UC/CSU. A good portion of public colleges publish information about grade distribution, so you can see which classes/professors had higher/lower grades than typical. For example, Berkeleytime shows grade distribution at UC Berkeley. All the non-accelerated/advanced, non-lab intro math/science classes (pre-med classes) show grade distributions with means near B/B-. Some specific examples are below.
Biology 1A/1B (General Biology): B-/B Average
Chemistry 1A (General Chemistry): B Average
Chemistry 3A/3B (Organic Chemsitry): B-/B- Average
Physics 8A/8B (Intro Physics) B/B Average
Mathematics 1A/1B (Calculus) B/B Average
Rather than having a specific “weeder” class, the grade distribution above strikes me more as having grade distributions lower than typical of schools with comparable selectivity. As a general rule, intro classes that are taken by a large number of non-major students have a smaller portion of students doing ‘A’ quality work than upper level major-specific classes, and classes with graded primarily on objective metrics such as solving numerical problems tend to have lower grades than classes graded on more subjective metrics such as writing papers; so intro math/science classes tend to have some of the lowest average grades among all larger classes offered by the colleges. Even colleges for which the median grade across all classes is A may have several common intro math/science classes with median grades near B+. A significant portion of students who get lower grades than they’d like in these intro math/science classes choose to not persist in the fields that require further math/science classes. This probably contributes to the reputation of being “weeder” classes.
That’s actually a pretty good description, but I looked at Math 1A and the actual gpa for all semesters was 2.99, getting rounded to a B. My calculus classes back in the day had about a 2.7 and were considered weed out. That being said, only 25% of the class had C+ or below, so that’s actually pretty good. Weed out is typically because of the grading curve, where 40 or 50% get Cs or below.
I’ve mentioned before that there can be secondary weed out courses in engineering as well, ochem already mentioned, thermodynamics for ChemEs, fluid mechanics for Mech/Civil, fields and waves (EE), switching theory (Computer engr). You typically take these later so they may not be true weed out, except for ochem, but you end up switching majors maybe or graduating and not taking an engineering job.