Dropping two classes in a semester?

College Life
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<p>I dropped Calc I after third day of classes. The way it was scheduled with everything else just made putting proper commitment to it extremely difficult and I wanted to spare my GPA so I'll either take it next semester or this summer.</p>

<p>But now I'm thinking of dropping my Chem II lab, too. I just transferred to this university after taking Chem I somewhere else. They use electronic devices and software that I'm not at all familiar with because they learned it last semester. I've tried explaining this to my TA and why this makes doing my reports extremely difficult (and why they fall apart at the results section) but he doesn't get it. I've gone to office hours, tutors, etc. and it's not helping because I'm still not becoming familiar with the technology since I'm not allowed in the lab when it's not my scheduled lab hours and we aren't allowed to take lab materials out of the actual lab. It's a huge portion of lab here and I can't do better than a D without knowing it well even though everyone else is a semester ahead of me. If I drop, I'll get a W (I have 1 W already after listening to a crappy counselor who told me to take A&P as a web class. Terrible idea, btw). But at least it's not a massive hit to my GPA. I'm transferring again at the end of the semester to another school(loooooong story) and I could retake the lab portion there or at the CC I started at which I'm leaning towards because I know how they teach labs -- no TAs, helpful/involved professors but it's still the same stuff and I still have my old textbook from the first course.</p>

<p>I'll still be fulltime if I drop lab, so I'm not worried about that.</p>

<p>What would you do?</p>

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<p>I am surprised that your TA or lab supervisor did not respond to the simple question, “I am not familiar with the lab equipment. Can you show me how to use it?” And your professor didn’t step in either when you went to office hours?</p>

<p>Jeez. Either no one at your current college cares about teaching, or maybe you didn’t communicate your need very well?</p>

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<p>I’ve always prided myself on how well I can speak to other people – I talk a lot, so hopefully I’d be good at it!</p>

<p>But, they don’t understand. This is one of my issues with this school that was not in the brochure. The instructors don’t care and seem very happy when the class averages are low Cs/high Ds and I’m not okay with that at all. I’ve told the TA during lab and during his office hours twice (last week when I couldn’t figure out how to do my results and this afternoon when I couldn’t figure out my results) that I was not familiar with the software, didn’t have the software (other than the free trial) or anything of the sort and was just told to play around with it. They didn’t seem to care which is why I’m contemplating just dropping the lab portion and to retake it at a CC because they don’t even use the software or device. The lab book tells you how to run a program on the device, but when we used it last week, I had no clue what to do with all the charts it spat out at me. I’m not the most tech savy person out there, but it’s ridiculous.</p>