hello! i just finished my freshman year of college and today i received my grade for the past semester. my first semester i admittedly made poor choices and did not apply myself to my studies as i should have. i believe i ended with a 2.6 gpa that semester. this past semester i worked extremely hard. there was one class that i worked the hardest on the entire semester that i ended up failing. i did everything that i could and the professor still picked on me and would not give me any help during his office hours. i made b’s in all of my other classes. my gpa for my first year is now a 2.44. i have cried all morning and i just feel sick to my stomach. anything below a 3.25 makes me feel terrible, but it being below a 2.5, let alone a 3.0 is making me physically sick. i plan on going to grad school someday to become a professor. i need my gpa to rise. someone give me advice please.
@thewisewillrise8 That’s not very helpful considering OP just finished second semester. What do you suggest they study? The material they have already finished the classes for? Next semester’s classes?
Well join a very crowded club! Many students do poorly their first year. There is a reason for that. It is not simply a matter of not knowing how to allocate your time. And it is not a matter of “goofing off”. You can be a great time manager and not “goof off” and still have a low GPA at the end of the first year. So, stop beating yourself up about it.
The reasons are convergence of a few unique contributors.
- Compared to most high schools, students within each college (and therefore each graduating class and each actual classroom) are more homogeneous. Typically the instructors pitch the level (rigor) of the class to the population that they are teaching, not to some general standard. And despite posters on this site that insist that a course in Calc is a course in Calc, that simply isn’t the case. If it were, choosing a college would be about selecting the ECs you want-like camp.
So, that means that within classes (and regardless of whether a school “curves”), there are students who are at the top and those at the bottom. The bottom at one school may be above the competency level of the top at another school. But, that also means that even in colleges that have only students who got high A’s in high school, there will be a spread of grades (despite “grade inflation” which does lower the % at the low end for some schools). And, while goofing off won’t help, grades are often related to how quickly students understand complex concepts in that particular academic topic.
Since it is likely that you are enrolled in a school where you are not an outlier, the probabilities are that you will find the classes challenging in a way that was not true in high school-regardless of how well or poorly you did in high school. You are now with a stronger group of peers and yet there is still going to be a spread in grades.
- Students often take large survey courses their first year...but not all students in the large survey courses are first year students. The large survey courses often favor those who can quickly and easily memorize and regurgitate facts. A few schools avoid this by their focus on "problem solving" rather than rote memory but its much more likely you don't attend one of those few schools.
For all but students with the most efficient working memories, that approach takes more time than aptitude. Upper level classes take more aptitude and skill than time. Unfortunately for the 1st year’s, they are likely to be taking a bunch of survey classes; In contrast to upper level students who may be taking only one a semester/quarter. To make matters worse, within schools, tests are often scheduled in similar ways across classes during the semester. That means that a first year student may have 3 tests on massive amounts of information at about the same time, thereby requiring him/her to skimp on effort for each in order to cover all 3. In contrast, an upper level student may have only one class that gives that sort of exam. So, the top performers in these classes will be the upper level students who have more time and fewer similar demands placed on them for memorizing massive amounts of information and those who have excellent working memories and those who happen to have lucked out with fewer regurgitation classes. And, if you are unlucky enough to have quite a few, then a poor grade on one test might make you sacrifice one class in favor of the other, to get that bad grade back up. That can cause a domino effect.
Students often call these survey classes “weed out” classes but that is not the intent. They are efficient ways to move students though the early level in a topic but doing it this way extracts a price.
- Since students have often had little exposure to the material they encounter in each major, they often don't know how easily or difficult they will find the material. So students often start out taking classes they think might be possible future majors, but find that they don't have strong enough aptitude or interest in the discipline. But that is not easy to predict. So most first year students will enroll in classes in disciplines that are poor fits to their interests, background or ability levels.
- All these factors occur together. Most student GPAs raise substantially from the first year to the last year. Students attribute that rise to "getting better" academically. That is part of the reason for the rise-along with "learning the ropes" in terms of what instructors expect. But the consistency within which this occurs supports the idea that it is highly influenced by the structures of US colleges, in the ways described above.
The take home message is not to beat yourself over the head about it and to have hope that it will improve as you move from the first to the final year of college. Another message is for funding organizations to stop including "minimum GPAs’ as a condition for continuation of a scholarship.
Good luck from here on!
thank you so much @lostaccount! this made me feel a little bit better. the high school i went to did not prepare me for college. i was at the top of my class too. i had no idea how to properly study for things. we have grade forgiveness at my college, i just wish i didn’t have to retake the class i failed with the same professor. he is horrendous. but thank you!