<p>What you are describing, standrews, sounds like a reasonable course, not a “weeder” where, as bluebayou describes, grades are artificially forced down and so forth. If the course material is appropriately challenging and covers an appropriate amount of subject matter, and some kids–perhaps even many kids in some situations–who take it can’t cut it, that’s one thing. The idea that most freshmen at a school like D should be failing chem tests is pretty ridiculous, IMHO, because most of them are good and highly able students.</p>
<p>My H was an adjunct math prof at a local Catholic college where the pre-calc math class effectively functioned as a weeder for students who wanted to study subjects that eventually required calculus. This was a very different population of students. In the first place, they obviously had not taken four years of math in HS. Secondly, we’re talking a place where the average SAT per section is in the 400s. My observation was that most of them had no idea how to study. Despite the fact that the course was structured so that kids actually got credit for doing homework and attending class, and the detailed pre-exam review involved working through every single exact problem that would be on the final, just with different numbers (!), over 50% of the students who took this class flunked it every year. They were not only not very bright, they simply had no idea how to go through the routine steps of mastering a subject. For example, rather than actually working through the problems assigned as homework, most of them were obviously simply looking up the answers in the back of the book and transferring them to a piece of paper, showing no work. They never came to office hours, did not consult the student tutor provided by the school, and claimed–after the unbelievably detailed review I described above, that spoonfed the material on the final–that the final contained material they had never seen before! What that school really needed to do was add a placement test and a lower-level math class, but they preferred to continue to feed their grossly incompetent students into the meat grinder and collect tuition $$.</p>