<p>Hi, I never post but felt the need to vent. My daughter was nearly a straight A student in a public high school, 33 ACT, 2170 SAT. She is a freshman and is failing chemistry and has a D average in calc. She talked to her advisor about switching her major to avoid having to do the next level of these two classes. Can't help but think she would've been better off at our flagship state university in the honors program. It seems like there are so many geniuses at Vandy. For the first time in her life, she is not one of the better students. Socially, she is enjoying herself. She was working a job but had to quit due to her grades. Hope this doesn't adversely affect financial aid next year. Anyone else having problems academically?</p>
<p>Red flag- “socially, she is enjoying herself”.</p>
<p>This is very common in the first semester at Vandy. Chem and Calc always shock first-years. It’s really not that “there are so many geniuses” – the school is just full of students just like your daughter who were in the top 5% or 10% of their school. Put all those student on a bell curve, and no matter how smart they all are, some have to be on the right of the curve and some on the left.</p>
<p>I’ll remind you that any class at Vandy can be retaken for a better grade. Your daughter also still has the option to withdraw from classes (as long as it wouldn’t put her under 12 credit hours). Leaves a W on the transcript but will give her the opportunity to have a fresh start or take the classes over the summer at Vandy or another school (pretty sure you can get credit elsewhere after withdrawing – not 100% sure though). </p>
<p>Would she be making straight A’s at her state flagship? Well, perhaps. Chem and calc aren’t easy there either, but she’d likely have better grades. You must keep in mind everything else that comes with Vanderbilt. GPA is such a small part of a student’s experience at Vanderbilt and won’t mean anything after landing the first job.</p>
<p>My son at Duke was bell curved to a B minus in Calc and higher level Economics on his best day. He has a successful career now and is glad Duke busted his chops as he works with a lot of Georgia Tech grads now and he is not shocked when he realizes how quantitatively experienced they are in the workplace. </p>
<p>After he dropped Calc the first time (goodbye the cash we paid for the class)…and had mono, he decided to pledge party a multitude of frats instead of cutting out his social life entirely and focusing on getting tutors when he should have done so. He slammed into his limitations and to an accurate view of his higher level mathematical talent. I am very proud of one thing: he was never jealous of those who were making the grades and he deeply admired them. Especially after getting a Duke Math team classmate to tutor him for money. What a great guy that guy was.
I am not saying your daughter is not studying enough (he wasn’t). I am saying that in order to make Cs on quizzes our son would have had to study much harder than he was studying-- plus he would need a tutor plus he needed to turn off his light at midnight and wake up at 7 and go to breakfast like being at Duke was a 9-5 job. He has a 780 on math on the SATII. He also seemed to inaccurately think that making a C was great because he would make that A or B next time when next time was only worse. That was freshman fall term. Sophomore year he took the same Calc class and made a solid B minus overall without the horrific quiz grades etc to worry over.
Is a B minus good enough? Yes…for most careers in a college where half the students made over 750 on the SAT Math…that puts you emotionally sort of where the ego battered engineering grad lives.
Making that appointment with the Academic Dean and your advisor and dropping a class was a maturity right of passage for our two high school “perfect” sons. Vandy son (ACT 34, ACT math 36) made a 30 on a Rock science exam at Vandy. Vastly underestimated the amount of learning he needed to do on his own. Dropped the class. Went to summer school for six weeks. (expensive.) Yeah…a merit scholar at Vandy on academic probation taking hours below 12. I must say he took on that ego blow pretty well…dealt with his negotiating with his advisor and academic dean interview. I was hoping Vandy son was going to be a doctor (!!) but it seems he had other plans and he majored in social sciences. He knew himself better and better as the semesters went on.</p>
<p>The only real pain in the end was to parental pocketbooks. By all means, have her get in with her advisor and encourage her to start with tutors. If it is not too horrible for her sequencing, I would consider letting her get a W in one of these classes so that she is only in one of those quantitative courses and either to take the other one over or take a different math or science next time. Both our guys bulked up on things they knew they were good at in their early semesters…and took on the more quantitative things with great deliberation on balancing out their schedules. I think some high schools are really good at teaching lab skills and some high schools are only good at rote learning in sciences. Our sons has lab skills but little in the rote learning department compared to their peers at Duke and Vandy. </p>
<p>Back her up and help her take one step back to get her momentum up again. There is no shame in not doing the premed type sequence on time anyway. Lots of people do it post graduation…in my city in VA…lots of twenty somethings go to the med school in Richmond and get masters in public health, warm up to knocking down things like Organic in their mid twenties and still enter med school at a decent age. Not everyone is ready to knock all this back at the age of 18. </p>
<p>Sympathies from all parents of our hardworking and deserving kids…hang in there and believe in her. Vandy does.</p>
<p>She would probably do better at a state flagship. Not knocking them, I went to one! They rigor just doesn’t compare. My oldest went to state school for first year, after getting wait listed at VU. She took chem 1 there and easily made and A, took chem 2 after she transferred… Barely made it out with a C-. My middle one is there now. Never made a B in her life, similar stats as your daughter, came out with C’s both semesters. And was thrilled. Her roommate got a D in chem both semesters, and failed calc and is retaking it. My daughter who is a sophomore is doing better this year. One thing they HAVE to do is go to the office hours, TA study sessions, and get help. I’ve never heard my girls sound so dejected to study 18-20 hours for a test and get a C, D or worse. My oldest said that for physics she was at the help desk every single day, found a TA who understood how she learned after several poor matches. She needed up with an A. It was hard for both of them to not be the “smart kid” anymore… Just average, but that’s ok. Humility is a valuable lesson!</p>
<p>Freshman Chem and Calc are weed-out classes. Lots of kids with stellar records in HS would be shocked to learn that college level Chem and Calc have been taught “fast and furious” and they could not keep up. But, no worries, just make an appt with the professor to have the necessary tutoring sessions. More importantly, there is lots of self-help for Chem and Calc for example, you can go to Khan Academy <a href=“https://www.khanacademy.org/”>https://www.khanacademy.org/</a> (free help for Chem, Math (Calc), physics, etc)…and there are also other websites or forums that also will help your daughters/sons. Just google or yahoo them. Nothing is impossible and be blessed.</p>
<p>OP, the first semester is hard for so many; kind of like boot camp in the military. I have some stories about my kids and other VU kids from my community, but they pretty much corroborate what you are reading in this thread. Your D will make it through this bumpy adjustment and will likely thrive in the future after making it past these weed out courses. Come back to brag on her when she does. 
</p>
<p>Thank you so much everyone for the great advice! Also, she cannot withdraw from chem as she only has 14 credits currently. </p>
<p>If I were The King I would ban fall freshman from taking Chem and Calc. Most students need a semester to adjust to their new social and academic environment. Too many pre-meds and engineers see their dreams disappear before they have time to adjust to the new rigor of VU. Freshman are advised to take the most difficult classes a university can offer too early in their college career because universities want them to move on to a new major and still be able to graduate in 4 years.<br>
Your D will adjust and learn how to survive then thrive. Most VU students go through this. She just needs to put everything she has into getting by the weed out classes. Talk to the professors, get help, and work hard. As noted above she can always retake a class and upper level classes are not graded on the same curve.<br>
I also question the validity of the tests in these two weed out classes. VU has the 7th smartest and 7th highest test scoring students in the world and suddenly they can’t pass intro chem and intro calc.??? Can the worlds best teachers not teach the worlds best students intro level classes? Did these students become average, stop studying and forget how to take exams when they moved on campus? </p>
<p>Preach on, bud123!! I tried hard to get a friend to encourage her D to take an easier class as part of her load fall of freshman year. She didn’t do it and I heard endless complaints about the calculus class and how it was eating her child alive. I thought it would be better now that it wasn’t standardized tests, but I guess not.</p>
<p>Happens all of the time in the STEM classes, in particular, though kids who have always thought they were great writers get slammed in writing assignments as well. One of my big mistakes in college was choosing not to take Freshman comp because I was exempt due to a 5 on the AP English. Didn’t learn what the college expected everyone to know so I got my head handed to me that first term in terms of writing papers and essays. i recommend for most students not to choose to skip base courses even when they can, if they need to build on them. College have some of their own rules and ways of doing things, and freshmen are often taught those things, and you miss out when you go right into advanced courses. I’ve seen kids kill their med school courses when they choose to go straight into O-Chem for instance. Retake that frosh chem. Retake that Calc and the Freshman Comp even if there was dual enrollment, kid went to Harvard summer program,etc, etc. You want to learn the foundations v-e-r-y well at the college, especially one that is fast paced, tough and with talented students.</p>
<p>My math major son was an exception in that he went right into Linear Alg and did well, but he was at a LAC where the dept chair screened him carefully as to where he belonged in math. Even so I wanted him to take the beginning calc courses. It’s nice to start out with not so difficult courses and maybe one challenging course instead of a whole slate of tough courses. My others have made that mistake.</p>
<p>In the first semester a MIT, all courses are graded “Pass/No Record” – You either pass or don’t pass, no letter grade. I was always jealous of that system and think it could do a lot of good here.</p>
<p>They are not the only college like that. Harvey Mudd does it, and I think Swarthmore as well. But I think all three of those schools are kick-a** difficult from the moment you set foot on campus. It is absolutely necessary for the mental health of their freshman to do it.</p>
<p>one thing I would say to our sons in college during bumps in the road is “what would you tell/advise your son/daughter to help them figure out how to get through this?” Although the phone calls with these sorts of problems…were upsetting to us, we looked at our kids who had been working at the top of their abilities as teens and knew in our hearts that they need to have permission for trial and error socially and academically in college. Our kids never had enough time to just be in high school and worked much much harder than we did in high school. When you study among Titans at Vandy…you have to master running your own race including folding your tent and doing remedial work at times with a smile and a shrug. The bottom line is that all who enter Vandy can and will succeed. As parents, being a safety net for having a long term view/perspective for our overly intense kids is pretty much our only job. The adults they will meet at Vandy will be their inspiration and will set the bar high for them…we are no longer those people. But putting their emotional health up as a priority is still our job. Our Vandy son also stumbled badly in a simple course on Speech a couple of times. But he only had compliments for his teachers and peers.</p>
<p>Duke student newspapers refers to the problem on their campus…often in reference to their daughters but certainly also of their sons re the underbelly of the expectation of “effortless perfection.” Students arriving who have not only been perfect in grades, they carry the loads of being “exceptional” in their home high schools and in their families.<br>
I certainly think that Vandy freshman have this same sort of self-expectation to wrestle with and to work through as they become more “who they will be” and exit the rigors of structures of high school. </p>
<p>Vandy does something Duke doesn’t offer which is to allow (with permission granted via Advisors and Academic Dean) a repeat of the same class for a different grade outcome. Both grades stay on your transcript but only the better grade goes in your GPA. This is a generous policy as it acknowledges that there are many roads to the same competencies and that it is human to have divergent paths and to stumble. The downside is finding ways to get this generous option paid for. (summer school is not cheap!). But being strategic is the road to success for many students. Thinking of one of Duke son’s roommates who did Physics at Northwestern and lived at home one summer and made it to Duke Med. Another Duke student now at Wash U Med…did his Organic in the summer at Duke. A local VA guy did his Physics at Va Tech when at Wake (Work) Forest and lived at home one summer taking care of that. Vandy son dumped Rock Science (he is not visual and all the rocks looked the same to him…and he was a graduate of a Governor’s Science program). Vandy son took Bio in summer session after sophomore year. I honestly felt like we owed Vandy son a relaxed supportive response to one of his first big stumbles in school. Tons of other kids were there at Vandy doing Chem, Calc, Physics —the typical things that create havoc in freshmen. </p>
<p>I agree with bud above re “does it really have to be a weed out environment?” Seriously. Isn’t getting into Vandy or Duke Weed Out Enuf? But in my own gut, I think both of our sons would have struggled with the STEM courses unless they had been in small liberal arts colleges. Others can fly through the larger intro courses in a mid sized college like Vandy. It takes a few years to get to know your son or daughter as a young adult–the same time it takes for them to make all those individual discoveries on their own. They are flying blind in these early years. </p>
<p>There are students who struggle with STEM courses at small liberal arts college, even ones that aren’t in the top 25, as well. And some of them are darned bright students. The STEM subjects at the college level are quite unyielding regardless of school. The subject matter is the subject matter – students MUST master it to be able to succeed at higher level classes and in graduate school.</p>
<p>@VandyParent2018 I’ve been thinking about how to respond to your initial post for a few days. My observations as the parent of a sophomore studying engineering is that the first set of tests are a wake-up call. S has generally had his worst performance on the first test in the class. Then he figures out what he needs to do to perform better.</p>
<p>The first semester freshman year is notoriously difficult. Vandy students are all capable of passing their classes. Yes, there are some geniuses, but by and large the difference is study skills and time management. Vandy has terrific support available for students. The key is to use it early in the semester.</p>
<p>Your daughter will do fine. She will adjust.</p>
<p>I do have one story. Last semester, we had the dreaded phone call where S called after his Chem Final on Monday to tell us he had flunked the class. He was a borderline C going into the test. By Wednesday, test results were in and he passed the class with what we thought was a C on the final. When the grades came in on Friday, he had a B-.</p>
<p>I do not believe that quitting the job will effect financial aid for next year. Assuming it was a “work study” job she will just not have the opportunity to earn the amount of work study money and it will need to be funded by her or parents to make up the difference. </p>
<p>I agree with other posters that she needs to develop better study skills. What may have worked for her in HS, clearly is not working now. S2 is a tutor in the math department and I know that there is free tutoring available for the intro math classes. I believe that it is also available for chem. There is also private tutoring available (have to pay for this) but it will help her. </p>
<p><a href=“http://as.vanderbilt.edu/supportservices/tutoring/mathematics/Math%20Tutored%20Study%20Hall%20F14.pdf”>http://as.vanderbilt.edu/supportservices/tutoring/mathematics/Math%20Tutored%20Study%20Hall%20F14.pdf</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://as.vanderbilt.edu/supportservices/tutoring/”>http://as.vanderbilt.edu/supportservices/tutoring/</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://as.vanderbilt.edu/supportservices/tutoring/individual.php”>http://as.vanderbilt.edu/supportservices/tutoring/individual.php</a></p>
<p>She can get 10 sessions of free individual tutoring per semester…</p>
<p>Like @Go9ersjrh kid, I got calls freshman year from my kid saying she thought she may fail (or had failed) a class. She is not at Vandy, but at a tough STEM school. The specific questions would go something like, “Will you still love me if I fail Special Relativity?” It was touch and go in a couple of spots, but she did not fail anything. C- in one class (D is still passing at her college), all other classes where she got grades (vs P/F) she got a B- or better. But she was sweating plenty. You kid is not the only one.</p>
<p>During that phone call after the Chem Final, I fessed up and told him I had failed Organic Chemisty. It was not the end of the world. I retook the class and still graduated as a Chemical Engineer. We told him that he had options and to put it behind him and focus on the upcoming tests.</p>