How hard is it, these days, to maintain a 3.5 in college? My daughter has accepted a scholarship that requires her to maintain a 3.5. This was a competitive scholarship and she will be part of a cohort of kids with great mentoring and research opportunities. I’m just a little scared of the 3.5. She has an unweighted 4.0 in HS so knows how to study but still… I graduated with over a 3.5 all those years ago but it took me all 4 years to get there with a rough freshman year. Major is biochem. No details were given about remediation if they drop below. I don’t know if she will let me ask and I am sure she isn’t willing to.
My D’s scholarship requires a 3.5, but the college told us no one in that cohort had ever failed to achieve it (and she has had no problem whatsoever). Some colleges are much more generous with grading than others.
So you need to check the grade distribution for her major and estimate what percentile she might fall into - most cohort scholarship winners are going to be in the top ~1% of entering students so they should be perfectly capable of being in the top 10% or so of the class. Look for something like this: https://www.obia.utah.edu/data/student-data/gpa-percentile/
That could be a high threshold for a STEM major at many schools. I agree with looking into grade distribution and asking the university how many students lose their scholarship. Can you afford the school if she loses the scholarship? That’s a lot of pressure for the student.
3.5 is the bare minimum for a pre-med, and the biochemistry majors will be filled with pre-meds competing for the limited number of A grades in the courses. Whether or not she is a pre-med, she should realize that her major will be a competitive environment.
Depends on the school and the professors and how they grade.
One scenario: If there are a lot of students thinking about premed then some may drop the class if they see their potential grade isn’t going to be high enough. Grading on a curve with the bottom falling out makes it hard on the rest of the class unless the professor realizes what is going on and adjusts accordingly.
Is she at the high or low end of the admitted students?
This:
“3.5 is the bare minimum for a pre-med, and the biochemistry majors will be filled with pre-meds competing for the limited number of A grades in the courses. Whether or not she is a pre-med, she should realize that her major will be a competitive environment.”
In all seriousness, if she is planning to go to med school (my apologies, but seeing a bio-chem major leads me to believe she’s actually pre-med), she needs to maintain a 3.5 as a minimum for acceptance to med school. The scholarship GPA requirement is somewhat irrelevant or at least, a simple complication.
BTW, the fact that she has an UW GPA of 4.0 in high school means that she knows how to study and take tests…
Thanks everyone - she is planning to go to graduate school and get a pHD. It is a state school. There is a biomedical sciences degree which most of the med school kids will be in but she will certainly have plenty of classes in common. I looked for grade distributions but didn’t find any…that is cool data. Most of her cohort in her scholarship class seem to be going into engineering. I guess I should just feel confident in her abilities but it just sounds like a lot of pressure and I wish I knew if there was any remediation. I guess I will try to find out at orientation (if it happens)