All these so-called weed-out courses aren’t the hardest ones on campus (for non-upperclasmen). They become weed-out because too many who take them are unqualified or underqualified for these courses (unless you believe everyone in college is somehow qualified). These courses aren’t specifically made harder for weed-out purpose.
A pre-med who chooses to major in physics or math obviously isn’t worried about his/her gpa.
By “qualified”, I mean that the student is academically capable of completing a degree in the major if there are no non-academic barriers (e.g. running out of money).
Some departments are undersized relative to the number of qualified students who are interested in the major, so they impose additional weed-out policies, such as a 3.5 technical GPA requirement to stay in the chemical engineering major at University of Wisconsin, or a 3.5 GPA requirement each of the first four semesters to stay in the nursing major at Arizona State University. Meanwhile, other majors at the same colleges, or the same majors at other colleges, may require only a 2.0 GPA and C grades to stay in the major, because those departments have sufficient capacity.
Or are you basing the definition of “qualified” on departmental capacity?
A student who is able to complete a degree in some major isn’t necessarily qualified for another major.
The most obvious current example of this is the CS department. Too many students currently want to major in CS, far exceeding the capacity of any CS department anywhere. If they can’t even pass some intro CS courses (which aren’t the harder CS theory courses), they’re obviously unqualified. I don’t see how one can draw any other conclusion.
When you say “pass”, do you mean C grades and 2.0 GPA (the conventional definition of “pass”) or some higher (possibly competitively-determined) grades and/or GPA intended to weed-out some of the students who earn C or higher grades because of department capacity limitations?
My kid hated calculus but did fine in it in college. But she loved differential equations, and statics and dynamics. Those were applied and she liked applying her math skills.
OChem was hard, but she made it through.
A pass could mean different things at different colleges. In an environment where grade inflation is almost everywhere, I personally wouldn’t, and many job recruiters probably wouldn’t, consider a “C” grade sufficient.
But should the definition of “pass” be based only on the threshold needed to prevent the department from going over capacity?
A department can use any method to limit the number of students enrolled in that department. However, even with any arbitrary threshold, there’s no guarantee that the department won’t be going over its capacity.
At D18’s Ivy+, where most classes are curved to an A- (yes, grade inflation), 1st and 2nd year premed classes like chem 1 & 2 and orgo are curved to a B-.
When I think of weed out classes I think of first year classes. Don’t think universities are trying to weed out kids in their third year or majors. So Calc 2 my son said after the first quiz or midterm kids were dropping like flies and the class got small with kids muttering, “not going into engineering or medicine now), same with physics 1. So it really depends on where you go to school and what your own skills are at. Sometimes the” good " grade for the class is a C. Recruiters that know your schools rigor etc know this. Never been an issue getting jobs out of Michigan. So all of this needs to be taken with a grain of salt. At many university engineering departments we visted like UIUC students were telling my son “Whatever you do try to get out of Calc 2.” … So that seems to be a common class among the many we visted.
I have already taken Calc 1, Calc 2, Calc 3, Physics 1, and Gen Chem 1, and 2. I don’t think they are weed-out class even-though the materials can sometimes be difficult. The hardest part of Calc 2 is just an integration techniques, which mostly pops up on 1st midterm. Once you get through integration techniques, Calc 2 is not that bad.
As noted by others, this is super school dependent. The intro courses at Purdue have odd grading rubrics and the curve is set to a C, and they use a bell curve so they limit the number of As.
Was a bit shocked to read up thread that some schools are curving to an A-!
In combination with the requirement to earn a 3.2 GPA to choose one’s engineering major without limitations, wouldn’t that qualify as an aggressive intentional weeding policy, since most students will presumably fall below 3.2 GPA and thus go into competitive admission for the remaining space in the majors?
Same… Most of my friends that went to Ivys told me… Hard to get in but easy to stay in…
Definitely school dependant… No question about that. There was actually a Michigan reddit and they were talking about Calc 2. They all said they had nightmares from it… Lol. Then a current Michigan Math professor got on and said something like “I” still “have nightmares from it”. 
My wife taught the Algorithms courses for a few years, and says that, if you don’t understand algorithms, you don’t understand CS. So it’s not developed to artificially weed out students, but because it is so fundamental that it will indeed weed out those students who maybe know how to code, but don’t really understand how computation works.
Of course, there are always professors who will make algorithms more difficult than they have to be, but often because CS professors are crappy at teaching.
My wife did her undergraduate in CS at Hebrew University, and there the entire first year was for weeding out. Every year 1/3 of the class was weeded out. They told them on the first day in class to look around them and understand that a third of them would not be starting their second year. I didn’t see much of her that year - she used to stay doing her class work until 2 am a few times a week.
Perhaps calculus 2 has a “hard” reputation because it is commonly taken as a first semester course by students who have AP calculus AB credit for calculus 1. AP calculus AB covers material at a slower pace with more supervision than college calculus courses, so it may be the shift to college (faster pace, less supervision) more than the material that makes taking calculus 2 “hard” for some students.
Nope… Know kids that had MV Calc before taking it. It’s a weed out for sure. It’s one of the known weed outs. But just as you say… Sorta. Lol… Any class can be a weed out if your struggling with the material. One thing my son told me in engineering… The easy classes are hard and everyone struggles together… Lol… So it’s more of that I guess. When 60% in some class’s is the “good” grade…??? I remember when he told me he got a 65 and I said "so you gotta take it over and he said the mean was 45… Lol or something like that… Crazy…
In college, many tests and grading scales are designed to avoid compression at the top of the scale like the typical high school grading scale has. For example, a test may have three problems with equal point values, an easy one that C students should solve, a somewhat harder one that B students should solve, and a harder one that A students should solve. The resulting grading scale will not look like the typical high school grading scale.
Perhaps people should define what they think a weed out class is. When I hear that term, I think of a class specifically designed so that lots of people fail. I don’t believe professors teach a class with the hope that students don’t learn the material. Do all organic chemistry professors design their classes to make them difficult for students, or is organic chemistry just naturally a difficult subject?