<p>I'm hovering at a 79 in my biopsychology class right now and it's very possible I'll get a B- in the class. As I'm a psych major who wants to go to grad school, this looks especially bad. If someone here has, or knows someone who's applied to top psych grad programs, how much is this going to hurt me? </p>
<p>I'm just a freshman now and I know I can get better grades than this in the future since I made a 3.5 last semester. The problem is I know it'll feel like I'll be making up for that grade until I graduate.. Ugh/</p>
<p>I have no idea what it’s like today to get into psych grad programs, but back when I went, I was also very concerned about my grades needing to be perfect. Once I arrived, there were kids in my program who had Cs and one even had a D on their college transcripts. (Of course the rest of their grades were very good and they likely had high GREs.) </p>
<p>I feel for you because psychobiology was one of the 2 Bs I had in college and that class drove me crazy (actually it was the tests). Also, there are so many areas in psychology - do you know which area you are interested in for grad school? Clinical, Behavioral, School, I/O, Experimental, etc.? </p>
<p>I don’t think you should put so much pressure on yourself at this point. If you are working as hard and smart as you can, then you’ve done your best. </p>
<p>Hopefully someone with recent experience can give you advice. I just wish you well and hope you continue to enjoy your psych courses!</p>
<p>Graduate admissions committees are going to be focused on your grades junior/senior year, your GRE scores, your research and/or related work experience, and your letters of recommendation from your faculty mentors. A single (or even more than one) poor grade freshman year is not a problem. Most students’ grades rise significantly as they adjust to college-level workload and expectations.</p>
<p>Agree with both of the above.
You still have plenty of time to work on a better understanding of the course material for this class, though. Have you gone to office hours? Done all the assigned reading? Do you understand it?</p>
<p>Put some of that anxiety into a CSI style postmortum. Where, exactly, are you losing points? Tests? Essays? Quizzes? Hit the tutoring center and query other students. </p>
<p>Hang in there. Some grad advisors actually will see one stumbling grade as a character building episode. It doesn’t ruin you.</p>
<p>Thanks guys. It’s reassuring just to be able to air out my anxieties. I understand everything in lectures, but the test questions don’t just test main concepts, and I find them a little tricky… There are only two tests and one final so it’s about 4 dense chapters of material each, and there aren’t many questions on the test either… it’s easy to mess up. While I hate to suggest that natural talent trumps effort, I just feel like I’d have to be a science person to do well in this course… I’ve definitely studied enough, and even wrote up neat summaries of my notes. There’s still the final which is worth 45%, but I don’t even know that I should be doing anything differently.</p>
<p>aerinyr, I’d suggest that you talk with a teaching assistant first, if the class has one. Ask for suggestions about approaching the material more effectively. If there is no teaching assistant, go to see the professor during office hours, and ask the same question. Your last sentence of your most recent post puzzles me, when you say that you don’t know that you should be doing anything differently. Well, clearly, if you are unhappy about your performance, and you are putting effort into the course, then there is something you should be doing differently.</p>
<p>I think it is possible that you are still approaching your college classes with the methods that you used in high school, or perhaps some hybrid of high school and college approaches, and you haven’t fully converted over to the college expectations. Is there a study center on your campus, or an academic advising group that could help you to study more effectively?</p>
<p>Perhaps it would be better to spend your time thinking about the connections between elements of the course, down to a fairly detailed level, or coming up with questions about something that doesn’t make sense (then you could ask a TA or the prof about it).</p>
<p>Also, if you were a “science person,” how would you be approaching the material differently? Try to think concretely about what someone who is oriented toward the sciences would be doing, and how you could adapt your own style to gain that understanding, perhaps in a different way.</p>
<p>Finally, the grading scales that applied in high school often do not apply in college. Do you know that your % score corresponds to a B-, or are you just assuming that?</p>
<p>If you need to figure out how to approach the material in a way to do better on the tests, get together with someone who is doing better and see what they are doing to get their results…get some fresh ideas.</p>