Taking 4 classes first semester?

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>Hi - I'm a rising college Freshman and am currently registering for my first semester of classes. So far, I have to tackle the 5 or so general ed requirements I have left over after AP and Dual Enrollment credit. As of right now - my schedule is as follows:</p>

<p>Monday/Wednesday/Friday
9:00 - 9:50 AM - Honors English (a requirement for being in my school's Honor College)
11:00 - 11:50 - Gender in American Society
12:00 - 12:50 - Principles of Latin 101 </p>

<p>Tuesday/Thursday
9:30 - 10:45 - Popular Culture in America
11:00 - 12:15 - Introduction to Environmental Science</p>

<p>Yesterday during my Orientation, my advisor told me that a lot of students only take 4 classes their Freshman fall semester to allow them an easier transition into college - she said that more often than not, students who opt for 4 classes rather than 5 their first semester do better GPA-wise. </p>

<p>I am on a full scholarship - the scholarship covers 5.5 years of study so long as I maintain a 3.0 GPA and take a minimum of 12 credits (4 classes) a semester. I've already knocked out about 1.5 semesters worth of study with previous credits. If I take 4 classes this semester, I can still graduate on time (4 years). </p>

<p>If I dropped a class, I'd probably drop Gender and find an earlier Latin class so that there wasn't a huge gap between English and Latin. I'm a commuter student and will be taking public transportation (about a 30 minute commute) from home to the school, so big breaks won't allow me to go home and I'll more than likely be stuck at school during that time. </p>

<p>At the same time, I'm the type of person that works best when kept busy - I lose motivation if I don't occupy myself with a lot of work. I'm not an Engineering major or anything of that sort, and my classes are pretty soft compared to what some Pre-Med and Engineering students at my school are taking. I'm worried that 3 "light" intro courses with a relatively easy science course are going to make me lose motivation. </p>

<p>Thoughts?</p>

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<p>Yeah, I’m like you. I say stick with the schedule you have. If you look at the syllabi and see that the courseload is heavy or start to feel overwhelmed with work or just don’t like a class, colleges usually have a period of time where you can drop a class without being penalized. I took five courses my freshman fall semester, including three Engineering courses, at a notoriously hard school and maintained a high GPA.</p>

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<p>None of those courses except honors english feels mod-high degree of difficulty to me. 12 hours is probably light, 14-15 hours is a pretty typical freshman workload. Your schedule is not graven in stone. Common freshman mistake is not to take full advantage of drop/add. If you really want latin, or don’t like the syllabus, or can’t understand the instructor, or want to go in a different direction, its ok to change (preferably do this early in the first week of classes). </p>

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<p>Five classes is a standard freshmen schedule where I’m from. </p>

<p>It looks like a doable schedule. You shouldn’t have problems with it, but if you do you can always drop the course within the dropping window. </p>

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<p>We have a 5 day add/drop period - I only meet my MWF twice before I can decide to drop them and I worry I won’t really have a solid perception of the difficulty or workload of the course before the deadline. </p>

<p>The only course that might give me some problems in terms of conceptual difficulty is the Intro to Environmental - only because I know that Environmental can be taught in a very wide variety of ways (from a Biochemistry standpoint, a Social/Economic standpoint, etc) - so “Intro to Environmental” seems broad as a course. My only other alternative would be Introduction to Biology (Biology 101) - but I’ve heard that college biology is substantially harder than AP Biology which also worries me. My GPA is of chief importance to me and I don’t want to sacrifice it over a General Ed Science requirement. </p>

<p>We have an option to take a class as Pass/Fail - I was thinking of doing that for Enviro but I’m worried about the ramifications of taking a class pass/fail when it comes to applying to top law schools.</p>

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<p>For Env, check out the course syllabus. IIRC, the school you’re going to (you posted about it way back when in the HSL section) keeps everything online. If you know your professor, google their name and check out the ratemyprofessor page. I did it for you from the name of the class, and everyone in the reviews said his classes were easy (provided it’s taught by the same guy as last year), and that it was an easy class. As long as you care, you’ll do fine (try to get an A+ for that LSAC 4.33 doe). </p>

<p>FWIW, it doesn’t look like Bio’s the only other alternative. PHYS121 Introduction to Astronomy and PHYS134 Energy for the Future look like some easy classes. I’m planning on taking Astronomy to get out of my science gen ed requirement next year. Same situation as you wrt law school and GPA protection. </p>

<p>If you can, see if your school has any place where you can find GPA distributions of different classes/different professors. There should be hard copies somewhere in administration. Easier, though, would be to find them online. My school has a website ( <a href=“http://ourumd.com”>http://ourumd.com</a> ) where we can click on the class and see the GPA distribution; check and see if you guys have anything like that. I know the student who made that website got the data from hard copies in some building on campus, so it should exist somewhere at your school. </p>

<p>On pass/fail for ls admissions, here’s some discussion on TLS:</p>

<p><a href=“Pass/fail grades on transcript Forum - Top Law Schools”>Pass/fail grades on transcript Forum - Top Law Schools;
<a href=“How Does Pass/Fail Judge by Admissions? Forum - Top Law Schools”>How Does Pass/Fail Judge by Admissions? Forum - Top Law Schools;

<p>General consensus from a few months of lurking is that HYS care, CCN kinda care, the rest of the T14 doesn’t care (so long as you have the #s). I’d suggest you either post a thread there for some more opinions or ask post in the law school section on here; Demosthenes gives some great advice on here. </p>

<p>ETA: See if you can find any people who went to your school and succeeded in law school admissions–try Reddit or some places like that. Current students and alums are a valuable resource. I posted a thread on TLS that had my school name in it (took it out two days later for anonymity) and had two different alums PM me w/ advice (both going to T6 law schools); then I had some people message me on Reddit (after posting for advice) helping me out w/ info (3 of them going to T14’s from Penn-GULC). Find alum and current students, network, and get advice on professors/classes from them; they’ll want to help you protect your GPA. Also, see what you can do to join a pre-law society or some social group like that. You’ll appreciate it for the social aspect (as a commuter) and the connections (usually they have test banks and are a wealth of information).</p>

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<p>If this is a concern, try picking up another fun course. Try not to exceed 17 credits for your first semester.</p>

<p>It might be worth it to rack up some softs in your spare time. See what you can do about joining some EC’s or getting to know some professors well (maybe start some research or express interest in doing so) so you have some good softs, including people for LOR’s. </p>

<p>Mea culpa if this is too long; I’m really, really bored w/ way too much free time. </p>

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<p>Keep the 5-course schedule for now, but make note of the drop deadline. If the workload is too high, or one of the courses is uninteresting, you can drop one course to have a 4-course schedule (assuming that the 4 courses make up enough credits to remain a full time student – how many credits is each course?).</p>

<p>Does your intended major have any prerequisite sequences that you need to start early?</p>

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<p>Yeah, main things to check for before/during those first few lectures:</p>

<ol>
<li>Will this class have a lot of work? (syllabus)</li>
<li>Is this an interesting class, or will I be bored to tears? (lecture, online comments)</li>
<li>Do other students consider this an easy class? (some colleges have course evaluations you can read, websites like ratemyprofessor.com; keep an eye out for phrases like “He’s a hard/strict grader”)</li>
<li>Is this course still doable if I fall behind? Does the professor post everything online, or if you miss/lose something, you’ve gotta hunt stuff down yourself? (syllabus)</li>
</ol>

<p>2 = No, drop it. Most reliable indicators of a class’s easiness are 1, 4, 3, in that order.</p>

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<p>

That’s the nature of the beast. You need to use the tools given to you (i.e. your professor, syllabus, current students) to make a decision whether you need to keep the class or drop it. If you drop the class, and really it wasn’t that hard and you could’ve kept it, that’s shouldn’t be anything to worry about…because you would never know. :wink: </p>

<p>Watch the deadlines, how fast the course moves through the materials, the grading policies, all of that jazz and see if one class isn’t really fitting in that you don’t feel is worth the hassle. If you don’t find one class that does that, keep your schedule. </p>

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<p>5 courses is ok as long as you don’t plan to get super good grades and don’t plan to have a little bit of social life. The killer is when you get to final, you can’t focus on one test, you must spread your energy to 5 different subjects.
Edit to add that those courses also don’t look hard like STEM courses, so I think it’s doable.</p>

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<p>@DrGoogle - But I actually want to get really good grades. :(</p>

<p>Unfortunately, the professor who teaches the Environmental class has literally no reviews on RateMyProfessor - I read the course description again and everything the course entails seems to involve material I’ve been exposed to before in AP Environmental Science and Marine Biology. I’m not saying it’s gonna be a cake walk, just that former exposure will probably help me more than hurt me in this situation. </p>

<p>I don’t think I care so much about there being a lot of work - I have developed really good time management and organization skills over the years so I can tackle pretty big assignments with very few distractions or other hiccups - I’m just worried about conceptual difficulty and whether or not the professor is a really strict grader - for instance, if he only gives a certain percentage of A’s or some policy like that. </p>

<p>I was not made aware of specific alum names who are going onto grad schools that I’m interested in - just that from my school’s Honor College, the class of 2013 put a few people at Harvard Law School, Kennedy School of Government, Columbia Law School, and NYU Law, (and then some medical schools that I didn’t pay much attention to) – but no names were given so I couldn’t contact them with questions. All of the advisors seemed to advocate for only 4 classes - but those advisors were all BioChem/Physics/Math majors so I imagined their experiences would be vastly different than a Poli Sci major. </p>

<p>Thanks for all the advice so far, guys. </p>

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<p>If your intention is to do law later, do all you can to make sure you have a very good GPA. For example, my daughter has very strong work ethic, rarely sick from birth to high school, not even an ear infection, but in her freshman year she got sick twice, I guess due to exposure to a lot of different people in college. So what I’m trying to say, is plan for the unexpected. She got easy A in Political Science class but took it as P/NP(not recommend for law school), she also didn’t know she would have gotten easy A in that class. But the plus side is she was able to channel her energy into getting top grades for her CS and math classes. It was not a clear choice that I would have forecast but when finals came and her grades were posted, I can see it was an advantage. It was not that she was failing, she was carrying a pesky A- and she finally made to a strong A. I think in college an A- is 3.7 and an A is 4.0. Not sure if her school gives any difference in weight for A+ and A, so that may not an advantage. But in law school there is a difference between a 3.7 average and a 4.0 average. One gives you more options and possibly more scholarship money which will definitely helps.</p>

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<p>It sounds like you don’t have much to lose by taking fewer classes and then adjusting in subsequent semesters. If you’re concerned that you will slack off if you aren’t kept very busy, why don’t you take fewer courses and busy yourself with other things? Get a job, become actively involved in clubs, play a sport, whatever you like to do. That’ll help structure your day more, and may help you have having TOO much free time that you waste it away not doing anything productive. Unlike taking an extra class, you don’t have to worry about a drop deadline or anything like that. If you find that you’re too busy with your coursework, you can cut back on the extra things that you’ve been doing without worrying about anything having affected your GPA. Once you have a better idea of what to expect, you can adjust accordingly from there.</p>

<p>Alternatively, if you’re really only worried about conceptual difficulty or grading policies, that’s something you can get a feel for very quickly within the first five days of classes. Take a look through the syllabus and read through the professor’s attendance and grading policies. Look at the topics that will be covered during the course. Flip through the course textbook (which you can usually look at in the library or bookstore, without having to purchase it–or you could buy it and then return it if you drop the class), and see what you think. Google some topics or problems. Look at when all of your midterms and assignments will be due. Are they all going to be in the same week? Are they more spread out? That’s all something you should be able to figure out within the first day or two of class.</p>

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<p>Law school admissions recalculates GPA; that method may be different from what a college uses to calculate GPA. For example, an A+ counts as 4.33 for law school admissions, but counts the same as an A at 4.00 at many colleges.
<a href=“Transcript Summarization | The Law School Admission Council”>http://www.lsac.org/aboutlsac/policies/transcript-summarization&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“Academic Record | The Law School Admission Council”>Academic Record | The Law School Admission Council;

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<p>^That good to know. Maybe next time kiddo should try for A+, just in case. :D</p>

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<p>If you take less than 15 credits a semester, then you will not be on track to graduate on time. If time or money isn’t as much of an issue for you as grades, then take the 4 classes. But realize that it means you’re looking at summer or winter session classes (extra tuition) or an extra semester or two (if you keep to the 4 class schedule) or an overloaded semester later on when the classes get even harder.</p>

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<p>@stradmom - Money is not an issue - I am on a full scholarship that covers up to 5.5 years of study at my school. Also, time wise, the 4 class schedule will not delay graduation. I am entering with 33 credits from AP and Dual Enrollment courses - a 5 course/semester schedule actually puts me on track to graduate 1 semester+ early. </p>

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<p>Lots of kids have AP credits, mine is ahead of schedule yet I keep reading kids have to graduate in 5-6 years if not taking summer classes. I know my nephew and nieces graduated in 4 years because that’s when their scholarships ran out. </p>

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<p>The issue with AP credits is whether not they transfer into a student’s program/degree - for instance, my school accepted all of my AP credits as they were all counted towards general ed requirements. My school’s general ed include four history courses, but I’ve already wiped them out because of 3 AP histories and a Dual Enrollment French History course from a local community college.</p>

<p>My scholarship is credit based, not semester/time based - it covers up to 120 credits with a minimum of 12 credits a semester + one semester off if need be, therefore, 5.5 years. </p>

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<p>Generally, 120 credits = 4 years. </p>

<p>Best to focus on credits rather than how many years. Saying a scholarship covers five and a half years suggests that it is time based rather than credit based. </p>