Hello,
How is Vanderbilt’s academic rigor? I am a highly motivated student who is willing to put in hours of work into each class per day. I don’t mind to study for organic chemistry 6+ hr/day if that means that I will achieve a solid A.
May any older peers please give advice on achieving high grades at Vanderbilt? Thank you very much, and I appreciate your valuable insights!
All the Best, Excited 1st Year Student :)
It depends on your major. Science and engineering can be extremely rough at Vanderbilt. To give you an idea, in bio I, A’s are capped at 5% of the class. So in that 220 person lecture, 11 kids will get an A. Other science classes have less harsh grade distributions, but classes like orgo will be similar. Most science classes curve to right around the C+/B- border, so about half of the students get a C+ or worse. On top of that, everyone at Vanderbilt his highly motivated and intelligent, so the “average” is really not so average. I don’t mean to discourage you with this; you can certainly achieve a high GPA as a science major, but it is important to understand that A’s will probably not come as easily as they did in high school, and to adjust your expectations accordingly.
Honestly, the most important piece of advice to achieve high grades is intelligent scheduling rather than intelligence in the classes themselves. If you are super smart (aka Cornelius Vanderbilt Scholar) you can probably load up on hard classes and get through unscathed. For the other 99% of students, you have to be really careful not to take too many hard classes together. Make heavy use of ratemyprof, only take a hard class if it is absolute requirement, spread your hard classes out as much as possible, and buffer them with easy A’s while avoiding moderately challenging secondary classes. A lot of kids come in with the high school mindset that they should err on the side of too hard rather than too easy in selecting classes, since schoolwork has always been too easy rather than too hard in their experience. However, classes at Vanderbilt are designed to weed out very intelligent kids, so they will employ tactics like heavy use of tricky questions, or just wasting a ton of time that could be better employed by studying (looking at you bio lab/sapling homework). This means that you can get into truly impossible situations where you can’t just “outwork” the class. You might spend every spare second studying with a “6+ hr/day” in order to scrape by with a B-.
Other than that, the common sense rules apply. Spread your studying out as much as possible to better retain knowledge, put as much time into studying as possible, and go to office hours if you have questions.
In my experience, you can’t really cram for Vandy premed classes. One of the best ways to get a good grade in Vandy is to study EVERYDAY. The Vandy premed tests are difficult because they ask about material that you know in a different way, which requires critical thinking. If you cram for tests the day or even the week before, you probably won’t understand it fully enough to go beyond memorization.
6 hours a day for one class is probably overkill. I always time how much I study per day, so I can tell you exact numbers. I usually studied about 1.5 hours everyday PER premed class. This includes rewriting notes, going over them, going over previous notes, and reading for tomorrow’s classes. So if you’re taking chem and bio in the same semester, that’s about 3 hours of study time per day (if you want an A). Then you have to study for those AXLE classes, which don’t take as long. Around test week, I was usually in the library from 10AM-6PM, and then more studying from 9PM-midnight.
The biggest trap is the first 2 weeks or so. You don’t really learn much material here, or if you do, it’s likely a review of what you should know. This gives you a false sense of security, and you start losing study habits in lieu of social time.
Also, DO NOT underestimate the syllabus. I remember when I first saw the bio syllabus, I thought the class would be easy because we would be learning stuff that I had already learned in high school (cell membranes, organelles, respiration, etc.) Rest assured, even though the subjects may be the same, the content is NOT.
If you’re already ready/willing to put time into your studies, my guess is that you will have no problem. Usually the students that struggle are those who come to Vandy unprepared to put much effort into studying because they breezed through HS (see: me), and those who take an extremely difficult courseload their first semester.
Derp is exactly right; courses like Organic chemistry expect you not to just regurgitate information from class but actually apply it to new situations you’ve never seen before. They seek to test not your memorization skills but your understanding. The same is true in pretty much every engineering course. This requires you not just to read the material but also practice.
“Some” organic chemistry instructors (in the general sense) require true understanding…some, if you a certain problem type, you get the problems on the exam (practice, practice, practice!) even if it isn’t the exact same one (which is I guess how it works in gen. chem where they try to trick students with different wording or an irrelevant application). But I suppose that is a tad above regurgitation where there is absolutely no problem solving whatsoever. I would also say that biology classes at most elite schools have at least a decent dose of problem solving and students are not used to taking biology exams that require that type of thinking but are used to “just the facts and details” without the deep understanding. The classes also tend to add more content then they let on in the syllabus as derp suggested and it will usually be things that are mechanistic or experimental in nature and thus best to understand conceptually than memorize.
Again, this is a shock to even those who succeeded on the AP exam where there was of course a huge curve for if they messed up on difficult free response questions that required analytical skills. You can’t afford to rely on that when the competition is at the top ends of the distribution and were perhaps already successful on AP biology and are exposing themselves to it for the second time. And without AP exposure, it is even tougher (though AP folks may be complacent). Even with biology, there is some “practice, practice, practice” needed as opposed to mindless reading and memorization of notes and textbooks which is, again, a new concept to those used to learning bio/life sciences the other way. In college, it is often about effectiveness and efficiency and less about “slaving” over a textbook when it comes to STEM courses. The first thing seems to be figuring out whether the its more of a “practice, practice, practice” (medium-high level problem solving) or a “details” (memorization) class or whether it is somewhere in between (in which case the study techniques will have to vary more). If it is at the extremes, then I promise you, you don’t want to mix up the strategies. Most instructors release back exams so one can get a feel of how they test and go from there (if you see fill-in-the-blank, simple MC, matching, pointed short answers and essay questions, then it is about details…if longer/convoluted MC, graphic/data interpretation, case/scenario/experimental situations, or math, then its about practicing…several classes will be a mixture but many instructors will be biased toward one or the other). Sometimes the lecture style offers hints as well.
Don’t use being a Cornelius Vanderbilt Scholar as a way to measure yourself against peers or determine the course load you’re able to handle.
In my opinion, it’s always better to be safe (especially if GPA is important to you) and balance your schedule well no matter how smart you think you are or actually are. Remember that it is to your benefit to participate in extracurricular activities and socialize with others. And, unfortunately, in college you have to put in at least some work in every class (if you want a good grade) because the professors sadly don’t teach you as well as they do in high school.
^ I pray that hasn’t been true in your experience (not being taught as well as in HS).
I had really good teachers in high school, so I might be a special case.
Do you feel your professors are better teachers than your HS ones?
I had really good HS instructors in social sciences and language arts and maybe 2 strong HS science teachers but the level wasn’t the same as my best college professors. I would say that only my bio 1 and physics 1, and inorganic instructors were meh…or ewww. I made sure to select better instructors. One weakness about college can be that too many instructors use the lecture by necessity and that isn’t really the best for deep learning. My best college STEM (I would say social science and humanities instructors were on par or more interesting than HS) instructors were either very good lecturers who went above and beyond or were the ones who taught in a lecture hall but used mostly Socratic or active learning (discussions, cases, in depth problems, whatever) methods. I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t below HS. Costs too damned much
@bernie12 Oh come on. It’s not unheard of for college professors to be terrible teachers. That seems to be the norm actually. Most professors are only there for research, and they’re literally forced to teach.
@derp125 : Yes, but most…I wouldn’t choose such that “most” are bad. I’ve had some bad ones, but I wouldn’t say most weren’t as good as HS. Luckily I think OP was a freshmen, so I kind of see where they are coming from, just much less choice.
As for that problem: Yes, my inorganic and physics 1 instructor were researchers (inorganic is actually a very top researcher in his field). My physics 2 instructor was a researcher but she cared. My advice would be to choose lecture or teaching track instructors (if you can) unless you “know” that the tenure track faculty member is half-way decent. Some of the research track folks in STEM are actually much better for advanced and smaller courses (partially because many will integrate their research into their content and way of teaching which is cool when done effectively). If it is large lecture, I just tried to get lecture track if possible. Also depends on department. Like chemistry only had a few “mehs” and ewws but biology was much more variable (like the physiology class had mostly weak instructors who were tenure track and biochem in the biology dept always had weaker instructors than those in chem).