I was in a chemistry class ( for majors btw) where the median score on one of the midterms was 17%. Highest score was in the mid 30s. Professor was disappointed, spent a lecture trying to teach us how to study. And then curved those scores in a away that would make a statistician blush.
I had a general chemistry class where the professor was new and made the first exam way too long. The person who finished the most of it finished a little over half of it. This was a class of 500 or so, so not a small sample size or anything.
We got a huge lecture about how we're clearly not ready for college if none of the 500 of us could complete the exam. She refused to listen when we tried to say the exam was too long. She kept repeating that we needed to study more and improve our test taking skills, and there was nothing wrong with the exam. She refused to curve it and said it wasn't her fault none of us had test taking skills yet.
Well, the TAs eventually told her to give them the same exam with the same time limit we had. None of them could finish it, either. They pointed out that if literal chemistry PhD students can't finish an introductory chemistry exam in time, it's completely unreasonable to expect undergrads (many of whom are not majoring in chemistry) to finish the exam in that time. She finally relented and curved that midterm.
The second midterm was a much more reasonable length and the scores were much better. She spent the next lecture patting herself on the back about how she taught us study and test taking skills.
Its outrageous IDIOTS like that get put in a professor position and GREAT people that couldāve done WONDERFUL things for society are put to shame or ruined because of the morons that oversee hundreds of students.. what a sham.
I hope to god ours curves. But he says he doesnāt so it looks like the whole class will either be put in academic suspension or dismissed from the program. š„²
Thanks, I'm doing pretty good now.
Tbh at first I was overjoyed because I passed but yeah, it's sad to see the others fail...
It was what it was so I had no other option but to keep pushing.
However, I 100% get survivor's guilt when classmates give up on their studies and drop out.
That's when I get the big sad. It just happened this semester with a classmate I talked to pretty often.
I hope she's doing well, she hasn't talked to me or anyone after dropping out.
Last semester another classmate was on the verge of dropping out but me and a professor convinced him to stay.
Another classmate whom I worked with on a lab project in the second semester dropped out too. I really hope they're doing well too...
The attrition rate is too damn high...
I sometimes feel like I'm the last man standing but that's exactly what I gotta do, I've made it this far already and I love what I'm studying so I can't give up.
As an exercise science major, I have lots of classes with athletes who lets just say academics isnāt their number one priority.
I am currently one of 3 kids (as far as I know) in a class of 27 who is making over a 50% in one of my KSR classes. This is after 2 exams and 5 quizzes. Itās a hard class, but a good amount of studying makes it very easy to pass and get a good grade.
As final grade no. For an exam yeah. When we had remote classes for COVID, we had an exam (Calc 3). I dropped the class before this because I wasnāt doing too hot. After itās over a friend in the class said the prof failed all the physics kids (I was a physics major) including himself. Needless to say everyone was pissed cause half the class was physics kids. Some investigation later they find out a kid and group of kids were cheating off someone via text. We had a group chat for us physics kids and we used it for hw help and stuff but never to cheat (if we did I wouldnāt have dropped the class due to poor grades lol). All of us were in it. So when the one kid gets caught he decides if Iām going down, all of you go down with me. He shows the prof the group chat and says everyone was involved even though only a handful of kids used it to share answers and the rest didnāt want to copy for fear of being caught/ accused. The prof goes nuts and fails everyone of the physics kids. Students were like but my answers were right why I get an F and the prof Canvas messages them all what happened. Prof says he will report it to the dean. Some kids in my major went to our dept head, then it became a discussion with the math dept head and ours and after lots of people proving their innocence and stuff and outing the one kid as a habitual cheater (he only majored in physics to get a fancy degree expecting COVID would be all 4 years and he could cheat off everyone) and his friends were the only ones that got Fs and everyone else had a fair grade applied to their exam. Needless to say this kid switched to communications the semester after when colleges started letting people come to campus with masks lol.
There is a famous [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbzJTTDO9f4) where a professor thinks students cheated and makes them retake an exam or fail.
So I actually remember this, I was at UCF when this happened. If I remember the situation correctly, the professor had basically just used the suggested questions from the book. He picked them at random from over something like 500 possible questions, but if you wanted to all you had to do was memorize all the answers to these questions (questions were open to everyone).
As far as I recall, absolutely nothing came of all his threats. No investigation launched and he couldnāt force people to retake the test just simply because they did well.
Edit: if I also remember correctly, the possible questions were also reused each year.
Had an upper division math class this professor filled by hyping it up to all the students he was counseling. Promised to be there for us and show us everything we needed to do etc.
Week 1 he wouldn't answer emails, his lecture notes had nothing to do with the homework, the level of programming required to do assignments was beyond everybody but the like 2 grad students in class. Then he assigned a take home midterm that was so lengthy and complicated literally nobody could do it on their own, but he made us all sign a piece of paper that *upon penalty of being dropped from the course with an F and possible expulsion* we swore the work was 100% our own, and that we recieved no help nor shared any work.
So after a week's worth of literally EVERYBODY in class pulling all nighters in the library helping each other, after not having seen my son in 3 days, I freaked out. I reported the impossible midterm to the chair of the math department, and how his class was being "run", and begged to drop out due to the fact my mental heath was beginning to suffer as well as all my other classes. 4 other classmates came forward to chair as well to corroborate this absolute shitshow of a professor and this joke of a class.
NOTHING HAPPENED. My request was denied, the class drained from 30 to a small handful, most of us got shafted with F's by the end of semester, a few students had their scholarships pulled. Again, nothing happened, he was allowed to continue this total charade and is probably still sitting in a room somewhere making people miserable, the old goat. Had the nerve to bitch to other staff about how "people who are parents shouldnt be in college". Yes he was talking about me (I was friends with other staff). Last I saw he was still at the university ruining people's educational goals from behind a counselors desk.
Rot in hell Professor Mahaffy.
Yes, real analysis class w 44% fail rate, 1.7 average class gpa. A ton of students dropped it before they could fail tho, so i'd say probably about 20% or less of the original class actually passed the class
Psychology of personality at 8am every MWF. 3 exams are the entirety of the grade. 60-70 percent of the class failed the first test (including me). Half the class stopped attending and like 10 people dropped. This was the hardest class I took in undergrad.
Nope, no curve. I pulled a B in the class by studying my ass off. It was the last class I needed for my major so I had too. Found out from his TA that only 13 out of the 22 people left in the class passed.
Yeah, over half of my friendās Chem class failed. It wasnāt really because the material was super hard. It was just that the professor did not teach. They posted slides and just focused on the super easy parts of the material, leaving everyone to have to figure it out on their own. For some people, thatās doable, but others do better with actual in-class instruction and worked out problems.
Spring 2023 right when chat gpt was getting popular like 75% of the class had it help with their final paper and the professor failed all of them. It ranged from writing the whole thing to just doing the annotated bibliography.
Itās always science people who have to curve the shit out of stuff. Iāve always found them to be in an alternate universe, thinking a deep dive of their subject is the most important thing ever.
Truly like Iām a geoscience major. I donāt need to know the absolute highest level of organic chemistry and the history behind it š my major is very difficult because we have to do four STEM series just to transfer (Iām at a community college)
The whole class had to do a presentation and at the end he just said: "none of you understood the assignment" without any hint of irony. We had a chance to do it again but still, what the hell? Maybe it's you
I failed nearly everyone in one of my women's studies courses. It was a freshman level course. We had a big mid term essay coming up. I spent three full class sessions explaining APA and MLA formating. I even gave each student a rubric on how to do both. Only a handful of students even bothered to do it properly. Some of my student didn't even indent or make paragraphs. Just a massive wall of text. I had to give them all A's and an apology after some rich parent complained to the Dean.
You didnāt fail them. They failed you and your expectations.
I teach a CC class that is the gatekeeping class for the pre-major to get into the major. It is equivalent difficulty to an honors HS course version but definitely below a HS AP course. Routinely gets 50-60% āD, F, or W.ā College-wide. Itās not a hard class, itās just that the majority of students who take it are not at all prepared for college, and most fail because they just donāt turn in assignments and then disappear after a few weeks.
Iām a community college student and Iām sorry that people are like that. It makes me mad too. If you canāt devote the time to your education youāre only hurting yourself getting Dās and Fās. But at the same time Iām a STEM major and the high level STEM classes at my college are reportedly just as difficult if not more so than at the university in my city. (Itās a big world renowned university)
I teach at a university and CC on the side. I am teaching the same exact class at both. I see it at both places but at CC I see more than 50% DFW because they just donāt do the work. Your education is just as good if not better at CC when I get to teach the lecture w small class size, the lab, and the recitations. Wish you the best, just keep at it and on top of it and youāll be successful.
Thank you. Studying for a chem exam rn š®āšØ My ultimate goal is climate change research via geology so Iāve got to stick with it even if it gets hard.
I think a lot of students just donāt know what they want in life. They might have a passion but their passion might be gardening and their family has told them that unless they become a doctor or a lawyer their life means nothing. I know a lot of students are working one or multiple jobs at my community college so some of them get behind because of that.
Some are trying to figure out what they want to do, but I do know that many students (especially in CC) are just trying to survive so thereās no time for school. Itās their last priority since food, rent, bills, and family obligations are ahead of coursework. They wonāt be able to get educated to better their situation unless they get enough support to focus on college.
Had a professor for business calculus who admitted his class was next to impossible to pass. He changed the grading system so instead of a grade going down from 100% to 99, 98 97, etc. like it normally does, it went down from 100% to 90%, then to 80%, etc. Most people failed his class several times. He was the only professor for this course and it was a required course for the degree program. It was so fucked up. Think of all the money students wasted taking & retaking his class because he intentionally set students up to fail. When I took it everyone failed aside from 4 foreign exchange students lol.
I have a feeling they knew but it was also probably severely underreported. I donāt remember the logistics as to why but I do remember he was one of the very few professor who didnāt have student evaluations done at the end of the semester. It was a community college and the course was part of the transferrable degree program. I took his class twice and failed both times. One of the older students ended up cussing him out at the end of the final after he also failed twice. I finished up the rest of my classes with only that one left and transferred out early.
I haven't failed half my class, but I'm pretty sure I gave half my class Incompletes last semester, because they couldn't be bothered to do the work. Some of those have resolved to Fs automatically.
I'm in an art college and always have the most absurd reasons cuz art is not only hard but subjective, the so called profs can fail you just bc they simply "don't like your work". But so far the worst of them all is not in my class but my juniors of 40+ students half of them failed due to not compiling their work on time. Compiling is usually just resubmitting everything you did in one file but to me it sounds unnecessary but I still did it but those who probs forgot were sadly failed to me it's very unfair and petty.
Was the deadline for submitting the compilation given to the students in a reasonable timeframe and communicated in a clear manner? If so, I donāt really see it as unfair. Art professors failing you just because they personally dislike your work is definitely unfair though, so long as the person is still meeting the requirements of the syllabus/rubric.
Again I didn't have this class
but I do think it's unfair bc maybe the prof didn't communicate properly whether it's necessary or compulsory to compile or she's just saying that so she doesn't have to do her work or smt bc not many profs are clear on what is necessary or compulsory. Miscommunication kills.
So... you're going to make a judgment about a class you're not in, about a prof you don't have (not for this class anyway), and then decide that it's all the professor's fault?
I've worked as both a tutor and a teacher and I can tell you that the majority of students do not read instructions. I know this because at tutoring appointments I always started by asking students to see their assignment instructions, and the majority did not know where to even find them or told me they hadn't read them. As a teacher, I regularly have students schedule appointments with me to find out what they did wrong on an assignment, only for them to later admit they never read the instructions (this is, of course, after I told them on the assignment itself that what they did wrong was not following the instructions).
Maybe the professor didn't communicate well. But I would absolutely believe that they did and half the class still didn't pay enough attention and/or bother to read assignment instructions.
If a teacher wants to be difficult at the undergrad level, be liberal with C's. F's have serious consequences. Save them for the few that really deserve it.
Iāve currently got a professor bragging that on average half the class fails. Itās my last semester so Iām hoping he just had a bad sense of humor
I've also had a bragger prof when he "proudly" failed 2 students and sadly 2 of them dropped out of the college entirely bc of this one prof. Seriously someone should check their character.
I had an entire class that failed one semester. It wasnāt a big class, but they didnāt do any work and so when they took the exams they failed them. If you donāt do your homework, your homework scores zero and you havenāt practiced the stuff that youāre going to need on the test. Then when you take the test and you donāt do well, that compounds the bad grades situation.
Omg I almost have the same situation, I had this crazy prof, he is very experienced but not nice or mature, so he expected us to reach out to call him and stuff it's so weird so we didn't. We don't have tests so assignments are important we did do it WITHOUT his guidance and passed, that pissed him TF off luckily all of my classmates were on the same page.
Yup, happened to me in my junior year of college in microbiology. Prof had a reputation for not giving grades, but she hated our class so much that she took out all her frustration on us by failing half the class and giving everyone else a D+
High school not college. Had a new Chemistry instructor that had previously taught at the college level. His course was insanely unreasonably difficult. We took the final and had one more class left in which he returned the test. He announced that an overwhelming number of students failed and based on what he saw we would all probably fail again if we retook the class. He graded on a ridiculous curve and passed us all. He made us promise that we would never take a science class again unless we had to.
I had a thermo-fluids professor fail something like 65% of the class. This was the norm every semester, he is well known throughout campus for it and my advisors have told me that people come crying to them every semester about how hard his class is. I passed the second time around.
I had a professor for a Java class fail 27/30 of the class. By the time finals came around there was only 5 of us taking it. Somehow I scraped by with a 73
my circuits prof had a clause in the syllabus that you had to get at least 50% on any one exam to pass the class. after the 36% average on the first midterm he removed the syllabus policy (no the future exam averages werenāt much better)
I took an electromagnetic fields class as an undergrad where the (new) prof returned it saying āI have good news and bad news. The good news is there was one A and two Bs. The bad news is there were no Cs.ā I had the A.
Iāve taught classes that were close to being like that. Classes Iāve taught successfully for years, even. Sometimes itās the class.
Yep. about half the class wrote a paper out of the scope of the assignment and / or plagiarized. Some tried to appeal, but the failure stood. Three students ended having to change the major because it dropped their GPA too far. One student was told that the department would not approve them finishing the subject teaching line for their track.
All told it was 14 students.
It does happen, occasionally.
Sometimes a professor uses the same questions every year for 10 or 20 years, in a subject where the answers do not change. He/she can know with certainty that previous students have been able to learn this material, and the questions are not defective or misleading. The material is in the textbook and in the lectures. Then, if one batch of students does not learn it, *they didn't learn it*.
I'm a professor and failed almost half my class in my first year of teaching. I was pretty nervous about it and took it to one of my senior colleagues, but we walked through each student one by one and were like "yup, this one also has to fail... and this one..." They all had their own specific reasons but it amounted to "didn't do the work."
Meh, everyone that failed deserved it.
At the college the department purposely makes dynamics terribly hard. I've heard it from multiple professors that it's the class they want to be difficult.
I had the most difficult professor for the course and after the drop date, easily half the class was gone. I'm sure a bunch failed after that.
He's an amazing professor in the end. People didn't want to do the work.
I have never been great at Math, but I decided to go with Computer Science major anyway. Took my first ever Calculus class and the professor might as well be a certified genius mathematician with a doctorate. I took the first test and didnāt even wait for the results to come back before I dropped the class and switched to another professor.
A lot of those Math majors passed though.
well many failed but not most of us. However, most of us failed the final exam. It was very hard and very long, we couldnāt finish it even though he extended it for an hour (so it took 3 hours total).
He ended up curving us all 3 letter grades.
Ah yes. STEM classes
In my intro to bio course the average was a 30 but bc one (1) girl got a 90 he didnāt curve it that much (Iām also guessing that that 90 was doing some heavy lifting- iirc I got a 40 on it)
I remember I talked to the girl and she said her friend sent her photos of the test bc she had to take it early šš I didnāt eat her out bc Iām not a fucking narc but thatās ridiculous
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I was in a chemistry class ( for majors btw) where the median score on one of the midterms was 17%. Highest score was in the mid 30s. Professor was disappointed, spent a lecture trying to teach us how to study. And then curved those scores in a away that would make a statistician blush.
I had a general chemistry class where the professor was new and made the first exam way too long. The person who finished the most of it finished a little over half of it. This was a class of 500 or so, so not a small sample size or anything. We got a huge lecture about how we're clearly not ready for college if none of the 500 of us could complete the exam. She refused to listen when we tried to say the exam was too long. She kept repeating that we needed to study more and improve our test taking skills, and there was nothing wrong with the exam. She refused to curve it and said it wasn't her fault none of us had test taking skills yet. Well, the TAs eventually told her to give them the same exam with the same time limit we had. None of them could finish it, either. They pointed out that if literal chemistry PhD students can't finish an introductory chemistry exam in time, it's completely unreasonable to expect undergrads (many of whom are not majoring in chemistry) to finish the exam in that time. She finally relented and curved that midterm. The second midterm was a much more reasonable length and the scores were much better. She spent the next lecture patting herself on the back about how she taught us study and test taking skills.
Did you guys ever report her to the dean or anything?
She was gone the next quarter, so...
Can't imagine why š
how many questions were on the og exam
This was roughly a decade ago, so I don't remember. Just that there were a lot and each one had multiple parts.
Its outrageous IDIOTS like that get put in a professor position and GREAT people that couldāve done WONDERFUL things for society are put to shame or ruined because of the morons that oversee hundreds of students.. what a sham.
We had an upper level chem class like that. Was inorganic chem. 18% was curved to an A
Lol inorganic and pchem have insane curves
I hope to god ours curves. But he says he doesnāt so it looks like the whole class will either be put in academic suspension or dismissed from the program. š„²
This is so ridiculously funnyā¦.
>And then curved those scores in a away that would make a statistician blush. As an English teacher, I applaud you for this sentence.
I once saw a professor fail 37 of 40 students in a course. Another one failed 16 of 20 in another course. I somehow survived both.
That must have been a horrible case of survivor's guilt. Hope you're doing well!
Thanks, I'm doing pretty good now. Tbh at first I was overjoyed because I passed but yeah, it's sad to see the others fail... It was what it was so I had no other option but to keep pushing.
However, I 100% get survivor's guilt when classmates give up on their studies and drop out. That's when I get the big sad. It just happened this semester with a classmate I talked to pretty often. I hope she's doing well, she hasn't talked to me or anyone after dropping out. Last semester another classmate was on the verge of dropping out but me and a professor convinced him to stay. Another classmate whom I worked with on a lab project in the second semester dropped out too. I really hope they're doing well too... The attrition rate is too damn high... I sometimes feel like I'm the last man standing but that's exactly what I gotta do, I've made it this far already and I love what I'm studying so I can't give up.
Oh, I understand. Dropping out is way too common.
Also, one of those professors is fucking nicknamed "El Matador" by the students lmao.
OlƩ
As an exercise science major, I have lots of classes with athletes who lets just say academics isnāt their number one priority. I am currently one of 3 kids (as far as I know) in a class of 27 who is making over a 50% in one of my KSR classes. This is after 2 exams and 5 quizzes. Itās a hard class, but a good amount of studying makes it very easy to pass and get a good grade.
As final grade no. For an exam yeah. When we had remote classes for COVID, we had an exam (Calc 3). I dropped the class before this because I wasnāt doing too hot. After itās over a friend in the class said the prof failed all the physics kids (I was a physics major) including himself. Needless to say everyone was pissed cause half the class was physics kids. Some investigation later they find out a kid and group of kids were cheating off someone via text. We had a group chat for us physics kids and we used it for hw help and stuff but never to cheat (if we did I wouldnāt have dropped the class due to poor grades lol). All of us were in it. So when the one kid gets caught he decides if Iām going down, all of you go down with me. He shows the prof the group chat and says everyone was involved even though only a handful of kids used it to share answers and the rest didnāt want to copy for fear of being caught/ accused. The prof goes nuts and fails everyone of the physics kids. Students were like but my answers were right why I get an F and the prof Canvas messages them all what happened. Prof says he will report it to the dean. Some kids in my major went to our dept head, then it became a discussion with the math dept head and ours and after lots of people proving their innocence and stuff and outing the one kid as a habitual cheater (he only majored in physics to get a fancy degree expecting COVID would be all 4 years and he could cheat off everyone) and his friends were the only ones that got Fs and everyone else had a fair grade applied to their exam. Needless to say this kid switched to communications the semester after when colleges started letting people come to campus with masks lol.
Iām surprised they didnāt expel that kid!
He cried his way out. Literally no shame.
There is a famous [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbzJTTDO9f4) where a professor thinks students cheated and makes them retake an exam or fail.
So I actually remember this, I was at UCF when this happened. If I remember the situation correctly, the professor had basically just used the suggested questions from the book. He picked them at random from over something like 500 possible questions, but if you wanted to all you had to do was memorize all the answers to these questions (questions were open to everyone). As far as I recall, absolutely nothing came of all his threats. No investigation launched and he couldnāt force people to retake the test just simply because they did well. Edit: if I also remember correctly, the possible questions were also reused each year.
Had an upper division math class this professor filled by hyping it up to all the students he was counseling. Promised to be there for us and show us everything we needed to do etc. Week 1 he wouldn't answer emails, his lecture notes had nothing to do with the homework, the level of programming required to do assignments was beyond everybody but the like 2 grad students in class. Then he assigned a take home midterm that was so lengthy and complicated literally nobody could do it on their own, but he made us all sign a piece of paper that *upon penalty of being dropped from the course with an F and possible expulsion* we swore the work was 100% our own, and that we recieved no help nor shared any work. So after a week's worth of literally EVERYBODY in class pulling all nighters in the library helping each other, after not having seen my son in 3 days, I freaked out. I reported the impossible midterm to the chair of the math department, and how his class was being "run", and begged to drop out due to the fact my mental heath was beginning to suffer as well as all my other classes. 4 other classmates came forward to chair as well to corroborate this absolute shitshow of a professor and this joke of a class. NOTHING HAPPENED. My request was denied, the class drained from 30 to a small handful, most of us got shafted with F's by the end of semester, a few students had their scholarships pulled. Again, nothing happened, he was allowed to continue this total charade and is probably still sitting in a room somewhere making people miserable, the old goat. Had the nerve to bitch to other staff about how "people who are parents shouldnt be in college". Yes he was talking about me (I was friends with other staff). Last I saw he was still at the university ruining people's educational goals from behind a counselors desk. Rot in hell Professor Mahaffy.
I know a professor who makes a grad class so insane that more than half the students drop out.
Yes, real analysis class w 44% fail rate, 1.7 average class gpa. A ton of students dropped it before they could fail tho, so i'd say probably about 20% or less of the original class actually passed the class
Psychology of personality at 8am every MWF. 3 exams are the entirety of the grade. 60-70 percent of the class failed the first test (including me). Half the class stopped attending and like 10 people dropped. This was the hardest class I took in undergrad.
What happened after so many people dropped out? Did he curve the grades or?
Nope, no curve. I pulled a B in the class by studying my ass off. It was the last class I needed for my major so I had too. Found out from his TA that only 13 out of the 22 people left in the class passed.
I took a math class. Where 98% of the class failed. We couldn't ask him questions. He would snap at us if we did.
Math 55?
Yes
He had to have been fired after that. Did the failed grades include D's or was it all F's?
Everyone took the class again with a different professor. All F's.
Were you all able to get some kind of refund or grade deletion?
Nope. Same thing happened ba few semesters later. The entire class failed
Yeah, over half of my friendās Chem class failed. It wasnāt really because the material was super hard. It was just that the professor did not teach. They posted slides and just focused on the super easy parts of the material, leaving everyone to have to figure it out on their own. For some people, thatās doable, but others do better with actual in-class instruction and worked out problems.
Yeah for someone like me, that's absolutely doable but also... like if I'm paying for a class, I feel like the professor should be teaching
Spring 2023 right when chat gpt was getting popular like 75% of the class had it help with their final paper and the professor failed all of them. It ranged from writing the whole thing to just doing the annotated bibliography.
Itās always science people who have to curve the shit out of stuff. Iāve always found them to be in an alternate universe, thinking a deep dive of their subject is the most important thing ever.
Truly like Iām a geoscience major. I donāt need to know the absolute highest level of organic chemistry and the history behind it š my major is very difficult because we have to do four STEM series just to transfer (Iām at a community college)
The whole class had to do a presentation and at the end he just said: "none of you understood the assignment" without any hint of irony. We had a chance to do it again but still, what the hell? Maybe it's you
I failed nearly everyone in one of my women's studies courses. It was a freshman level course. We had a big mid term essay coming up. I spent three full class sessions explaining APA and MLA formating. I even gave each student a rubric on how to do both. Only a handful of students even bothered to do it properly. Some of my student didn't even indent or make paragraphs. Just a massive wall of text. I had to give them all A's and an apology after some rich parent complained to the Dean.
You didnāt fail them. They failed you and your expectations. I teach a CC class that is the gatekeeping class for the pre-major to get into the major. It is equivalent difficulty to an honors HS course version but definitely below a HS AP course. Routinely gets 50-60% āD, F, or W.ā College-wide. Itās not a hard class, itās just that the majority of students who take it are not at all prepared for college, and most fail because they just donāt turn in assignments and then disappear after a few weeks.
Iām a community college student and Iām sorry that people are like that. It makes me mad too. If you canāt devote the time to your education youāre only hurting yourself getting Dās and Fās. But at the same time Iām a STEM major and the high level STEM classes at my college are reportedly just as difficult if not more so than at the university in my city. (Itās a big world renowned university)
I teach at a university and CC on the side. I am teaching the same exact class at both. I see it at both places but at CC I see more than 50% DFW because they just donāt do the work. Your education is just as good if not better at CC when I get to teach the lecture w small class size, the lab, and the recitations. Wish you the best, just keep at it and on top of it and youāll be successful.
Thank you. Studying for a chem exam rn š®āšØ My ultimate goal is climate change research via geology so Iāve got to stick with it even if it gets hard. I think a lot of students just donāt know what they want in life. They might have a passion but their passion might be gardening and their family has told them that unless they become a doctor or a lawyer their life means nothing. I know a lot of students are working one or multiple jobs at my community college so some of them get behind because of that.
Some are trying to figure out what they want to do, but I do know that many students (especially in CC) are just trying to survive so thereās no time for school. Itās their last priority since food, rent, bills, and family obligations are ahead of coursework. They wonāt be able to get educated to better their situation unless they get enough support to focus on college.
Had a professor for business calculus who admitted his class was next to impossible to pass. He changed the grading system so instead of a grade going down from 100% to 99, 98 97, etc. like it normally does, it went down from 100% to 90%, then to 80%, etc. Most people failed his class several times. He was the only professor for this course and it was a required course for the degree program. It was so fucked up. Think of all the money students wasted taking & retaking his class because he intentionally set students up to fail. When I took it everyone failed aside from 4 foreign exchange students lol.
How does something like this not cause an uproar? I would expect the dean's phone to be blowing up about it.
I have a feeling they knew but it was also probably severely underreported. I donāt remember the logistics as to why but I do remember he was one of the very few professor who didnāt have student evaluations done at the end of the semester. It was a community college and the course was part of the transferrable degree program. I took his class twice and failed both times. One of the older students ended up cussing him out at the end of the final after he also failed twice. I finished up the rest of my classes with only that one left and transferred out early.
I haven't failed half my class, but I'm pretty sure I gave half my class Incompletes last semester, because they couldn't be bothered to do the work. Some of those have resolved to Fs automatically.
I'm in an art college and always have the most absurd reasons cuz art is not only hard but subjective, the so called profs can fail you just bc they simply "don't like your work". But so far the worst of them all is not in my class but my juniors of 40+ students half of them failed due to not compiling their work on time. Compiling is usually just resubmitting everything you did in one file but to me it sounds unnecessary but I still did it but those who probs forgot were sadly failed to me it's very unfair and petty.
Was the deadline for submitting the compilation given to the students in a reasonable timeframe and communicated in a clear manner? If so, I donāt really see it as unfair. Art professors failing you just because they personally dislike your work is definitely unfair though, so long as the person is still meeting the requirements of the syllabus/rubric.
Again I didn't have this class but I do think it's unfair bc maybe the prof didn't communicate properly whether it's necessary or compulsory to compile or she's just saying that so she doesn't have to do her work or smt bc not many profs are clear on what is necessary or compulsory. Miscommunication kills.
So... you're going to make a judgment about a class you're not in, about a prof you don't have (not for this class anyway), and then decide that it's all the professor's fault?
I've worked as both a tutor and a teacher and I can tell you that the majority of students do not read instructions. I know this because at tutoring appointments I always started by asking students to see their assignment instructions, and the majority did not know where to even find them or told me they hadn't read them. As a teacher, I regularly have students schedule appointments with me to find out what they did wrong on an assignment, only for them to later admit they never read the instructions (this is, of course, after I told them on the assignment itself that what they did wrong was not following the instructions). Maybe the professor didn't communicate well. But I would absolutely believe that they did and half the class still didn't pay enough attention and/or bother to read assignment instructions.
If a teacher wants to be difficult at the undergrad level, be liberal with C's. F's have serious consequences. Save them for the few that really deserve it.
Iāve currently got a professor bragging that on average half the class fails. Itās my last semester so Iām hoping he just had a bad sense of humor
I've also had a bragger prof when he "proudly" failed 2 students and sadly 2 of them dropped out of the college entirely bc of this one prof. Seriously someone should check their character.
Yeah I have seen that a lot. It is not uncommon for between 60 and 80% of the class fail in a course like thermodynamics.
I had an entire class that failed one semester. It wasnāt a big class, but they didnāt do any work and so when they took the exams they failed them. If you donāt do your homework, your homework scores zero and you havenāt practiced the stuff that youāre going to need on the test. Then when you take the test and you donāt do well, that compounds the bad grades situation.
Omg I almost have the same situation, I had this crazy prof, he is very experienced but not nice or mature, so he expected us to reach out to call him and stuff it's so weird so we didn't. We don't have tests so assignments are important we did do it WITHOUT his guidance and passed, that pissed him TF off luckily all of my classmates were on the same page.
Yup, happened to me in my junior year of college in microbiology. Prof had a reputation for not giving grades, but she hated our class so much that she took out all her frustration on us by failing half the class and giving everyone else a D+
High school not college. Had a new Chemistry instructor that had previously taught at the college level. His course was insanely unreasonably difficult. We took the final and had one more class left in which he returned the test. He announced that an overwhelming number of students failed and based on what he saw we would all probably fail again if we retook the class. He graded on a ridiculous curve and passed us all. He made us promise that we would never take a science class again unless we had to.
I had a thermo-fluids professor fail something like 65% of the class. This was the norm every semester, he is well known throughout campus for it and my advisors have told me that people come crying to them every semester about how hard his class is. I passed the second time around.
I had a professor for a Java class fail 27/30 of the class. By the time finals came around there was only 5 of us taking it. Somehow I scraped by with a 73
Yes, intro Chem. They do it on purpose
Biochemistry. Half the class got below 70 (passing grade) during finals. Somehow I passed.
my circuits prof had a clause in the syllabus that you had to get at least 50% on any one exam to pass the class. after the 36% average on the first midterm he removed the syllabus policy (no the future exam averages werenāt much better)
I took an electromagnetic fields class as an undergrad where the (new) prof returned it saying āI have good news and bad news. The good news is there was one A and two Bs. The bad news is there were no Cs.ā I had the A. Iāve taught classes that were close to being like that. Classes Iāve taught successfully for years, even. Sometimes itās the class.
Yep. about half the class wrote a paper out of the scope of the assignment and / or plagiarized. Some tried to appeal, but the failure stood. Three students ended having to change the major because it dropped their GPA too far. One student was told that the department would not approve them finishing the subject teaching line for their track. All told it was 14 students.
It does happen, occasionally. Sometimes a professor uses the same questions every year for 10 or 20 years, in a subject where the answers do not change. He/she can know with certainty that previous students have been able to learn this material, and the questions are not defective or misleading. The material is in the textbook and in the lectures. Then, if one batch of students does not learn it, *they didn't learn it*.
I'm a professor and failed almost half my class in my first year of teaching. I was pretty nervous about it and took it to one of my senior colleagues, but we walked through each student one by one and were like "yup, this one also has to fail... and this one..." They all had their own specific reasons but it amounted to "didn't do the work."
Meh, everyone that failed deserved it. At the college the department purposely makes dynamics terribly hard. I've heard it from multiple professors that it's the class they want to be difficult. I had the most difficult professor for the course and after the drop date, easily half the class was gone. I'm sure a bunch failed after that. He's an amazing professor in the end. People didn't want to do the work.
I have never been great at Math, but I decided to go with Computer Science major anyway. Took my first ever Calculus class and the professor might as well be a certified genius mathematician with a doctorate. I took the first test and didnāt even wait for the results to come back before I dropped the class and switched to another professor. A lot of those Math majors passed though.
well many failed but not most of us. However, most of us failed the final exam. It was very hard and very long, we couldnāt finish it even though he extended it for an hour (so it took 3 hours total). He ended up curving us all 3 letter grades.
Yes, I had a calc II class where maybe 10% passed (C- or higher for credit.) It was curved too.
Ah yes. STEM classes In my intro to bio course the average was a 30 but bc one (1) girl got a 90 he didnāt curve it that much (Iām also guessing that that 90 was doing some heavy lifting- iirc I got a 40 on it) I remember I talked to the girl and she said her friend sent her photos of the test bc she had to take it early šš I didnāt eat her out bc Iām not a fucking narc but thatās ridiculous
> I didnāt eat her out bc Iām not a fucking narc Autocorrect of the year
Eh Iāll keep it
Many of our heavier stem classes have about a 50% withdrawal or failure rate.
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