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<p><a href=“Supporting Students from Day One to Exam Day – AP Central | College Board”>Supporting Students from Day One to Exam Day – AP Central | College Board;
<p>Of course, it is possible that a teacher teaching an AB course may include additional topics as time allows.</p>
<p>It seems like a lot of overlap there, ucb. S has done most of this stuff in AB and/or pre-calc. What is gained by taking both of them?</p>
<p>The class my daughter & 12% of the students at her school failed wasn’t a math or science class. It was a philosophy class.
At the community college where I was an advisor, this class had a certain level of math as a prerequisite. At her university however, it was a 100 level class with no prereqs.</p>
<p>Chem & Ochem should have math pre-reqs. My daughter @ Reed failed the spring final in Ochem her jr yr & as a result opted to take a year off & retake the sequence instead of taking Ochem at the same time she was writing her thesis.
She graduated two years later with a biology degree ( she is now in grad school)
Reed is well known for very , very few A’s. THey are also well known for the percentages of students eventually receiving Ph.ds.</p>
<p>I think that upper division classes should have prereqs & lower division classes should be examined to insure they prepare students for future study. Especially for students who had IEPs or 504s in high school, college can be very rigid in expectations & lack of accommodations, even though accommodations will have to be made in the workplace.</p>
<p>I had taken an English 101 class, that was supposed to involve preparation for writing further research papers. Actually the prof was a poet, so we studied her own, & other poetry. THe class on its own was fine, the class as a foundation to produce research papers was a failure.</p>
<p>I have never come across a class that has been designed specifically to be a “weed out” class. The designation comes from the results of students taking the course. These courses tend to be engineering, math, chem courses that have a body of knowledge that all students taking that course need to know in order to move to the next level. Because there is not the compromise in teaching the basic tenets of such courses, little flexibility in the grading, a lot more students will fail such courses than those where there is leeway to change the curriculum covered, the type of questions asked which many humanities and social sciences course do. In the hard maths and sciences, this does not happen.</p>
<p>I always thought of certain majors as “weed out” majors. The number of kids going into a college with pre med and engineering as majors is greatly reduced after the first year.</p>
<p>I believe Ben Bernanke was weeded out. Started in engineering and moved to economics.</p>
<p>*The class my daughter & 12% of the students at her school failed wasn’t a math or science class. It was a philosophy class.
At the community college where I was an advisor, this class had a certain level of math as a prerequisite. At her university however, it was a 100 level class with no prereqs.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Was this Philosophy Deductive Logic? </p>
<p>*I always thought of certain majors as “weed out” majors. The number of kids going into a college with pre med and engineering as majors is greatly reduced after the first year. *</p>
<p>Very true…</p>
<p>UMBC has come up with an innovative idea to increase the number of kids who are successful in Chem 101. The chemistry dept chair developed the Chemistry Discovery Center in 2005. Since then, the pass rate has increased from 71% to 86%. UMBC has a reputation for graduating STEM scholars. As a direct result of the Chemistry Discovery Center, a greater number of students are retained in the STEM areas. I believe this is one of the many reasons UMBC has been ranked as the #1 “Up and Coming Universities in the US” for the past 2 years. If you go to YouTube and search for UMBC Discovery Center, you can view a great video.</p>
<p>Thought I would share a story. 30 years ago, my brother was in college studying to become an engineer. He had very poor math skills. He flunked out of college his first semester. He ended up working several years before going back to community college. He received his AA degree, then transferred to the state university where he majored in engineering. It wasn’t until his junior or senior year in college that he realized he was not going to be able to pass the necessary math courses to become an engineer. He ended up changing his major to information systems mgmt, but it ended up taking him about 7 years to earn his BS. He has since gone on to be very successful working as a Corporate Information Officer of a major company.</p>
<p>I applaud UMBC for what they are doing. I’ve also read about some other schools who have a “pre med” major where the kids who want to apply to medical school are given encouragement and support during those college years with the intent to enhance their chances rather than being the “weed out” gauntlet this major tends to be. I recommend such programs to most kids who want to be doctors and who are not truly the top of the top students in the maths and sciences to enhance their chances of making it through those courses needed for medical school with good grades.</p>
<p>Weed out courses are fine and necessary. Chemistry is known to be one. As a Chemistry major and physician I understand why the Chemistry courses are required. I also understand how many physician wannabes are thwarted by it. The courses are not taught for the purpose of medical school, they are teaching what is needed to know and the material, especially the problem solving skills are important to future physicians. Likewise, many would be engineers find they can’t hack the math. Better find out early rather than be babied in an intro course only to find you can’t handle the pace/level of material semesters later. I’m sure most professors are teaching the courses to maximize material/knowledge/skills offered and not to be weeders. </p>
<p>Dreams hit reality. The competition among premedical students is sometimes horrible, but the reality is that mastering the medical school material in the time allowed is just as, if not tougher. Physicians need to be able to handle scientific material easily for decades after school. A good, comprehensive foundation in basic sciences is crucial to evaluating material not yet thought of. btw- some top schools in Chemistry offer more than one general chemistry sequence- the top chemistry students get to forge ahead and everyone isn’t getting the same material.</p>
<p>Without becoming too wordy (easier to read shorter posts, btw), the bottom line is that the colleges and professors are not doing the “weeding”. It is the students discovering what they truly are good or not good at that cause it.</p>
<p>Certainly, a body of knowledge is absolutely necessary for certain disciplines, and the courses that represent that they cover it should do so. However, in my opinion, in this country, more can be done at many schools to reduce the number of “weed outs” freshman in year in a number of majors. There are many reasons why kids will 'weed out" at that time that have nothing to do with whether they could do well in these fields in the future. Some of these kids just have not had the proper preparation for the rigor of such courses and it is a danged shame that more prep and time cannot be given to help them make the transition. It’s just too easy to miss that first great step.</p>
<p>We had a freshman engineering weed-out class, using one of Van Vlack’s Materials Science books. It was a tough one!</p>
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<p>All the material for BC Calculus is contained in the textbook for AB Calculus. According to my son, who self-studied calculus, there were a few sections at the end of most chapters that were BC-only plus two or three chapters at the end of the book that were BC-only. If you take a BC Calculus class in high school after taking AB Calculus, you end up spending half the year or more repeating (“reviewing”) the previous year’s material.</p>
<p>I was in a true weed-out class many decades ago: intro to programming, still done on mainframes using punchcards. CPU time was very expensive, so the curve was intentionally killer: every time someone dropped the class, your previous grades were re-curved to only include those students who remained – which, of course, caused more students to drop the class. About 75% of the class dropped and my original A- grades ended up becoming Cs. </p>
<p>While I had no intention of majoring in computer science back then, I probably would have switched fields after that class, had I been so inclined.</p>
<p>Every high school will use a different book for calculus. My school had different books for AB and BC. Calc AB is roughly 1 semester of college calculus, BC is roughly 2 semesters. The topics in BC which are not in AB are integration (they start but do not finish integration in AB) and series and sequences.</p>
<p>There are many classes where X% fail or X% fail+withdraw. This is just a fixed number. Classes where this number is high are classes I call weed-out classes. Beyond that I would call some classes where the fail or fail+withdraw rate is very high year after year weed-out classes, even if there isn’t an exact number the will fail.</p>
<p>Though I would agree with some that have said, even in these classes, if you fail it meant you didn’t really understand the material. The real weeding out I think comes more from giving qualified students Cs who then go on to give up on that major and find another.</p>
<p>Some top universities will not let you take courses elsewhere instead of taking their course. My son goes to Northwestern and is a Chem Major. Organic Chemistry must be taken at Northwestern to major in Chemistry - there is no transfer credit accepted for Orgo. And the Chem classes are definite weeder classes at Northwestern. After the first test, after ther second test - my son would text me the class is getting smaller and smaller. Granted there are probably 200+ students in the classes to start.</p>
<p>Then regarding skipping the into courses. He could have skipped three of the four math classes required, we talked about it and he only skipped the first. He’s glad he did what he did.</p>
<p>Wis75 said "…the bottom line is that the colleges and professors are not doing the “weeding”. It is the students discovering what they truly are good or not good at that cause it. "</p>
<p>I agree, but I’d add that often it’s the students discovering what they like and what they don’t like. There are 17 year olds who think they want to be an engineer, chemist, doctor, whatever, but they get to college and discover a passion that takes them in a different direction. A good university is opening doors and providing a vision that students never knew existed. It’s not always about ability or aptitude; some students have the ability but they find they don’t have the interest, so they move to other fields.</p>
<p>Kleibo – UCSD had the same requirement for genetics back in the day (not sure about now) – you could not graduate with a biology degree if you took genetics at another school. I think Chemistry had one course that was similarly required to be completed on campus. Both were considered to be real killer courses, and back then you did not get the school’s endorsement for med school without doing very well in them.</p>
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<p>Not much for the student who could otherwise take a BC course immediately after precalculus (AB is a subset of BC). However, some high schools force all students to take AB one year and BC the next (basically spreading a one year university level calculus course over two years), rather than allowing students who completed precalculus to go straight to a one year BC course. Considering that such students are good enough in math to be two grades ahead in math, this does not really make sense, since universities expect students zero grades ahead in math to handle the same or similar material in one year.</p>