<p>As a current CS major, I would like to say that I consider a 2.6 for a freshman CS major to be very, very bad(and I also don’t think a 3.2 is too much to require of freshmen… I think people are overestimating how hard the major is to people who have some talent in it). It’s a hard major, but it’s a major that gets much more difficult as you progress. If he thinks the current stuff is hard, wait until he gets into algorithm design, scientific computation, compilers and systems programming, and that’s not even getting into the dreaded practicums. So he shouldn’t expect his GPA to increase as he goes on, unless he makes some rapid adjustment and gain some magical understanding of everything so far (and he needs a very solid footing on what he learned this year to succeed in the future). </p>
<p>I’m at a top 5 CS program (and yes, it’s really freakin’ hard), and a 2.6 in what rightfully should be the easiest year of my college career would be a sign for me to reconsider my choice of majors. I’m not a good programmer by any means (I didn’t even start programming until Fall 07), and I still pulled off some decent grades (lowest was B+) despite usually missing 60-70% of lectures in any given CS class. I guess my point is that considering the circumstances, if your son is trying in his classes and not doing as well as a slacker and a subpar programmer like me, and considering his previously demonstrated intelligence, maybe his specialty lies elsewhere. My personal opinion is, get out before it’s too late. I’ve seen quite a few people try and hack away at a subject they never seemed to have a talent for and only barely get by, for the reward of slim employment opportunities. Maybe your kid is just not made for CS… it’s a possibility.</p>
<p>CS is a fairly known area of knowledge and you can learn quite a bit of it through the textbook. Some schools also record the classroom lectures so that you can view them on your personal computer later on. There are several sites which provide CS course lectures over the web for free.</p>
<p>CS is a tough major in terms of the sheer volume of work and because it is really three majors in one covering different areas. One can find one area easy and then hit a roadblock in another area.</p>
<p>Parents are having the hard talk with their kids back home from their first year. It’s a hard talk whether it’s CS or any other major. Are you in the right major? Do you love the major? Do you eat, sleep and breathe the major? What other majors might interest you more or be more in line with your talents and abilities?</p>
I disagree with this generalization. Those conclusions might apply at the poster’s particular school but certainly not all of them. It’s actually in the first year that many/most CS majors will get ‘weeded out’. I think a lot of schools purposely grade very harshly in order to convince a student whether to stick with it or not. Although the material itself doesn’t get easier later, the student is usually either in the groove or not by then and has their study habits refined by then. I think grading is less harsh than in the first year or so as well. A lot of this depends on the particular college and these statements are all generalizations.</p>
<p>It really comes down to what your son’s assessment of his performance and factors is.</p>
<p>Ray192, I agree that it’s a reasonable question to ask whether or not CS is the right major for OP’s S. It’s the right question to ask no matter what his GPA is. But I disagree, right now, with some of your other comments. </p>
<p>For most of us, experience plays an increasing factor in ongoing success. Yes, the classes get tougher as you move up the ladder, but not only has your knowledge of the material increased, your knowledge of how to handle and approach the classes has improved. You not only learn the “What” of the class, but also the “How” of succeeding. If OP S’s “Ds” came in upper level classes that he took because he AP-ed out of the 100 level, then his problem may have been self-inflicted. He had the burden of tougher material without the experience base of a typical freshman CS major.</p>
<p>Until OP and S understand the root cause of the issue, it’s going to be hard to come up with a solution.</p>
<p>I guess my point was not necessarily that the son would not have some success with CS later on, but that given his intelligence, and supposed relative lack of distractions, he should have had no reason to end up with a 2.6 in his best subject, so maybe he should try and look into what he’s actually best at. That is, I disagree with the notion that a 2.6 is perfectly good for a CS major and he will do great in the major; I think it’s a sign of deeper troubles.</p>
<p>I’m also not that optimistic when it comes to improving CS grades that much. While the son might improve substantially in the future and suddenly understand CS, my personal opinion is that the probability of this occurring is very slim. The reason is that in my experience, and in the experience of the CS people I know, the difficulty of classes increases much faster than a student’s adjustment rate. And the grading never seems to get any easier (in fact, it gets harder considering graders will put more and more weight on fast/efficient coding and documentation, not a good thing when simply getting the programs to compile, not to mention actually work, takes hours on end). I went into functional programming with an A in the last class in the sequence, and I felt totally lost throughout the first 2 months of the course; I wonder how a person who got a C/D in that last class would’ve fared? I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a person who struggled heavily in a course to suddenly perk up and totally rock the next class in the sequence, at least in CS. At least, this is the experience me and my CS acquaintances had.</p>
<p>Many of the kids who started out in my son’s Honors College (3.5 to stay-in) are no longer in that program, due to the GPA requirement. </p>
<p>I think Ray192 is right-on-point.</p>
<p>Some kids struggle with being away from home, but most of the kids in my son’s honors college who fell out of the honors program were science majors. Many of these kids are no longer engineering, cs, prepharm or premed, due to encountering college subjects that were particularly difficult for them, or in which grading on the curve defeated them. It’s sometimes no longer enough to be really, really smart, when the curve favors that brilliant student whose researcher parent taught him/her organic chem from 1st grade, for example.</p>
<p>The key questions to ask are (1) what are the reasons for the grades; (2) is the student still in the right major; (3) is getting poorer grades than others in that major an indication that the student will fall further behind in more advanced classes; and (4) do the grades impact scholarships or other perquisites of a particular school, which make that school a bad fit now. </p>
<p>This happens all the time. I think it’s harder for the parents when a student struggles for the first time - we’re so used to our smart kids succeeding. One of my kids had a roommate who was failing chemistry and getting poor grades in another science class. The kid is no longer in the honors college. The kid’s parents made him withdraw from the classes to avoid getting poor grades, and then signed him up for summer school to take the classes in a setting where they could monitor and help their son get better grades. The parents just aren’t giving up on the premed dream for their son, even though IMO it’s clear that their son should be thinking about other careers. </p>
<p>My kid thinks that his roommate just didn’t get the same foundation in math and science from his high school’s curriculum that my kid got from our high school, so he has been struggling to catch up. (On the other hand, his roommate did better in physics since his high school had covered some of the material in their calculus based physics class that was not covered by my son’s high school physics class.)</p>
<p>Absences are a huge problem at universities. Parents might be horrified (esp. given tuition costs) at how many classes their children miss. It has gotten to the point where professors of smaller, discussion-based classes must state how many absences are allowed without grade penalty and where some professors of large lecture classes will test on information the student could not have known without attending class. Unfortunately, a lot of professors just lecture from the text, so students are able to skip class; the problem arises when the student misjudges the professor and thinks that reading the text or a friend’s notes is enough. </p>
<p>As others have said, there are many reasons why a bright young adult could fail in college: lack of time management, partying, inadequate preparation, depression, tough schedule. Some kids shut down after receiving one bad grade. </p>
<p>Ray192 is correct to some degree about first year grades in CS. Our CS is in the engineering school, and so CS majors get grades comparable to other engineering majors because they have many of the same requirements. In the first year sequence, there are always a couple of intro, easy A courses that get combined with weed-out calculus and physics. As the students progress, As get harder to earn, but fewer students fail outright since calculus and first-year physics have already weeded out a lot of majors. An engineer/CS major who graduates with a 3.0 has done quite well. </p>
<p>I applaud the OP for asking for advice how to get her son on-track. The more help and understanding he gets, the better for him in the long run – as long as others don’t get blamed for his struggles.</p>
<p>I went back and reviewed OP’s posts in this thread and was curious about the courses and the grades - could the OP state the courses taken and the grades for the course as that may help to identify the problem.</p>
<p>It may also be that exiting the honors program may be a benefit to your son. The honors classes at my son’s university are taken with non-honors students (for the most part) but have extra requirements for the course (usually an additional project or additional homework problems). My son had the opportunity to join the honors college in his first year because of his first-semester GPA but I looked at the benefits and the commitment and determined that it wouldn’t be worth it for him. A coworker with a son in a similar program did get into the Commonwealth College program at UMA and he told me that he was considering dropping out of it - not because of any grade issues but because the son didn’t see the benefits of the program relative to the commitment. His son has an internship at a prestigious company this summer and he just finished his first year.</p>
<p>Our son’s school had three weeders in the first year: calculus, physics and computing. The workload in the latter two was unreal. Calculus was only a problem if the student didn’t get it. Calculus was also a coreq for physics and learning both of them at the same time where one depends on the other can be quite a challenge. If the problems were mainly in calculus and physics, then the problems for the remaining three years may not be that bad. Physics may be slightly useful in a few other CS courses but it isn’t a major base course like discrete math. The usefulness of the physics course is that it teaches you to think and handle a lot of work. Calculus is required for other courses and any deficiencies there should be made up, perhaps with a summer course.</p>
<p>If the problems is in the Computing course, then he has to determine whether it is the ability to do the problems or if there isn’t enough time in his schedule to do them (perhaps affected by calculus and physics) and if he can fix those problems. Sometimes office hours, the tutoring center, working in a study group or other efficiency issues can fix the problems. He really does need to figure out the problems and find the solutions before the fall semester. The work and pace do not let up. The grading might but he wants to get his GPA up.</p>
<p>At law school, you could join a notepool for a class. Every person was assigned one lecture to attend and would attend that class, take copious notes, go home and organize those notes, type them up, and give one copy to everyone in the notepool. Needless to say, attendance could be an issue at some of my classes!</p>