<p>I am tired of reading posts from kids asking whether they should drop classes, or kids saying they have dropped classes, just because they were getting grades other than A’s and didn’t want the almighty GPA to suffer, or their class rank to go down. What happened to learning just for the sake of learning?
My D has stuck with classes, regardless of the work load, or a less than desirable final grade, and her school only allows classes to be dropped during the first week of the semester. I have to believe that colleges are on to this. Do they allow students at the college level to just drop classes when they get too hard? What happened to perseverance, and learning something new because it will enrich your life? Isn’t learning calculus, etc, and getting a C better than not learning it at all?</p>
<p>^^ What Happened? —
— Med school admissions, Law school admissions, grad school admissions, even job applications - all of which are driving the education to be more and more GPA-centric and encouraging some people to play the games of taking easier majors, easier classes, and gaming the system with the course drop/retake to preserve the GPA.</p>
<p>I doubt that most students who finish calculus with a C learned much of anything. Without conceptual understanding, plug-and-chug calculus knowledge is neither terribly useful nor very rewarding.</p>
<p>I will be the first one to admit that I do occasionally choose (and drop) college classes with my final grade in mind. There are random requirements that I don’t care very much about, and the least I can do is not let them ruin my GPA. A few times I have dropped work-intensive classes that I was actually interested in, because I was afraid that an overwhelming workload would impact my learning across the board. Other times I opted to take fascinating classes outside of my comfort zone, knowing fully well that I would struggle and that my GPA would take a hit. </p>
<p>For me it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. I have two goals academically: I want to learn and I want to maintain a strong GPA. Some classes impede both. (I will stay as far away from those as I can.) Some classes do well on one criterion and poorly on the other - this is the grey area where I consider tradeoffs and make pragmatic decisions. Lucky for me, most of my classes are such that I can both learn a lot and earn strong grades reflecting my progress.</p>
<p>Before I came to the US I did not worry much about grades because grades did not count in my former country. When students graduated from highschool or college, their diploma had the rank (similar to A, B, C) however the rank did not have much on people’s life, except for graduate schools or overseas studies. I don’t mean school system in my former country was better than the US but I must admit I was happier there.</p>
<p>I take classes for the sake of taking them because my father said to. And he’s the one who pays. I am very fortunate to have parents who allow that. His rule is as long as it doesn’t affect my scholarship, I don’t have to have straight A’s. I have to retain a 2.5 to keep my scholarship, and I currently have a 3.4 I’m not sure if it’s going up or down after this term, but I’ve got all A’s and B’s AND I love my classes.</p>
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<p>I don’t know, I certainly learned a lot more in my complex analysis class where I got a C+ than my ODE/PDE classes where I got As.</p>
<p>For most people, college is an investment made with the idea that if you put off going into the workforce for 4 years and further your education instead, you will be able to have a higher income after 4 years when you enter the workforce. This heavily depends on your GPA however, and if you have a very low GPA this could turnout to have been a bad investment. People take actions to protect this investment the same way you would take actions to protect your retirement savings.</p>
<p>You can learn for the sake of learning by dropping the class altogether and reading the material on your own instead. You can even say doing that would capture the essence of the statement even more-- because then you would not be learning for the sake of doing well on an exam but for personal enrichment, in your own time.</p>
<p>There is too much at stake if you want to maximize your future options. And besides if you don’t drop that unnecessarily difficult class because you wanted “to learn for the sake of learning,” others surely will and they are the ones who will end up getting into law/med school over you. If you are fine with that, then good, that’s your life. However, others will be enjoying theirs even more and will get more respect to boot. I just hope you don’t wind up in debt while having a low GPA at the same time.</p>
<p>I’m a person who believes that if you truly learn the material, your grade will be just fine. ALso, you will be better off in the long run. I took a harder math class my first semester than I needed to and got a B, but I learned something and LOVED that class. Some people may have taken an easier way out, but I’d rather say to a potential grad school/employer/whatever that I challenged myself. If they don’t respect that, then I don’t want to be there</p>
<p>Unless the student drops a class very early in the semester (during the official add/drop period, which is usually not more than a couple of weeks), most colleges will still post a grade of “W” on the transcript (for “withdrawal”), so graduate school admissions committees can see how many times a student has dropped classes, even if the “W” is not factored into the overall GPA. Having several "W"s on a transcript looks bad. It makes a student look like a quitter or a dilettante. So the strategy of selectively dropping classes in which you are not doing well is not without cost to the student.</p>
<p>I have enjoyed reading the replies. I am especially concerned about this topic where high school students are concerned. My D’s school limits dropping classes to the first week of a semester only, when you really don’t know how the class will even really be. I worry that teaching high school kids that it is ok to just quit when the going gets tough, or that they should worry about GPA so much that now a B is a bad thing (remember when C used to mean ‘average’?) is just setting them up for a really tough time in college. I was an “A” student in high school, but my high school was “small-time” compared to the rigors of my LAC, and it was tough to get an A in any class. Some profs even said they didn’t give A’s ever. Setting kids up to feel like failures, or afraid of working hard for a B is just unfair, and I think employers still prefer people who stick with things versus employees who will crumble or quit. What good are A’s if they were all earned on easy classes?</p>
<p>I don’t believe employers pay much attention to which courses are taken. Some may know of a couple of classes that they like candidates to have taken and may look for those, but beyond that I don’t think they’ll notice who took how many hard classes, there’s too much work involved with that. GPA however is very easy to see and understand.</p>
<p>I agree. You can’t really tell which classes are easy unless you make huge assumptions about which majors are harder or easier. Those are HUGE assumptions to make though and I doubt employers, especially those who value an elite-caliber liberal arts degree, would go that far. </p>
<p>Even in classes in hard majors, you can still pick and choose classes so you won’t end up with unbearably hard classes. Honestly, some professors just make the material harder than they should be for the sake of making the class hard, but that’s not really smart.</p>
<p>Some universities allow students to drop until the midway point without penalty (without the “W” designation).</p>
<p>It seems to me that many of the posters here who are considering dropping classes, are suffering from a health problem, a psychiatric problem such as depression, learning disabilities,or maybe burnout. Many of these students have more perseverance than most, and actually need to be encouraged to reduce their courseload for their well-being and health, temporarily.</p>
<p>I never dropped a class in my life until my senior year of college. Then I realized that was hopelessly asinine. There are circumstances under which it makes perfect sense to drop. It possibly being challenging isn’t one of them, but if it is going to be so challenging so as to significantly damage your quality of life, or if it is just plain not interesting or useful to you, there is really nothing to be gained from forcing your way through it short of the opportunity to act superior to those who made wiser use of their time. </p>
<p>I love learning just for the sake of learning, it is largely the only reason going to college was so important to me, but I am not interested in driving myself into the ground with work, either-- which I accomplish pretty well by accident anyway. So If I get a syllabus on the first day of classes and the coursework doesn’t look like something that is going to be worthwhile for me, I would much rather find a more suiting replacement.</p>
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<p>This is a reasonable approach to choosing classes and it’s why colleges have an add/drop period. There also may be situations where students need to withdraw from one or more courses in a given semester for health reasons or a reassessment of one’s curriculum (i.e. change of major).</p>
<p>However, students who think they can “game the system” and raise their GPA by practicing strategic withdrawals throughout their college careers should know that it’s not going to work and it does not look impressive. People who analyze transcripts will see it for what it is.</p>
<p>I remember being thankful my school had a very generous add/drop policy. I was taking a class “for fun” without some of the pre-reqs since the professor said I wouldn’t actually need any of the prior knowledge in the class. I found this to be true all the way up until the midterm, when almost every question required knowledge of that pre-req I didn’t have. I had nailed every homework leading up to that point, yet got my butt kicked by the midterm because I hadn’t taken organic chemistry.</p>