Struggling With Science Courses - Need Advice

gutter
Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:41:10 +0000

I’m a freshman in college now, but first, a little background. This is long but I deeply appreciate any insights you all might have on the matter:

Going through the grade school system I was largely successful in the sciences. In fact, everyone pegged me as a very science-y and math-y person. I was always the one who didn’t need to ask questions to do well (though I did anyway, but the questions I asked were things that the teacher always admitted he/she didn’t know) and it all seemed to come very naturally to me. All of the way through middle school it was expected by everyone, including myself, that I would enter some kind of science field.

In high school my mindset shifted drastically and I became much more interested in the humanities and other non-science disciplines. I really engaged myself in my English classes in particular and really enjoyed them. This isn’t to say that I didn’t feel that I still had science talent…Despite doing poorly in Biology, my issue in that class was that I didn’t hand in any of the labs (that were like 40% of our grade). I always did excellently on the tests, and I did very well in the Computer Science courses I took that year. Sophomore year Chemistry was a breeze and I scored one of the highest grades in the class.

This was all true up until about my senior year of high school. I struggled a little bit in Physics during junior year but for those that know my story (I’m not expecting any of you to) that was very likely attributable to the fact that as academics went in general I really stopped caring during that year. Despite my senior year not being very successful due to various factors, I put significant effort into the AP science classes I was taking, specifically AP Chemistry and AP Physics.

But it was disastrous.

In AP Chemistry, the class always seemed to know what it was doing when I had no idea. We went through various subjects and in every single one of them the class seemed to have insights that I had no clue about. They’d just know the names of compounds off the top of their head and seemed to intuitively be able to predict the outcomes of chemical reactions. The problems from the book didn’t seem particularly hard but whereas I’d spend 15 minutes figuring out what to do they’d be done with the entire problem set in under half an hour. I’d ask my classmates during or after class what it was we were supposed to actually do and they’d act as clueless as me, but when the tests came they got A’s and I got D’s. And these were the same people I was tutoring back in sophomore year!

It literally felt like I had entered a time warp and somehow ended up in a level 3 chemistry class after skipping level 2. It was like I had missed an entire year of instruction, but I know this wasn’t the case.

I ended up dropping AP Chemistry.

In AP Physics I did no better but at least felt a little better about myself. There were 10 people total in my AP Physics class and all of us agreed that our teacher, while a very cool person, was really bad at teaching. Plus, our book (which is apparently one of the better ones) had problems that to all of us seemed practically impossible. Each individual homework problem seemed to take half an hour (unless it was REALLY simple) and involved complex logical connections. Ironically enough, I ended up being instrumental to my class’ success because I found a copy of the solutions manual which ended up circulating the class allowing everyone to actually do the problems. Our teacher was actually okay with this.

But despite everyone’s problems with the homework, I once again was in the bottom 10% of the class when it came to the tests. Every once in a while I would miraculously see my score spike for a particular test and beat the rest of the class but this was truly an anomaly for which I have yet to find an explanation. For the most part, I got C’s or lower on every single test. Once again I’d ask people for help and they’d all claim to be just as clueless as me, yet they all got at least B’s whereas I was struggling just to pass.

I eventually finished out high school as home school, and now I’m at Penn State University Park.

I was admitted to UP under the college of the Liberal Arts because I was originally intending to go Philosophy/Political Science. But then I decided that I actually wanted to get a job (no offense to all you LA majors! I love you all!) and decided that I would once again foray into the sciences. “College is a clean slate,” I thought to myself, “and PSU was originally my safety school so I really should be at the same level as everyone else academically.” When I took my placement tests I couldn’t remember much chemistry from my sophomore year but I could tell the problems were very elementary and I still scored highly enough to place into the highest entry-level chemistry course at PSU. So I decided to start taking courses that would put me on track to a major in the sciences, specifically biochemistry because that interested me the most. I took regular Biology, Honors Chemistry and Experimental Chemistry (chem lab). I took the honors chemistry because I needed an honors course (for honors college requirements) and it was the only honors course available at the time I registered for courses. I was also very interested in Chemistry and really wanted to use this opportunity to dig into it and get a good understanding of it.

Well let’s just say it’s not exactly going as planned.

I love my professor, the course is highly interesting, but it’s like AP Chemistry all over again. Everyone else seems to know a lot about Chemistry already and I don’t even know what the terms they’re throwing around mean. On the first quiz I actually beat the class average by 2% (the average was a 91%) but I’m pretty sure that’s just because I seemed to be the only one in the class to actually memorize this table with metric prefixes that we ended up needing to know. The second quiz I flat out failed while the class average was a C. I spend hours on this course every day but when we get the quiz all my knowledge seems useless. They’re take-home quizzes over the weekend done on the honor system (we’re to set aside one hour to take it without looking at anything other than a periodic table) and I always make sure to follow this honor system. When the hour is up, though, I try to figure out the questions I didn’t understand using the book (without making any changes to my quiz), and the book seems useless in helping me figure out the problems.

Just like in AP Chemistry, the rest of the class claims to hate these quizzes too but they’re the ones actually passing the assignments.

I just don’t know what to do. I see all of these people from my high school that are by and large considered to be worse at math/science than I am (and score worse than myself on the relevant tests like the Math section of the SATs) go on to major in things like engineering and they don’t have any real problems, and here I can’t even get by in an entry level chemistry class.

I don’t know what my problem is. My first Chemistry exam is tomorrow and I feel like I need to fix this problem fast or I’m going to find myself in huge trouble when I really want to succeed in college.

Thanks in advance…