What if I can't graduate?

tkm256
Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:07:09 +0000

I’ve always been a good (enough) student, had some difficulties with organic and molecular like everyone else but I’ve always passed my classes and kept my GPA hovering around 3.75. In my last semester of college, I’m taking three classes, maintaining A’s in two of them and about to fail the third (biochemistry). I’ve barely scraped by with C’s on the first two exams (each worth 25% of my grade) and took a third today that I had studied for hours every day for the past week, yet still didn’t know half the answers. It’s lots and lots of picky memorization without testing knowledge of the overall process; I could describe in detail the light reactions of photosynthesis, where the electrons go, the difference between cytochrome bf in plants and its ancestor in bacteria, calculate the energy needed to make any sugar in the RPP cycle, but despite two lectures devoted to all that there was a single question on the exam: “How many photons are required to separate water into oxygen and protons?” The rest of the test was “name this enzyme” or “name that intermediate,” things that I don’t really attribute importance to when I’m studying. I know the structure, I know what it does, what it’s function in the overall process is, but have great difficulty just pulling its name out of thin air. If I’m really lucky, I’ll get a 60%, bringing my average down to a precarious 70.5%.

With my average dropping, I have little hope of getting out of the final with a C-. Since I’m not going into science for graduate school, they won’t care about this particular class, but they probably will care if I can’t graduate. So what do I do if this happens? Don’t send in my final transcript and hope I can repeat the course in summer before I start my program? Tell the school or not?