Is Failing Your First Course a Sign of Bad Teaching?

[JasonRox]

I never thought this day would happen.

I'm writing the exam in about an hour and I'm clearly going to fail. If I pass, it's clearly a miracle.

I don't deserve to pass either. I don't know anything literally. I worked on it over and over again, but the professor just flat out didn't teach. I'm going to learn the material again this summer regardless of passing or not.

Passing will merely just save me money and that's it. I'd still have to learn it all over again on my own. I have to take full responsibility for learning this stuff. I wasted 4 months on this class. The school literally ripped me off.

We are a very small class, and no one seems to understand it at all. Not even students who get better marks than I do, and I already have like a ~3.9 GPA.

I stopped stressing about it now, so I'm just going to go in and write the very little that I know.

Anyways, share your experiences on failing your first class or coming close to.

 

[Cyrus]

Welcome to the club my friend, welcome to the club. I failed criminal justice! because I COULD NOT STAND the teacher. I basically just stopped going to class and did not give damn. I got a big fat D-. I'm retaking it with a different professor. The difference is night and day. I have an, A now . So it will put my gpa back up where it belongs. But then again criminal justice is a BS class anyways, I could care less if I got a D- in CRIMINIAL JUSTICE! I have an A in every class for my major, so screw you humanities. I guess it means I won't go to grad school now, and no one will hire me, I won't make millions and millions of bucks ....sike.

 

[JasonRox]

Welcome to the club my friend, welcome to the club. I failed criminal justice! because I COULD NOT STAND the teacher. I basically just stopped going to class and did not give damn. I got a big fat D-. I'm retaking it with a different professor. The difference is night and day. I have an, A now . So it will put my gpa back up where it belongs. But then again criminal justice is a BS class anyways, I could care less if I got a D- in CRIMINIAL JUSTICE! I have an A in every class for my major, so screw you humanities. I guess it means I won't go to grad school now, and no one will hire me ....sike.

Well, I'm not taking the course over again if I get a D-. It's a major course so that's why I'm really not liking it.

For those hockey fans out there, he's like putting Wade Belak as captain and signing him for $10 million dollars. That's just absurd.

He clearly shouldn't be teaching.

He's not your average bad professor. I had some bad ones before, but they taught. They just taught differently. This one just didn't teach at all. HE DIDN'T EVEN GIVE US A COURSE OUTLINE!

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

The closest I ever came to failing a course was actually my high school physics class. Every day we did group work, so obviously nothing ever got done and half the time we got permission to work outside the classroom. Which ment we roamed the halls and messed around. Anyway, I needed the class to graduate and it was a month before the semester ended. I talked to the teacher and by some miracle I was getting a "D" considering I failed every test. In the start of the semester he said you can get extra credit by doing a large project. So PF was born and I ended up getting a "C" in the course!

 

[JasonRox]

The closest I ever came to failing a course was actually my high school physics class. Every day we did group work, so obviously nothing ever got done and half the time we got permission to work outside the classroom. Anyway, I needed the class to graduate and it was a month before the semester ended. I talked to the teacher and by some miracle I was getting a "D" considering I failed every test. In the start of the semester he said you can get extra credit by doing a large project. So PF was born and I ended up getting a "C" in the course!

Should have got an Alpha for PF! That's beyond A+!

 

[Chi Meson]

The closest I ever came to failing a course was actually my high school physics class. Every day we did group work, so obviously nothing ever got done

But calculations have shown that if you put a block of wood, a ramp, and a pad of sandpaper in front of a group of four high school students, they will figure out Newton's Laws of Motion and Gravitation by themselves in about 45 minutes!

So what was wrong with you?

 

[franznietzsche]

The closest I ever came to failing a course was actually my high school physics class. Every day we did group work, so obviously nothing ever got done and half the time we got permission to work outside the classroom. Which ment we roamed the halls and messed around. Anyway, I needed the class to graduate and it was a month before the semester ended. I talked to the teacher and by some miracle I was getting a "D" considering I failed every test. In the start of the semester he said you can get extra credit by doing a large project. So PF was born and I ended up getting a "C" in the course!

Slick.

Nice to know we're just a passing high school grade to you

 

[JasonRox]

But calculations have shown that if you put a block of wood, a ramp, and a pad of sandpaper in front of a group of four high school students, they will figure out Newton's Laws of Motion and Gravitation by themselves in about 45 minutes!

So what was wrong with you?

Are you sure?

Most high school kids would start chipping the wood, and then collect the bits. After that, roll it up in the sandpaper and smoke it.

That would take them approx. 7 hours though. They will be debating who should be the one to chip the wood for precisely 6 hours and 55 minutes.

 

[dav2008]

The closest I ever came to failing a course was actually my high school physics class. Every day we did group work, so obviously nothing ever got done and half the time we got permission to work outside the classroom. Which ment we roamed the halls and messed around. Anyway, I needed the class to graduate and it was a month before the semester ended. I talked to the teacher and by some miracle I was getting a "D" considering I failed every test. In the start of the semester he said you can get extra credit by doing a large project. So PF was born and I ended up getting a "C" in the course!

Great to know PF was founded by a physics failure

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Great to know PF was founded by a physics failure

Should be a lesson to everyone! It's rarely what you know, but rather how badly you want something and the passion you have doing it I get hundreds of emails a week with people thinking I'm a top physicist. If they only knew I graduated college with a degree in communication.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

What! I thought that you are really old, like Integral.

 

[Chi Meson]

Are you sure?

Most high school kids would start chipping the wood, and then collect the bits. After that, roll it up in the sandpaper and smoke it.

That has been my experience too. Then they copy the work of the one guy in the class who understands what's going on.

Group work!

 

[JasonRox]

That has been my experience too. Then they copy the work of the one guy in the class who understands what's going on.

Group work!

Exactly!

Hey, I'd give my answers to the group. Watching them smoke random stuff would be pretty funny.

Believe it or not, we almost got two kids to smoke styrofoam in high school. Crazy kids.

 

[JasonRox]

By the way, I just finished the exam, and maybe I will pass after all.

We also had an assignment due today. Nobody did it. So, um... yeah no one knows what's going on.

If you're a professor and no one (I MEAN NO ONE) does the assignment, I think that's a (really) bad sign.

 

[BobG]

I failed my Math Analysis class in my senior year of high school - for one grading period, at least.

I only needed about three classes to meet the minimum number of credit hours to graduate, so that's all I took. I had a lot of study halls my senior year and went into coast mode.

Failing a math class was pretty embarrassing (math was always pretty easy for me) and would have been even more embarrassing if I had managed to fail an entire semester and been short of the credits I needed to graduate.

 

[theCandyman]

That has been my experience too. Then they copy the work of the one guy in the class who understands what's going on.

Group work!

Sounds familiar, me and our class valedictorian were the "come to" guys for the honors physics class. I would have ended up top in the class, but my lab partner dragged my grade down; maybe because she was a girl? (I am kidding, to all women who read that in earnest.)

My closest to failing class was Introduction to Electronics and Circuits. I had a graduate student the first half of the semester, he was very lazy and we always got out about 20 minutes early, sometimes even half an hour. He ended up getting a job halfway through the semester and we got a really awesome professor, the problem then was that he had to teach really fast to catch us up with his other class. I had not had differential equations at that time so I was struggling with all the math and could not manage to keep up. It really is a miracle I passed in the end, either that or a huge curve.

Edit: I actually have the exam for the lab for this class tonight.

 

[Danger]

I'm not sure about failing a first course, but I never pass on dessert.

 

[Gokul43201]

Group work!

I've heard of students getting bad grades "because they don't work well in groups" (ie : don't wish to waste their time helping folks that are only interested in leaching off them). And this is in a physics class, for crying out loud !

 

[Gale]

i remember when i got D's in middle school for the first time ever. i felt horrible. i had been boycotting homework because i knew the material and i thought it was stupid, so of course, my grades plumetted. my mum went in and talked to them, and i ended up getting my way and they changed my grades.

after that though, i didn't stop. pretty much in any class i felt i knew the material or that the material wasn't worth knowing, i started doing poorly. always fought with the teachers and won. started getting used to seeing loads of D's on my progress reports. i just gradually kept adjusting to failing till in high school i finally actually failed a class. i was miserable, but it was entirely my fault. i refused to retake it, still managed to get my way, went off to college, failed e&m my first semseter.. now its been ages since I've ever seen an A. hm... I'm suddenly quite depressed.

 

[Moonbear]

Are you sure?

Most high school kids would start chipping the wood, and then collect the bits. After that, roll it up in the sandpaper and smoke it.

That would take them approx. 7 hours though. They will be debating who should be the one to chip the wood for precisely 6 hours and 55 minutes.

That's sort of what I was thinking, that they'd be carving things out of the block...and not necessarily polite things either.

I can't recall if it was a D or F anymore...that's how much it really matters this far down the road...but I had to retake physical chemistry in college. But, for me, the problem wasn't so much that course or that professor (though, the class had a reputation for being tough...when I had to get the dean's signature to retake it, she looked visibly shocked that I had failed a class and asked me what happened, I started explaining about p-chem, and she stopped me and said I didn't have to explain any more and signed my form I think it had about a 50% passing rate...or so that was what was rumored)...anyway, the problem for me was that it relied heavily on deriving equations using partial differentials, and for some reason, my knowledge of those just evaporated after I was done with my calculus courses. I spent the summer relearning the math, and when I retook the course, I aced it. I actually found it to be a wonderfully fun course, and ended up realizing the professor was absolutely wonderful, I just had started off the first time with insufficient background knowledge.

 

[scorpa]

I have a bad feeling that I will be failing my Organic chem final...which is absolutely depressing as I have done so well in it until now. If I do fail I don't know what I will do. :(

 

[J77]

It's probably easy to fail a first course due to not putting in enough work - excitement of a new place etc.

I don't think you can blame the lecturer tho' - if you're not learning off them, you should put the work in yourself to understand the course. Unless no-one is learning off them, then someone needs to speak out.

I've alwyas quite liked the system where you don't get taught anything specific to exams in lectures but this part of the course is done in small group tutorials.

 

[Mk]

What! I thought that you are really old, like Integral.

Ivan can be pretty funny sometimes.

 

[Mk]

Math Analysis

What a lame name. What do you do in math class anyway? Why don't you just call it "Math." Whoa.

What if you could call all the high school courses what they are.
"World Regions" - Geography
"Physical science" - Physics
"language Arts 11" - English
"Physical education" - Exercise

Oh my god, this could be a reformation.

 

[big man]

No I really think that you can blame the lecturer. A bad lecturer can just suck you dry of any desire to learn more about a subject out of class.

I don't really mind lecturers that can't teach properly as long as they are approachable and don't have unrealistic expectations.

I hope that I don't fail my calculus class this semester (I shouldn't if I do the work), but that is my worst class. The lecturer is chinese and it is practically impossible to make out what he is saying. He is an extremely nice lecturer, but I spend all my energy trying to decipher what he is saying in the lecture that I don't take in much. This is a huge problem with the Maths department at my uni. I had a Russian lecturer who could barely speak English last semester and the semester before I had an Indian lecturer who could barely speak English. It just gets a bit frustrating to constantly get lecturers who struggle with the English language since it is their second language.

It'd be nice to have great lecturers throughout the duration of your degree, but if you get a bad one you just hope that there is an accompanying book to that class that is really good.

 

[daveb]

The lecturer is chinese and it is practically impossible to make out what he is saying. He is an extremely nice lecturer, but I spend all my energy trying to decipher what he is saying in the lecture that I don't take in much.

My upper division mechanics professor was Chinese with a speech impedement, which made things even worse. I got a B- in that class, even though I studied my a$$ off. The second semester I had someone more understandable and got an A. The best thing to do is just suck it up and hope it doesn't affect your ability to get into grad school, and maybe (if you have the time) take the class over later on, even if only by audit.

 

[Reshma]

Well, I have never failed in any of my courses. But I did fail to clear the entrance test for a very prestigeous institute I was trying for.

 

[Gokul43201]

What a lame name. What do you do in math class anyway? Why don't you just call it "Math." Whoa.

Analysis typically includes computation, calculus and the theory of (special) functions. It does not include topics that would normally come under Algebra (sets, groups, vector spaces, categories...), Number Theory (congruences, partitions...) or Geometry (manifolds, transformations...).

 

[Math Is Hard]

What if you could call all the high school courses what they are.
...
"Physical science" - Physics

At my school, physical science is a very broad term. Our Division of Physical Sciences includes these departments:

Atmosphere and Oceanic Sciences
Chemistry and Biochemistry
Earth and Space Sciences
Mathematics
Physics and Astronomy
Statistics

 

[scorpa]

I just wrote my general chemistry final and omg I am so screwed. I studied my a$$ off for that test and I know there is no way I passed it. I've never failed anything before, I don't know what I am going to tell my parents when my mark comes back.