Benzoate said:
You are so narrowminded. You are like those inadequate public school teachers in grade school who placed a student in a in a special ed's class just because he receives a bad IQ score and tells the student he will amount to nothing.
Not everyone learns in the same way. Therefore, not everyone one will get the lecture a professor presents to his students. If everybody learned a subject in the same way, their would only be one textbook publisher. Everybody's brain is wired differently.
Another thing I want to mentioned. We are PAYING these professors to teach physics. They should be encouraging their students to do better.
I'm sorry to say this but if a professor sat down privately with his student for the x amount of hours a student desire, I gurantee you the student will improve his performance in solving physics problems 150%. Richard Feynman even said this because he was not proud the way his famous introductory physics lectures notes from Caltech that were later published and formed into a book for the lay public were written or presented . He said the best physics education a physics major could received was if the professor was able to privately tutor a student who was having trouble understanding basic physics concepts.
Of course this scenario would be impossible since professors have to devoted an equal amount of time to all 30 + students inside their class , not to mentioned there research.
First of all let me say that you are also guilty of being narrow minded. In fact you were the one first persons on this thread to make a narrow minded comment, i.e., you said "just because a student doesn't get straight A's doesn't make him a mediocre student."
This was a response to a statement about getting Bs on all physics classes meaning a student is very mediocre. Now the if the statement had been "Not getting all As in physics classes means a student is very mediocre mediocre" your statement would have been OK.
This was narrow minded because if you got Bs for your first 4 physics courses and then As after that then you would not have straight As, but you would not have all Bs either. Under the comment you responded to, this situation would not make a student very mediocre.
Now this discussion pretty much began with symbolipoint's:
"An evaluater should view course grades carefully and cleverly, and really must do something beyond just viewing a set of course grades to know what each grade really means.
One understanding of grade A is that the course was too easy; and of grade C is that the student worked very very hard in order to achieve meaningful learning. The C grade was due to much learning occurring.
Really, has anyone ever tried to repeat a course and achieve the same grade the second time as was earned the first time? Generally, the second grade should be higher. Really too, has anyone ever studied in a class that relied on a pre-designed strict grading scale of 90-80-70-60 for A-B-C-D, instead of the instructor grading "on a curve"?"
I thinks that the key observation about symbolipoint's statement is what I put in bold above. He could have phrased his statement differently so that what he meant was more clear, however.
Maybe something like it could "be the case that a student who got an A in a course found it ridiculously easy, while a person who got a C worked very hard
trying to achieve meaningful leaning".
(Maybe the person go got a C even achieved meaningful learning, just not on as much material as was required.)
However, we should ask how often this happens. Certainly it does not always happen all the time. Symbolipoint did not say it did happen all the time.
Even when it does happen I'm not sure that supports the point symbolipoint was trying to make. For example there are courses I could take for which I have studied the material before and learned it well. I would surely find those courses ridiculously easy and I would get an A. But maybe someone who is not as well prepared as I am works very hard in the same course only to achieve a C. Maybe he learned a lot more but that would be because there was very little for me to learn (as I would already know the material).
symbolipoint, maybe you should just start over and do a better job of explaining what you meant with your first statement. In particular, I think you should explain why it is significant, and why people evaluating an application should keep in mind that this is a possibility.
From my point of view a grade means that based on the professor's (or whoever assigned the grade) the student was able meet the requirements for that being awarded that grade .
This is because the meaning of the grade depends on what class it was and who assigned the grades. For example, I took an advanced class before where the professor said that to get an A we had to demonstrate that we had tried to solve the homework problems. Here the meaning of my A means that I was able to demonstrate that I tried to sold the homework problems. Of course there's no way for anyone looking at my transcript to know this.
There was another class I took (my first upper division class) in which there was very strict grading. My professor even told people to drop the class if he did not think they were doing well enough to pass the class (get a C). I got about 50% on the first midterm but did well enough on everything else to get an A-. Now if I had gotten an A it would not have been because I found the class easy. I worked very hard to learn the material for this class and was able to demonstrate that I had learned the material to a certain level but not at the level my professor thought was enough to be awarded an A. Now if someone looked and saw that I had an A in the class I described first and an A- in the one I described second they should not compare the two. Those grades mean different things because they were different classes at different times in my education from different professors, etc.
Actually I would say that I have not had to work as hard as I did when I took my first upper division class to learn the material for the course. In my view that's a good thing. That means I have gotten better.
Its way too hard to try to figure out what each grade means. Why should evaluators try to?
Now as for retaking classes:
This should probably only be done if the grade you got in the class is lower than the minimum required by anyone is going to be reviewing your grades. As I have already hinted at before the meaning of a grade does is not always clear and it can also happen that one gets a bad grade in a course we could do better in another try. In fact my first two grades in my major were a B, B+ respectively. Now I while other's might not be able to know what these grades mean and there is a very high chance that they will not means the exactly same as another person who got the same grades in the same two classes from the same professor, I know that they mean I had not learned the material as well as I should have. I know exactly why I did not learn it as well as I should have also. I was able to identify and eliminate the problem and got A-,A,A+'s (just 3 A-)on the rest of the classes for my major except for one B+. I never retook the the first two classes (where I got a B and a B+) and it would have been a great waste of my time to do so.
I am going to have to support Cyrus' statement that you have to be able to learn at the pace the university sets (actually at the pace that the specific class you take sets). One of my professors has commented about this before and it is not really a system that is "fair" to everyone because as you said not everyone learns at the same pace. But a line has to be drawn somewhere. If a person is just trying to take classes towards a degree for the sake of being able to say that they could complete the material or if they retake classes until they get As for the sake of being able to say that they could eventually learn it well enough to get an A then that's OK. But if you look at it from the point of future employers and of the institutions that trains those who will be employed they are not looking for a person to "eventually" be able to understand, solve, etc. Sadly there are time constraints that we will have to deal with in our adult lives, especially as scientists.
Now as to your original question, it is definitely possible for you to get above a 3.0 GPA in your physics classes. What you have to do is identify the source of your getting a B- average rather than B, B+, A-,A, A+. Then figure out what are your options as to addressing that issue and figuring out how to implement a solution.
