The Inevitable Weeding Out

My major is science and I feel that to succeed, you have to have the drive to stick with it right from the beginning. If you don’t, you will fail.

I saw a lot of kids in my first year who majored in science because they took bio in high school because it can lead to careers in the healthcare industry, and in high school it was easy. Easy at least compared with Math and Physics and Chemistry. So they thought it would be easy here as well.

Here's some news for people like that. First Year Biology is not easy!

For one thing, the University accepts about twice as many people in First Year as they have room for in the years that follow. The First Year course is designed to determine which 300 of 600 students are going to be the ones who get to go on, and to get students used to Biology as it is here; it needs you to know all the material, and then to be able to take the pieces apart and put them together in different ways. Apart from 20% labs, the marks are all for multiple-choice tests and exams. Intro Psych is the same; they know people will find it interesting and fun (which it is), so they have to make the tests hard to get rid of people who can't or won't do the work.

The challenge is learning how to take these tests and how to make sure you are studying the right things. You could either learn that the hard way, which I did, through trial and error. That method results in many bad marks, but by the end, you do know how to handle the various types of questions that appear. First thing: almost none of the questions are just memory questions. Some need you to know the work, and then to be able to figure something new out from it. Some need you to take something you did in September, and to put it together with something from a different unit you did in November. To get yourself up to speed for these kinds of questions, you need to know September's work by the time November comes; people who leave all their learning and review to the last minute aren't giving themselves practice for the kind of thinking the questions need, so unless they're geniuses they can't do them. As I said before, I learned all this using the trial-and-error method, which is extremely uncomfortable at times, like when you get a test back with a terrible mark.

Or you can use the services of the TAs who have been through the courses and can tell you how the profs write the questions, and any kinds of trick questions that they use. I didn't go to the TAs because I didn't bother to find out who they were and what they were there for; In truth, I was intimidated by the thought of going to a TA. And the prof: well, there are hundreds of people in the class. That's why the TAs are there to do that job. And of course, the same thing applies as for anything else in University: if you use TAs at the beginning, you get more benefit from them, and save yourself a lot of grief.

I found the different teaching styles of profs challenging. Sometimes I would have a prof who would base the entire exam on his lectures; other profs would test completely from the text. And sometimes I would have a prof who told us he was going to test from the lectures but used the text instead. That was frustrating.

I found many profs to be helpful; if they knew a student wasn't good at multiple choice, like me, they would let them take an essay exam instead because they wanted to help you get a good grade. But I hated the ones who tried to trip you up to keep you on your toes. They were usually the ones who expected you to be in class each day, to understand every word they said, and who felt obliged to test you on every single word that they said.

People complain about it, but this kind of course is specifically designed to be difficult. I graduated fourth in my high school class but from a small high school without the kinds of programs offered at other high schools devoted to academic achievement for kids. So it was really hard for me. But I wasn’t worried about getting weeded out because I knew it was what I wanted to do, and that I would do whatever it needed me to.

But the kids who come in with an undecided major don’t do well and I think they would have been better off taking a year off to decide. If you want to be a science major, you have to start first semester freshman year with these difficult classes and you will have to take them every year until you graduate. There’s no avoiding them. Why put yourself through that if it’s not what you want?