During Orientation week of freshman year, it seemed like almost everyone I met identified themselves as "pre-med." Two years later, I've seen many of these students swear off math and science forever and switch to majors in the humanities. While I'm sure some of them changed career goals due to a shift in interest, I know several people who truly wanted to go into medicine but felt obligated to switch because their GPAs were suffering from the difficult courses required for the pre-medical path.
Known as "weed-out courses," many of the introductory science classes at Dartmouth are notoriously difficult to do well in. Freshman year, my chemistry professor put up the grade distribution histogram of our second midterm and the median was a 48 percent. The entire class burst into a hysterical fit of laughter and tears when we learned that a failing grade by most standards would be curved to a B. Even with intense curves, however, grades received in these classes are unsatisfactory for many.
Because most students come to Dartmouth after being at the top of their class in high school, good grades are expected by many. But because everyone comes from different high schools with varying strengths and degrees of competitiveness, Dartmouth is an entirely different ball game.
Of course, there are many programs that offer students a variety of support options, such as office hours with professors, TA sessions, study groups and private tutoring. Unfortunately, despite these resources, many students still struggle to do well and fall into the mentality that has been ingrained in us since I'm not getting a good grade, I shouldn't be taking this class.
This mind-set stems from an early age when children receive praise from their teachers and parents upon receiving good grades and are told that this means they are smart. While I'm sure that many students at Dartmouth have been told that they're smart in the past, this expression might actually be detrimental in the long run. In an article in Educational Leadership, Carol Dweck argues against this kind of praise because it causes students to believe that intelligence is fixed someone is either smart at something or they're not. Instead, Dweck believes students should be commended for effort on tasks instead of performance, as this teaches them to view intelligence as malleable, able to change and improve with time.
By now, most members of the Class of 2012 have received a mediocre (or worse) grade and have had their "intelligence" questioned. But what differs is each person's response to his or her bad grade. For some, a bad test grade is followed by "I'm not smart enough to be pre-med" which is followed by a "W" and a new major card. Others, however, take bad grades as motivation to improve and start exploring resources for help with the next test. They view intelligence the right way as something that can be changed, not as something that is fixed.
It would be beneficial if Dartmouth did more to promote the idea that effort counts and grades aren't everything. At every college, students who do well will be awarded in some way (such as cum laude designations or citations), but I find fault in the other ways that Dartmouth uses grades. Specifically, admittance into our Presidential Scholars and honors thesis research programs is based on a certain GPA cutoff. Dartmouth is supposed to promote undergraduate research, but through these programs, we actually bar people from engaging in intellectual opportunities by making stipulations on who can and cannot partake in them.
By placing the focus on a three-digit number instead of the effort that students put into classes, Dartmouth is causing students to focus more on comparative performance than personal passion something that should not be the mission of the College. Students should be encouraged to search for courses that interest them, rather than ones that offer A- medians. Only then will we truly get the most out of our Dartmouth experiences.
