I'm not majoring in anything as of yet. I'm just in the planning stages of getting back in college.
I understand things are hard, but if you have all the prerequisites under your belt all it takes is the time and dedication to make at least a passing grade work.
I've taken college courses, DOS programming and networking. Granted I had some experience in the field, but I never did any of the homework and still passed with a B average.
I guess my point was you're paying out the ass for the classes, and you had to have known going into the class that it was going to be hard, how do you fail it?
Its simple, you run into something you just cannot grasp or understand.
I'll be confident here and tell you that in a literary sense, I will crush the majority of the country (think 98% according to SATs), but I ran into this math course and simply find it extremely difficult to grasp.
I've never failed a course in my life. I've never had lower than a C in any class and I don't believe that I had more than one or two C's in my lifetime - and this is dicking off and not caring about academics as a middle and high schooler.
This class, since everyone else at this college is ahead of me in terms of math, is a course where they tell you to buy a book. You open the book, load up the CD on your computer and teach yourself the material. I'm sitting here looking at how to graph the inverses of trig. functions while restricting domains, for sin, cos, tan, cot, csc, sec and thinking to myself, "is this a foreign language?"
To me, these abstract ideas of math, graphing points in space is just not a concept which I understand. Sure, I can mimic formulas and actions and get the correct answer for some problems, but when I need to apply the concept and the problem is not verbatim from the book - I just cannot grasp and apply the material.
I don't know his major, but after experiencing this sort of academic stress for the first time in my life (when I'm now 21 and in my junior year of college) I feel for him.
My friend who went on to be a premed major at the University of Maryland squeaked by in his Organic Chem. class. The majority of students fail the course atleast once, but hey thats why not everyone is a pharmacist or doctor.