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AngryDatayesterday at 4:16 PM3 repliesview on HN

It sounds okay at first glance, but how many people are going to get saddled with an extra semester of debt now because they didn't figure out they weren't suite/ready for college yet but were just passed along through the first semester anyways?


Replies

dtj1123yesterday at 4:30 PM

Completely agree. My first semester of university was straight up hazing, which at the time felt like crap.

The consequence though, was that every single person who stayed on the course actually cared about being there. Staying motivated for the next three and a half years was made so much easier because the first six months were so difficult.

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to11mtmyesterday at 4:33 PM

Pretty good question.

I remember two things about my university.

First, I was a 'provisional' admission. Which meant that I had to maintain at least a C Average for the first year, Had to log a certain number of hours in one of the 'study centers' every week (Although I could technically do whatever, so I wound up reading a lot of books once I had my coursework done,) and there was a 1 hour a week pass/fail that was primarily following up on the study center logs and connecting students with extra help if the needed it.

Second, I remember a -lot- of people pledging a fraternity their first semester, and statistically it seemed to cause a much higher fail rate... In fact, I tried pledging a social fraternity my second year, dropped out in less than a week because I realized the time commitments and requirements would have tanked my grades; sure enough out of the entire group that didn't drop out, less than 10% survived through the full year.

That second point actually got so bad that, for my last year they actually banned Social fraternities from recruiting first semester freshmen... not sure whether it stuck or not after I graduated tho.

locallosttoday at 1:56 PM

The same amount of people maybe that will not have quit and would go on to thrive. Two sides of the same coin. If you want to go to the bottom of it, it's wrong answers only.