Grade Deflation At University: A Reality

Acceptances for university for the 2024 admission year are now mostly in, and as counsellors, you must be happy in the knowledge that your students are now bound for great experiences and challenges in the years ahead as they prepare to start life at university.

Your students too must be thinking that they have now gone through the tough part – the application process, the acing of the predictives, the test taking process and now finally the fun part begins – university, party time and freedom!

However, there is a deeper issue at stake here and this is especially true for your STEM students: this is a time of great change in the lives of these students. Most will be leaving their family home for the first time and moving to another country as well. They will have to cope with these changes, adjust to dorm life, fend for themselves and make new friends – all a bit daunting! And, even while all this is occurring, they will need to keep their eye firmly on the ball and ensure that their grades do not falter. And it is in their initial few months at college that they have to make this transition AND maintain a good grade from the get go. What do we mean by this? Let's examine this in more detail:

What are the biggest challenges STEM students will face when they first start at University

Besides all the challenges mentioned above, incoming STEM freshmen typically find freshman calculus, physics and chemistry the toughest subjects in their first semester. This is true even for those STEM students who have taken these subjects at an Advanced or Higher Level and scored well in them in their school leaving boards. This is because, even though the topics covered in the first year at University would be more or less the same as at the HL or advanced level for the school leaving boards, the level of complexity of the problems and questions at the university level are distinctly much tougher than at the school board level and so even the good students find it difficult to cope.

Yet, it is vital they get through this first few months with good grades, because recovering from an initial poor grade will leave them climbing an uphill mountain for the rest of their undergraduate years. The next point illustrates this.

Why is it so important to start university well

Let us presume that two STEM students, Student A and Student B both finish University with a cumulative 3.5 GPA. However, they take very different journeys during their time in University to get there.

Student A starts freshman year by not being able to cope well in the first semester in the core STEM subjects for example Physics and Integral Calculus – an all too familiar scenario – and therefore ends up with less than optimal grades and secures a starting GPA of 3.00. Subsequent to that, Student A knowing the pressure of maintaining a good GPA, works harder and harder and continues getting better and better and at graduation attains a cumulative GPA of 3.5. However, Student A's entire time at University has been spent under pressure – not a fun way to spend perhaps some of the best years of your life!

The GPA mountain problem

On the other hand, Student B, having prepped rigorously through the StemPrep101 bootcamp before University, is all prepared and therefore scores well in the first semester itself and secures a starting GPA of 3.50. Now as it stands, having coped with the first semester which is typically the toughest, Student B is on track to maintain or even improve that GPA without any pressure.

Now, while it is highly unlikely that B's performance will falter after the first semester, but as the graph shows, even if it does and B's GPA actually dips after the first semester, and even if B scores lower than A in every single semester thereafter until graduation, B still ends up with the same cumulative GPA as A! No pressure, and even with a dip in performance (although that is unlikely to happen), B comes through level with A and without any pressure throughout University life just because of starting well. As the graphic above states:

Numbers do not lie. Start well. The rest is easy

So how can StemPrep101 help

Stemprep101 is an intense 6 week, live streamed, online bootcamp held in the June/July period in these Integral Calculus, Differential calculus, Physics and Chemistry before students start University or start Year 12, giving students the clear head start they need. Some key highlights:

• Program is run by tenured University professors
• Contents closely mirror the actual college syllabi along with graded assignments, midterms and finals
• Courses are live streamed with 3-4 hours of online class time and lots of interaction and Q&As with the instructor
• Separate office hours each week with the professors for one on one meetings to resolve concepts and solve problems.
• The entire focus is on teaching using university level problem solving techniques and not just focus on rote methods to arrive at the final answer, thereby building a solid understanding of the topic
• Limited class sizes to ensure a quality learning experience

Our inaugural bootcamp that we ran in Summer 2023 was a huge success. We had students who were bound for universities such as Stanford, Purdue, University of Michigan, Arizona State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, just to name a few and we got tremendously positive feedback on how valuable our bootcamp was to them.

What if students are getting credits for some of the foundation STEM courses? Should they take these and bypass these foundation courses all together

A number of STEM bound students would have taken physics and math at an Advanced / Higher level for their school leaving boards and a good score will entitle them to claim credits for some foundation level courses in these subjects in their freshman year. Most students are keen to take this. Should they? Our view is that unless the reasons are financial (i.e., saving fees by reducing the time required to graduate), students SHOULD NOT take these credits, but should enroll for these courses in their freshman year. University level problems for the same topics are markedly more difficult than even the questions posed for the advanced/higher level for the school leaving boards and building your foundation properly is far more important than the few months you may save by taking those credits.