The First Semester Grade Drop

Unfortunately, holiday cheer can be dampened when first semester grades arrive. If you are unpleasantly surprised by what you see on your student’s first grade report from college, you’re not alone. Many students see a drop of a letter grade or more between the grades they saw in high school and what they earned in their first semester of college. There are a few common reasons for this:

A 4.0, or “perfect”, GPA in high school is fairly common these days.  When our generation attended high school there may have been one or two students who were able to maintain a perfect GPA and each high school probably only had one valedictorian.  This is no longer the case, and many students from a variety of high schools have never made anything below an A in any class.  This is simply a result of grade inflation* in high school and unfortunately it can do a lot of harm to a student’s psyche when they arrive at college and realize they are one of many “perfect” students vying for top grades.

There’s more to the first semester of college than a GPA. In addition to attending 15-18 credit hours worth of class each week, your child has also had to learn how to navigate an entirely new world.  Everything from how and where they live, shower, eat, and socialize is completely new and learning the ins and outs of college life is emotionally and intellectually draining. Even students who earned a 2.0 GPA have actually learned a great deal from college in their first semester.

College is harder than high school. When I relay this fact to students most of them give me the “Duh, no kidding” look, but some are surprised. They think that they can employ the same strategies they used in high school and earn the same grades, but that usually doesn’t work. Students are in college classrooms less than half of the time they were in high school classrooms and they have to do much of their reading, writing, and learning on their own or in student groups. In addition, college classes require that students think through problems critically and develop their own solutions based on research, their own or someone else’s. In other words, in addition to simply answering questions, they have to explain why they answered in that way and how they came to their conclusions. This is the mental equivalent of heavy lifting and it takes time for students to get used to flexing their intellectual muscles.

If your child is disappointed by his grades in the first semester, don’t worry. Most students’ grades rebound during the next semester after they adjust their study and time management habits. If your child needs help with these issues, a visit to a study skills center, academic counselor, or attending a workshop on these topics can give him the information, skills, and motivation he needs to improve his grades in future semesters.

* http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/pdf/issues.pdf

http://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publications/2012/7/researchreport-2011-2-investigating-grade-inflation-non-equivalence.pdf