Tag Archives: college grades

GPA, Guest Posts

Recovering a Tanked GPA

 

GPA

Summer is an excellent time for students to re-evaluate their progress in college. Here are some tips for students whose GPA could be suffering after the first year of college.

The college spring semester has come to an end for most colleges and universities by this point. By now, your student probably has a sense of how well they’ve done in their classes. Soon college grades will be posted and your student’s grade point average (GPA) will be recalculated.

GPA, as many parents know, is an important statistic that can affect their academic and professional career during college and after. Here’s just a few things a low GPA can do:

  • Disqualify students from qualifying for scholarships and grants.
  • Prevent from pursuing degree programs that have minimum GPA requirements.
  • Make it harder to be competitive when seeking jobs or internships after college.
  • Prevent students from qualifying for many master programs. Many masters programs have a minimum GPA requirement of 3.0.

It can be a stressful time for the student and the parent. Did they pass? How will the last semester affect their grade point average and academic standing? When the grades are finally posted, your student reluctantly reveals their final grades. It’s not pretty. Far more D’s and F’s than you would prefer. Their GPA has tanked.

The bad news is that, at least for the next semester or so, scholarships and grant opportunities might be slim pickings. The good news is that if the student is early in their academic career, they will have two or three years to slowly increase their GPA to an acceptable level.

I’ve been there.

My second semester of college didn’t go well. Long story short. I spent more time reading than studying. And I occasionally forgot about important assignments. My GPA sank to around a 2.0.

The report card was a wake-up call. I needed to start taking school a lot more seriously. Instead of spending the entire summer beating myself up over the mistake, I decided to proactively strategize how I would slowly increase my GPA to an acceptable level. By my final year of college, I had successfully increased my GPA to a 3.2.  

Your student made a mistake, but with a little strategizing they can follow a similar recovery path.

Before we delve into tips and tricks to facilitate GPA recovery, let’s pinpoint a GPA goal. Amber Anderson, a career coach counselor, for University of Alabama at Birmingham, is a career expert. Anderson sets the minimum acceptable GPA at 3.0 in a webinar entitled Job Search, Interview, and Business Attire Strategies.

In the webinar, Anderson also points out that students can choose either to utilize their overall GPA or their degree GPA which excludes non-degree courses taken. The fact they can choose the highest score makes GPA a little more forgiving.

Below are strategies to help your student reach the 3.0 GPA they will need to increase their chances of academic and professional success.

Drop the Course

Before the cut-off date for dropping courses, students can determine if there are any classes they have no chance of passing. If it looks likely your student will earn a ‘D’ or an ‘F’ in the class, they might want to drop the course. Just warn them not to drop too many. Dropped courses, while not affecting their GPA, do show up on their academic transcript. If they withdraw from too many courses, it can look bad.

Scope Out the Professor Before the Class

Encourage your student to try to discover how the professor of a class grades while they can still drop the class without it showing up on their academic transcript. I had one poetry professor, for example, who tended to give low grades on almost all assignments. If I had known about that tendency, I wouldn’t have signed up for the class. Your student can get a sense of their future professors by asking his fellow students who have had classes with the professor and utilizing professor rating websites.

Re-Take Classes

Many universities and colleges have policies that allows students to re-take a course to improve their grade and GPA. Depending on the school, the policy tends to either replace the grade entirely or takes the average score of both attempts. Re-taking my math class changed my grade from a low ‘C’ to an ‘A.’ That was a huge boost to my overall GPA.

Appeal for Special Permission if GPA is Barring You from a Degree Path

Teaching, I know, often has a minimum GPA to pursue higher level classes within that degree path. If your student wishes to pursue that career, but does not currently meet GPA standards, he or she can appeal to be granted entrance to that degree path.

Whether not the appeal is granted, will probably be dependent on the reason for the drop in GPA, how far off they are from the minimum GPA, and how much progress they’ve made restoring their GPA to an acceptable level. If the appeal is a semester after the student partied their grade away, I wouldn’t count on having that appeal granted.

Grade point average is an important metric that can lead to academic and career success. A low grade point average early in your child’s academic career, while not ideal, won’t destroy their chances of success in the future. With a little hard work and dedication, students can gradually increase their GPA to an acceptable level by the time they graduate.  

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Today’s guest blogger, Samantha Stauf, was a first generation college student. Since Samantha graduated two years ago, she’s spent her free time writing articles meant to help current students succeed. You can find her on Twitter at the hashtag @samstauf.

 

college guidance, parenting, Uncategorized

What to do when your college student’s grades drop

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college gradesWhen kids are in grade school, junior high, or even high school, parents have a great deal of influence when it comes to grades. For one thing, you have the ability to offer or deny rewards based on performance, including allowance, gifts, or even activities like slumber parties, trips, and so on. But you can also levy punishments for poor grades that include grounding kids, removing privileges, or taking away their toys (including video games and cell phones). And of course, they live in your home, so you can sit with them from the time they get out of class until they go to bed if that’s what it takes to ensure that they get their homework done. You can also call their teachers or even embarrass them by showing up for their classes to make sure that they’re paying attention instead of goofing off (chances are you’ll only have to use this tactic once in order to turn it into an effective threat). In short, you have many tricks up your sleeve to ensure that your kids work hard to get the good grades they’ll need for admission to their college of choice. But what can you do to keep them at peak performance once they fly the coop, head for campus and your college student’s grades drop?

Money talks

While you might not think that any of your old strategies will work once your kids head off to college, the truth is that you probably have a lot more sway than you imagine. This is particularly true if you happen to be paying for a significant portion of your students’ expenses. There’s nothing that says you have to put your kids through college, although of course, most parents want to ensure that their children have the best possible education and prospects for the future. The point is that college is a privilege, not a right, and it’s one that your students have to earn. So you should make the terms of your contributions conditional. Even though your kids might not be footing the tab for their time in school, they have to hold up their end of the bargain by receiving at least passing grades. Otherwise they’re throwing your money away.

Outline the rules and guidelines

What you need to do is enter into an agreement with the college-age kids in your household before they leave for school. If they want to have fun and waste time while they’re on campus, focusing on socializing rather than studying, make it clear that they can pay their own way. But if they’re willing to work hard for a degree and maintain a certain GPA, you should definitely do what you can to help them. Now, this is not to say that you shouldn’t give them a little leeway. One bad grade doesn’t necessarily mean they’re slacking – it could just be a particularly hard teacher or class.

Use tough love

However, should your students persistently suffer from poor grades, chances are good that they’re either clowning around when they should be studying or they’re simply not ready for the demands of a college schedule. In this case it might be time to cut them off financially or demand that they move home and attend a local college (where you can keep an eye on them) until they’re back on track with their grades. Further pursuit of education, such asHarvard Law or  a USF MPA online, means they need to make their studies the main focus of their time in school. And if they simply aren’t getting the grades needed to graduate, you might have to draw a line in the sand on your end so that they learn a valuable lesson about decisions and consequences now, instead of later in life when you’re not there to catch them and set them back on their feet. Learning this lesson before grad school or permanent employment is much easier while they have your support in college.