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Women Avoid STEM Degrees to Get Better Grades?

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My Experience (Score: 4, Interesting)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-03-14 05:26 (#J3)

When I was in college, the school would kick you out of the program if your GPA dropped below a certain threshold in the core classes (science, math, etc) and higher threshold for classes in your field (computer science for me.) Furthermore, the thresholds where quite high, 3.0 and 3.5, I believe.

The school allowed anyone to "drop" a class without any GPA penalty if done by a certain date. This led to the mass-abandonment of the harder classes midway through the semester. After this date, a lecture hall of 300 calculus (or whatever) students instantly became less than a hundred.

Re: My Experience (Score: 3, Interesting)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-03-14 11:47 (#J7)

Same here. I started my Com. Sci. program with nearly 400 (not all in one class of course). My university actually reserved, still does, seats for women in the program, which is a huge point of contention because they have a hard time filling them and most of the women who do join, didn't have the grades to be there in the first place and drop out after the first semester.

There were only three women, started with over a hundred, in my graduating class of 70. I'm good friends with one who went on to work for IBM Canada. Of the other two, one's a stay at home Mom, which is still admirable, but you don't need a degree to do it. And I haven't spoken to the other, but I hear through mutual friends she's apparently a hostess for a high end restaurant doing very well for herself. We all graduated at a bad time economically, after 9/11, so I kind of wonder how the rest of my class made out. I'm only still in contact with six, but we're all doing well at jobs in our field.

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Time Reason Points Voter
2014-03-20 13:17 Interesting +1 kerrany@pipedot.org
2014-03-14 17:23 Interesting +1 rocks@pipedot.org

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