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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

> The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department’s chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a “one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college.”

I find that one interesting. You'd normally not be allowed to retry a class you scored badly in? Or what's the purpose of retroactively withdrawing?

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> what's the purpose of retroactively withdrawing?

GPA inflation. Failed O-chem and ruined your chances of a top med school? Not to worry, how about a do-over!

So it's a special exception to let a student repeat a class they failed first try?

Students can always repeat a class to get a better grade but this removes the stain of a failure on your report card.

Which is stupid because who cares if you get it in one or ten tries? Allowing retaken classes to replace old grades should be the standard.

Doctors don't get do-overs.

Coming up in a culture of "get this right the first time" makes all kinds of sense for a medical training track.

No it doesn't, what? How do you think learning works? I couldn't remember what 7 times 6 was on my 4th grade test and now it's impossible for me to know it. I get that it's hard to see because it's so normalized but it's ridiculous that our education system is based on fixed time intervals. God help someone who needs to take a little more time on the material before mastering it, guess you just fail. And when we create a system that punishes anything less than perfect forever we end up selecting good test takers rather than good doctors.

I went to NYU, albeit many, many, years ago.

I also failed a class - a bonafide big fat F fail.

I retook the class and got an A. However my final grade for the class was a C, because NYU policy (at least back then) was to average out your grades.

Plus the primary reason I failed my first attempt was because my professor was a hardass strict ex-military Lt. Colonel who gave no mercy. On my second attempt, my professor was a sweet old man approaching retirement who gave open book + open notes multiple choice exams.

Meanwhile I had friends at other schools - Rutgers, for example, who also failed classes and retook them. However for them, their final grade was either their best grade, or most recent one (I don’t recall). So if they failed, then got an A on the retry, their grade would be an A.

I think we were given one chance to withdraw from a class, before it finished. I don’t remember why I didn’t for the class I failed - I might have used up my chance already because I recall I was doing terribly that semester in general.

Granted this was many years ago. I’m not sure what NYU’s current policies are.

I remember severely regretting choosing NYU over Rutgers because I graduated with an abominable GPA, partially because of this averaging of grades.

>You'd normally not be allowed to retry a class you scored badly in? Or what's the purpose of retroactively withdrawing?

You can take the class again for a better grade, but the bad grade stays on your record and factors into your GPA. Retroactively withdrawing eliminates the bad grade.

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