> Also: everyone should be required to fail a couple classes sometime in their life. It's not nearly as bad as you'd imagine. (Hint: after high school, nobody c

> Also: everyone should be required to fail a couple classes sometime in their life. It's not nearly as bad as you'd imagine. (Hint: after high school, nobody cares about your grades anymore.) At least for prestigious schools (like Harvard), this is completely true, even outside engineering disciplines. A friend of mine who went to Columbia got a D on one of her language classes. At Columbia, a D isn't even a passing grade - you don't receive credit for the course, and have to retake it. That didn't stop her from receiving the highly-competitive Fulbright scholarship[0] to study at the graduate level in that very language. If she had done badly in three or four of those language classes, that'd have been a problem. But students almost always overestimate the importance of a single course grade as opposed to a pattern of grades. (And even the latter can be accounted for otherwise, though it is admittedly an uphill battle). I wholeheartedly agree that everyone should fail a class or two at some point in their lives. It teaches you a very good lesson: don't sweat the small stuff, even when that small stuff seems like really big stuff. [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulbright_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulbright_Program