When your ‘easy A’ class ends up wrecking your GPA

We’ve all been there. You’re signing up for classes for the next semester, and it’s going to be killer. Maybe you’re just getting into your major(s) or finally getting around to fulfilling humanities requirements that have nothing to do with your actual life plan. In between all those pre-med requirements and Comm school weed-out courses, it’d be nice to have a fun class, right? Especially to keep taking a respectable amount of credits (to make it look like you’re not at Crozet every Tuesday for $1 Fresh Zens), you can’t deny you’ve asked your friends to suggest an easy A course to throw into your schedule and boost your GPA a bit.

Of course, though, it seems like most of the times these “fun” courses eat up all our time and devour our sanity with it. We should have realized this will backfire and now we have to stress about not getting into Batten because “Popular Musics” was indeed not about Miley Cyrus.

***Disclaimer: These are real, collected accounts from different students. For their protection from angry TAs they will remain anonymous. These are not simply all my classes. I promise I take real classes, Mom.***

Intro to Media Studies

“I took this class my first year figuring it would compensate for other more difficult courses and help ease the transition from high school to college. I assumed that because I was social media savvy and able to quote a lot of movies, it couldn’t be too hard, right? Wrong. This class consisted of extremely dense weekly readings that delved into far more than simple interpretation of media content—and we were also quizzed on them. Discussion sections took far more of an open-ended, almost philosophical approach than I ever would have expected. Now I know why it’s considered a “weed-out” intro level class!”

stuDYING

Intro to Women and Gender Studies

“I had always heard or been told that this class was an easy A and sort of a joke. Don’t get me wrong, the subject matter interests me greatly, but the way people talked about it being easy certainly didn’t hurt me wanting to take it.

WGS turned out to be far more difficult than I could have expected. I learned more about concise writing than I ever did in my first year ENWR class, and it was no easy task to end up with an A- in the class. Looking back, I think there’s a bigger issue of people not taking the subject matter itself seriously enough. But trust me, people, the Women and Gender Studies department is no joke! The expectations are high and the critical thinking aspect of the class is tremendous and challenging.”

Popular Musics

“I took this class First Year for fun with a bunch of friends. We walked in first day and saw so many athletes we knew we were set. SIKE. I quickly learned that not only did we apparently need a PhD in music theory to know any of the terminology required in describing the music we listened to, but also that we were going over the music that was popular since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. If I never hear the term “Tin Pan Alley” again, it’ll be too soon. Between seriously-graded multimedia projects, essays and exams, this “no brainer” kicked my butt. However, we did get to make fun of Celine Dion for a week and that was pretty great.”

Library: verb, meaning to go to the library and die.

Intro to Environmental Science

“This class was only one credit and it involved a hands-on approach to environmental science, so taking it seemed like a no-brainer. But then I realized that some knowledge of environmental concepts had to be gained before they could actually be applied to our activities. This is where the challenge came in: readings were extremely detailed and covered a broad range of information—far too broad for the highly specific weekly quizzes that were given (usually open-ended)! Although the lab activities were fun and a good way to escape the classroom environment, the write-ups were tedious and painful.”

The best way to study