Olivery Ni | Staff Illustrator

With December settling in, students across WashU are bracing for two kinds of flurries: the winter snow and looming finals. There is a shared tension on campus as everyone’s cortisol levels spike in anticipation of the gauntlet that is finals week. For the pre-meds, engineers, and really anyone else in STEM, I imagine that stress is a whole lot worse. But it doesn’t need to be this way.

It’s a commonly held position that STEM classes are more difficult than humanities classes. Ask around, and you’ll hear the same talking points: STEM classes have the real workload, while humanities classes are luxuries and things you “fit into” your schedule. Brutal curves, problem sets that force students to grind late into the night, and exams that can be the difference between a B- and an A+ all contribute to this sentiment. Still, the most insidious part of STEM academia is the weed-out class. 

Classes purposefully designed to demoralize students — think Organic Chemistry or Dynamics — are antithetical to the goals of higher education. One of WashU’s goals, as stated in its mission statement, is “to welcome students, faculty, and staff from all backgrounds to create an inclusive, equitable community that is nurturing and intellectually rigorous.” Weed-out classes are rigorous, but nothing about them is equitable or nurturing.

Weed-out classes operate on a scarcity model that treats education as a zero-sum game rather than an opportunity for growth. The underlying philosophy suggests that only a predetermined percentage of students deserve to continue in a field, regardless of their actual mastery of the material. This approach conflates difficulty with quality. Someone’s ability to rotely memorize and regurgitate facts on a test has no bearing on their future success in life, let alone in that field. This is exactly why graduate programs prioritize quality research over class grades. 

A student who enters college passionate about chemistry finds themselves in a general chemistry class where the curve is so inconsistent that a 75% might be an A on one test and an 88% a C+ on another. The grade depends less on understanding than on outperforming peers. Study groups become obsolete as there is no incentive to aid a fellow student. Instead of fostering a community of learners working toward intellectual growth, a weed-out culture makes success for one student another student’s failure. 

The equity issues run even deeper. Students from under-resourced high schools who arrive at WashU without AP experience or expensive, private tutoring face steeper learning curves through no fault of their own. Weed-out classes don’t account for these disparities in preparation; they exploit them. When a course is designed to fail a certain number of students regardless of their absolute performance, those who started with fewer advantages get pushed out before they’ve ever had a chance to compete. There is nothing inclusive or equitable about this.

Some proponents of weed-out classes argue they prepare students for difficult professional realities. Medical schools are selective, engineering projects require both depth and breadth of knowledge, and scientific research requires considerable patience. However, there is a significant difference between teaching students to overcome adversity and artificially manufacturing failure. A well-designed, challenging course teaches complex material while supporting students in the struggle. A weed-out class makes the objective struggle. 

Ultimately, weed-out classes need to be done away with, and students need to learn for the sake of learning. The whole concept of a weed-out class indicates a much deeper contradiction in higher education: people don’t go to college to learn anymore — they go to college to get degrees. The university has become more of a business of vetting students than actually focusing on intellectual development. All this corporate-speak by universities saying they “desire to foster intellectual curiosities” is a virtue signaling masquerade for their true intentions: to turn a profit.

Universities should be in the business of creating scientists, engineers, and doctors, not winnowing them through hazing rituals disguised as pedagogy. When we make STEM education unnecessarily brutal, there is no evidence to show that we get better scientists, and we lose talented people who would have thrived if they were given a chance to learn rather than merely survive.