Oh? Early 90s EE curricula my experience was more like 50 students came to the first "ohms law" type class and by the time we were talking about rectifier topologies (half-wave, full-wave, bridge, etc) we were down to like 10. I honestly don't know what happened to the other 40 or so.
Even first semester calculus wasn't that high of an attrition rate, maybe only 50%. Something I never really understood about the whole process of attrition is most of the dropouts happened during the really easy stuff like basic continuity concept or perhaps definition of basic derivation equation. Then everyone still present when we talked about the derivative of x squared, mostly made it thru diffeqs together although the difficulty ramped up sharply and smoothly over time. Although freshman classes may distribute on some bell curve, or graduating classes may bell curve, I don't think filter classes have a distribution anything like a bell, because then I'd expect people to randomly drop out at a decreasing rate thru the curriculum rather than all at once in the start.
(edited to add there's probably a startup opportunity to "help" attrition rates by introducing prospective EEs to ohms law or similar in other fields. All the ham radio operators (including myself) pretty much slept thru the early classes with straight As so conceptually an early introduction and filter in a non-uni setting should be possible in other fields?)
Ah but difficulty increases, I think diffeqs was much worse than 2nd semester of calc. Or circuit analysis class was much worse than 2nd month of "ohms law" class. But the dropping out stopped after the first month of the filter classes. I'd expect it to smoothly decline as difficulty smoothly increases.
I think it's a lack of confidence or guts if you'd rather. There's a short window to fill in another class in your schedule so if a person thinks they'll drop later, may as well drop now.
This is the exact reason I dropped Calc this semester. My math background already sucks and I fucked up early and fell behind fast. Makes more sense to not fail and learn on my own before trying again.
Get back into that shit next semester, no excuses.
You're a freshman, I take it? If you start giving up on shit as "too hard" now, everything's going to be too hard in the future. Learning only gets harder when you get older. If you need to enroll in a more remedial class first, fine, but don't waste your and your parents' money by avoiding classes that are "too hard" for four years of college. You are what you repeatedly do.
Not a freshman but a transfer student. I'm absolutely taking it again as soon as possible. In the meantime I'm going to keep attending the lectures for no credit and learn on my own through Khan Academy. I'm actually confident I can complete the course fine, but I was distracted with other things when the course started and missed some important grades. Thanks for the advice.
Even first semester calculus wasn't that high of an attrition rate, maybe only 50%. Something I never really understood about the whole process of attrition is most of the dropouts happened during the really easy stuff like basic continuity concept or perhaps definition of basic derivation equation. Then everyone still present when we talked about the derivative of x squared, mostly made it thru diffeqs together although the difficulty ramped up sharply and smoothly over time. Although freshman classes may distribute on some bell curve, or graduating classes may bell curve, I don't think filter classes have a distribution anything like a bell, because then I'd expect people to randomly drop out at a decreasing rate thru the curriculum rather than all at once in the start.
(edited to add there's probably a startup opportunity to "help" attrition rates by introducing prospective EEs to ohms law or similar in other fields. All the ham radio operators (including myself) pretty much slept thru the early classes with straight As so conceptually an early introduction and filter in a non-uni setting should be possible in other fields?)