Mid terms are coming up and guess what? You plan on taking it easy because you are simply not motivated to do well. Many students will go through a phase during their college experience where they are not serious about their studies and they may end up failing a course. Once again I don’t want to come off as a preacher but if you currently find yourself at a cross roads where you are not totally serious about your studies and your grades are slipping then please allow me to provide you with an additional list of incentives that should motivate you to pass all of your courses.
Price of the course. The lowest a course costs is about $500 and the most could end up being over $2,000 easily. You may not think about it from this perspective but give it a try. Take a look at your bank account, if you have about $1000 in your account then imagine it just disappearing, That is what will happen when you fail a course in college. You are literally throwing money away. It doesn’t matter if your parents paid for it, if you took a loan, or if you had a scholarship. You are still throwing valuable money away by not focusing on at least passing the course.
Opportunity cost. Instead of spending all that time on the course you could have spent your time more wisely. If you are not serious about your studies then you should be doing something more productive with your time. Assuming you actually went to every class but just never studied, it would mean that you spent at least 3 hours a week on this course. Those 3 hours could have been on spent learning a new language, working a part time job, or better yet taking courses that interest you.
Price of retaking the course. After paying your initial fee to take the course you now have to pay again. Yes imagine buying a new pair of jeans, throwing them away or losing them, and then buying back that same pair of jeans. This is exactly what you are doing. You pay for something, squander it, and then pay for it again.
I know I can’t convince anyone to study but just look over the financial implications of failing a course to decide if spending some time preparing for mid terms is worth it. With that being said, I want to ask the readers how would you motivate a college student to take mid terms seriously?
I forgot to mention that one common comeback to failing a course is that people will say the course has a high failure rate. You know what I do before I take a course with a high failure rate? I do a practice run the semester before. I try to attend as many of the lectures as possible and try to obtain a few sample exams just to know what I have in store for me when I do take the course. I wouldn’t recommend doing this often, in fact I would only recommend doing it before taking a course that you honestly think you will fail no matter how hard you try.
All of these are great points. I tend to look at opportunity cost a little differently. Many classes are only offered during a particular semester. If you fail a core class, you may have to wait a full year to retake the class. This just might push your graduation a full year back. Pushing graduation back means you start working a year later, which means your income takes a severe hit for one year. The best advice I was ever given was to start investing for retirement as early as possible. Failing that one class just might push your retirement back more than one year when you think about the magic of compound interest.