Why Your Good Student Is Getting Bad Grades
Every freshman is unique. Every freshman finds a certain factor more challenging than others. There are many reasons that could explain your freshman’s low grades.
Carol Lloyd, in her post for GreatSchools, points to the pressure parents put on their children to make high grades as a contributing element to poor academic performance. While parents want their children to do their best during this first year of college, adding extra pressure may actually harm their children’s chances of improving their grades.
Other experts point to other external factors caused by living away from home for the first time. This new “home” called college can actually present more barriers to his academic success than the actual difficulty of his college courses.
Below I share four common causes for low grades during a freshman year of college. Read to discover how you can help your good student recover from his bad grades!
Loneliness
This may come as a surprise to you, but loneliness can actually be a contributor to poor academic performance. Dr. Marcia Morris writes in an article for Psychology Today that “loneliness . . . [is] bad for academic progress.” If your freshman is living away from home and knows few people at college, he likely has some struggles with loneliness. This struggle is normal.
In my post “How to Help Your College Freshman Deal With Loneliness,” I share about the common struggle of loneliness that many freshmen experience. Because your freshman feels isolated, he may have the impression that he is the only student who feels lonely at a time in his life that is supposedly “best years” of his life. He is not alone. Other freshman feel this way too.
Your freshman’s loneliness may contribute to a lack of motivation or focus when he does have time to study. He can only seem to think about how lonely he feels. Why study if he has no social activity to look forward to later in the day? Why work to get good grades if he doesn’t know if college is a good fit for him?
So what can you do? Start by encouraging him. He isn’t the only freshman who feels lonely. Remind him that these feelings will pass, but this process will take time. Encourage him to reach out to others rather than waiting for others to approach him. While these steps certainly won’t solve all of his academic problems, it can help him get through this stage of loneliness.
Homesickness
This may be the longest period of time in which your freshman has spent away from home, so your freshman’s homesickness is probably not too surprising to you. While he may be aching to come home, you know that he needs to give college a try. He will be home soon enough.
In an article for Psychology Today, Dr. Carl Prickardt shares that when young adults become extremely homesick, withdrawal can control freshman’s actions. He states, “if withdrawal takes over, social isolation and academic disengagement can occur, making a hard situation worse.” Adjusting to college is difficult, even when homesickness is not extreme. Homesickness only worsens the normal academic struggles of adjusting to college.
So what can you do? As heartless as this may sound, the best thing for you to do is to require your freshman stays home on the weekends. In my post “How Often Should College Freshmen Go Home?,” I share about the academic struggles that can occur as a result of your child visiting home too frequently:
Depending on how far home is from college, your child may be traveling for hours just to be home for one day. This effort shows how highly your child values times at home. But your child may be spending valuable time traveling, when he should be spending that time on homework.
Realistically traveling home includes much more than travel time. It includes factoring in time to spend with family, friends, etc. It also includes catching up, going on outings, and more. Traveling home may negatively impact his academics, because these fun activities leave little time for studying.
In addition to limiting your freshman’s trips home, you may want to consider making yourself slightly less available by phone. In my post “Pause Before Answering Your Freshman’s Phone Calls,” I share ways in which being too available to your freshman by the phone can hinder his ability to solve his own problems and make decisions:
[Answering your phone too often can communicate] to your freshman that he is not capable of solving his own problems. Your child may feel that his actions and choices are always lacking or imperfect, so why even try to do it on his own. Sadly this can lead to anxiety issues as well, especially when he is faced with a challenge . . .
If you continue to make decisions for your freshman, you will one day find him frozen, unable to make an important decision. His immediate response may be to call home, but don’t let this dependent behavior continue. It will hurt your freshman in the future.
Next time your child calls, consider sending it to voicemail. If you do answer or call back, refrain from giving advice even if he repeatedly asks. Instead of giving examples from your own life experiences, ask questions. Keep asking questions, and don’t make the final call. Let your child make the choice, because he’s the one who has to live with the consequences.
These actions will not likely solve all of his academic problems, but your actions can help to push him into accepting the college experience and owning his grades for himself.
Lack of supervision
Up to this point, you’ve likely had a supervisory role when it comes to your freshman’s grades. You repeatedly reminded him about assignments, tests, and projects. You regularly kept track of his grades and encouraged him to work harder. You kept tabs on his academic performance.
Now that your freshman is a college student, you do not have the same access to his grades that you once did. Due to FERPA, your 18-year old’s grades are no longer accessible without his permission. Handing over the supervision of his grades is a hard step for many college parents. Without supervision, you also lack control. As a result, your freshman may be less than forthcoming about his grades, especially the bad ones.
This lack of supervision may be one of the best things to happen to your freshman. This freedom allows your freshman to have complete responsibility for his decisions. He makes the choices, but he also carries the consequences. (Which is one of the reasons I suggest parents have freshmen pay for at least part of their college tuition.)
So what can you do? The focus in college should shift from earning good grades to learning. To help this happen, you can shift your conversations from “what did you get on your test?” to “how are you enjoying your major classes?” or “what are you learning?” This lessens the pressure to perform and places the focus on developing skills and growing in knowledge.
In my post “Why College Parents Should Stop Stressing About GPAs,” I point to reasons how your stress about your child’s grades can actually lessen his own personal concern:
If you fixate on your freshman earning good grades, your freshman likely feels little pressure to improve. Why? He may feel as if he can never please you, he can do little else to improve, or your level of concern is overkill. In any case, his own personal consequences are mild . . .
Instead of assisting or guiding, you may need to take a step back. Eventually your freshman will grow weary of the painful consequences resulting from a low GPA. Then, your child will realize he needs to change his studying habits and work hard to improve his GPA.
As Adam Grant pointed out in his article “What Straight-A Students Get Wrong,” earning good grades means that your freshman meets and conforms to requirements well. Receiving an A, however, does not ensure that actual learning is happening.
Place the focus on learning rather than on earning a certain letter-grade, because in the long-run learning is what matters. You know that, but your freshman likely doesn’t fully grasp this concept yet.
Time management struggles
Talk to any academic advisor to college freshmen and you will soon learn that time management is usually the top struggle for their advisees. Even if your child was an exceptional high school student, time management in college is a whole different league. The new experience of college will take time for your freshman to adjust to, but it may take more time than you expect.
Managing his own social life, academic life, sleeping schedule, eating schedule, and work responsibilities is overwhelming to him. In all honesty, he may not be fully aware that he should be juggling these things with a strategy. Your freshman may be simply jumping from one task item to another without any plan.
Unfortunately, time management isn’t typically something you can teach your child through a few conversations and a quick article read. Your freshman will likely have to learn the hard way—through making many mistakes.
Some freshmen learn more quickly than others, but your freshman isn’t like every other freshman. He needs to learn at his own pace. Fair warning: watching and hearing about this process can be agonizing.
So what can you do? One of the best things you can do is ask your freshman questions. Your freshman probably falls somewhere in between the two extremes of wanting your advice on every task and/or decision and wanting independence from you in his day-to-day choices. Instead of being quick to offer advice, pause and consider how to ask him questions that would elicit the same kind of information:
What do you think you should do?
If a friend came to you with a similar problem, what would you tell him or her to do?
What are your options?
Encourage good time management choices, and refrain from making “I told you so” statements when he fails to manage his time well. Your freshman will learn how to manage his time better, but this process isn’t usually a quick and easy fix.
Your smart freshman may get bad grades. When you feel confused as to why he earned a poor grade, consider taking a step back to assess the factors of loneliness, homesickness, lack of supervision, and time management struggles. As your freshman matures, he will learn how to overcome these struggles and improve his grades. This process will just take time.
