With just a short two months left of the school year, seniors nationwide are faced with an “illness” known as senioritis. Common symptoms of the disease include lack of motivation, dropping grades, skipping class, and the general careless attitude toward school. It’s going to be hard for seniors afflicted with senioritis to get through the rest of the year, and those infected may not even make it to graduation…
All jokes aside, there are consequences to the lax attitude seniors take up starting second semester. Year after year in public high schools, seniors unintentionally take their last four months off by putting tests and homework on the backburner. During this period, research reports that the U.S. has the highest dropout rate of any country, almost 40 percent, according to Edutopia.org.
The reason students feel they can take a load off second semester is because of how K-12 education is set up: many students have the majority of their credits come senior year. As a result, many seniors take blow-off or easier classes throughout their last year. However, senioritis creates a difficult learning gap for students from high school to college. Nationwide, about 20 percent of freshmen entering four-year colleges are placed into remedial English and mathematics after being told they aren’t ready for college-level courses, according to USNews.com. At community colleges, that number can be as high as 60 percent of students. In addition, just over half of the students attending college are taking up to six years to graduate due to remediation needs and classes taken on college campuses that are below college-level. In order to be better prepared for the next four years, seniors should take classes that are of their level of learning – regular, honors, or AP – and to simply do the work that comes with those classes.
Although it is pretty rare, the rescinding of applications from students’ chosen colleges should be motivation enough to stave off senioritis. It is required to send colleges a final transcript, and if the admissions office notes a drop in grades from past semesters, they may rethink their decision of admission. Colleges like the University of Colorado Boulder, University of Michigan, and University of Washington are known to rescind admissions yearly, according to CollegeBoard.org. Twenty-two percent of colleges revoked an admissions offer in 2009, the most recent time a group has collected data of this sort, according to NBCNews.com.
With the decision deadline coming up fast on May 1, most seniors have decided, or are getting closer to deciding, on their college of choice. Instead of slacking off and ignoring the consequences, seniors should push through and get those grades up to avoid that dreaded email informing the student: “thanks, but no thanks.”
Since prom is coming up and graduation is just around the corner, it isn’t easy for seniors to stay on track. Some may even feel more like college students than high school students at this point in the year, with the decision deadline being May 1 and all. Suddenly, the everyday routine of high school becomes too much to bear, and the privileges seniors may experience in college seem drastically different than those seen at LHS. But resist that urge seniors, working hard now will pay off next year when you won’t have to relearn everything you would have known if you had just paid attention in class second semester.
Click to read about junioritis here!
