failing a course in fourth year

[docmira]

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Has anyone failed a course in their final year of university? I have no idea what to do. This has been sitting with me for a whole semester and just making me depressed. It's a long story but my fall semester this year was horrible. I failed a course. I've never failed anything. Not even when I did horribly in first year. All my other marks since second year have been relatively good (high 70s-high 80s), except this one. I plan to retake it in the fall, but still it brings my GPA down so low that I don't even think I'll get a good enough GPA to be considered for med school 🙁
I am planning to meet the prof this week to talk to him and go over my exam. I have been trying to contact him forever. But to make a long story short concerning him, he's a major a$$ who doesn't really care about his student or anything else. He yelled at our class one day when someone asked a simple question and told us we should be used car sales men 😕
Anyways, I hope I catch him on a good day. Do you think it'd be possible to redo the course and have the old mark erased from my record? Or how do I explain such a mark to med schools? I don't even think they would give me the chance to explain considering I received the mark in my final year.
I have a valid reason for doing poorly in the fall. In September my grandmother passed away and then two weeks later my dad collapsed in our house and almost died. He was in ICU for two weeks and we later found out he has hypertrophic myocardiopathy. So anyways my family has been having a hard time dealing with that since now he can't do anything and he's being used as an experimental guinea pig since no one knows how to treat this problem.
Honestly I don't think this prof would even care to hear my story. I have no idea what to do at this point. I was supposed to be graduating and moving on in life. But now I have this to deal with and I am not graduating so I can take another full year of courses (including this failed one!) just to some how deter admissions committees from focusing on one bad mark from one bad course that I never should have taken.
Does anyone have any helpful advice for how I should deal with this??
Has anyone been through anything similar?
Thanks..

 

[hanahbanana]

Depending on the school that you go to, you can retake the course and have either the new grade replace the first one, or the school averages the GPAs. This way you can explain what happened in you PS, or secondaries and it shouldn't be a problem. A more extreme measure would be to go to the registrar and have the whole semester removed because of personal problems, but you can't just get rid of one class. So I say retake the class, you might have to anyways.

 

[SaltySqueegee]

Depending on the school that you go to, you can retake the course and have either the new grade replace the first one, or the school averages the GPAs. This way you can explain what happened in you PS, or secondaries and it shouldn't be a problem. A more extreme measure would be to go to the registrar and have the whole semester removed because of personal problems, but you can't just get rid of one class. So I say retake the class, you might have to anyways.

Yep. Had something similar happen during my First Semester of college. Whole thing was changed to W's; dropped out my during the 6th week in. Had to explain it in my PS; called it a "change in career focus."

I had only one person comment on it out of 8 interviews.

Redo the class or semester and take two sentences max in your PS to explain it. Shouldn't be a problem. 👍