Harvard Business School

"By the end of their first month of classes," wrote Orth, "most of the first-year student body are convinced that the academic program is the most difficult, frustrating, confusing, and chaotic experience they have ever been through.   Faced with this 'dangerous' situation and the implied threat to their belief in themselves as potentially successful executives, many students who came to the School with a desire to learn shift to a less ambitious goal.   Their desire now is to pass—to get good enough grades so that they will get through the first year without flunking out."  

"It is hard for Faculty members, who know that normally no more than 9 percent of the students are dropped at the end of the first year, to understand or to take very seriously the apparently illogical and irrational fears which seem so widespread among first-year students.   In the first place, many of them believe that real learning must inevitably be a challenging and sometimes painful experience.   In the second place, those who teach in the first year are used to seeing students rise to a peak of frustration around Thanksgiving and then take things a little less seriously for the rest of the year."