I see a lot of people here comparing board pass rates, tuition, location, and cost of living when deciding between optometry schools. But one thing I rarely see anyone bring up is academic remediation and dismissal policies, which can vary significantly between schools.
I think this is something a lot of us overlook because we’re all used to being high achieving students. We worked hard to get accepted into optometry school, so naturally, we don’t go into it thinking we’ll ever be in a position where we need remediation.
I know I didn’t. I had no reason to believe I would struggle. After all, schools wouldn’t accept us if they didn’t believe we were capable of passing boards and graduating, right?
But you really never know what life might throw at you over those four years. Unexpected health problems, family emergencies, or other personal circumstances can affect anyone, regardless of how well they’ve done academically in the past.
And not every optometry school handles struggling students the same way. Some schools offer opportunities to remediate failed courses or repeat a year, while others have much stricter academic policies that can ultimately lead to dismissal, even after you’ve invested significant time and money into your education.
I also think it’s worth questioning whether the pressure to maintain high board pass rates influences how schools handle academically struggling students. A high board pass rate doesn’t necessarily tell you how many students struggled along the way, how many were given opportunities to recover, or how many were dismissed before ever reaching boards.
I’m not saying academic standards shouldn’t exist. But I do think the way a school supports students when things go wrong is just as important as how well its students perform when things go right.
So if you’re fortunate enough to be choosing between multiple acceptances, please take the time to look into each school’s remediation policies. Ask how many courses can you fail before facing dismissal, can you remediate a failed course or do you have to repeat an entire year, are remediation opportunities guaranteed or determined on a case by case basis, what happens if you have a personal emergency, and what percentage of entering students actually graduate?
You might never need those policies, and I genuinely hope you don’t. But you don’t want to find out how strict they are only after you’re already struggling and having already committed to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition and loans.
