How Difficult Will College Be If You Can’t Remember High School Material? A Teacher’s Perspective
The kale in my hand was wilting a little in the July heat when Mara grabbed my arm by the checkout line at the grocery store. Her son Jax had graduated from my 12th grade college-prep class three months earlier, and she’d been thinking about my number ever since Jax sat down to start his pre-engineering summer work and hit a wall. “He can’t remember how to factor a quadratic equation,” she said, voice tight. “He forgot most of what he learned in 11th grade chemistry. How hard is college going to be if he can’t remember any of high school?”
I knew exactly what she was talking about. Jax was the kid who drew skateboard decks in the margins of his notes, crammed for every final the night before, and walked out of the exam room forgetting half the material before he even got to his car. He got decent grades, but he never hung onto content he didn’t think he’d need right away.
I’ve been teaching high school for 12 years, and this question pops up every single summer. Last year it was Lila, headed to pre-med, panicking because she couldn’t name more than three elements on the periodic table six weeks after graduation. Two years before that it was Sam, going into communications, worrying that forgetting high school physics meant he’d fail all his general ed requirements. Most of the time, what looks like a big problem is just how human memory works.
I once read a study that found most students retain less than 15% of the factual content they learned in high school a year after graduation, if they don’t use that content regularly. Cramming for exams, memorizing terms for a test you’ll never take again, moving from one topic to the next every few weeks – that’s not how long-term memory works. Forgetting most of what you memorized in high school isn’t a sign you’re bad at school, or that you wasted four years. It’s normal.
That doesn’t mean it’s never a problem. The only time forgetting high school content makes college harder is when you’re going into a field that builds directly on that content every day. If you’re an engineering major, you do need to remember basic algebra to get through your first semester classes. If you’re pre-med, you do need a baseline of high school chemistry to follow along with intro bio. But what most people don’t know is that colleges expect this forgetting. My cousin teaches introductory biology at a large public university, and he told me the first two weeks of every 101-level class are explicitly reserved for high school review. They know kids come in with all different levels of preparation, and most have forgotten the basics over summer break. That review isn’t a nice bonus – it’s built into the curriculum on purpose.
When Mara asked me what she should do, I didn’t tell her to sign Jax up for expensive tutoring or make him re-take algebra all summer. I gave her three small, concrete things to try, all of which take less than an hour a week. First, check the syllabi for Jax’s fall classes as soon as they’re posted. Most colleges put syllabi online 1-2 weeks before classes start, so you can see exactly what the first few weeks cover. Sure enough, Jax’s first engineering class had “Review of fundamental algebra and trigonometry” clearly marked on the schedule for week one. That took a lot of the panic away right there.
Second, if the content you forgot is actually required for your major, do 10-15 minutes of daily review on a free platform like Khan Academy, instead of cramming for hours all summer. Jax did 15 minutes of algebra practice every night after dinner, no tests, no pressure, just enough to jog his memory of the basics he’d forgotten. By the time move-in week came around, he had all the fundamentals he needed.
Third, and this is the part no one talks about, spend more time practicing how to learn something new than re-learning old content. The hardest part of college for most first-years isn’t forgotten high school material – it’s learning how to teach yourself something when you don’t remember it, when no teacher is reminding you to study, when you have to look up the answer yourself. Jax told me later that when he got stuck on a factoring problem the first week of class, he almost emailed his professor to complain he hadn’t been taught it right. Instead, he looked up a 5-minute YouTube video, worked through two practice problems, and figured it out on his own. That skill is worth more than remembering every formula from 10th grade.
I got a text from Jax last month, halfway through his first semester. He got a B+ on his first midterm, and he’s joined the college skate club. He said the hardest thing he’s dealt with so far wasn’t the forgotten algebra – it was remembering to do his laundry before he ran out of clean socks, and scheduling his own study time instead of having his teachers remind him every day. He still forgets the occasional chemistry term, and he still has to look up a formula every once in a while when he’s doing homework. But that hasn’t stopped him from keeping up.
Mara still texts me sometimes, asking if I think he’ll be okay for finals. The panic doesn’t go away completely, not for parents, not for kids. But what I’ve learned after 12 years of watching kids go off to college is that forgetting what you learned in high school doesn’t mean you’re not ready. Most of us don’t remember most of what we learned in high school, and we turn out fine. The real work of college isn’t building on what you memorized as a teenager. It’s learning how to learn what you need, when you need it. That’s something you can’t memorize ahead of time anyway – you just have to figure it out as you go.
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