This comes from my years of teaching higher ed from frosh to MA candidates.
It is not unusual at all for freshmen to have trouble transitioning from high school. The Assistant Dean of students makes this quite clear on the witness stand that that is her perspective and the tradition at Mount Union. It is also my experience teaching freshmen, plus my own idiocy. Some of the issues make me chuckle (e.g. the guys who have never done their own laundry, and have no idea what to do with washing machines); not reading exam questions clearly, not believing professors when they're supposed to read a whole Dickens novel by next week; not knowing how to take notes; having no experience with critical thinking skills; getting freaked out by other students who seem to know what they're doing; freezing on an art history test ....the whole gamut.
Sydney might have been in all these categories. She may also have been getting used to straight A's in high school, but come to find out, everyone did. And if she didn't avail herself of the help—counseling and academic—that she was told to use (heck, she didn't even have to dream up that would be a good idea), this is not someone who can be successful really at any institution.
Personally, I went to chemistry lab, and young women were pouring things from glass bottles into test tubes like they'd been doing it for years; I thought it was entirely the right thing to do to sit around and play guitar with my new friends; I thought "do as much as you can" in a language class meant "do a few exercises", when actually, that would get you a passing grade if you got those exercises correct (unlikely, and in reality, it meant do ALL the exercises if you wanted a respectable grade); and "don't plan or practice for essay exams", when everyone knows (but you) that you'd better have some thoughtful ideas on the top of your brain.
I'm sure everyone of us posters here have some humor about our frosh year (professors actually take it for granted and make allowance for it), and some of the dumb things we did from being newbies.
I would guess Sydney was WAY far off in not getting the swing of things (I mean, was she skipping tests? not turning in papers?), and that's how she managed to get warnings, probation, and suspension. She seems to have had a good high school education. My guess is, no high school teacher had figured out that she might be depending on memorization and be very weak in conceptual thinking; this should have shown up in high school, but it takes an astute teacher to land on it as a problem. I'm speculating from my experience that if relying on high grades entirely achieved through memorization, a student at college entry would be very thrown off: it's just not going to work (distribution classes would be hell) and would be very challenging to get past, especially if you think of yourself as an A-grade student. FWIW most any student at college can memorize well. Some students never get more sophisticated, though, as college work requires.
To wrap up, an educated guess that makes sense to me, Sydney might have had a more subtle problem than skipping class (which is easily fixable by simply attending!), and it could have created a hole she couldn't get out of because it didn't jibe with her assumptions about herself. All those lies! IMO going to community college and then transferring (after a year or two of feeling successful) might have been a more comfortable and fitting strategy in her case. And it might have prevented her from getting in a position where the extreme act of taking her mom's life was the next step.
But I am speculating here!
