Retaking a Failed Course Through TRU Open Learning

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Failing a course is bad. Failing a course that is a prerequisite for the program you are trying to get into is a different kind of bad, because now it is not just a grade, it is a locked door with a twelve-month wait behind it.

That is the situation a student came to us in last spring. Two years into a degree at UVic, aiming for the business program, and statistics had gone badly enough to put the whole plan at risk. He needed to retake it, and he needed the mark to be good, not just passing.

He took it through TRU Open Learning instead of waiting for the course to run again. Three months later he finished with an A minus and got into the program.

Here is how that worked, and what to think about if you are in the same spot.

Why TRU Open Learning, and not just waiting

Thompson Rivers University runs a distance division called Open Learning. Courses have flexible start dates, no scheduled classes, and up to 30 weeks to finish. You can enrol in the middle of a term.

For someone who has failed a prerequisite, that last part is the whole point. A course that only runs in the fall on your home campus means waiting a year. An Open Learning course you can start next week means clearing the requirement before the application deadline instead of after it.

The credit transfers, which is the question everyone asks first. Check the BC Transfer Guide for your specific course and receiving institution before you enrol, because the answer depends on both.

The part nobody warns you about

Self-paced sounds like a gift when you are choosing. It is the reason people pick Open Learning, and it is also the reason a lot of them do not finish.

There is no Tuesday lecture reminding you the course exists. Nothing goes wrong in week three. It goes wrong in week nineteen, when you look at the calendar and realise you have eleven weeks left, four units untouched, and no real sense of how long a unit takes you.

Retaking a course makes this worse rather than better. You have seen the material before, which makes the early units feel easy, which makes it feel safe to put off. Then you reach the part where it fell apart the first time, and now you are behind as well as stuck.

What we actually did

He worked with Ryan, one of our tutors, once a week online for about three months.

Two things about that are worth pulling out, because neither is really about statistics.

The weekly session was the deadline. An open-ended course with no fixed dates got a rhythm back the moment there was a standing appointment on it. Not because anyone was checking up on him, but because a session where you have nothing to show is uncomfortable enough to prevent itself. Most students we work with through Open Learning book weekly for exactly this reason, not because the content is beyond them.

We started with where it broke, not chapter one. When a course has already gone wrong once, the temptation is to restart from the beginning and be thorough. That usually wastes the first month. It is rarely the whole course that failed. It is more often one idea partway through that never landed, with everything after it stacked on top. In statistics that is very often the shift from describing a sample to inferring something about a population, which is the point where the arithmetic stops being the hard part. We wrote about why that transition catches people out in this guide to intro statistics at UVic and Camosun.

Finding that specific break took one session. Fixing it took a few more. The rest of the course went considerably faster than the first attempt because the foundation underneath it was finally solid.

The result

He finished with an A minus. At TRU that is 80 to 84 percent, which you can check against their published grading scale.

He needed a grade in the low seventies to qualify for the program. He cleared it by more than ten points, on a course he had previously failed, in three months, part time, alongside everything else he was doing.

He is in the business program now.

If you are in this position right now

A few things worth doing before you enrol, in roughly this order.

• Confirm the credit transfers. Check the BC Transfer Guide for your exact course and your receiving institution. Do this first, because everything else depends on it.
• Check the course code carefully. Open Learning codes are not the same as the Kamloops campus codes. Calculus 1 is MATH 1140 on campus and MATH 1141 online. Statistics is STAT 1200 on campus and STAT 1201 online. The syllabus and the assessment differ, so the code on your registration is the one that matters.
• Find out what grade you actually need, in writing, from the program you are applying to. Not what you think you need. The difference between a pass and a competitive grade is often the difference between an offer and a waitlist.
• Work backwards from the deadline, not forwards from today. Count the units, count the weeks you have, and divide. If the number that comes out is uncomfortable, you have learned that in week one rather than week nineteen.
• Be honest about where it broke last time. This is the hardest one and the most useful. If you can name the specific week the course got away from you, you have saved yourself a month.

If the course you are retaking went badly because of one bad term rather than one bad topic, our guide on recovering from a failed midterm covers the wider version of this problem.

Our Problem Bank Launches in September 2026

The thing that helps most when you are retaking a course is volume of practice with the working shown, so you can find the exact line where your attempt went wrong instead of just learning that it did.

That is what we are building. Over 300 problems with the full solution written out step by step. Statistics is in there alongside Calculus 1, 2, and 3, differential equations, linear algebra, physics, statics, dynamics, and solid mechanics.

It opens in September 2026, and everyone on the waitlist gets a free 30-day trial the day it launches.

• Join the waitlist
• See what is in the Problem Bank

We tutor the TRU Open Learning calculus and statistics courses, along with linear algebra and discrete mathematics. See the full list on our TRU tutoring page, or read about statistics tutoring generally.

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