That is good (or bad, depending on your philosophy) for a freshman course. It is humane to start weeding out early on, rather than wait until 4th year to cull the weak (lol).
For a contrasting situation, during my undergrad, we had some untouchable profs near retirement teaching the 4th year math and theoretical physics (AKA math) courses. One particular (required) course in partial differential equations began with 35 solid students (solid enough to finish 3rd year) and ended with 14 students, with a posted class average of 56%. Two women remained, with no non-Asian minorities. Because of this course, the rest switched majors or dropped out.
Intro to quantum field theory started with 12 students and we ended with 2 (though the average this time was in the 90's), both of us Caucasian males, FWIW.
The hard sciences can be merciless, and there is no room for subjective excuses for personal failure (like "the prof doesn't like me" - you either get the correct answer/perform a sane analysis or you don't, end of story).
Clicked on your name to see your homepage.
Consider yourself highly commendedTM, sir!
Cheers!
On the other hand, there’s no reason to cram huge amounts of this stuff into a single semester, or to push so far beyond the limits of even the less than half of initial enrollees who stayed in the course that the class average is 56%. Our society does NOT need tunnel-visioned humanoid robots building our nuclear power plants, space craft, and military technology, and calculating the structural soundness of our skyscrapers, and getting things right 56% of the time.
Many students who are pushing themselves like this have no lives outside their schoolwork, couldn’t care less who the next President is, and wouldn’t dream of taking a day off from studying to help out at a church or community group. Some even become dangerously unstable since they have no perspective on anything and keep themselves extremely stressed all the time.