Students with hearing loss finally breaking sound barrier.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

PHILADELPHIA _ Last year, Willemara Thompson received a grade report full of D's and F's and a dire prediction that she just wasn't college material.

Thompson wasn't a poor student. She simply couldn't hear what her professors were saying.

Now, the human-services major from Pennsgrove, N.J., sails through Camden County College with A's and B's, thanks to new technology that allows students with hearing loss to function fully in conventional classrooms.

"I used to fail tests because a teacher would turn around and say something important with his back to me, so I missed it," said Thompson, who uses the technology in each of her four classes this semester. "Now I get everything, down to when somebody walks into a room, somebody tells a joke."

C-Print, a computer-aided speech-to-print transcription system, was developed in the late 1990s at the National Institute for the Deaf.

Camden County College became one of the first C-Print users in 1997 and is the only South Jersey site that offers C-Print training.

The technology, said Josie Durkow, director of the Mid-Atlantic Post Secondary Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, which is based at the college, offers students who relied on lip-reading or note takers the chance for a fuller classroom experience.