This was my economics course. The professor would come in, play the textbook manufacturer provided PowerPoint on the screen, and read the slides word for word with little to no elaboration. It was the most boring course I had ever taken.
Had perfect attendance and got 55% on my midterm.
Gave up, skipped almost all of my classes to instead just sit in the library and study on my own.
Got about 87% on my final exam.
Mandatory attendance is stupid, if you can pass the course you can pass the course.
a bunch of my uni courses were taught by TAs doing that same regurgitation.
my first semester transferred into a UNIVERSITY a animal physio course, was just the professor barely lecturing while most of the semester hes researching in a tropical place, and the TA barely did anything because she had her own MS research to do, so everyone was like confused the whole time he was in the class, what he wants to teach us, because he was 90% more concerned about his own research.
yep. I kept thinking in my first two years that things would change enormously when I reached the more rarefied advanced courses… nope. memorize the slides. see the prof once or twice from across an auditorium of 300+ people. :|
Essentially my entire computer science bachelor’s degree was professors sending us the slides and expecting us to read it on our own. Then also mandatory attendance to lectures where they simply read the slides aloud with no additional context. And 90%+ of questions asked would be answered with “the test will only be on stuff in the slides”
Every class I gave at least a few weeks to see if the lectures would help at all but they never did. The only useful thing about them was being able to talk to the professor after class ended about homework clarifications.
You’re giving me flashbacks to this Unix class I had in junior year. The professor had (either prepared or stolen) a 100 slide deck, and as you said the final was based solely on the slides.
Well I did attend just to have him read the slides in broken English. (No shade on non-native English speakers btw, but if you’re teaching native English speakers you kind of have to put in the effort, and this guy was coasting on straight phonics as he read these slides and couldn’t answer any questions not covered by his slides.)
Then I converted the slides into a TTS audio file, snaked an earbud up my sleeve, took and passed the test.
you got it reversed if you want to really excel. You go home and teach yourself, then you go to class to review and see if you got it right.
Once I understood this, school really started to click. Too bad it wasn’t until I had baked in a shitty undergrad GPA.
If anyone doubts me, my graduate degrees are at perennial number one schools in their field. And I didn’t mention my disabilities in my application.
I’mma try that if I ever try for a 3rd time. Though second time around I had zero problems understanding any of the material since I’d been working in the field for 4 years, my ex just had a problem with me spending every other weekend in university instead of catering to her every need. First time I was just a moron who didn’t study at all and I had a pretty tough calculus course first semester and I failed it two semesters in a row lol
I used the “give a wrong answer in class to get the right answer” trick as an undergrad and only the econ and history professors got what I was doing. It drove the stats and humanities teachers up the wall
That’s pretty in line with what I’ve read of cognitive science research around learning from lectures.
Though it’s not actually necessary to teach yourself first, at least not fully. The important part is to sandwich things together. You can get a lot of the benefits with just half an hour before and after a lecture.
The short version of it is:
- Before the lecture, write down what you already know about the topic of the lecture, and what you don’t understand. I can’t remember as much about this part, though, to be honest.
- In the lecture, don’t take notes, except perhaps extremely brief notes such as a reference that you want to look up later (i.e. if the lecturer references a particular paper verbally that isn’t on the slides). Focus on engaged listening rather than taking notes (and if you’re neurodivergent, “engaged listening” may involve doing something with your hands, such as crochet or fidget toys)
- The big one is that after the lecture, without looking at notes or your books, you should try to write down as much as you can remember from the lecture, as a free recall test. After you’ve done this, you can look up anything you couldn’t remember.
Though I should note that there isn’t a consensus on the best way to learn. There are some broad themes that research agrees on though. It does seem pretty close to consensus that splitting your learning up into multiple stages is best, and that free recall exercises like this are super powerful. A lot of the specifics are up for debate though
I was failing engineering probability and statistics until i stopped going to class and just read the book. Then i got an A. Professor was just horrible.
I took my college level statistics class during one summer and the teacher threatened to just never show up again and cancel the class after giving us a test where the average grade was a 48.
Bro gave us 8 hours of homework per night and expected us to have z tables memorized.
i had one in CC, in 09, where advanced alg teacher decided everyone should be doing matrices, adv calculus, and discrete math, which was wierdly in the textbook for adv algebra for some reason. half the class dropped out by the last withdraw date, only because i informed/ and noticed how the professor unilaterally dropped people from the couse without telling them. oh and the prof also called the students “terrible” paraphrased because they dont know math and said he it is the reason why people are graduating HS with such a low level.
the textbook in question was Pearson publishers how are people supposed to do math that is way above adv algebra, i also suspect he intentionally does this to make people drop the class so he doesnt have to teach.
I had one truly awful professor in college. I’m pretty sure he came in hung over multiple times. Regardless of speculation, he definitely DID Google the topic of the say and get notes from other professors from other universities to teach from and then also had the audacity to complain about them. The cherry on the shit cake was him falling asleep during the grad students’ presentations and then was weirdly aggressive and nit picky about what they said after waking up. I really laid into him on the student review. Supposedly their boss reads them all. I hope he saw some consequences. It’s one thing to sort of be hands off and say “you’re in college now, you need to teach yourself,” but it’s another thing to be an asshole and disrespect your students by falling asleep.
oh yea in our CC, WHEN attendance during the math course was pretty low, the department knew and sent someone to monitor if that was true. im guessing someone nosey complained to department that this teacher dint care about people attending or not.
Idk if this is specific to computer science or engineering, but the higher level CS courses I’ve taken basically stop caring. Most of them even make the lecture slides available for the general public. You can just access it, like my
networkingOS course just throws the slides to GitHub.Edit: I linked the wrong set of slides lol. Here are the slides for networking.
I cannot for the life of me understand why they do that.
So everyone, being an adult, can learn at their own pace in a way that is most efficient to them?
I think what I find most valuable with education is something that is an immersive collaborative experience. I suppose it’s contingent on what you teach but I only put up power points until a week or two after the course so that people can come and experience education and learn together. From my pedagogy courses that I’ve had to take there’s a lot of evidence of how information is better retained when in person.
My enjoyment of teaching comes from having an interactive relationship with my students. I mostly find students who take these huge courses where you get the PowerPoints to just kind of slide it into an AI chatbot and then never come to class.
I realize though that everyone is different and I am not in CS. I don’t mean to create a blanket statement but if I had to take classes like that I would enjoy teaching and being a student much less.
No, that’s a fair point. I had super interesting classes, where I was the only one attending. And I had classes where I knew the lecture hall was full, but I figured after the first lecture that I’ll just sit at home, with the script, unlimited coffee, unlimited google access, and be done with the content in half the time.
Even some more renowned universities do that too. Sometimes if a course is being taught poorly I can go look up slides from like Stanford or something.
I think the higher level courses simply require too much basic knowledge to understand anyway, so putting it out there will allow people in similar level to help out each other, but people who don’t have the basics will still not understand.
Thanks for sharing, I can put that to good use in the classes I’m about to take! That’s an intro class though? Maybe it would be even worse if they did it the other way round: leaving beginner students hanging, wait till half drop out and only care for the survivors in advanced classes.
Oh I actually linked the wrong course. That one was for intro to OS. This here is the networking one: https://github.com/henryhxu/CSCI4430
Thanks!
that was one of the biochem class(for life science majors) i took, the professor dint teach at all, just repeat verbatim from the slides and the book without going into too much detail. i had to retake the class due to that because her tests did not match what she was saying on the POWERPOINTS whom she repeated. and i self-taught once i took 2 semesters later with a different teacher.
Like how can we know about CANCER biochemical metabolism when its not even mentioned in the whole lecture, eventhough the test mentioned how the “cancer” was shunting part of the metabolites to alternative pathway for energy thats related to what we know about normal metabolism which was in the textbook(very convoluted question) and it seems to be beyond the scope of the class, since beginners biochem isnt talking something as advanced as cancer metabolism. it was the reverse wharburg effect for cancer cells.
and that class has a large number of people confused about her teaching style and thier grades reflected that and since it was the last semester for most of them, she pontentially screwed people out of grad school. she claimed “SHE was busy person in her LAB”, translate i dont really have time for lecturing/teach students, her test were as hard as my CCollege org.chem courses(whom decided thier courses have to match ivy league colleges for some reason).
At some level, college is supposed to be about teaching yourself.
That said, professors are supposed to help.
Is that why it’s 10s of thousands of dollars, or more?
Nah, that particular part of it is because of:
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Maintaining college’s role as a personal economics gatekeeper, keeping the poor and unprivileged away from the good jobs.
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Administrators deciding that administration needs more money, causing incredible levels of administrative bloat.
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To some degree, financial aid (both scholarships and subsidized loans) enables increased prices because it allows them to increase prices more without affecting demand as much as it otherwise would.
- the first one i can see, the tenures arnt leaving til they croak, so alot of people trying to become faculty cant find jobs, plus the private industry is only slightly better, it also gatekeeps BS/MS majors form the industry, because companies would mostly hire the profs and make them do most of the work, rather hire more lower level workers for research labs.
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when they arnt doing thier on research projects, which is most of thier time to. i also notice they are forced by the univesity to be “Advisors” too, which is a big mistake, as some of them are pretty arrogant and protective of thier reputability, they dont want competition in the future for some reason, and alot of them give very bad advice. Hire an actual advisor, not someone that barely has time.
Professor here, maybe 1% of my students ask for help. About 15 % don’t show up to class to a course run around manuscript discussion, do poorly. Why bother? Save tuition and stay home, because even if they do get a piece of paper after 4 years they will fail in any professional environment with those habits.
Exactly. Full-time college itineraries are based roughly on a full-time 40-hour work week. Each credit represents three hours of study time. One in-class and two out of class. A fifteen-credit itinerary should eat up 45 hours of time. Fifteen in class, 30 of independent study.
Man, I’m glad it wasn’t like this for me. I went to school in the middle of nowhere North Dakota and nearly all of my professors were active and attentive. My genetics class was the only one where the professor was phoning it in, just reading the textbook as a lecture, but me and the other students complained, and he got replaced with another much better professor a few weeks into the semester.
lucky, we had a biochem that just read verbatim off the POWERPOINTS she made, which were taken from the book. she was the only biochem for life science majors, so no mechanism, in fact i dont think our region would replace professors suddenly, unless they became ILL , which was rare.
Forced attendance is just a stupid concept… If you pass the exam, who cares where and how you learned it? Happy that I never had that.
Ah, so university is just about get a number to get a piece of paper.
That is not the case, exam evaluates learning outcome. If the student satisfies the learning outcome in the end, I don’t care how they did it.
I am only here to help the student acheive as much as they can, then assigning a score that reflects their achievements.
That is the important part: it is only a letter, but I would like that letter should reflect skills, instead of total time spent, or how they choose to learn and allocate their time. I don’t want student to waste their precious time when they can achieve the required outcome without doing homework and/or attending classes.
Yes, in the same way that hospitals are just expensive ways to get a discharge letter.
Something something metrics and goals.
some colleges will notice if students arnt attending a class, the admin/dean/department would send a moniter to investigate, and likely next semester they wont be teach the class anymore, or even have the actual class in the category.
At my uni lectures were recorded / livestreamed. I honestly dont think i went to one for my whole degree
Am I going insane or do the two women in front middle have weird looking hands?
Noup, probably AI generated picture as messed up hands are a rather stereotypical for AI.
Mmmm
Now that you mention it, all of the hands look weird
It’s slop. Coming to take yer jerb.
A good chunk of early undergraduate education was designed as a filter for students. Can students, in a system that doesn’t care if they fail, make it through the system? A lot of the rest of it was leadership training with some technical classes bolted on.
the CC in my area was the actual filter, to weed out people completely from 4-university, via thier STEM CLASSES which rivaled those of prestigious colleges. it was sad to see people trying come back to the CC after being academically dismissed. the state uni i went to was way easier and easier to manage than the CC. thee CC claims they are aligning thier courses with certain Universities so they would accept transfer students, but i think its bs, because theres no info confirming that, they just want to keep student perpetually paying the cc by failing students. but they would ACCEPT courses from a state uni, eventhough the courses are much more managable.
If you are in the US you are paying for it too, most likely with debt.
Good thing my Uni doesn’t have attendance. Although I still try to attend all lectures.
i had to stop attending one of my courses in the morning, because too tired and had another course where i had to do research papers. i liked the class but i couldnt fully attend it, only did the papers for the course(luckily he dint enforce attendance, and it was a philosophy class.
#1 Spaced repetition, #2 quizzing, and #3 explaining it in plain common language without any technical words or phrases are 3 really good methods to learning something new. The lectures provide #1 if you study the material a few days before or after the lecture. Note taking can help focus on the material during the lecture to stay engaged and focused, and be useful when studying later to target what you have trouble with.
