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 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.
Good thing my Uni doesn’t have attendance. Although I still try to attend all lectures.
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.
My 26 yo son recently went back to college to get a degree that might lead to an actual job, and he is shocked at how awful the younger students are. They watch YouTube and TikTok videos in class instead of paying attention, they are openly hostile to profs’ teaching choices, they think they know everything when they clearly don’t know anything, everything is too hard, etc.
And some of the Profs are just as bad.
Covid blew a big hole in our educational system, and messed up that whole generation.
our education has been declining for as long as I’ve been alive. I think it still succeeds in it’s systemic goal of creating drone slaves for the empire… anyhow dunning-kruger is a bitch. It’s easy to mistake information available to you through your phone as knowledge you actually possess, If I was in charge of educating people I would challenge those notions by putting them in situations where they have to apply that knowledge and how it’s dangerous to assume everyone with a platform is a credible source of information
27 here, back to university too for similar reasons and seeing the same thing.
I don’t actually blame the lecturers or teachers. A huge part of higher education is self motivated learning with access to people who are incredibly knowledgeable, who also happen to be your teachers / lecturers.any lectures are there to guide the topics of independent learning.
Until a certain point, the purpose of most education was education itself. The matter half of the 20th century into today has seen a shift of the purpose of university being for employment on the other side. This is an enormous difference, it no longer appeals only to people who are passionate about the subject. If 70% of the lecture theatre is there not to learn but graduate, it changes the learning itself. People by nature want to optimise their tasks to get their goal; if the goal is to be as educated on the subject as possible, then you’re motivated across the board. If the goal is to get a job and the degree is a checkbox in the process, or even if you’re going because “that’s what you do”, then the motivation is to pass. There is no bare minimum to learning, there is to graduating.
The goalposts move on difficulty too. Universities are for-profit companies, who sell qualifications. Inevitably the difficulty of the qualification will creep downwards, as the expectation of difficulty from the learner does the same.
I think this has been happening for long enough that in all but the most prestigious or passionate corners of higher education, the staff and teachers also first entered higher education in establishments where everyone was motivated by either employment or profit.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe plenty of people in higher education are motivated by education for the sake of it, but it’s no longer the default expectation.
Covid gave everyone who graduated in 2019 and earlier another layer of job security.
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 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.
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 didn’t like history, until I just sort of discovered it on my own. After that, I wondered why EVERY history teacher I ever had before or after, was so terrible at it. It’s the most fascinating subject, just stories of interesting people doing interesting things, how can you fuck that up?
And yet somehow History has to be taught in the most mind-numbingly way possible.
it’s because they don’t share their excitement, or they are stuck teaching a time period they absolutely could not care about if they tried.
i have a history professor friend who does women’s history in europe renaissance through… i wanted to say industrial revolution i need coffee and that doesn’t seem long enough. apparently she is the best person to go to prague with.
i took her european history class and it was the best history class i have ever had. made me change majors to history
“fun” little historical factoid on that. WAY back when the idea of national standards was being developed around 1992ish all the various disciplines started working on their stuff. A lot of them had agreed standards by 1994 or shortly thereafter. History/Social Studies took almost 10+ years to get that far because they were arguing over if dates/actions were more important or trends/impacts were more important. As it was explained to me at the time (2006ish) the issue was just stating facts or making them meaningful.
Disclaimer: I’m not claiming the above is scientific fact. That is what was relayed to me when taking a non-history course 20 years ago. Still, a fun thought experiment on what is truly important in learning.
I had one history prof in college who told us in the opening moments of his first class, that he didn’t really care about actual dates, and he’d never ask a date question on a test, which caused an audible sigh of relief in the room. He felt that knowing the CHRONOLOGY of events was better than the actual dates. It was one of the few insightful things I ever learned from a History professor.
Just yesterday there was a Jeopardy question about history, and I didn’t know the answer, but they gave a person’s name, and with that I was able to eliminate guesses that were after that person’s time. I didn’t know the exact dates of those eliminations, but I knew in general that they were after that person. That only left me with a few options left, and I wasn’t sure about one, so I guessed the other, and was right. It was an example of just knowing chronology was good enough.
Besides, if you need to lock down a strict fact like a date, we have a super computer in our pocket holding the entirety of human knowledge. Google it.
my history professor friend thought that if you could cork board and yarn it together, see what led to what and influence what, who cared if you got the dates slightly wrong. you had the tapestry and the big picture. you could get the letters and the individual stories. that’s history
Yeah, sometimes a date is important, and you end up remembering a lot of them anyway, but generally, just knowing the story is all you need, and that’s the fun part anyway.
Date Anxiety has kept more people from enjoying history than anything else.
woof tell me about it the hot chick in the front row in history 204?
edit: wait, she was in the center row in Industrial Design. Dear gods i don’t remember college At All. Those must have been good drugs back then.
#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.
so many of my 100 and 200 level STEM classes were like this in no small part due to the instructors not wanting to teach. they were being forced to teach as part of their employment contract but their main work was research
i resented them for turning their lack of ability to get a position that didn’t require teaching into my problem because they refused to give the slightest effort towards actually explaining the material
doing problems from the textbook on the overhead projector with near-zero explanation is dogshit teaching
At least yours were taught by actual faculty?
A lot of my 100 and 200 level classes were taught by grad students who were interning as teachers in exchange for free/discounted tuition.
At least yours were taught by actual people.
My girlfriend showed me recently that one of her profs made an AI clone of himself (voice and visual) and distributed prerecorded lessons that way. Who knows if he’s even writing the script for it. Probably not.
Did the professor willingly do this? Around/after COVID a lot of universities were forcibly claiming the lectures recorded by teachers in previous semesters as their own IP so they could lay them off. Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s yet another cost cutting measure.
Looks like academics should be unionizing.
During covid when I was recording lectures I tried to make them fun and silly and it would take me like 3-4 hours to record and edit. The art is gone.
That was the most jarring thing for me transitioning from a community/junior college to a private university. Pretty much every teacher I had in CC was there because they loved to teach, but didn’t want to teach children. In University it felt like everyone was teaching because they had bills to pay and had no concept of a world outside of school.
I went to fairly small private college for Music, and all my music professors were really great, every one. Even the couple that were considered the worst were decent teachers, it’s just that some were amazing, and made everyone else look mediocre.
Once you got out of the Conservatory, and started experiencing other subjects, the quality was variable. I had some excellent profs, but also some fairly bad ones. The worst were the adjunct teachers who were only doing it for a side hustle, they generally weren’t too invested.
I went to a very small public university campus that a few years before was associated with a massive state university. They were still mostly independent but we’re getting all sorts of pressure to conform to the larger universities policies on research etc. At my school the professors all taught and did little to no research.
As part of their ongoing arguments they had all juniors/seniors in both schools take a standardize tests at the end of their core degree courses for a year. My tiny university averaged 90th percentile. The large university averaged 30th percentile. The difference having highly qualified dedicated teachers.
Even for the classes with excellent profs, sometimes I’d have to do the thing above.
If I had midterms or an important project in one class, I might have to skip the prereading / review for another class. After that, I’d get to class and not understand much of it. Then I’d catch up the best I could during weekends, reading breaks, or just during finals season.
And that’s how universities work, because who cares if it’s all just a giant farce, right? Gotta have the paper that says your smart.
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.
Am I going insane or do the two women in front middle have weird looking hands?
Mmmm
Now that you mention it, all of the hands look weird
Noup, probably AI generated picture as messed up hands are a rather stereotypical for AI.
My son just had to write a short screenplay for a class, and he has one woman confront another with a photograph, demanding to know who is in that photo, and the accused flippantly says: “Oh that’s AI, look at the hands,” and the accuser glances at the picture and hollers “Their hands are NORMAL!”
YOUR MOM IS AI
calm your tits i just said the keming was bad on the menu jeez i can’t go anywhere with you
actually you know what i might use that somewhere
It’s slop. Coming to take yer jerb.
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 networking course just throws the slides to GitHub.
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.
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.
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.
Forced attendance is a combination of oversight, because it proves the university is trying to accomplish the ‘whole teaching thing,’ and because it’s pretty evident that students who attend more classes do better. I’m sure all of us on lemmy can say they had classes (or just areas of life) where they completely taught themselves, but in general even a mediocre professor makes the self-reading/studying portion fit better into your head.
The oversight thing can go take a hike, but I’m okay with raising the outcome for a bunch of students by requiring attendance.
The other thing is, there are maybe 10% max of students who understand it on their own and it hurts forcing them to come to class (it’s department policy in my case). 80% don’t do shit but most are exam smart enough to pass. I wouldn’t give those any responsibility for any serious project at this point, but I don’t know how they develop after graduation. 10% are just lost.
Now try to design a course that accommodates all of them appropriately.
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 learning outcome as they can and in the end, assigning a score that reflect how much they have acheived.
That is the important part: in the end, it is only a letter, but that letter should reflect real skill. Yet 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.
At some level, college is supposed to be about teaching yourself.
That said, professors are supposed to help.
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.
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.
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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.
If you are in the US you are paying for it too, most likely with debt.
I learn best by reading anyway, so lectures were always a waste of my time.
