BeepCollege core: you sit in the class for attendance then go home and teach yourself
spicy pancakeso 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
OtterEven 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.
bennypr0faneAnd 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.
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.
every time i think I’ve encountered peak “worst timeline” some new shit tops it by a mile
probably used AI to write his own script, lol.
or adjunt professors who would rather do research, which is about the same thing tenures do anyways.
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 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.
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’ve had similar experiences. I went to a university and not a conservatory, but my music teachers were consistently excellent; from my very first elementary school band teacher all the way through college.
By contrast, I’ve never had a good math teacher. Ever.
I’ve never been good at math, but it wasn’t the teachers. I wouldn’t know a good math teacher from a bad one. I didn’t know that good ones were so rare.
that was my CC too, unfortunately they taught like everyone should be ivy league level courses, too many people failed out and repeated the course, for stem, i suspect this was part of the scheme to keep students forever studenTs in the CC. AND THIER were quite a few that stayed there 5-10year+ with no direction in thier goals.
i had multiple professors like that 1 was animal physio, the PROFESSORS was actually doing research/lab during the whole semester so he was barely in class, and had the TA who had her own MS degree research to do, when the final came about, everyone was like wtf he dint mention any of this in the whole course, like actually chemical/energy equations that he never discussed in class.
NorthWestWindIdk 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.
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: github.com/henryhxu/CSCI4430
Thanks!
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.
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 tyring to becom 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
i barely attended 2 of my courses, and i easily passed those course. probably not doable on harder classes though.
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.
SigntistMan, 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.
ShellofbiomatterNoup, 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, just look at the hands,” and the accuser glances at the picture and hollers “Their hands are NORMAL!”
MinnesotaGoddamYOUR MOM IS AI
calm your tits i just said the keming was bad on the menu jeez i can’t go anywhere with you
Now that you mention it, all of the hands look weird
It’s slop. Coming to take yer jerb.
I’ve never been to a lecture that took attendance. The only classes that did take attendance would sure as fuck notice that you got up and left.
Please take your AI trash tf out of here.
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 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.
“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, 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.