College core: you sit in the class for attendance then go home and teach yourself

Comments

• Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    a bunch of my uni courses were taught by TAs doing that same regurgitation.

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  • captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨34⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    I’m a flight instructor. We get prosecuted if we’re that bad at our jobs.

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• janus2@lemmy.zip ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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

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  • OwOarchist@pawb.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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  • Pickleideas@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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    • The_v@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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  • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • bennypr0fane@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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• FrostFaux@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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• BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Khrux@ttrpg.network ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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  • whalebiologist@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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

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    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      What you are talking about are Critical Thinking Skills, which is how humans are supposed to think, but it has to be taught to us, and we have to learn it, and we have to practice it until it becomes second nature to just think that way. It starts with just questioning an assertion and picking it apart on its face, to offering sources for your arguments, and insisting on sources for the other side.

      If you don’t learn how to automatically apply Critical Thinking Skills, then your brain substitutes a chaotic form of thinking that could settle into anything. It’s like tossing a box of LEGOs in the air, and hoping they land as a fully constructed house.

      They become easily susceptible to manipulation, because they never learn how to spot it. So a guy like Trump is easily manipulated by the most insincere flattery, a quality that surprised the Soviets on his first visit to Moscow in 1987, that they recognized his value as a Useful Idiot, and gave him the code name Krasnov.

      They also take unrelated facts and connect them, filling in the gaps with “obviously logical” fabrications, and declare them the truth, and a conspiracy theory is born.

      Or they become Sociopaths, because they never learned to see the value in empathy or honesty.

      Or they become White Supremacists, for the same reasons.

      All of them are easily attracted to sophisticated propaganda, which manipulates them by rewarding their Dopamine receptors. Their hate is literally addictive.

      The only cure is Critical Thinking Skills. It’s best to adopt them early, and be able to resist the propaganda from the start. That’s the way we are supposed to think.

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  • THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Covid gave everyone who graduated in 2019 and earlier another layer of job security.

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• HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨52⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    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

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  • boonhet@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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

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    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I used the “give a wrong answer in class to get the right answer” 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

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  • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Once I understood this, school really started to click. Too bad it wasn’t until I had baked in a shitty undergrad GPA.

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    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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• HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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    • nuachtan@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      “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.

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  • Restaldt@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I took my collegel 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.

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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 fall 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.

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• NorthWestWind@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • crash_thepose@lemmy.ml ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I cannot for the life of me understand why they do that.

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    • NorthWestWind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      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.

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    • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      So everyone, being an adult, can learn at their own pace in a way that is most efficient to them?

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  • bennypr0fane@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • NorthWestWind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      Oh I actually linked the wrong course. That one was for intro to OS. This here is the networking one: github.com/henryhxu/CSCI4430

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• Signtist@bookwyr.me ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Ah, so university is just about get a number to get a piece of paper.

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    • spectrums_coherence@piefed.social ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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    • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yes, in the same way that hospitals are just expensive ways to get a discharge letter.

      Something something metrics and goals.

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  • imadethis@fedinsfw.app ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • jeffep@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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• OwOarchist@pawb.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  At some level, college is supposed to be about teaching yourself.

  That said, professors are supposed to help.

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  • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Is that why it’s 10s of thousands of dollars, or more?

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    • OwOarchist@pawb.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Nah, that particular part of it is because of:

      • Maintaining college’s role as a personal economics gatekeeper, keeping the poor and unprivileged away from the good jobs.

      • Administrators deciding that administration needs more money, causing incredible levels of administrative bloat.

      • 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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  • modus@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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  • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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• HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• hayvan@piefed.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Am I going insane or do the two women in front middle have weird looking hands?

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  • Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Noup, probably AI generated picture as messed up hands are a rather stereotypical for AI.

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    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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!”

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  • Beep@lemmus.org ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Mmmm

    Image

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  • MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Now that you mention it, all of the hands look weird

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  • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s slop. Coming to take yer jerb.

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• whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  #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.

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• Ghostie@lemmy.zip ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  While paying for it, most likely with debt.

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• timestatic@feddit.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Good thing my Uni doesn’t have attendance. Although I still try to attend all lectures.

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• tacosanonymous@mander.xyz ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• melfie@lemmy.zip ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I learn best by reading anyway, so lectures were always a waste of my time.

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