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).
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. :|
I’m a flight instructor. We get prosecuted if we’re that bad at our jobs.
I feel like attendance is one of the most important traits for a pilot. These guys showing up and just sitting there doing not much for a class seems to resemble what pilots seem to do now mostly unless I’m mistaken. Chemist doesn’t show up on time and leaves late, doesn’t matter job done, no one should care. Pilot, people would probably be pissed if the pilot was late
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.
or adjunt professors who would rather do research, which is about the same thing tenures do anyways.
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.
probably used AI to write his own script, lol. i can see pretty much why alot of reviews online about university, said they dint learn anything.
every time i think I’ve encountered peak “worst timeline” some new shit tops it by a mile
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.
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.
Looks like academics should be unionizing.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
At my uni lectures were recorded / livestreamed. I honestly dont think i went to one for my whole degree
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.
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.
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
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.
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
With the power of the Internet, now you can fail History 203 from the comfort of your crying corner.
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.
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
PEPE SILVIA YES i haven’t seen her in a while but she loved this meme
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.
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 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 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!
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.
At some level, college is supposed to be about teaching yourself.
That said, professors are supposed to help.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Am I going insane or do the two women in front middle have weird looking hands?
Mmmm
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, just 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
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.
