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MIT Moves Away From Massive Lecture Halls
eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on MIT's migration away from large lectures as many colleges and universities have. Attendance at these lectures often falls to 50 percent by the end of the semester. TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) gives the students a more hands on approach and may signal the death of the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."
Are you implying that the lecture halls are homosexual?
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Is this going towards a future where students do not need to be physical present on the campus? they would attend classes from home (or basement for some) and graduate with professional degrees. while that may be well and good for knowledge and proficiency what does it do to learning about social coexistence?
oh well, i guess they could take a class for that too.
My sig has been answered.
I've been in 2x150+ classes at my university and it's really a good idea to move from those as the best the teacher can do is read the slides (God they love those at the university) which every student can do on their own at home, there's no "plus-value" of going to class especially when you have 45min of bus each way to get there.
The giant schools are not the place where the best educations come from. Sure they often have the biggest research budgets and thus are in the news the most. Smaller schools with smaller class sizes are where it's at from a value for dollar spent standpoint.
My biggest class was intro psych and it was 75 folks. My Hydrodynamic instability was four students and the professor. Just try to hide when you haven't prepared with only three other peeps to hide behind.
Sheldon
But that will change the future!!!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Why is a 50% reduction in failures a useful stat? The schools want a certain amount of failures in these large "weeder" classes, because giving a diploma to everyone who pays waters down the value of the diploma.
If they wanted to reduce failures, they only needed to move the curve (which was set where it was on purpose in the first place).
Honestly, by the time you get to college, especially ones like MIT, if you can't learn because the environment isn't as cozy as it could be, I'm not sure it is completely the school's job to fix that for you. You might expect that in primary school, but you can't expect it in the world of work, so seems like college is a great place to start introducing people to the concept.
I would have to imagine another flip side of this is the students "don't get access" (whatever that really means in a big lecture) to top professors. Teaching 80 kids at once instead of 500 means you have to run 6x as many classes and professors aren't going to do this willingly. You're probably going to end up with only access to a T.A. (teaching assistant).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If one happens to be a self-directed learner, then the research U's ARE the place to be, with far better resources available to students. I went to a SLAC as an undergraduate, then to Giant Research University for grad school, and I can promise you that I'd have given anything to have the resources of GRU as an undergrad.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Massive lecture halls were completely pointless in my experience. The only correlation between attendance and my grade was actually a negative correlation: the less I went, the better my grades got.
I had one class, a planetary geology course, where I was told in the first class that there was no way I could pass without attending class (to watch his boring-ass slideshows, which were going to be on the exam). That was the last class I went to, and I aced the class and the final.
Likewise physics, and all the gut CS classes (everything up to the 300 level). If you have a question, you're fucked anyway, because with 200+ students, you'll never be able to ask it...Half the time they put you off to the end of the lecture anyway, and then they tell you to ask the TA during the practicum or the lab.
After I graduated I heard that they'd put in this system where you had to "rent" this fricking remote control, register it (unique serial number, so they could track you attendance) and use it to input multiple choice answers to questions the prof put on the board. I can only imagine the benefits felt by the students [/sarcasm]
Save your time for the practicum, keep on top of the syllabus, and let the prof drone on at 8:00am while you get an extra hour of shuteye.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
There is no doubt that academia needs to be mindful of the learning environments it creates. But technology is no magic bullet.
A poorly designed lecture might lead to low attendance, but so can a badly designed online or technology-enhanced environment. Some courses simply work well in a large classroom environment. Others are more amenable to a blended learning environment.
This means your chance of getting into MIT just decreased by over 9000%.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Yes and no. If you're looking for a lot of individual time and supervision, no, a big school is not the place to go.
But if you're looking for great resources and opportunities, then a big school is far superiour. I jumped into a graduate research lab my junior year for credit, experience, and references that were a huge benefit to me, and that sort of opportunity was impossible for me at the smaller school where I'd spent my first two years.
The gotcha is that you have to go looking for those opportunities. No one is going to try and force you to take them.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The schools with the large lecture halls just want your money. They accept everyone, (not MIT of course) and then weed you out by making learning as difficult as possible. They get a semester or two of tuition at very little cost to them. Good schools may have lower acceptance rates, but higher graduation rates.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Large impersonal classrooms reduce accountability for attendance and decrease overall learning rates. Film at 11.
I had a couple monster lecture hall classes as an undergrad. They were usually either introductory courses or weed-out courses. TFA is right that by the end of the semester addentance is cut in half. Students either don't need to attend anymore (introductory course) or they have already dropped it (in the case of a weed-out course).
Big U's are THE place to be for grad students and researchers. If you can manage to keep your head above water as an undergrad you will be better acclimated.
Where else can I look at scantly dressed cheerleaders for several hours without being arrested now?
I doubt it was MIT in the first place.
No sitting in the back of the room for you!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
This is MIT we're talking about. Searching other schools for your cheerleader-eye-candy may be a good move anyway.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
When I was a Cornell EE back in the day, the engineering school took great delight in the fact that only 50% of people who entered the school ended up graduating - most of the 50% who were gone either flunked out or "quit before they were fired". This was incredibly stupid, since the admissions process already "weeded out" 80% of applicants, and caused virtually all students to cheat like crazy.
My sister went to Harvard, where virtually everyone graduates. It's a damn fine school, and their alumni seem to do OK.
The ones with 50% drop off were the decent ones.
Some were much worse, and the ones with great professors were noticably better.
Many of my friends who skipped lecture just read the text books if they could get away with it. If the class was better then the books, then it was worth it to go, otherwise why bother.
Parents, teachers, and professors like to view lecture halls as being too impersonal to effectively teach. Students view more personal classrooms as cramped and uncomfortable. I'd argue that sitting in a movie theatre seat for an hour and half certainly improves my ability to learn more than sitting closer to the teacher, but on a fucking wooden plank.
Where will students go to take their afternoon naps now?
Yet another reason why liberal arts programs are inherently superior (aside from the fact that they're the only subjects that can reliably arrive at Truth, and are more human).
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
...but this just happened. I got a phone call this morning from my son, who is a Freshman just beginning his second term in college (math/physics major).
His college requires all freshman to take three credits of social/cultural liberals arts classes focused on diversity, understanding, and rainbows. On the plus side, they focus on writing weekly research papers, which is probably a good habit for freshman to pick up.
In this specific class, the teacher was warning against the perfidious institution of sexism in places of power, and gave the evil ex-dean of harvard as an example. I happen to have had conversations about that with my son, and so when the teacher asked for open discussion, my son spoke up. He said that as he understood it, the Harvard dean was a poor example of sexism, since all he stated was that there was possibly may be some physical difference in brain development between the genders that lead to the male preponderance in hard sciences.
The teacher turned red, started to stammer, so my son stopped talking. By the end of the day, he had been notified that he had been removed from the class. Now, he's probably learned a good lesson... shut up and don't engage in free discussion in a class that encourages free discussion, until he gets a feel for the teacher's maturity. It's an unfortunate lesson, but probably necessary. I should stress that he is always polite, and always soft-spoken; there would have been nothing objectionable about his behavior.
To bring this back to topic, perhaps losing face-to-face contact and easy interactivity with the professor and other students is not really much of a loss. Except for the best teachers, most classes are no more educational than spending an hour with a textbook, and sometimes (when personalities get involved) much worse.
"...the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."
Synonymous? Maybe at large colleges, but guess what -- you can get a degree without that experience. It's called a smaller school. Sadly, many of my high school compatriots looked at "name brand" first, and size or cost second, if at all. For any high school slashdotters listening, I have a secret -- it's the same degree. My father went to state school in RI, and was recruited by Raytheon before he'd even graduated. He was working alongside graduates from all the Ivy Leagues, getting paid the same. It doesn't matter what the name on the diploma is, what matters is the effort you put in and the skills you provide for your employer. Save your money, avoid crippling student loan debt, and get those smaller class sizes anyways.
Smaller university equals smaller classes. The largest class I've ever had at my university was 40 students -- hardly unmanageable. Consider these things first, since you're going to school for your degree, not bragging rights, at least ostensibly so.
A bit on that note is that the kids who are going to MIT might usually be very intelligent and might have high grades but what may happen is that they start to burn out around this time or go through some sort of identity crisis where they want to party and relax. So this might be a big factor as well. I mean how many of you want to learn things all the time no matter how cool they can be? I know I've gotten sick of even the things that I was interested in if it was a common routine.
Cornell is like the easiest Ivy to get into. It's practically a State School. So, it maintains its "standard" by making it as hard academically and psychologically to graduate from. I didn't make it past freshman year from social and psychological breakdown.
One of the professors who implemented this was a classmate of mine and we talked about this several years ago. MIT's big initial concern was cost. Lab space takes more room than lecture hall seats. Plus you have run the class much more often to keep the lab size down to manageable numbers. Combined this is almost an order of magnitude of more capital and labor than your standard lecture course.
:-)
The NY Times article pretty much lists the advantages. Foremost is an improving the pass rate from 85% to 95%. Second is students learn and retain the material better. Freshmen courses are the basis of subsequent coursework. Third is more efficient grading. Students and professors are being given automatic feedback. You dont need as many problems sets and exams. (A disaster for the MIT tradition of showering freshmen on the night before the first physics midterm
There are hybrid solutions to make lectures more interactive. Something as simple as clickers, like they use in TV game shows, to give the prof immediate feedback and keep students focused on lectures. And this costs on $50 per student.
"What's the use of having a class so huge that the professor can't even know all his students, doesn't grade papers(his TAs do that), the student can't necessarily see the screen well or hear the professor"
It's more cost efficient. It saves money. Why don't all students have their own personal tutor, or only get taught in classes of ten or less? Because teachers cost money, rooms cost money, equipment cost money. If you can get 150 students through with one professor, rather than one professor per 30, well you've just saved 4 salaries.
Q: What do you say to a second year engineering student who did not attend all the first year lectures? A: Big mac and fries please.
You'd get smaller lecture sizes and, if you're interested in post-grad work, likely be better off going to a small college for your undergrad work and waiting for MIT until post-grad. The undergrads at MIT, like those at many major universities, are there mostly to fund the post-grad programs and facilities. If you just want a name on your resume that'll make employers drop their panties for you, then MIT is a great choice for undergrad.
My very first class at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY was Calculus I. I was sitting alongside hundreds of Freshmen engineering students. The first question from the instructor, who I am told was world renowned for his mathematics prowess, was "how many of you are in Engineering", to which it looked like 95% of the hands went up. The second question was "how many of you have had calculus in high school". I was the only one that did not raise my hand. Uh oh, now what?!?
The thing that made that classroom setting useless as a teaching tool, and more useful as a data dump, was the intimidation factor. I couldn't very well ask the teacher to repeat why the first derivative didn't make any sense to me without complete embarassment.
I will say that the instructor was marvelous. He did not defer his office hours to some foreign TA, he did them himself. And in the gentlest way possible, he would ask to see your notes (to prove you were in class) and then would give really great examples of how to do things. Unfortunately he was the only one to make a positive impression and it wasn't until I had flunked out, changed majors to Business and changed schools that I would get to demonstrate the results of his teachings later in an MBA level economics course. Who knew that calculating the area under a curve with calculus could be useful to business majors? Anyway most of my fellow students in business didn't get calculus, but I did!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Science lectures are often boring because there is no story to it. It is just facts and figures to be memorized and regurgitated later. People sleep and do not attend out of boredom.
History, Poli Sci, and Philosophy classes on the other hand can use the lecture hall to great effect. They can get a really good speaker/story teller (with a PHD in the subject) and let him explain how things happened, or perhaps why learning about that subject is of great importance to all mankind. If he is good then why shouldn't he have 500 to 1,000 people listening to what he has to say. Some of my favorite times as an undergrad were spent listening to wonderful lectures from great Historians and philosophers. They made me want to come to the next lecture. It was like anticipating the next episode of my favorite tv show. While you couldn't ask questions, nobody wanted to because they were all so enthralled with the lecture.
"...because giving a diploma to everyone who pays waters down the value of the diploma."
http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N14/col14nesmi.14c.html
"Even at MIT, where we pat ourselves on the back for our meritocratic ways until our skin is raw, admissions staffers report that legacies are granted an additional review before their rejection is finalized. At several schools, such students receive much more than an extra review. "
Talking about a school which even considers "legacy" status in admissions not wanting to give a diploma to everyone who pays...
Thank you. That's the best laugh I've had all morning.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
50%? For Engineering, that seems high. At the University of Pittsburgh, I remember being told that every year, the number of students drops by half. 200 Freshman = 100 Sophomores = 50 Juniors = 25 Seniors. People dropped out of Engineering (and flocked to Business/History/English/Econ/Imaginary Engineering) like flies at my school, and it definitely showed as you got to the higher classes.
Been on both sides - graduated from Big U (undergrad), graduated from Small U (undergrad), graduated from Big U (grad), teach at Small U. What I saw - those who knew how to learn didn't have any trouble. Those who didn't always had trouble. Teachers don't pour education into your brain; students must want to learn and must actively pursue it. So many students want to passively obtain an education. You will never become proficient at anything except reading if all you do is read a book - you've got to DO. If MIT's efforts are successful (i.e. students actually learn) it's not because they got rid of the lecture halls. It's because students are performing more hands-on work and less book work. Unfortunately, it appears that the small class size is necessary to get some of these students to actually make the effort.
I suspect if MIT were to provide a set of self-study projects and then test the student at the end you would find a large percentage of the "failures" would disappear - once students figure out you have to actually make the effort (and this includes seeking assistance) the whining will cease and the students would begin the process of truly learning.
...not that there's anything wrong with that.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
I got my undergrad degree from Berzerkeley. At the time, Art History was pretty much a required course. It was held only at 8 AM, in Wheeler Auditorium (this was before somebody burned it down). Promptly at 8AM, the prof would turn out the lights and start showing slides. Mostly they were The Madonna of This and That, by some Italian guy. My max was five madonnas, after which I would be in deep REM sleep. I mean...they expected me to stay awake? In the dark ? At EIGHT IN THE MORNING????
The only thing I learned in that course was that sleep learning definitely doesn't work. Luckily, I had signed up for it pass/no pass, and in those days, at least, it didn't count on my GPA...
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
The giant schools are not the place where the best educations come from. Sure they often have the biggest research budgets and thus are in the news the most. Smaller schools with smaller class sizes are where it's at from a value for dollar spent standpoint.
My biggest class was intro psych and it was 75 folks. My Hydrodynamic instability was four students and the professor. Just try to hide when you haven't prepared with only three other peeps to hide behind.
Sheldon
MIT's not a giant school. Their freshman class is around 1000., which is bigger than it was when I was a freshman, but not as big as a few year ago when they took steps to reduce size.
I think I had a half-dozen big classes the entire time I was there; the rest of the classes were small enough that I felt everyone got enough attention, especially in the recitations, where my biggest beef was the occasional grad student who didn't speak English.
I think the worst was a math professor pressed into service for a recitation section, who would stand at the board, say, "Uh, I don't remember how to do this one. What's the answer to this integral? Oh yeah, it's..." and write down the answer and prove it was right. But I later found out that is actually how you solve differential equations!
Disclaimer: I teach physics at an American university.
When you switch from a big lecture class to small, "workshop" rooms which use computer-based sensors, you raise the cost of the class by factors of many.
Smaller classes are good -- of course. I am much more effective in smaller classes than in a big lecture. But do students want to pay 4-7 times more for the privilege of having small classes?
I'm teaching a "workshop" class in which I can't depend on the computers at all. It doesn't bother me -- I have exercises which use metersticks and stopwatches. But it does cause problems for professors who have become used to using the nice computer-based sensors. Our department/university just can't afford to replace the computers right now.
I'm just trying to point out that changing the way some courses are taught may lead to increased costs. That's all.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
""The New York Times is reporting on MIT's migration away from large lectures as many colleges and universities have. Attendance at these lectures often falls to 50 percent by the end of the semester. TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) gives the students a more hands on approach and may signal the death of the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science.""
Amen to that! I was tired of the professor being in the front and me being waaay in the back and having to bust out the Hubble to see anything.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
At Ohio State (where I did my undergrad work), we did a lecture/recitation model where you went to a lecture by a full-time faculty in a large lecture hall 600-2000 seats where he/she lectured and assigned the homework/reading. The class would on other days be split into 40-60 student sections where a GA would lead any discussions, answer questions to problems, collect and grade assignments, etc.
I found it really nice in that it allowed FT Faculty to lecture in 100-200 level classes taken by a lot of non-majors, to get a feel if that program was for you, and tended to be pretty good at it and had accomplishments in the field. It would be impossible at a school of 50-60K students to have tenured faculty teach 50-100 students in smaller settings when the General Ed courses had 20-30 sections per quarter throught the day and evening. It also gave the TAs an opportunity to develop their teaching skills independently, but on a rather short leash.
The nicest part was that in some courses, if the lecture wasn't very useful and had no depth beyond what I could read on my own (which is usually pretty easy to discern early in the class) no one cared that I wasn't at lecture. In some courses, the recitation was primarily a more public form of "office hours" with the TA, and attendance was encouraged but never required, depending on the lecture size, where tests were administered and other things.
I think the lecture attendance is below 50% when the material is identical to the text and there isn't much anecdote, exposition or discussion relating to the reading. Secondly is when the instructor is nearly impossible to understand (like my MATH 152 Calc 2 class). As a teacher now, I don't particularly care if my students come to class and if they can pass my exams which are based heavily on in-class lecture and lab, then why waste their time. Students are adults and are busy people, particularly if they work and can't see why some instructors look down on a student other than pure ego; if they are making the grade in a more independent manner. I treat school like a buffet; a lot is offered, but you'll only benefit by what you take; and the more you take the better you'll be. However if you take little or nothing, all you've done is pay a huge fee for a degree and missed out on a lot of value behind it. In that case though, it is the student's loss but not me. Everyone has opportunity cost and all I can do is encourage them to see the value in being there as it really is and let them decide if alternative options are truly more worthy to them. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we don't, but it is no sweat off my back in either case.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
If you want to be social the take hands on classes or join a club.
In most classrooms your job is to sit there and listen. Not to interact with other students. For those types of classes there's no reason to be required to waste time and gas driving to school. You can sit and listen anywhere.
Also if you want to have a job before you get out of college (a very good idea) you can't afford to be in a classroom from 9-5 or you're SOL for getting a decent job. My last two years of school I took on-line courses only and held down a full time job. That wouldn't be possible if I had to actually go to class.
By the time I got out of college I already had a good job in my field.
Work Safe Porn
outsourcing, you know
I don't think it's the lecture hall size that's the sole factor here. In my college, lecture halls were only used for low brow classes (such as basic High School grade math classes).
Kids taking such rudimentary classes probably aren't very serious about their education so of course their dropout rate would be might higher than those in smaller classrooms. I just think the class size may not be as much of a factor as you might think it is, it sounds like a scapegoat to me.
I took MIS (Management of Info Sys) and CompSci at my college and absolutely none of my classes were in a large class (aka lecture hall) scenario. But I can't say the same for people taking faux majors like Liberal Arts (which I now hear has branched off into General Studies now) or those who needed to learn their basic high school classes.
PS: I'm probably biased on the setup and small size of the no-name college I attended. I can see it's possible that in a large college, everybody needs to take the same Creative Writing course or what-not.
You should have just transferred to the Communications program in the Ag school. That's what people having trouble did in my days at Cornell when they were broken by the pre-req classes. Worked out pretty well for them too.
And no, I wasn't in the Engineering school, which is why I never had to take the option. :)
Does anyone really learn anything in a lecture-hall like that? I know that when I was in college I found it was a somewhat decent way to take a nap or practice my doodling skills. It seems to me that if you want to learn, some interaction with your teacher may be necessary. . .
I had a philosophy class at Oklahoma University, in one of the Dale Hall large lecture classrooms. I think it would hold something like 600 people. The professor was Tom Boyd, who was also a Presbyterian minister. It was like having George Carlin teach the class, without the coarse language. No problem staying engaged there.
On the other hand, the psychology class was so dull I can barely remember taking it. After 20 minutes of lecture, everyone looked like a stunned mullet.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
There's a gigantic unanswered question here: How does this scale?
Under the large-lecture system in place when I was at MIT ('92), 300+ students filled the lecture hall two times a day, 3 days a week. That is 600+ students taking class 8.01 (Intro Physics). This required one professor to deliver the lecture, and a handful of TA's to handle recitations and study groups.
Under the system described in the article, only 80 students are taught at a time. But *each* class requires a professor and a team of TA's. To handle 600+ students taking the class, it would require 8 classroom sessions, 3 times a week, each involving a prof and TA's. That's 24 hours a week the prof is spending in class teaching. (not even counting prep-time, grading papers, or office-hours).
This system, for whatever successes it might have, just doesn't seem to scale. It seems to put a huge load on the prof and TAs.
It's clear how advantageous small class sizes are..."the research" indicates it, my personal experience also does.
I go to a large university (~16000 students) - a year and a half through, and I haven't gotten stuck with any class larger than 40 or 50; I've even had a bunch of classes with a class size around 10.
A large class (40-50) would be hard to manage at the high school level or lower (all the noise and commotion form the underachievers)...it works well with college students though. [I'm *not* at a "party school" or "big sports" school, however]
Also, all of my classes are taught by the actual professor, with either no accent or a moderate & understandable accent. (There are occasional "dud" professors though - sh*t happens.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Speaking of college costs, can someone explain this to me: Suppose your typical student is paying $10,000 per semester and taking 15 credits. Now suppose your typical professor costs the school $250,000 per semester. If each professor teaches 9 credits a semester, wouldn't that make your average class size 40 students? Why do universities seem to feel justified charging that amount for a class size of several hundred? Where does all that other money go?
Maybe I should start my own university. It seems like there is a lot of room to undercut the competition and still make a huge profit.
Where else are kids gonna be able to take a good mid-afternoon nap? The seats in 10-250 were so comfortable. And in these smaller classes, everyone can see you fall asleep.
I doubt spending more money on high tech gear for classrooms will increase interest for understanding science among students.
The best thing about college is learning from the best in the world--both professors and students. You can learn data without the other people, but really thinking about the data happens best when you can discuss it--when it becomes something you talk about over lunch. When it becomes something you chat with to your friends at three in the morning.
Being surrounded by people who think intelligently is also wonderful in terms of restructuring your own thought patterns in positive ways. It's a subtle but very real influence that's a good part of good colleges.
Um, there are PLENTY of hot chicks at MIT, having brains does not make you unattractive and MIT is the elite of the elite so they can be selective for well rounded very smart people. Don't get me wrong there are plenty of basement dwelling nerds there, but from my campus visits and all of the tv shows I have seen they aren't even the majority. Think head chearleder who was in all honors/AP classes with a near 4.0 while also being an officer of 6-8 other clubs/groups, that's the people that get into MIT.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I've never yet had a computer be able to answer the question, "Could you explain it another way, please?" or "Could you think of an analogy?" A critical part of teaching is the charisma and attention of the teacher. Computers have neither.
I piss off bigots.
I once got a paper back on which a prof had written something like "If you take this position, you have to defend it better. It's okay that I don't defend my position better because my position represents values we espouse."
I made my papers for her thoughtless echoes after that and got A's and A+'s. People do ridiculous things.
I, however, wasn't lucky enough to get a professor with eidetic memory. What I got was a professor who, if I was lucky, realized he had a class.
There are good teachers, there are bad teachers. I generally posit average. You need a very excellent teacher to effectively teach a class size over a hundred. There are reasons states pass restrictions on class sizes in primary education.
What I discovered was that attending lecture in such a huge class was effectively useless for me. The sheer number of noises(coughs, chair creaks, whispering, pen clicks, etc...) often drowned out the teacher. It was often difficult to get a seat at the right range to effectively see the slides. The books ended up explaining it better, but people don't learn just by reading. Lecture helps, in my case discussion helps a lot more. Experimentation, hands on is even better.
I don't read AC A human right
Mmmm.....ivy-covered chambers of love...
They migrate, too, you know -- to be with their beloved coconuts on Fire Island.....
Just don't ask where the swallows grip 'em....
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
Smart is sexy and many physically attractive people are also smart.
But how many cheerleaders are there at MIT? They're not really well known for their football/basketball prowess...
On the other hand, MIT has excellent shooting and fencing teams. We'll just see whose athletic program is superior when the zombie horde overruns Cambridge!
On the other hand, MIT has excellent shooting and fencing teams. We'll just see whose athletic program is superior when the zombie horde overruns Cambridge!
What, is Harvard back in session?
By the time I was done with my GE classes and starting my engineering classes, I learned that I could skip most lectures and do self-study. I would pick up the syllabus on the first day to get the semester schedule. Then I would simply show up for quizzes, exams and the occasional lecture. The only classes I attended regularly were the labs--much more interesting. I didn't get perfect grades, but I didn't fail either. It took a little bit more discipline to self-study, but the benefits are enormous especially when struggling with a particularly difficult subject and you finally get it. You don't get that in most "spoon feeding" lectures.
"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?" --Yoda {whips out green light saber}
And with dropping enrollments, many schools are now running classes for as little as 8 students...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I find your story HIGHLY unlikely. The only way a student can be thrown out of a class is if they are disruptive. Extremely disruptive. We're talking physical violence, or shouting and not allowing the class to proceed for a long time.
Children aren't stupid, and they're very manipulative.
The very fact that you are on this forum promoting this anecdote as some example of evil liberal professors will not be unknown to your child. He knows that this is going to be your reaction, that you have allowed preconceived notions to blind you from proper skepticism. So he's worded his version of the events to reinforce your behavior.
The red flag was when you said he made one mild statement, and the professor few into a rage and then he shut up. Come on, let's get real here. Nobody is going to fly into a rage because of one comment. Especially not a teacher who just asked for open comment.
What you just described is an event which will hit the newspapers. So while I'm very skeptical, I'm more then willing to believe your version of the events if you can send us a link to the school paper discussing this in more detail.
It pretends that regular classes are only taught in massive lecture halls, where you are lost in a sea of students and professors are just spouting on about something for an hour or two.
Reality: you attend two or three "lectures" a week, but everyone understands that they are really only meant for high-level surveys of the material.
You then attend two or three "recitations" a week, which - in my department, EECS at MIT, is almost always taught by professors to groups of 10 to 25 students. This is where you get into details, solve problems, and ask questions.
It isn't difficult to explain why lecture attendance drops (especially because TEAL makes it mandatory! 80% attendance is the best they can do???), but recitation attendance almost always stays very high.
(Also, they forget to mention that at MIT, these classes are Pass/No Record, so why do you need to attend lectures when you know the material well enough to pass the course? Noone in these classes are physics majors, because otherwise they would be taking 8.012, a much harder, lecture style class).
This is nothing new.
When I was younger my Dad told me a story (I have no idea if he made this shit up), about when he was in university. He got his BA and then went on to get his Law degree. I am not sure which (as they were different universities) this happened at.
So this is before my time, back in the 1970's. So before laptops, email, slashdot (oh noes!) and everything else.
Anyway back then I guess the thing to do was bring in a recorder to class. That way you could pay attention to the lecture, and get your notes later. Eventually students being students, people started coming to class, starting their recorders and then leaving, coming back after to pick up their notes. I guess one day Dad was late for class and rushed in to find that the cheeky professor has taped his lecture and was playing it and had left, to a classroom filled with tape recorders, and nary a human being in sight!
Anyway that is the story as I remember it. Never even thought of it again until today!
I know when I went to university I wasn't a fan of the big lecture halls. It is a bit moot anyway as it was really only 1st year classes. After that class size diminished drastically, so that by the end they are very small. On top of that all my classes had other components that were smaller. My science classes had labs, my arts classes had seminars, both would range from 10-30 students. Science was usually with a TA, arts would be the actual prof. If you had a question your asked then. You could also ask via email, or simply camp their office.
I did find most 1st year lectures pointless for one reason or another. Most are pretty simple basic stuff and if you read the book and remember stuff you are good to go. Some even said that they would email all the slide notes to all the students, which was my flag not to go anymore, or at least irregularly at best.
My biggest pet peeve was how is it decided that all science classes are in the morning and all arts classes in the evening? Math at 8:30am on Monday morning is just cruel and unusual punishment...
One horrible act I did one year was for a full year credit course, I only ever attended one lecture (Environmental Science 100). They played a movie on the Colorado river and dam. I never went again. I also didn't buy the book (which was 120$). At the end of the year I borrowed a textbook from a friend a week before the exam. I went and wrote the exam, and passed the course. Now I didn't do well by any means, but I got credit for the course.
My fav answer in hindsight was a short answer definition on what "Deep Ecology" was. I BS'ed some answer about sub-marine trenches in the Atlantic ocean. The TA must have had a fun time with my exam, lol.
In case you are wondering, it really means this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology
I still like my answer better! :)
Why is there only a quote from one MIT student? Perhaps because the rest of them didn't agree with the NYTimes glowing assessment of the format? Many students are now trying to pass out of physics altogether by passing the Advanced Standing Exams or just putting up with the hell version of the class that they teach in the traditional lecture and recitation format (provided they get in, as a dislike of TEAL and its beloved Mastering Physics increased enrollment in the harder course so much that they implemented a cutoff on who could enroll based on their entrance math exam score). The two hour lectures aren't for everyone and the only reason why attendance is up because attendance is now mandatory - not because students actually like the program, especially since this program also reeks of profesors reading from the slides that are readily available on the course website. Not only is the attendance now mandatory, but they've also stopped reusing the clickers and are now making students buy their own (to cut down on people punching in the clickers for their friends who didn't show up). And while it seems like working in groups would be a great idea in preparation for the workplace, the reality is that this isn't the workplace - it's a college filled with students who aren't getting paid and who can't stay awake, don't care, or are so anxious to get out of the class that they'll leave behind anyone who isn't on the same page as them instead of taking the professors advice to help their fellows out (yeah, so maybe it is a good preparation for the workplace). The other problem with TEAL is that instead of having one professor teaching the course, they have nine professors - yet still maintain one standardized pset. This is a problem because many of the professors (those who aren't named Dourmashkin) move at a slower pace than the others and their students are at a disadvantage when it comes to pset completion (as the material either wasn't covered or was just covered the day before the due date). Also, if you think the people are paying attention to the lecture instead of using the provided computer to sit on their inbox, you are sadly mistaken.
I'd think you'd favour a return to the professor reading the text and not making you buy the damned book.
*cackles*
All you have to do is go to its Open Courseware site and get free lectures, homework assignments, tests, and more (http://ocw.mit.edu). Now why would you pay $150k for an MIT degree when you can get it for free? My guess is the fancy piece of paper you get at the end of the process...
I graduated from MIT and loved it, but have been questioning how much it was really worth. One thing that the Institute didn't do for me was kick my tail when I decided to major in a humanities subject, thus making my degree useless. I was too ignorant to understand that this was a mistake, and was mainly thinking that I didn't want to end up as Dilbert. Innovations like MIT's OpenCourseWare project and a shift in class sizes may be useful, but they don't address the question of whether students are learning anything useful for their tuition.
Revive the Constitution.
Attendance to lecture does not translate to success. Even if the professor is a good lecturer. A lot of MIT kids are at MIT because they're self motivated and have the capability to learn on their own. Even if a professor is an excellent lecturer, if his material is taken straight out of a textbook (even one he wrote), it's hard to justify going to class from the standpoint of some students if they can get the same information from a textbook at a more convenient time for them.
I don't see why the attendance rate to lecture is important. On that note, I'd like to offer a student's perspective on the usefulness of lecture. For many people, lecture is one of the worst ways to learn material, but it's not like the ONLY way offered to students. If they prefer smaller settings, there's recitation. If they prefer one-on-one time, professors (at least at MIT) have office hours. So as a whole, I don't think the system is broken, because the students are offered a *choice* to use any one of the three aforementioned resources. However, with TEAL, you lose that choice. As the article mentions, TEAL was and still is widely unpopular amongst students, mostly because it forces students to go to class. I'm sure class is helpful for many students but for many others it's really not, and the only difference between lecture and TEAL for them is that they have to go to one and not the other. So, instead of skipping a lecture that would not have been useful, they now have to waste time sitting in a TEAL class that, to them, still isn't helpful.
(I want to clarify that I'm not criticizing the TEAL setting in particular, but I think the lack of choice between TEAL and a conventional lecture setting is a problem)
Don't get me wrong - I agree with you - I love small class sizes. I'm just telling you that in many educational environments the bean counters (accountants) have the upper hand over the educationalists.
Disclaimer at this point: I am a postgrad researcher in education and technology in a large UK university, and have worked as a librarian in the UK state (US: read public) school system.
Going back to your original point, you asked "what's the use of classes this size" (excuse my summary) - I'm afraid I'd still stick by my opinion that it is driven by economic reason, and not pedagogic theory. I think if you asked educational theorists to design a teaching system and told them they could have an infinite budget, they would choose a very low student to teacher ratio. I don't think many would choose one to one as there are social and educational benefits in getting groups of students working together. But I don't think many educationalists would choose high student to teacher ratios in an ideal world.
I understand the spirit of your original post and agree - what's the use of large class sizes- not a lot. Many educational researchers would agree that they are not conducive to learning and quite a few would argue that the lecture format itself is a medieval model that is outmoded and should be thrown away (thanks Prof. Elton!). However to read your post directly, the use of large class sizes is they are cheap to run. I imagine if you pressed your university hard enough you'd find that that, rather than any pedagogic reasoning, is why they choose that format to teach. Maybe not all, but enough students survive that format and continue to pass to keep it as a teaching method.
The difference is that the big schools tend to set the bar much higher, at least here in Australia they do. You might be struggling for teacher attention (this is doubtful if you are a good student) but you will be forced to solve harder problems and work through greater volumes of material. Plus you can be part of much more interesting and rewarding research projects.
The problem with this whole assessment is that it is nothing new, everyone in teaching already knows that smaller classes are superior for the student and the teacher. The issue is you can't always keep the teacher/student ratios up high enough to even have small classes. For that you need limitless funding and student demand... but then I guess we are talking about MIT.
It's true, as many other posts have pointed out, that didactic lectures are pointless. You'll learn just as much from reading a book, or watching a video of the lecture. This has been known for certain since at least the 1970s.
The reason we still have lectures is obvious: they are a cheap way of disseminating information to a large number of students, and in the UK the word "cheap" is very important as we currently have a huge funding gap in Higher Education. Classes will get larger and we will see figures approaching those at MIT
After spending quite a lot of time researching this issue, I realised that lectures were an inevitable feature of university teaching for the foreseeable future, but also that they can be very productive. It is the way that a lecture is taught that makes it useless, the insistence on many lecturers (MIT's OpenCourseware lecturers included) on a purely one-way lecturing style.
Lectures can be interactive, engaging and useful even with 500 students. The secret is to involve the students ffs! Other posters have noted how they could hide in the crowd amongst 499 others... but there are many methods and techniques that can transform such situations into lectures that are both incredibly useful and very enjoyable and engaging for the students.
So, my two cents, is that lecturers must change their style... the didactic lecture is just a convenient charade that allows the students to sleep and gives the lecturer no fear that he/she will be challenged by their audience.
Passing that knowledge on is the other half.
It does no good at all to get a Newton or an Einstein if their discoveries aren't then transmitted down the generations. In fact, I'd argue for a democracy to work, their discoveries need to be not only passed on, but dispersed as widely as possible. It's not until the general population truly understands the implications of "fallout" and "half-life" that we can move past the "Nuke 'em all, let God sort 'em out," nonsense. Think of how our options for Vice-Presidential candidates would improve if the general population truly understood what the biologists mean by "natural selection."
Think of all the misery we go through in this country because the average college graduate can't offer you that much better of an explanation of why the light goes on when you turn the switch other than "Magic fairies made it light up."
It's all well and good if someone over at CalTech discovers "zero point energy" tomorrow, but if the new knowledge isn't then handed down and widely explained enough that the general population can vote intelligently about the matter, then it doesn't do us any good, and may very well put us in greater danger.
And don't even get me started about how we're whoring out our universities so corporations don't have to fund their own product development like Xerox PARC or Bell Labs any more...
Hooray for research. I'm glad I lived long enough to see Fermat's theorem proved, and I'd love to see the Grand Unification Theory before I die, but the purpose of a university is not only to expand the frontiers of knowledge, but to pass it on as well.
Any professor who talks about how he doesn't care about his teaching is only doing half his job.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The University of Michigan has some very large lectures. What they do is that they also add a discussion meeting/class once or twice a week in addition to the lectures/labs. Some are optional and some are not. If there is material that needs to have a more active involvement with the students the profs can ask the GSIs or post docs to go over it with the students. Or the other way around; if there is material that a student needs more active involvement with someone then that is satisfied too.
Id like to note that I have had some amazingly clear and engaging lectures in halls containing hundred of students. It takes a special kind of instructor to pull it off though..
No, that's just ridiculous. It wasn't a university for scripts, it was a university for PEOPLE who want to become scripts. It's like going to law school or med school. I earned my degree and became the script I am today.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I volunteered to take a TEAL version of 8.01 my freshman year (in anticipation of adjusting to the then-required 8.02T the second semester). The class was horrendous. It was a ton of forced experiments that didn't really teach the concepts (but rather focused on a dumbed-down scientific method). Additionally, I was always skeptical of the class as it was obvious that the professors were actively trying to promote/prove that the TEAL version was better than the lecture version (increased attendance was likely caused by the fact that TEAL *required* admission in order to get a good grade by monitoring whether students used their PRS (personal response systems) in order to answer questions). Overall, the class felt like more of a joke than anything and I was saddened that I didn't get to take the lecture class (or have Walter Lewin for 8.02). Regardless, Peter Dourmashkin was a great professor for 8.01T.
I took 8.01 TEAL (physics: mechanics) last term and to be honest it was pretty obnoxious--and that seems to be the general consensus. Reminded me a lot of high school with its assigned seating, and elementary school with the round tables to encourage "collaboration". The projection systems were a complete gimmick; it seemed like professors were always working against the setup, with technical difficulties every day. The whole thing really just seemed like a novelty, and eventually I stopped going entirely (pass/no-record so the whole attendance thing doesn't apply, I passed). I have no idea how they found a person to vouch for it, and she definitely doesn't represent MIT very well (surgeon wtf?, ask course 6 and 8 or something).
MIT really should spend money in other areas, like FOOD. I live on the east side of campus and there is no real structured dining hall system where you pay for a meal plan like you do at other universities. I guess on one side this [literally] forces you to be more "independent", and learn to cook every meal or find food in boston/cambridge. But, I find myself asking myself have I eaten today? way too often. Right now my friends and I are going on two meals a day, I guess that's somewhat okay. I guess I'll figure it out.
I hear 8.02 TEAL is better though, and works better with the TEAL system. I've also heard that TEAL was just developed to pass more students for the physics pre-reqs. As for 8.01, I don't think the "technology enhanced" actually helps with anything, other than mirror [the wrong] white-board in 8 places throughout the room, ymmv.
I'm sorry, I'm calling bull on this. I go to MIT. There are no hot girls here. End of story.
"However, while you can get basic scientific knowledge taught as - more or less - a byproduct of a research development focused program, you cannot get research development as a byproduct of a "good teacher" focused program. "
And, truth be told, I'm not arguing your point either. You're right.
It's just getting awfully dark out here.
When I first set foot on a college campus way back in the early 80s, professors listed their academic affiliations on their door -- Dr. Someguy, PhD, Caltech, Dr. OtherDude, PhD, Stanford, etc.
The last time I spent any significant time on a college campus in the year 2000, I saw entire departments listed by their corporate sponsor. Professors began listing the companies they consulted with, rather than the institution that granted them their degrees.
Yes, it was at the height of the boom, but several professors I heard of -- at a big famous state school of awesome reputation -- had ditched teaching their classes entirely. They literally did not show up to lecture a single class and dumped all teaching duties on their grad students of dubious communication skills, who in turn slashed schedules to a minimum, too busy consulting on the side themselves.
And then we had eight years of Bush. Public schools in this country aren't even a shell of their former selves any more. They're not even a joke. They're just sad and pathetic, cargo cults going through the motions of running a school who have forgotten the substance and barely remember the form.
Most of the "official" communication my kids bring home looks like the first drafts of a high school freshman comp class. I talk to history teachers who can't tell the difference between the battles of Manassas and Midway, science teachers who can't make an electromagnet, English teachers who dimly remember seeing a couple of Shakespeare's plays on video, math teachers who can't take a derivative...
The two people doing the most to educate the American public about science right now are Jamie and Adam of "Mythbusters," and as much as I adore those guys, it's a little like saying our national defense is secured by the good ol' boys of the Buford Volunteer Fire Department.
It's not just our physical infrastructure that's crumbling, our intanglible assets such as level of education among the populace are falling apart as well.
So when I hear someone who calls themselves a "professor" -- and that title literally means teacher, mind you -- talk about how teaching is too trivial a task for them to attend to, how it's not their main mission, it's a little like hearing a firefighter talk about how he doesn't wanna get his hair messed up. It makes me want to grab them by the collar and pimpslap them across the room until they get back into the fight they're supposed to be leading, the fight that we are losing so badly.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I say that because, although I dislike huge lecture halls, the likely alternative isn't going to fair much better, perhaps worse.
Lecture halls are primarily bad because the voice of the instructor might not be able to reach everyone, and more importantly, what is being written on the black/white-board isn't going to be visible to everyone. The former can be solved by using a microphone and speakers. But, the latter is a critical issue. The only real solution is to reduce the room size. Unfortunately, this comes with its own issues.
So, what do we do with all those students? After all, there are only so many people that can fit into one room and only so many Profs that can teach so many sections. Some common solutions are video taping the lecture or putting it on a cable channel live/alternate times or having different rooms viewing the one Prof in the other room. Unfortunately, all these have critical issues.
The first and second are similar. The problem being lack of access to the Prof. I've had peers that have taken such a class and they hated them. For one, being surrounded by all that equipment and people with cameras, etc, is irritating and distracting. Secondly, you have to wait to ask your questions while some guy with a shoulder-camera comes to video you asking it. Thirdly, to get what is written in the video, one must use a special tool which isn't good at displaying what is written and can also fail from time to time. Well, those are the common ones that I remember. But, they did bitch a lot about it. So, I'm certainly not giving a complete list. Needless to say, student don't like this.
The last one has many of the same features of the first two if one is in the room where the Prof actually is. If one isn't in that room, then Prof-student interaction is a problem. Of course, there is that button that one can push to ask a question, but that ruins it. I for one (among *every* other student I've known) like the ability to instantly engage in discourse with a Prof when the issue comes up. Having to do this by pushing a button and waiting destroys the flow of the classroom. There is also the problem of the Prof just not acknowledging when a student pushes the button. Yes, this happens. And yes, I know of someone who does this pathalogically. In fact, he does this on purpose and has stated so explicitly. I could go on.
The only real solution is to convert those 1000 student massive lecture halls to several smaller ones that will fit about 100 or so students. No that's not big. I've had much of my academic career in such rooms and even in the back one can see the board clearly enough as long as the Prof doesn't write /really/ small. And if (s)he does and you don't say anything, it's NOT the Profs fault, it's yours.
But, to do this, the University is going to have to do something that it doesn't want to do: spend money. That is spending money on renovations and hiring more Profs. That latter one being something that Universities *really* hate doing. Why? Because, they cost *a lot* of money.
So, what the Universities do is hire stipends. For those that don't know what that is, a stipend is a Prof that doesn't work for the University, but rather they just teach that one class. So, the University doesn't have to pay them full wage, nor do they have to pay out benefits of any kind. They are very cheap. So, much so, that about or over 50% of the Profs teaching a Universities (at least in North America) are not actually Profs, but rather stipends. This is the type that will likely be teaching these new sections.
Why is this a bad thing? Well, for one, because of the increase in spending to teach a section for a course, the tuition fees will likely be increased. But, that's hardly a surprise. The main and more painful problem is that since stipends will be teaching it, the quality of instruction will be lower. I'm not saying that these people are incompetent or any such thing. It's just that these jobs will either
I remember a Psych 1000 class. It was a big hall and there was really only room for about 850. At least 50 people had to sit in the aisles or in extra desks at the front of the lecture theater. As time went on, more room became available. I remember one class (before a long weekend), there were only about 30 people attending. The prof urged people to come closer (instead of being 20 rows back). Some reluctantly did. I suppose it didn't help that people could hand in assignments at the start of class and that acted as an attendance register. Sometimes one person would be designated to hand in more than 20 separate assignment papers with 20 different names (no one paid attention). And sometimes people would hand in papers at the start of the lecture, but then leave. You mean to tell me that's all going away?
Um, there are PLENTY of hot chicks at MIT, having brains does not make you unattractive and MIT is the elite of the elite so they can be selective for well rounded very smart people. Don't get me wrong there are plenty of basement dwelling nerds there, but from my campus visits and all of the tv shows I have seen they aren't even the majority. Think head chearleder who was in all honors/AP classes with a near 4.0 while also being an officer of 6-8 other clubs/groups, that's the people that get into MIT.
You obviously did not attend MIT. The stereotype of the head cheerleader would never consider even applying to MIT, much less attending.
Personally I find MIT open courseware kicks my uni's lectures butt a billion times over. As a supplement to a face2face course, it really excels.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with you - I love small class sizes. I'm just telling you that in many educational environments the bean counters (accountants) have the upper hand over the educationalists.
Captain Obvious, I would like to be the first to congratulate you on your promotion to Major.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not to say there were not a few lectures i enjoyed, but even seen from afterwards (i visited the last lecture in 1999) i still feel the same about lectures in big halls: They are usually a waste of time
Let me classify the persons in the room
1) the Lecturer. If it is a big lecture, it is likely that he got the shortest straw. The students are so many that he doe not see a possibility figure out which student belongs to which the following class, which makes him feel sad at best and revengeful (for beeing there) at worst, instead of working with the students.
2) sometimes: the assistant for experiments. His role is to be an overqualified (with a phd) replayer of experiments unchanged for decades. He would prefer to be at his own research. Nobody can expect that he contributes, so he doenst even if he may enhance the lecture very much.
3) The students.
a) the ones reading the book before the lecture. A small but important group. the best would be to meet them in a tewnty minute session and let them ask questions.
b) The completely clueless/untalented ones, whose last attempt it is to pass the exam for this lecture, and who are present always therefore, hoping to get a few extra-points for beeing present. They will only feel even worse about beeing clueless because of a)
c) the rest, who is there for one of the following reasons: Coffee Machine in the basement. Meeting with buddies for the breakfast. Returning Homework. Copying homework. Meeting the cute biologists in the break. Ahem, and yes: looking at which chapter in the the textbook the lecture is currently.
I belonged usually to class c). I now have my phd and i am currently working as a postdoc. I visited maybe 25% of the suggested lectures, and my attention span is, due to ADS, something like 5 Minutes. I am only moderately talented for what i am doing and my intelligence is in comparison to my peers slightly below average. The best students who started with me where virtually not present in the lectures. And visiting the lectures did not help the untalented ones a little bit. For me, it never made a difference, as for a lot of other people i know.
What i know is: the closer you work with students, the bigger is your chance to teach them something (not only about science) - and also to give them positive or negative feedback, and parts of your enthusiasm. I feel good about the fact that i manage to bring even a mediocre student trough his maste thesis and that the lab courses in which i supervised small groups of students sometimes motivated the students to continue the subject, or research in general. Talking twenty minutes per week with a single student to discuss where his internship project should be headed is, in my opinion, worth more than putting him in a lecture hall for 4 hours. Even students not keen on theory sometimes are reading theoretical chapters enthusiastically if you make the project in which they work for you "their" project (i started to find a lot of subjects interesting, which i found boring before, when i worked on my masters thesis). Science contains a huge amount of project which just need to be done and for which it is not required to be a genius already or have big knowledge.
If you're looking for a lot of individual time and supervision, no, a big school is not the place to go.
But if you're looking for great resources and opportunities, then a big school is far superiour.
Well said. I teach in an european University of Applied Sciences where the size of a class is guranteed to be between 15 and 32. And that makes a difference!
The down side is, the bachelors has become something you go buying. As a result you get some 25% of students who shouldn't be there. I'm talking about the first year, where failure rates are around 40%.
This is way past due. When I was a freshman at Ga Tech in 1971, my first calculus class had thirty or so students and was taught by the dean of the math department. This is what an undergraduate education is supposed to be like. A class of hundreds taught in a massive lecture hall is essentially self-taught. It lacks two essential components - an opportunity for individual students to interact with the professor during class, and the interaction between students from which so much real education derives. I recently took my son to Tech (he was accepted but decided to go elsewhere). The first two years of calculus are now taught in massive lecture halls. These are make or break classes for so many students who might do fine if any actual *teaching* was going on there. As far as I'm concerned, putting undergraduates in lecture halls with hundreds of other students is a theft of their tuition - and a waste of their time. Let the *graduate* students teach themselves. By the time they get to that point they should be able to anyway.
You raise a very good point about chicks, but the end of lecture halls is the end of an avenue of socializing. Don't get me wrong: a lot of smart people have social intelligence, but to take away a lecture hall experience is to some extent the closing of an avenue of meeting new people. Smart people, more often than not, lack in their abilities to socialize due to a huge prioritization of time spent on stuff that matters to them. Social intelligence is not logical, which is why many geeks suffer in social environments.
Thanks, appreciated. You'd better keep those medals out, you'll be awarding a few more to posters on slashdot who don't realise things cost once they get out into the real world :-)