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.
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 took my college level statistics class during one summer and the teacher threatened to just never show up again and cancel the class after giving us a test where the average grade was a 48.
Bro gave us 8 hours of homework per night and expected us to have z tables memorized.
I didn’t like history, until I just sort of discovered it on my own. After that, I wondered why EVERY history teacher I ever had before or after, was so terrible at it. It’s the most fascinating subject, just stories of interesting people doing interesting things, how can you fuck that up?
And yet somehow History has to be taught in the most mind-numbingly way possible.
“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.
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!”
Now that you mention it, all of the hands look weird
It’s slop. Coming to take yer jerb.
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.
so many of my 100 and 200 level STEM classes were like this in no small part due to the instructors not wanting to teach. they were being forced to teach as part of their employment contract but their main work was research
i resented them for turning their lack of ability to get a position that didn’t require teaching into my problem because they refused to give the slightest effort towards actually explaining the material
doing problems from the textbook on the overhead projector with near-zero explanation is dogshit teaching
At least yours were taught by actual faculty?
A lot of my 100 and 200 level classes were taught by grad students who were interning as teachers in exchange for free/discounted tuition.
At least yours were taught by actual people.
My girlfriend showed me recently that one of her profs made an AI clone of himself (voice and visual) and distributed prerecorded lessons that way. Who knows if he’s even writing the script for it. Probably not.
Did the professor willingly do this? Around/after COVID a lot of universities were forcibly claiming the lectures recorded by teachers in previous semesters as their own IP so they could lay them off. Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s yet another cost cutting measure.
Looks like academics should be unionizing.
During covid when I was recording lectures I tried to make them fun and silly and it would take me like 3-4 hours to record and edit. The art is gone.
That was the most jarring thing for me transitioning from a community/junior college to a private university. Pretty much every teacher I had in CC was there because they loved to teach, but didn’t want to teach children. In University it felt like everyone was teaching because they had bills to pay and had no concept of a world outside of school.
I went to fairly small private college for Music, and all my music professors were really great, every one. Even the couple that were considered the worst were decent teachers, it’s just that some were amazing, and made everyone else look mediocre.
Once you got out of the Conservatory, and started experiencing other subjects, the quality was variable. I had some excellent profs, but also some fairly bad ones. The worst were the adjunct teachers who were only doing it for a side hustle, they generally weren’t too invested.
I went to a very small public university campus that a few years before was associated with a massive state university. They were still mostly independent but we’re getting all sorts of pressure to conform to the larger universities policies on research etc. At my school the professors all taught and did little to no research.
As part of their ongoing arguments they had all juniors/seniors in both schools take a standardize tests at the end of their core degree courses for a year. My tiny university averaged 90th percentile. The large university averaged 30th percentile. The difference having highly qualified dedicated teachers.
Even for the classes with excellent profs, sometimes I’d have to do the thing above.
If I had midterms or an important project in one class, I might have to skip the prereading / review for another class. After that, I’d get to class and not understand much of it. Then I’d catch up the best I could during weekends, reading breaks, or just during finals season.
And that’s how universities work, because who cares if it’s all just a giant farce, right? Gotta have the paper that says your smart.
Forced attendance is just a stupid concept… If you pass the exam, who cares where and how you learned it? Happy that I never had that.
Forced attendance is a combination of oversight, because it proves the university is trying to accomplish the ‘whole teaching thing,’ and because it’s pretty evident that students who attend more classes do better. I’m sure all of us on lemmy can say they had classes (or just areas of life) where they completely taught themselves, but in general even a mediocre professor makes the self-reading/studying portion fit better into your head.
The oversight thing can go take a hike, but I’m okay with raising the outcome for a bunch of students by requiring attendance.
Ah, so university is just about get a number to get a piece of paper.
Yes, in the same way that hospitals are just expensive ways to get a discharge letter.
Something something metrics and goals.
That is not the case, exam evaluates learning outcome. If the student satisfies the learning outcome in the end, I don’t care how they did it.
I am only here to help the student acheive as much learning outcome as they can and in the end, assigning a score that reflect how much they have acheived.
That is the important part: in the end, it is only a letter, but that letter should reflect real skill. Yet I don’t want student to waste their precious time when they can achieve the required outcome without doing homework and/or attending classes.
Idk if this is specific to computer science or engineering, but the higher level CS courses I’ve taken basically stop caring. Most of them even make the lecture slides available for the general public. You can just access it, like my networking course just throws the slides to GitHub.
I cannot for the life of me understand why they do that.
So everyone, being an adult, can learn at their own pace in a way that is most efficient to them?
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.
At some level, college is supposed to be about teaching yourself.
That said, professors are supposed to help.
Exactly. Full-time college itineraries are based roughly on a full-time 40-hour work week. Each credit represents three hours of study time. One in-class and two out of class. A fifteen-credit itinerary should eat up 45 hours of time. Fifteen in class, 30 of independent study.
Is that why it’s 10s of thousands of dollars, or more?
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.
I’ve never been to a lecture that took attendance. The only classes that did take attendance would sure as fuck notice that you got up and left.
Please take your AI trash tf out of here.
I learn best by reading anyway, so lectures were always a waste of my time.
If you are in the US you are paying for it, most likely with debt.
