Numbers and rankings couldn’t have told me that, and I curse the day I set foot here. I’m trying to get out into some place where my fellow students won’t call me a nerd for actually taking an interest.
They don’t sound like people who worked very hard to get in the school. What was the acceptance rate for incoming students?
I don’t actually know if there even are STEM schools that don’t have sucky lectures and apathetic students, though. Learning the stuff involves building models in your head that are too complex to do while listening to a guy talk to a hall full of people, so you have to do most of the work by yourself with pen, paper and textbook anyway. The teaching organization is there to give you exams to give you feedback on how well you’ve learned things.
My current idea for the best way to deal with post-secondary education is to basically think of yourself as an autodidact and do your basic degree as fast as you can with minimal interaction with lectures and other stupid distractions for the magical piece of paper that will show the industry workplaces that you are good for serious business.
It’s a bit messed up situation overall. The standard conventions for teaching undergrads are bad enough that you could just as well have the students watch lecture videos off YouTube. There are methods that work, but they are much more costly on the expensive professor labor, like one-on-one tutoring, so I guess only the students who demonstrate that they are good enough to master the undergrad stuff effortlessly without proper instruction are considered promising enough to get that. I remember reading about mathematics education in Oxford or somewhere, which was basically trying to educate people with a good chance of doing novel mathematical research, which involved lots of tutoring with a single tutor working with just one or two students and working on whatever stuff they needed to be doing.
It’s very easy to get accepted, it’s very hard to survuve the five official years the degree takes, which become eight on average. The dropout rate is fifty percent in the first two years, and thirty percent of what’s left after that.
so you have to do most of the work by yourself with pen, paper and textbook anyway.
What’s the point of making us go to a building, then?
you could just as well have the students watch lecture videos off YouTube.
And if the videos were well done, it would be a net improvement.
lots of tutoring with a single tutor working with just one or two students and working on whatever stuff they needed to be doing.
What’s the point of making us go to a building, then?
As far as my experience went, there isn’t much of a one. Thankfully the Finnish university I went to was also very flexible on letting you do most of the courses by just showing up for an exam and doing well on that, no need to attend classes if you don’t like them.
That’s only for postgrads, though, right?
Found it. It’s Cambridge (and he mentions that Oxford has a similar system), and it does seem to be specifically for undergraduates.
A lot of places will start letting you talk with a competent human once you go postgrad, but undergrad students going from high school math to university math are the ones who would probably most need that.
Yes, both Oxford and Cambridge use the tutorial system. Undergraduates get lectures, classes and tutorials (or supervisions in Cambridge), where the latter would be one lecturer/professor to one to three students.
They don’t sound like people who worked very hard to get in the school. What was the acceptance rate for incoming students?
I don’t actually know if there even are STEM schools that don’t have sucky lectures and apathetic students, though. Learning the stuff involves building models in your head that are too complex to do while listening to a guy talk to a hall full of people, so you have to do most of the work by yourself with pen, paper and textbook anyway. The teaching organization is there to give you exams to give you feedback on how well you’ve learned things.
My current idea for the best way to deal with post-secondary education is to basically think of yourself as an autodidact and do your basic degree as fast as you can with minimal interaction with lectures and other stupid distractions for the magical piece of paper that will show the industry workplaces that you are good for serious business.
It’s a bit messed up situation overall. The standard conventions for teaching undergrads are bad enough that you could just as well have the students watch lecture videos off YouTube. There are methods that work, but they are much more costly on the expensive professor labor, like one-on-one tutoring, so I guess only the students who demonstrate that they are good enough to master the undergrad stuff effortlessly without proper instruction are considered promising enough to get that. I remember reading about mathematics education in Oxford or somewhere, which was basically trying to educate people with a good chance of doing novel mathematical research, which involved lots of tutoring with a single tutor working with just one or two students and working on whatever stuff they needed to be doing.
It’s very easy to get accepted, it’s very hard to survuve the five official years the degree takes, which become eight on average. The dropout rate is fifty percent in the first two years, and thirty percent of what’s left after that.
What’s the point of making us go to a building, then?
And if the videos were well done, it would be a net improvement.
That’s only for postgrads, though, right?
It’s for undergrads across all subjects. See tutorial system.
Oh. We have those too. In name only. They usually ignore you, or make it clear to you that they are not interested in helping.
As far as my experience went, there isn’t much of a one. Thankfully the Finnish university I went to was also very flexible on letting you do most of the courses by just showing up for an exam and doing well on that, no need to attend classes if you don’t like them.
Found it. It’s Cambridge (and he mentions that Oxford has a similar system), and it does seem to be specifically for undergraduates.
A lot of places will start letting you talk with a competent human once you go postgrad, but undergrad students going from high school math to university math are the ones who would probably most need that.
Yes, both Oxford and Cambridge use the tutorial system. Undergraduates get lectures, classes and tutorials (or supervisions in Cambridge), where the latter would be one lecturer/professor to one to three students.