“I decided we would do an oral exam* because it’s a great way to see if people have actually learned anything from my course and aren’t just parroting notes. Because I can ask them to elaborate on their answers.”
Yeah and it’s also a great way to get otherwise good students to go blank because it isn’t possible to absorb every bit of complex information you spent 12 weeks rushing through, Barbara.
This “gotcha” style teaching fucking pisses me off. There is no time in the real world people are not going to be able to look up their notes. Fuck, half the time I’ll ask a professor something and they’ll be like “I’ll have to look that up later and get back to you.” Why? BECAUSE THEY’RE HUMAN AND THATS HOW BRAINS ARE.
This type of teaching only favours students that already had experience with the subject beforehand and freaks with amazing memories. This kind of understanding of the material only comes from experience and repetition, something that the traditional 12 weeks of rushed lectures/labs that discard each topic quickly to fit all of them in don’t do.
I fucking hate how much I am going into debt to be taught only the vaguest concepts but doing most of the teaching myself in my own time. Education under capitalism is a joke.
*An oral exam is an exam where instead of answering questions in a quiet room on paper, you have to answer questions on a live video call with your instructor.
I never understood “filter” classes, ones with failure rates >50%. Because to me it seems either the professors are fucking awful or that it’s deliberately meant to be failed and retaken multiple times, charging full price each time
Sometimes it’s because the Professors (who are, yes awful) feel there’s a minimum level of knowledge to be taught and that’s the barrier. Which might be fair, if University were free. And there are courses I struggled at because I didn’t have to learn appropriate prerequisites that aren’t usually taught until 2nd-3rd year (Partial Differential Equations and stuff beyond, mostly)
Ideally you could have 6-7 year BSc-Beng courses for difficult courses where it really is required to learn advanced math to even start learning the subject. Not every subject takes the same time to learn to a Bachelor’s level and not every person, even extremely smart people, learn at the same pace.
To illustrate, the working class scientist Michael Faraday famously went through almost everything Maxwell did in electromagnetism in a qualitative way but his struggles with manipulating even basic arithmetic crippled his progress towards a unified theory (he might have done an end run around the Aether concept with just a bit of trigonometry). Imagine if he’d had another decade to work on it instead of having to get a job as an apprentice at age 14.
But see “free university” as a prerequisite for that.
Some classes, acting to filter out students before they take higher level courses in a subject, makes sense to me.
If you cannot understand Organic Chemistry 101 as a freshman, perhaps Microbiology isn’t the subject you should major in. If the worst student in med school still becomes a doctor, filtering these applicants is arguably a social good.
But. This only works when you remove the profit motive from universities. If there is no financial incentive to fail people, only reputation of the institution.
(I am neglecting the very real issues some people have with learning differences, poor primary education, etc. And as someone who is profoundly dyslexic myself, I can testify that these are real issues that need to be acknowledged. But again, a society that prioritized education as opposed to profit, that prioritized intellectual excellence instead of securing funding for sports, would go a long way towards mitigating those issues in the first place. If Texas spent more time and money on education, then they do on stadiums for example, students would be entering university with a well-rounded general education, instead of being barely literate, they would be in a position to take a difficult filter class and succeed or fail based on their merits instead of as a result of what zip code they were born in.)
I’m gonna recommend you check out a series published in Naked Capitalism called What If Medicine Were Taught Like a Science. It’s written by a microbiologist who has taught at medical schools for decades. Organic chemistry isn’t harder to understand than inorganic, we just teach it poorly so it acts as a filter class.
Cuba shows that we could create as many doctors as teachers each year, we just choose not to in order to artificially inflate their wages.
At the end of the day the core issue is the profit motive.
So long as education is gatekept to prevent social mobility, and doctors have a vested interest in keeping their numbers low and their salary high, we will have these issues.
Especially as college costs continue to go up.
In a communist Utopia, people will still fail organic chemistry. When the dictatorship of capitalism is abolished, people will still fail advanced math courses.
And that’s okay. Individuals have different skills, different strengths and weaknesses, not everyone is equipped to be an astrophysicist.
But when you throw capital into the mix, when you turn University into a daycare for your young adults, And you structure society in such a way that without an advanced degree you are doomed to poverty, You have created a system with perverce incentives.
This means that the person who has the resources, even if they don’t necessarily have the innate skill or desire, can brute force their way to a degree.
Whereas the next Einstein, the next Newton, the next Hubble, is working at a fast food joint, their mind preoccupied not with the mysteries of the universe, but with how they’re going to pay their cell phone bill this month.
This morning, our generations Lenin had to wake up 2 hours early, take three buses, to arrive on time to a job that barely pays enough to survive. And instead of pontificating on theory, they are being ground down by poverty.