College Learning?

I’m still killin it

I like the idea of free third level education, but students should be working 9-5 at least.

I’m going to college for the first time right now at a local community college. I’m a little older then your average freshman, I’m 24, and that gives me some interesting perspective on the goings on around there. I see a lot of kids really wasting their time, missing lots of classes, not taking things seriously, not studying or doing homework. I also see a lot of kids focusing and, as one of my professors put it, leaning into the material. Unfortunately, most kids fall into the former category.

To them college is something they have to do to get mommy and daddy to continue to fund their current lifestyle. For them, learning occurs by accident.

My statistics teacher read this aloud in class the other day and just started laughing afterwards since it’s SO easy to skew these types of studies.

[quote]study wrote: He noted that students in the study, on average, earned a 3.2 grade-point average. “Students are able to navigate through the system quite well with little effort,” Arum said.
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I did laugh at this though because it is very true. I currently have a 3.87 GPA at a community college and am transferring to a university next year. I typically study 1-5 hours a week, and 4 of those hours will be doing math problems. I can cruise through the typical gen.ed. class doing <1 hour of work a week and getting a A in the course. However, I do learn a lot, and I’m sure most of the students in the study do also. But when you ask someone, did you learn anything? Coming up with a specific answer doesn’t usually work to well.

[quote]Tyrant wrote:
My statistics teacher read this aloud in class the other day and just started laughing afterwards since it’s SO easy to skew these types of studies.

[quote]study wrote: He noted that students in the study, on average, earned a 3.2 grade-point average. “Students are able to navigate through the system quite well with little effort,” Arum said.
[/quote]

I did laugh at this though because it is very true. I currently have a 3.87 GPA at a community college and am transferring to a university next year. I typically study 1-5 hours a week, and 4 of those hours will be doing math problems. I can cruise through the typical gen.ed. class doing <1 hour of work a week and getting a A in the course. However, I do learn a lot, and I’m sure most of the students in the study do also. But when you ask someone, did you learn anything? Coming up with a specific answer doesn’t usually work to well.
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Lol Oh man that quote accurately describes how I was at my CC. I just transferred to a Cal State so well if it holds true. I mean look Gen Ed. Courses at CC are just ridiculously ezy.

[quote]TD54 wrote:

I definitely think it depends on the major. Science majors can’t bullshit through and expect to graduate. Neither can Econ or Engineering majors. Majors like communications, any kind of art, psychology or sociology are pretty easily bullshitted in my opinion…[/quote]

This is very true, Im taking Accounting/CIS as a major and that stuff is pretty detailed, or maybe im Biased :stuck_out_tongue:

As an architecture student, I spend about 9-12 hours every day doing classwork in my studio. My roommate who majors in Computer Science skipped a week of classes and stopped showering to get all of the Halo Reach achievements. You can fill in the blanks.

It is what you put into it.

If you go, apply yourself, study hard, make connections for your job and make lasting friendships, then college will have been absolutely worth it.

I learned a ton about life, myself, and my major while I was in college.

College is what you make of it, just like anything else in life.

If you don’t have fun in college you fail at life.

That series of articles is kind of tricky. It asks a lot of comparative questions like “Do you think that students today study as much as students 10 years ago?”, which is difficult to answer for a current first time undergrad student who was not a first time undergrad 10 years ago.

It also asks for self evaluation from a category of people who are, as a matter of development, overly concerned with outward appearance. What 18-20 something year old kid wants to admit that he had to study to do well in what may be considered a fluff course or bullshit type of major?

Maybe things have changed a lot, or maybe it has more to do with course content, but even at the CC I attended in 03 and for a few spring semesters beyond that, if you didn’t study and prepare for class, you got dropped. The profs. would even tell kids straight out- If you don’t do x hours of work in preparation for this class, you will fail.

If academia as collective social institution wanted to participate in a collaborative effort that looked more like an honest evaluation for the sake of improvement, they would pool resources (money) and engage the services of an independent entity such as a corporate auditing or analytical firm. Of course that would be extremely expensive and could very well end up with some colleges paying a lot of money to get embarrassed.

[quote]SkyzykS wrote:
The profs. would even tell kids straight out- If you don’t do x hours of work in preparation for this class, you will fail.
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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told this over the course of my academic career. It’s been true maybe once or twice. When profs say this I take it with a grain of salt.

[quote]Solarisol wrote:

[quote]SkyzykS wrote:
The profs. would even tell kids straight out- If you don’t do x hours of work in preparation for this class, you will fail.
[/quote]

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told this over the course of my academic career. It’s been true maybe once or twice. When profs say this I take it with a grain of salt.[/quote]

It held very true in those classes. The people that did the assignments invariably passed the tests.

The ones that didn’t or tried to bs their way through got dropped. My pre-calc professor told a girl to her face and in front of the class “Quit lying to me and wasting my time. You shouldn’t be here, now get your stuff and get out.”. A whole lot of others just fell like dominoes up until mid-term. By then prof would just pull them out and tell them “Don’t bother coming back. You can no longer pass this class.”.

Maybe it’s different in other places or with other people, but if you weren’t going to be bothered with bringing your book and doing what you were directed to do, they weren’t going to be bothered with someone taking up time and space with questions that exposed the fact that they weren’t doing the work, thereby holding back and wasting the time of the people who did.

“I had a hard time with problem # 37” was fine, but “What is factoring polynomials?” got you the boot.

[quote]SkyzykS wrote:

[quote]Solarisol wrote:

[quote]SkyzykS wrote:
The profs. would even tell kids straight out- If you don’t do x hours of work in preparation for this class, you will fail.
[/quote]

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told this over the course of my academic career. It’s been true maybe once or twice. When profs say this I take it with a grain of salt.[/quote]

It held very true in those classes. The people that did the assignments invariably passed the tests.

The ones that didn’t or tried to bs their way through got dropped. My pre-calc professor told a girl to her face and in front of the class “Quit lying to me and wasting my time. You shouldn’t be here, now get your stuff and get out.”. A whole lot of others just fell like dominoes up until mid-term. By then prof would just pull them out and tell them “Don’t bother coming back. You can no longer pass this class.”.

Maybe it’s different in other places or with other people, but if you weren’t going to be bothered with bringing your book and doing what you were directed to do, they weren’t going to be bothered with someone taking up time and space with questions that exposed the fact that they weren’t doing the work, thereby holding back and wasting the time of the people who did.

“I had a hard time with problem # 37” was fine, but “What is factoring polynomials?” got you the boot.
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I remember I found my HS pre-cal very tough. Seemed like every day they were moving on to a new subject. That made it very easy to fall behind when you had to know/understand what was taught the day before, knowing that the next day would be something new.

Take a science degree and try and bullshit your way out of that.

It seems like it’s dependent a lot upon which school you go to and what your major is. If they include community college in those statistics I’m not surprised. ATSU (across the street university) is filled with dumbasses doing high school part deux, which they sucked at the first time round. Even at my school (a research university), the psych, cognitive science and such majors seem pretty fucking easy.

I guarantee you, though, all my neuroscience, bioengineering and math friends have to study their asses off.

No one ever bullshitted their way through a proof-based, upper division math class. The economics at my school is kind of a joke though, you barely have to be able to take derivatives and many of the students seem a lot more concerned with their frat/sorority than doing much work. Even so, I know lots of people who don’t even know calculus, and that’s a pre-req for some of the ‘easy’ majors.

In short: a lot of college is hard and a lot isn’t. It’s a matter of the work the student puts into learning and challenging him/herself.

[quote]Agressive Napkin wrote:

No one ever bullshitted their way through a proof-based, upper division math class. The economics at my school is kind of a joke though, you barely have to be able to take derivatives and many of the students seem a lot more concerned with their frat/sorority than doing much work. Even so, I know lots of people who don’t even know calculus, and that’s a pre-req for some of the ‘easy’ majors.
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I’d just like to point out that they don’t really need nearly as much math as, say, a physicist or an engineer. It’d probably be beneficial for them to build up their network for those more biz-econ type majors.

Just playin’ the devil’s advocate. FWIW I’m an engineering major lol.

In any case, as for learning, for myself, the more classes I take, the more math and physics makes sense. Of course, “learning” is very subjective. If it’s just straight knowledge, I’d say I’m doing fine. If it’s the capacity to learn and understand new ideas, then I’d say I’m doing fine too. It’s always fun to have a class that introduces a concept that rapes your brain.

I go to a liberal arts university, and it seems their focus (besides the science majors, such as biomedical) is less on fact memorization and more on critical thinking. At least thats what they tell us in every class.

I’m one of those that can skate through most things in school. I got by pretty easily for the first couple of years, but something clicked and I started trying. My gpa went up considerably. That being said: I feel my education in college has been more about maturing as a person, learning to teach myself, learning to think critically, and developing a work ethic with anything that I’m doing. Yet I still don’t study much. I do the work necessary, but studying is not a normal habit. I would still say that my education is completely worth it.

This is my second year out of high school,and I am a complete fucking retard compared to what I was then.It sucks.

[quote]Tex Ag wrote:

[quote]MementoMori wrote:

[quote]Tex Ag wrote:

[quote]MementoMori wrote:
I feel as if I never put in any effort into univeristy, and the feeling only grew as time went on. I just fnished my degree this past semester with a 7.9 on 10 and I do not feel as if this was an achievement or struggle or action worth praising. I finished the degree because I had the patience to do it. I don’t feel as if I ever really broke a mental sweat. It’s just something I did over the past 4 years.

I’m more proud of the full time work I did (entirely unrelated to my field) and the money I saved during school than I am about the school itself.

I handed in work knowing it wasn’t what I was capable of and got A’s anyway. I got bad mark’s too occaisonally and didn’t really mind because it showed the professor was actually paying attention.

For the record I have a Bachelor of Arts with Honours, specialization in Communications. I’m sure some will say this is why it was so easy, if I could go back I wouldn’t have taken it.[/quote]

How much do you think this was a lack of intellectual ‘pushing’ by the course/college and how much of it was your approach/expectations of the program/college?[/quote]

I did everything that was asked of me. I just feel like I wasn’t asked much. All classes overlapped and all classes discussed dated theory with next to no real world relevancy. When a few professors chose to incorporate the later I listened intently and didn’t mind what my mark was.

In group assignments if I tried to include real world ideas and applications my classmates stared blankly and demanded a quotation or a theory or a class slide that could be used for this point.

I developed this jaded perspective from what I experienced not what I expected.

For the most part I view university as an Ivory Tower that has divorced itself from reality in order to stand in judgement of it.

Of course not all professors exhibited this and I obviously don’t know your teaching style or philosophy to include you in that generalization.
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Your experience is one reason I think college should include a wider, not narrower, set of classes. Once you get ‘trapped’ in your department/discipline, this can be a problem. Sorry that was your experience but hopefully in some years you can see more from your experience than disappointment.

I would argue that universities, at least in the US, are not divorced from reality (though some disciplines may certainly well be) but rather so hung up in the reality of getting funding (meaning meeting the agenda of those giving the money) that they have lost sight of educating. I actually think a greater disconnect could lead to better education - though many business leaders would strongly disagree.

Case in point, the ability to get outside funding in more important than ability to teach when it comes to gaining employment as tenure track jobs (based on a decade of looking at the job ads and talking to department chairs/deans/etc.)

On a different note: What do you think would have helped (generally) in your case/classes?[/quote]

Maybe that is a difference between Canada and the United States. Obviously there is still funding for Research and my University was recognized in Canada for its contributions. However, given that Post Secondary education is heavily subsidisedby the Provincial Government, the onus on results isn’t the same.

My biggest qualm with university is that I went there to get the training for a job. Not learn about how jobs destroy the environment, class structure and my soul. Maybe I was wrong to do so and should have gone to college or picked a more specific major. That could be my fault.

Another problem I find is professors do not fail students. Especially in group papers. I see students in 4th year, senior level classes with piss poor english skills. They don’t remember the subjects taught over and over and over again in my degree either (for example John Stuart Mills, Jeremy Bentham, Hedonistic Calculus, Panopticon, etc etc). I had to learn about these subjects in at LEAST 6 classes. If I mention it in a group assignment, blank stares answer me.

Professors give uniform marks to all group because they know someone in that group deserves and needs an A. If they punish the poor members of that group they’ll be signing themself up to a 2 hour debate with the “smart” student that will end in them receiving an A. Why bring that upon yourself? Just give everyone an A.

All that being said. I had fun during univeristy. Pretty easy to since school rarely got in the way.