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I think if they forced students to actually work on meaningful problems they'd get around a lot of this.

• zbyszek 16y ago
  Indeed, but in my experience, students regard a problem as "meaningful" if and only if it will appear in the exam. Were they forced to work in a manner designed to stimulate their intellectual curiosity for the subject, many would complain that the course was too hard and the teaching methods were unfair, leading to fewer students enrolling for it. Low pass-rates and low take-up look bad, and the faculty administration would scrap the course. I am generalising wildly here, of course.
  • philk 16y ago
    That's true, but I think it's important to draw a line in the sand and say "students don't get to dictate that their studies should be easy".[1] Otherwise we end up with courses that teach little, are easily gamed, and produce graduates with little value. [1] And to be clear, I think universities as a whole should take up the fight. When an institution keeps handing out degrees to anyone who pays tuition it devalues the college overall.