6 ms·

FTA: Those fixed standards enable a world of variation. At Western Governors, students aren’t asked to sit in a class any longer than it takes for them to demon

by buff-a 15y ago

FTA: Those fixed standards enable a world of variation. At Western Governors, students aren’t asked to sit in a class any longer than it takes for them to demonstrate that they have mastered the material. In fact, they aren’t asked to sit in a “class” at all. This article seems to suggest that at other US universities, you actually have to show up to classes to pass them? Is that actually the case????

sliverstorm 15y ago
Good luck passing an in-class final without attending class at least once.
- shard 15y ago
  Lucky for me most of my undergrad classes had take-home exams.
sakura_k 15y ago
Attendance-based grading is the salve a mediocre instructor applies to keep up the appearance that they're creating value for the university.
- jseliger 15y ago
  Sometimes, however, attendance policies are also benevolent paternalism: I say this because I teach English comp at the University of Arizona. Students who don't show up tend to miss a lot of the material and don't do especially well—hence the attendance policy. And the stuff that's done in class (discussion, close reading, sentence construction, and so forth) is stuff that can't really be made up outside of class—as I tell students, if you could do it at home, I'd say, "Do it at home" and I'd do something else in class. Yeah, there's a correlation != causation problem with weak students who tend to miss class being the ones who most need it, but the overall idea of class doing things that can't really be done otherwise still holds. There are also a certain number of students who say or believe, "I'm already a good writer; I don't need to take a composition class." Out of the ~300 I've taught, that's probably been true of one to five, or so, but far more seem to have believed it. A school like the one listed sounds great. It also sounds like it'll work best for the highly motivated. One problem with the HN posts about how universities are wasteful, unnecessary, and so on, is that a pretty small percentage of people are willing to do university-caliber work without the structure of the university. HN posters tend to forget about the other 97% of the world. I tend to see them, and so do a lot of other teacher / prof types.
  - eric-hu 15y ago
    I find this very believable and would like to add that some people learn best by reading about a subject, some by performing exercises, some by listening and conversing and for some it's a mix of all of those. I wouldn't expect the typical 18 year old college freshman to be self-aware enough to know this about himself. That's not to say it's impossible, but I think for the majority, it's something they still need to discover. Graded attendance gives them an incentive to explore this.
    - ThePawnBreak 15y ago
      From what I've noticed, the more you understand the subject, the better you learn from reading on your own and the less you learn from exercices, listening or conversing. I think the cause is that there is a difference in focus: With books, you can identify the things you already understand ( as-is or as an analogy to something you understand ) and focus on the new stuff, so the more you understand, the better you focus on the new stuff. The problem is that when you don't understand lots of things well enough, your concentration is not focused, so you end up with a superficial understanding and forgetting a lot as you go. The solution comes in the form of exercices, which provide an artifial focus, having your full attention until you understand them very well, which is good if you're a beginner, but redundant if you are experienced.
- cynest 15y ago
  Often it's required of the prof as well. Mandating classroom attendance is a way for colleges to retain students through two means: 1): Making N% of the grade attendance based means that students have to do even less well to fail the course. 2): For a student who would need to learn the material to pass, there is a learning benefit to attending the class. Moreover, more people in a lecture hall is going to create an impression that you do need to show up to pass.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Baloney. It is a mechanism to keep the lower half of the bell curve in class and absorbing some level of information.
  - wisty 15y ago
    You are too charitable. I think it's a medieval tradition, dating back to the days when lecturers were real authorities on the courses they were teaching. I'm not saying that lecturers are no longer competent at the stuff they teach, or that they aren't great authorities on something, but they don't have the edge that they used to. If you want to understand the cutting edge of a field, you go to conferences, and listen to top researchers talking about their field. Perhaps that's what undergraduate lecturers used to be. But research gets more specialized and eclectic every year, while the foundations become more firmly bedded down. Undergrad education is mostly a solved problem. Courses don't change much from year to year, except the useless faddish ones. New research gradually seeps down, but it's rare that you need an expert to bring it all together.
    - pnathan 15y ago
      I'm speaking from experience. edit: I was a TA for early CS classes. Sometimes we took attendance, sometimes we didn't. When we did, more people showed up, and more people passed. Teachers have a responsibility to teach both sides of the bell curve, and generally pressuring people to learn helps the lower side pass. I understand that it's kind of old fashioned and authoritarian from the perspective of a top student, but it really winds up better for the bottom students in general.
Sniffnoy 15y ago
I don't think this is generally true. I can certainly think of a few classes I passed while hardly showing up. But there are some reasons you might need to regularly show up even without the case of a teacher who counts attendance (which the school might require of them if it's an intro sort of class). There might be unscheduled in-class quizzes (I think this is pretty rare). More commonly, though, the teacher may not have bothered to set up a course website, so without showing up you won't know what the homework is or when the tests are. The latter is something I remember quite a few cases of. Even if you don't show up, the course still takes up time in the sense that you can generally only register for so many classes at a time.
- nazgulnarsil 15y ago
  rare? almost every one of my classes had random quizzes.
  - shard 15y ago
    I was trying to think of a college or graduate level course I took that had random quizzes, and I couldn't think of any off the top of my head. I remember there was one freshman level math class where you can drop off homework assignments and exams in the teacher's mailbox. I diligently completed every homework and exam, but didn't attend a single class. I knew most of the material already so I spent my time more productively elsewhere. To this day I don't even know what the professor looked like.
Jach 15y ago
Some (all? I don't know) schools and regulations tie up your financial aid with attendance in some way or another. It's often more concerning than the grades, but easier to game.
sixtofour 15y ago
(Response to above, and most of its responses.) I understand that you can not show up and pass a class, but why in the world would you spend all that money and time on a physical university if you aren't going to go to class? Why not just read a book and get a job?
- eric-hu 15y ago
  Sadly, because of what a degree means. This goes doubly so for a degree from a "big name". I strongly disagree with this sentiment, but I can't deny that a majority of people I meet will be impressed with someone who went to MIT, Yale or Harvard. Likewise, I think a majority of people (albeit a lesser-majority) will have reservations about someone with "only" a high school education. In most industries, you won't find people saying "show me what you can do" before you show them you have a degree. The tech industry is far more egalitarian in this sense, which is awesome.
- paulcapelli 15y ago
  The question you should be asking: what is the marginal benefit of ass-in-seat time to a student?
- wisty 15y ago
  Because you hadn't heard about Western Governors University, and thought you needed to enrol in a brick-and-mortar university to get a half-way credible degree?
- perokreco 15y ago
  Most of the benefits university provides are not gained in class, those being accreditation, networking, and being in a group of really smart people. Moreover a lot of people are spending somebody else's money through scholarships and etc.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  I had a course split between low level computer architecture and networks. The low level part was awesome, but the guy who did the network part was reading from the powerpoint slides that came with the teachers manual. It was so bad, I stopped going to the lectures. Ended up with the highest possible grade, so little was lost.
doctoboggan 15y ago
While you may not have to show up to pass some classes at traditional universities, you still have to wait a semester to pass them. Under the WGU system you can simply pass the class whenever you feel ready and move on to other subjects.
- timtadh 15y ago
  This is highly dependent on the professor of the class in question. Professor's will sometimes offer a student the option of testing out of a class. It of course depends on the institution exactly what goes on the transcript in these cases, but usually it will not count towards the GPA an will be treated in a manner similar to AP credit.
  - frankiewarren 15y ago
    That's exactly right. It doesn't seem right that one can receive credit hours for knowledge previously held. The only value added by GWU in that instance is some form of verification/certification. It seems more appropriate that if you already know the material you be placed into a higher level course, otherwise the educational system runs the risk of stagnating at a base level of knowledge rather than challenging students to excel.
    - gte910h 15y ago
      >. It doesn't seem right that one can receive credit hours for knowledge previously held. Sure it does. It shows you've met a bar of learning.
      - frankiewarren 15y ago
        That's true, I suppose. But in a perfect world, I don't think universities should just be signing off that you understand a subject. They should be promoting the growth of their students. In my opinion, one shouldn't leave university the same person they were when they entered (plus a diploma).
joshAg 15y ago
at berkeley, or at least the college of engineering, there's no way to test out of classes (according to my adviser), so you have to take the course, but you don't have to go to lecture, unless the class has an attendance requirement.
Jabbles 15y ago
Are most universities in the US for-profit, or is it referring to for-profit online-learning companies?
- dsr_ 15y ago
  The vast majority of US universities and colleges are non-profit. Kaplan and Phoenix are for-profit and mostly online. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Category:For-profit_universities_and_colleges_in_the_United_States https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Category:For-...

by buff-a 15y ago

sliverstorm 15y ago

Good luck passing an in-class final without attending class at least once.

shard 15y ago
Lucky for me most of my undergrad classes had take-home exams.

sakura_k 15y ago

Attendance-based grading is the salve a mediocre instructor applies to keep up the appearance that they're creating value for the university.

jseliger 15y ago
Sometimes, however, attendance policies are also benevolent paternalism: I say this because I teach English comp at the University of Arizona. Students who don't show up tend to miss a lot of the material and don't do especially well—hence the attendance policy. And the stuff that's done in class (discussion, close reading, sentence construction, and so forth) is stuff that can't really be made up outside of class—as I tell students, if you could do it at home, I'd say, "Do it at home" and I'd do something else in class. Yeah, there's a correlation != causation problem with weak students who tend to miss class being the ones who most need it, but the overall idea of class doing things that can't really be done otherwise still holds. There are also a certain number of students who say or believe, "I'm already a good writer; I don't need to take a composition class." Out of the ~300 I've taught, that's probably been true of one to five, or so, but far more seem to have believed it. A school like the one listed sounds great. It also sounds like it'll work best for the highly motivated. One problem with the HN posts about how universities are wasteful, unnecessary, and so on, is that a pretty small percentage of people are willing to do university-caliber work without the structure of the university. HN posters tend to forget about the other 97% of the world. I tend to see them, and so do a lot of other teacher / prof types.
- eric-hu 15y ago
  I find this very believable and would like to add that some people learn best by reading about a subject, some by performing exercises, some by listening and conversing and for some it's a mix of all of those. I wouldn't expect the typical 18 year old college freshman to be self-aware enough to know this about himself. That's not to say it's impossible, but I think for the majority, it's something they still need to discover. Graded attendance gives them an incentive to explore this.
  - ThePawnBreak 15y ago
    From what I've noticed, the more you understand the subject, the better you learn from reading on your own and the less you learn from exercices, listening or conversing. I think the cause is that there is a difference in focus: With books, you can identify the things you already understand ( as-is or as an analogy to something you understand ) and focus on the new stuff, so the more you understand, the better you focus on the new stuff. The problem is that when you don't understand lots of things well enough, your concentration is not focused, so you end up with a superficial understanding and forgetting a lot as you go. The solution comes in the form of exercices, which provide an artifial focus, having your full attention until you understand them very well, which is good if you're a beginner, but redundant if you are experienced.
cynest 15y ago
Often it's required of the prof as well. Mandating classroom attendance is a way for colleges to retain students through two means: 1): Making N% of the grade attendance based means that students have to do even less well to fail the course. 2): For a student who would need to learn the material to pass, there is a learning benefit to attending the class. Moreover, more people in a lecture hall is going to create an impression that you do need to show up to pass.
pnathan 15y ago
Baloney. It is a mechanism to keep the lower half of the bell curve in class and absorbing some level of information.
- wisty 15y ago
  You are too charitable. I think it's a medieval tradition, dating back to the days when lecturers were real authorities on the courses they were teaching. I'm not saying that lecturers are no longer competent at the stuff they teach, or that they aren't great authorities on something, but they don't have the edge that they used to. If you want to understand the cutting edge of a field, you go to conferences, and listen to top researchers talking about their field. Perhaps that's what undergraduate lecturers used to be. But research gets more specialized and eclectic every year, while the foundations become more firmly bedded down. Undergrad education is mostly a solved problem. Courses don't change much from year to year, except the useless faddish ones. New research gradually seeps down, but it's rare that you need an expert to bring it all together.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    I'm speaking from experience. edit: I was a TA for early CS classes. Sometimes we took attendance, sometimes we didn't. When we did, more people showed up, and more people passed. Teachers have a responsibility to teach both sides of the bell curve, and generally pressuring people to learn helps the lower side pass. I understand that it's kind of old fashioned and authoritarian from the perspective of a top student, but it really winds up better for the bottom students in general.

Sniffnoy 15y ago

I don't think this is generally true. I can certainly think of a few classes I passed while hardly showing up. But there are some reasons you might need to regularly show up even without the case of a teacher who counts attendance (which the school might require of them if it's an intro sort of class). There might be unscheduled in-class quizzes (I think this is pretty rare). More commonly, though, the teacher may not have bothered to set up a course website, so without showing up you won't know what the homework is or when the tests are. The latter is something I remember quite a few cases of. Even if you don't show up, the course still takes up time in the sense that you can generally only register for so many classes at a time.

nazgulnarsil 15y ago
rare? almost every one of my classes had random quizzes.
- shard 15y ago
  I was trying to think of a college or graduate level course I took that had random quizzes, and I couldn't think of any off the top of my head. I remember there was one freshman level math class where you can drop off homework assignments and exams in the teacher's mailbox. I diligently completed every homework and exam, but didn't attend a single class. I knew most of the material already so I spent my time more productively elsewhere. To this day I don't even know what the professor looked like.

Jach 15y ago

Some (all? I don't know) schools and regulations tie up your financial aid with attendance in some way or another. It's often more concerning than the grades, but easier to game.

sixtofour 15y ago

(Response to above, and most of its responses.) I understand that you can not show up and pass a class, but why in the world would you spend all that money and time on a physical university if you aren't going to go to class? Why not just read a book and get a job?

eric-hu 15y ago
Sadly, because of what a degree means. This goes doubly so for a degree from a "big name". I strongly disagree with this sentiment, but I can't deny that a majority of people I meet will be impressed with someone who went to MIT, Yale or Harvard. Likewise, I think a majority of people (albeit a lesser-majority) will have reservations about someone with "only" a high school education. In most industries, you won't find people saying "show me what you can do" before you show them you have a degree. The tech industry is far more egalitarian in this sense, which is awesome.
paulcapelli 15y ago
The question you should be asking: what is the marginal benefit of ass-in-seat time to a student?
wisty 15y ago
Because you hadn't heard about Western Governors University, and thought you needed to enrol in a brick-and-mortar university to get a half-way credible degree?
perokreco 15y ago
Most of the benefits university provides are not gained in class, those being accreditation, networking, and being in a group of really smart people. Moreover a lot of people are spending somebody else's money through scholarships and etc.
tomjen3 15y ago
I had a course split between low level computer architecture and networks. The low level part was awesome, but the guy who did the network part was reading from the powerpoint slides that came with the teachers manual. It was so bad, I stopped going to the lectures. Ended up with the highest possible grade, so little was lost.

doctoboggan 15y ago

While you may not have to show up to pass some classes at traditional universities, you still have to wait a semester to pass them. Under the WGU system you can simply pass the class whenever you feel ready and move on to other subjects.

timtadh 15y ago
This is highly dependent on the professor of the class in question. Professor's will sometimes offer a student the option of testing out of a class. It of course depends on the institution exactly what goes on the transcript in these cases, but usually it will not count towards the GPA an will be treated in a manner similar to AP credit.
- frankiewarren 15y ago
  That's exactly right. It doesn't seem right that one can receive credit hours for knowledge previously held. The only value added by GWU in that instance is some form of verification/certification. It seems more appropriate that if you already know the material you be placed into a higher level course, otherwise the educational system runs the risk of stagnating at a base level of knowledge rather than challenging students to excel.
  - gte910h 15y ago
    >. It doesn't seem right that one can receive credit hours for knowledge previously held. Sure it does. It shows you've met a bar of learning.
    - frankiewarren 15y ago
      That's true, I suppose. But in a perfect world, I don't think universities should just be signing off that you understand a subject. They should be promoting the growth of their students. In my opinion, one shouldn't leave university the same person they were when they entered (plus a diploma).

joshAg 15y ago

at berkeley, or at least the college of engineering, there's no way to test out of classes (according to my adviser), so you have to take the course, but you don't have to go to lecture, unless the class has an attendance requirement.

Jabbles 15y ago

Are most universities in the US for-profit, or is it referring to for-profit online-learning companies?

dsr_ 15y ago
The vast majority of US universities and colleges are non-profit. Kaplan and Phoenix are for-profit and mostly online. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Category:For-profit_universities_and_colleges_in_the_United_States https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Category:For-...