3 ms·

I think weeder courses aren't really about teaching rigor. If you want someone to know something rigorously then have them study it for 2-3 semesters or somethi

by ianai 5y ago

I think weeder courses aren't really about teaching rigor. If you want someone to know something rigorously then have them study it for 2-3 semesters or something like that. And give them lots of chances to practice the various skills. Like my math professors said, if you know how to do something one way then that's ok - maybe you have some idea of what's going on with it. But if you know how to do something two ways, then you definitely have a better idea than just knowing one way to do it. The more ways you can approach the same problem and come up with a solution the deeper your understanding. Weeder courses are more like an obstacle course or the (perhaps: literal) obstacles in the collegiate course. Lab techs that give you slightly wrong ingredients or technically the right ingredients if you knew some trick. Math problems that require some trick to prove or otherwise shoot you down 8-12 hours of grind with no solution. Or just giving the student a large matrix to calculate the determinate of without a calculator. Or marking -10% (out of 100%) for each, individual grammar mistake.

gruez 5y ago
>Weeder courses are more like an obstacle course or the (perhaps: literal) obstacles in the collegiate course. Lab techs that give you slightly wrong ingredients or technically the right ingredients if you knew some trick. Math problems that require some trick to prove or otherwise shoot you down 8-12 hours of grind with no solution. Or just giving the student a large matrix to calculate the determinate of without a calculator. Or marking -10% (out of 100%) for each, individual grammar mistake. The conditions you described sound closer to "unfair" than just "weeder". I've heard of people describe certain courses as "weeder", but that's because they covered difficult material and had difficult assignments, not because the teachers were actively sabotaging the students.
- eli_gottlieb 5y ago
  IME, a "weeder" course (public universities, CS department) has: * Large lecture sizes, often with professors who cannot teach or don't care to * Little student-professor engagement * Large discussion sections with TA's who can't teach either * Usually focused on calculation over rigor or depth. Usually no proofs, actual reasoning behind things hand-waved away, focus is on memorization. * Large homework loads * Large test loads or particularly high-stakes exams * De facto pass requirements drastically different from the actual grading scheme used in the course (eg: requiring an 80-90% grade to stay in the major in a course where the professor expects the average exam grade to be 40-50%). This often leads to curving the grades arbitrarily to get the cohort size the department actually wants.

by ianai 5y ago

gruez 5y ago

>Weeder courses are more like an obstacle course or the (perhaps: literal) obstacles in the collegiate course. Lab techs that give you slightly wrong ingredients or technically the right ingredients if you knew some trick. Math problems that require some trick to prove or otherwise shoot you down 8-12 hours of grind with no solution. Or just giving the student a large matrix to calculate the determinate of without a calculator. Or marking -10% (out of 100%) for each, individual grammar mistake. The conditions you described sound closer to "unfair" than just "weeder". I've heard of people describe certain courses as "weeder", but that's because they covered difficult material and had difficult assignments, not because the teachers were actively sabotaging the students.

eli_gottlieb 5y ago
IME, a "weeder" course (public universities, CS department) has: * Large lecture sizes, often with professors who cannot teach or don't care to * Little student-professor engagement * Large discussion sections with TA's who can't teach either * Usually focused on calculation over rigor or depth. Usually no proofs, actual reasoning behind things hand-waved away, focus is on memorization. * Large homework loads * Large test loads or particularly high-stakes exams * De facto pass requirements drastically different from the actual grading scheme used in the course (eg: requiring an 80-90% grade to stay in the major in a course where the professor expects the average exam grade to be 40-50%). This often leads to curving the grades arbitrarily to get the cohort size the department actually wants.