Hey, I remember you from HUT circa 2006. I was comparing the level of primary and upper secondary school teaching with university teaching, not different unive

Hey, I remember you from HUT circa 2006. I was comparing the level of primary and upper secondary school teaching with university teaching, not different universities. Seems like university rankings have little to do with that. For what it's worth, I maintain that the quality of teaching drops by a whole lot in universities, if only because there are way fever universities around in Finland. My personal experience (some of which you share) is that in some common subjects (like maths) the group size in lectures more than quadrupled in the first year—way too many students for the lecturer to spare any individual attention, apart from answering some questions that came up in the class. Even the word changes from teacher to lecturer, reflecting quite well on the changed focus. This duty of individual attention falls on TAs in smaller student groups, who usually have no pedagogical studies behind them and often resist taking any share of responsibility in how their students perform. The lack of attention to students is known and acknowledged, even marketed as 'academic freedom' and 'having to take responsibility for one's own studies'. While it's imporant to learn how to do that, the quality of teaching should not suffer as markedly as it does. Some struggling students banded together to overcome the steeply increased difficulty curve and others dropped out from the courses, often after the very first few weeks. Speaking of catering to individuals, it would not take much to improve the life of an advanced upper secondary school student by a whole lot. Let the advanced students advance to freshman level concepts. Instead we faced the "it's not in the teaching plan" paralysis. It feels stupid to do three years of upper secondary level physics without touching vectors or calculus. Or bring out the matrices and linear algebra in maths (instead of showing a small glimpse in one elective course during the third year). Allow and even recommend some more advanced books on the topic. It must be better than playing Tetris on your Ti-83 calculator all day. Many currently bored students would regain some of the lost morale and momentum this way.