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> What has changed exactly? Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semeste

> What has changed exactly? Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. My brother and I graduated from university a little over 4 years ago and we were both top students (he studied music and I studied applied math). There were classes where he and I (without exaggeration) skipped more than 90% of the lectures. I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.

serjester 2y ago
Agreed. In college I would always go to the first class, see if the lecture was useful and probably 80% of the time I wouldn’t go again. Although I do sympathize with many of the author’s broader points.
Nebasuke 2y ago
I think this is a good point. I found the following sentences of the article shocking: > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. It makes you wonder whether the lecturer actually values the time of the students. Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
- alistairSH 2y ago
  I’d post that straight lecture is a crap way to teach/learn. And the large auditorium classes that are common at most state Us are fundamentally broken. Interactive discussion is probably much better for most students.
  - throwawaysleep 2y ago
    The one course where I showed up to every class was a discussion class. It was on AI and each lecture was a 10 minute topic intro, 30 min of group discussion and research, and 10 min of presentations. The courses I never attended a single class for were reading screenshots of a textbook.
    - nothercastle 2y ago
      Idk my fellow student didn’t have any more insight than I did. Without work experience it’s all theoretical
      - alistairSH 2y ago
        Theory is kind of the point thought. College isn’t/shouldn’t be just a job training program. That’s part of the problem.
        nothercastle 2y ago
        Without experience you can’t ground theory into reality and you miss the critical details that actually make things work. For me interesting stuff happens in the implementation later between theory and dirty reality.
  - hollandheese 2y ago
    Pretty much everyone but the actual students agree that would be better. We can't do that since the students typically refuse to do the necessary prep.
    - rgblambda 2y ago
      I'm reminded of Amazon's meeting rule where the first 15 minutes are devoted to reading any documents because it's assumed no one did it ahead of the meeting. This is a problem in the workplace as well.
- JackFr 2y ago
  It is not interactive because the professor has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter and thoughts, ideas and suggestions of the students are an order of magnitude less of less value than that of the professors. Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    It's much easier to learn if you can ask questions and try (and fail) to make your own connections, and this has nothing to do with whether or not your own ideas and suggestions have any merit of their own. I don't engage in class to show off or try to contribute, but because it's an incredibly valuable part of the learning process for me.
    - JackFr 2y ago
      Questions are fine, unless they end up being a substitute for not preparing for class. As a professor I had once put it, "This is difficult material. I don't expect you to understand it from just one lecture. You need to read the material before the lecture, but it will only be after you've struggled with the problem sets that I would expect you to understand it."
  - Ragnarork 2y ago
    A class that is not interactive then doesn't have to be a class. It could be a book or a set of slides with an audio narration and that'd have the same result. Teachers that can only read their notes and write stuff on a board without ever interacting are of the most useless kind. They're completely replaceable by course material.
- bsder 2y ago
  > Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped. Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room. The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts. In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty. The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures. Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable. Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    I vaguely remember the philosophy classes I took oncr upon a time as all being lectures and then extensive papers for homework, with real discussion only happening in the 400-level ones around when I finally stopped taking them because the endless paper-writing rhetoric in circles was just terminally boring by that point.
    - viccis 2y ago
      That sounds like an abysmal philosophy education. Sorry you got that. The main purpose of a philosophy class is to read some material, engage with it critically in a guided dialogue in class time, and engage critically by yourself with it in written work. Straight lectures are basically going to wind up just being cliff's notes for a written source and are about as useful as any secondary source. The exception would be survey courses and intro ones, where the professor's choice of how to guide students through material can make an overwhelming task of exposing yourself to a lot of different thought into something manageable.
- hollandheese 2y ago
  A professor's lecture notes would never be good notes for a student to learn from. They are simply reminders to the professor to talk about certain topics that they know the ins and outs of. Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Agreed that the notes are usually not so great for learning from. But in this case the “notes” are actually the slides, which are explicitly intended to be consumed by the students.
  - shiandow 2y ago
    Even so, a set if slides is a great reminder of whatever the professor talked about.
  - elicksaur 2y ago
    This is conflating written jots with information presented to the students. The author is talking about PowerPoint slides that were presented to the students as valuable information.
- kashunstva 2y ago
  > This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped. I understand that one could jump to such a conclusion; and I’ve attended more than my fair share of talks where the speaker over little more than I could glean from looking over the printouts for a few minutes. But here, can we truly come to the conclusion that the slides are being read verbatim, or whether they are placeholders for a richer discussion that comes out verbally in class? We obviously cannot know, but I can’t say that I’d pre-commit to skipping before knowing more.
- ratmeadow 2y ago
  Agreed, when I was at uni a few years ago, having the lecture slides was a handy reference EVEN when I wrote my own notes during lectures. One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.
- rgblambda 2y ago
  I loved it when lecturers made the PowerPoint slides available before the lecture, as it meant I could read the slides ahead of time and thus keep up in the lecture. It made it easier to take meaningful notes. I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The physical act of having to take notes helped me understand and remember them. Being given a handout doesn't work that well.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    Nobody is stopping anyone from taking notes during class. Even you should appreciate the slides because they’d give you an opportunity to review before big exams and make sure you didn’t miss anything.
- musicale 2y ago
  Personally I always ask for lecture/presentation slides - it's common practice in computing and related fields. Technical conferences (be they industry-focused like Nvidia GTC or more research-focused like Usenix ATC) routinely provide presentation slides and recordings. Both are extremely valuable. I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!) Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.
  - Groxx 2y ago
    >The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!) This is massively true IMO. Taking detailed notes during a lecture is an absurd waste of attention - we have universally-available recording technologies. Use them. They're used professionally too, and there's essentially zero chance that they'll go away, it's much more realistic to use them in classes. This is something that has changed with phones and computers becoming universal - college needs to adapt to it. Use lecture time to do things you can't do with a recording: interact. (Yes I'm thoroughly aware that student interaction is a myth and it pretty much never happens - I've zoned out in classes with attendance scores too. Except for those handfuls of classes that many people can remember where it does happen, those don't count and there's surely nothing special about them that is worth learning from)
    - canjobear 2y ago
      Taking notes forces your brain to process the information in a way that just reading or listening doesn’t.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Ha yep, I bumped on that too. Like, what? Post the slides for future reference, who cares? What an odd bugaboo.
- wickedsight 2y ago
  > Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. Also, the taking of notes is a distraction in a class. You can't pause the teacher while writing or rewind, so whatever the teacher explains while you're writing is just missed. This isn't true for everyone, but many people can't blindly type while paying attention to something else. I prefer to just listen and interact with the teacher over writing down what they say (and is already written on their slides).
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  Yeah I don't get that statement at all. How can a professor not just post their slides on their website? What exactly is so special about their slides? I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes. in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.
- yvesyil 2y ago
  100% agreed. When I was in Uni, I had a few lectures where going to the class was actually a waste of time for me (especially when I had to work on other time-consuming assignments) since I knew about the topic already. I passed those classes with high grades solely by going over the lecture slides.
kmoser 2y ago
I'm guessing you and your brother are both well above average, in which case I'd agree that you could get more out of studying on your own (if the material was even challenging to begin with). The students referred to in the article don't have the wherewithal to study effectively on their own; the lectures are their only hope for learning, assuming they were to take advantage of them. Also, many classes are not simply lectures, but an opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. By not coming to class, one robs themselves of that opportunity.
- cyrillite 2y ago
  In my experience it’s one or the other: attend all the lecturers and nullify the need to study more than that attendance and some specific exam revision if they drop hints or don’t attend but do the readings. I think a lot of being a successful student is cutting through all the duplicative work that gets thrown your way.
  - jmye 2y ago
    > I think a lot of being a successful student is cutting through all the duplicative work that gets thrown your way. And being honest with yourself about which duplicative work you actually don’t benefit from (vs. which work is “boring” or interferes with sleep/whatever other excuses).
jenny91 2y ago
Fully agree as a "top student" from probably a school similar to where author is a professor. I would add that reading this piece and the attitude the author has towards students, I doubt I would want to attend their class (or possibly even take it in the first place, professors have reputations).
1932812267 2y ago
One thing that's changed in the past decade is that college professors are now competing against youtube. There are really bad lecturers in college (and also really good ones!). But now, when you encounter a bad one, that's okay--you can watch lectures online.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  Not to mention that there are now also LLM’s to help you understand difficult topics!
  - beezle 2y ago
    I'm sure the average college student will know when the helpful LLM is hallucinating, misrepresenting or stating outdated material as factually accurate today, right?
    - MyFedora 2y ago
      Don't worry, professors do it too. I had one such professor in accounting. Typos, numbers from wrong year, copy/paste mistakes, forgot to turn on precision as displayed, mismatching account numbers, etc. The textbook (written by someone else) also had mistakes. At least not in every exercise, but enough to be annoying. Exams were also graded based on an incorrect solution, so you always had to fight for a revised grade.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Probably the worst thing you could ask to help you understand a topic you yourself don't understand and are encountering for the first time.
- SamuelAdams 2y ago
  Not just YouTube. MIT has an open course system that is available to anyone, for free, from actually employed MIT professors, lecturing real courses [1]. I went to a state university that basically copied Pearson slides and books into a course with minimal adjustments. Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples. And my course instructor hated me pointing that out. [1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/ https://ocw.mit.edu/
kayo_20211030 2y ago
How do you really know you're top students? Maybe you just got a pass.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  My median grade was an A+ and my brother got the silver medal for second highest GPA in the faculty.
  - beezle 2y ago
    Congrats but was that on a curve? Do you think your A+ today would have been an A+ 20, 30, 50 years ago? Considering that you've just stated that your MEDIAN grade was an A+, I suspect not.
- kayo_20211030 2y ago
  I meant "pass" as in the sense of "Olé, here's an A+, so off with you to the rest of your life". But, seriously, how's that lack of engagement working out in "the rest of your life"? Meetings? Why bother? Seems like a lecture. Reply to Slack or Email? Does that sound like something you ought to do? Or a judgement call, based on your intuition of their value?
kibibyte 2y ago
I empathize with this. I went to one of those “top tier” universities and had a handful of classes where I regretted being one of the few (fewer than 10) goody good students who attended lecture, and subsequently fell asleep anyway. Over time, I realized that universities like these primarily prioritize faculty who can attract grant dollars over those who are excellent teachers. But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.
- viccis 2y ago
  >But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern. From experience on the professor's side, the problem isn't the brilliant students who show up to one class and ace the exam like everyone in here seems to have been. The problem is the students who miss most lectures and get 50% or lower because they (and, increasingly, most students these days) don't actually understand how to study from a textbook.
  - silverlake 2y ago
    Long ago CUNY had a low admission bar and a high graduation bar. This meant, of course, that many students dropped out. In your case, students choose to pay tuition and not do the work. What is the external pressure on you or the dean or university to make things easier for these people? I think there should be a reverse feeder school idea: enroll in a university where standards are high, if you do poorly then transfer to a community college. That way a degree from that university is a signal for quality.
    - viccis 2y ago
      >What is the external pressure on you or the dean or university to make things easier for these people? Mostly that students are all giant piggybanks that spit out tuition every year. And, from experience, a lot of administrators view themselves as doing a service for marginalized students (who are often more likely to come in ill prepared and wash out like this). They are generally old and paternalistic (and sometimes a bit racist) and often just assume that all such students need lowered standards rather than what they actually need (a kick in the pants and plenty of resources to help them get their shit together).
ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
I had a lecturerer who recorded every lecture and posted it to a player you could control the speed of. So I could listen to lecture at 1.5x speed and skip any parts I thought were filler. Of course I didn't show up to class...
izacus 2y ago
You're top students and don't understand that a sample of two is a poor way to reason about social and human problems at scale? Across large population of individuals with different traits?
bielescope 2y ago
[flagged]
beezle 2y ago
Totally disagree. Lecture is an opportunity to directly ask your professor to clarify the material or perhaps extend to an adjacent area. It is also an opportunity to learn from your classmates who may pose insightful questions or comments. TFA omits this trend (seemingly since wide spread availability of the internet) to being solitary - the view that nothing of value can come from interactions with peers or superiors other than wasted time. [this is different from missing classes because of laziness which is implied].
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > Lecture is an opportunity to directly ask your professor to clarify the material or perhaps extend to an adjacent area. You raise a good point, but in this situation I would usually either: 1) go to office hours or 2) ask my question to other capable students.
snoppy 2y ago
[flagged]
slowcooked12_ 2y ago
> when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own. Unfortunately, some colleges doesn't value efficiency nearly as much as they do their self respect. Because of which we now have strict attendance requirements (75%) for every course.
sanderjd 2y ago
Yeah a lot of what this essay called out seems bad to me, but I always felt like professors thought their lectures were more important to the learning process than they were. Most of my courses had more workshop like class periods where grad students and/or upperclassmen would be there to answer questions, and those were universally more valuable uses of time than the lectures. Office hours with the professors, and of course textbooks, were also great. But lectures? Pretty skippable, honestly!
gspr 2y ago
I'm confused. At the universities I attended, or later worked at, lectures were absolutely, definitely, optional. That's how it should be. Universities provide a framework for students to learn. The university then tests what the student has learned in order to give them a diploma. How the student learned that is surely not important. (Things are of course different when there are practical considerations to the teaching, such as labwork, which of comes with a degree of associated testing anyway.)
weatherlite 2y ago
> I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own. Jeez I wish they would have uploaded all the material online, not everyone does that (perhaps thinking if they do it lots of people won't show up). And even if they do it , it is often sparse slides with half the material passed in person - so very missing. It's enough to not understand the first 10 minutes of the lecture and then you're completely lost for another frustrating 35 minutes ( or more, some lectures are double). It's enough not to fully remember the last lecture and you don't follow what the professor is talking about now. It's not a fun experience and happened to me a lot - the material is hard, my intelligence is good but nothing stellar so it's super easy to become lost. The truth is it's probably better for the average person to study at their own pace with an LLM or something like that, I had a real rough time following computer science lectures. I can ask the LLM to stop, to re explain, to re explain in a different way etc etc. If I'm tired I can stretch a bit. I think its the really bright kids or those with superior concentration and preparation skills that got something out of those lectures, the rest of us hated it.
deleted 2y ago
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zjp 2y ago
I regret this showing of disrespect, but I'm a little proud of the fact that I got an A in inorganic chemistry by reading the book when I felt like reading it and otherwise doing homework on my laptop all semester during lectures.
perrygeo 2y ago
I had a linear algebra teacher who would not speak to us. Literally conducted most classes in complete silence. His English wasn't great but manageable - that wasn't the issue. He would just walk into class without acknowledging us and proceed to solve out the previous homework problems. Then he'd introduce a few other problems (written on the whiteboard, nothing verbal) and keep writing. This was presumably similar to our next assignment, which he handed out at the end of class before leaving. Often zero words spoken for the 50 minute class. All of the solutions were available without going to class. So I didn't. If the university isn't going to invest anything in lecturing, why should I attend the lectures?

serjester 2y ago

Agreed. In college I would always go to the first class, see if the lecture was useful and probably 80% of the time I wouldn’t go again. Although I do sympathize with many of the author’s broader points.

Nebasuke 2y ago

I think this is a good point. I found the following sentences of the article shocking: > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. It makes you wonder whether the lecturer actually values the time of the students. Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.

alistairSH 2y ago
I’d post that straight lecture is a crap way to teach/learn. And the large auditorium classes that are common at most state Us are fundamentally broken. Interactive discussion is probably much better for most students.
- throwawaysleep 2y ago
  The one course where I showed up to every class was a discussion class. It was on AI and each lecture was a 10 minute topic intro, 30 min of group discussion and research, and 10 min of presentations. The courses I never attended a single class for were reading screenshots of a textbook.
  - nothercastle 2y ago
    Idk my fellow student didn’t have any more insight than I did. Without work experience it’s all theoretical
    - alistairSH 2y ago
      Theory is kind of the point thought. College isn’t/shouldn’t be just a job training program. That’s part of the problem.
      - nothercastle 2y ago
        Without experience you can’t ground theory into reality and you miss the critical details that actually make things work. For me interesting stuff happens in the implementation later between theory and dirty reality.
- hollandheese 2y ago
  Pretty much everyone but the actual students agree that would be better. We can't do that since the students typically refuse to do the necessary prep.
  - rgblambda 2y ago
    I'm reminded of Amazon's meeting rule where the first 15 minutes are devoted to reading any documents because it's assumed no one did it ahead of the meeting. This is a problem in the workplace as well.
JackFr 2y ago
It is not interactive because the professor has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter and thoughts, ideas and suggestions of the students are an order of magnitude less of less value than that of the professors. Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  It's much easier to learn if you can ask questions and try (and fail) to make your own connections, and this has nothing to do with whether or not your own ideas and suggestions have any merit of their own. I don't engage in class to show off or try to contribute, but because it's an incredibly valuable part of the learning process for me.
  - JackFr 2y ago
    Questions are fine, unless they end up being a substitute for not preparing for class. As a professor I had once put it, "This is difficult material. I don't expect you to understand it from just one lecture. You need to read the material before the lecture, but it will only be after you've struggled with the problem sets that I would expect you to understand it."
- Ragnarork 2y ago
  A class that is not interactive then doesn't have to be a class. It could be a book or a set of slides with an audio narration and that'd have the same result. Teachers that can only read their notes and write stuff on a board without ever interacting are of the most useless kind. They're completely replaceable by course material.
bsder 2y ago
> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped. Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room. The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts. In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty. The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures. Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable. Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  I vaguely remember the philosophy classes I took oncr upon a time as all being lectures and then extensive papers for homework, with real discussion only happening in the 400-level ones around when I finally stopped taking them because the endless paper-writing rhetoric in circles was just terminally boring by that point.
  - viccis 2y ago
    That sounds like an abysmal philosophy education. Sorry you got that. The main purpose of a philosophy class is to read some material, engage with it critically in a guided dialogue in class time, and engage critically by yourself with it in written work. Straight lectures are basically going to wind up just being cliff's notes for a written source and are about as useful as any secondary source. The exception would be survey courses and intro ones, where the professor's choice of how to guide students through material can make an overwhelming task of exposing yourself to a lot of different thought into something manageable.
hollandheese 2y ago
A professor's lecture notes would never be good notes for a student to learn from. They are simply reminders to the professor to talk about certain topics that they know the ins and outs of. Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Agreed that the notes are usually not so great for learning from. But in this case the “notes” are actually the slides, which are explicitly intended to be consumed by the students.
- shiandow 2y ago
  Even so, a set if slides is a great reminder of whatever the professor talked about.
- elicksaur 2y ago
  This is conflating written jots with information presented to the students. The author is talking about PowerPoint slides that were presented to the students as valuable information.
kashunstva 2y ago
> This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped. I understand that one could jump to such a conclusion; and I’ve attended more than my fair share of talks where the speaker over little more than I could glean from looking over the printouts for a few minutes. But here, can we truly come to the conclusion that the slides are being read verbatim, or whether they are placeholders for a richer discussion that comes out verbally in class? We obviously cannot know, but I can’t say that I’d pre-commit to skipping before knowing more.
ratmeadow 2y ago
Agreed, when I was at uni a few years ago, having the lecture slides was a handy reference EVEN when I wrote my own notes during lectures. One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.
rgblambda 2y ago
I loved it when lecturers made the PowerPoint slides available before the lecture, as it meant I could read the slides ahead of time and thus keep up in the lecture. It made it easier to take meaningful notes. I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.
WalterBright 2y ago
The physical act of having to take notes helped me understand and remember them. Being given a handout doesn't work that well.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  Nobody is stopping anyone from taking notes during class. Even you should appreciate the slides because they’d give you an opportunity to review before big exams and make sure you didn’t miss anything.
musicale 2y ago
Personally I always ask for lecture/presentation slides - it's common practice in computing and related fields. Technical conferences (be they industry-focused like Nvidia GTC or more research-focused like Usenix ATC) routinely provide presentation slides and recordings. Both are extremely valuable. I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!) Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.
- Groxx 2y ago
  >The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!) This is massively true IMO. Taking detailed notes during a lecture is an absurd waste of attention - we have universally-available recording technologies. Use them. They're used professionally too, and there's essentially zero chance that they'll go away, it's much more realistic to use them in classes. This is something that has changed with phones and computers becoming universal - college needs to adapt to it. Use lecture time to do things you can't do with a recording: interact. (Yes I'm thoroughly aware that student interaction is a myth and it pretty much never happens - I've zoned out in classes with attendance scores too. Except for those handfuls of classes that many people can remember where it does happen, those don't count and there's surely nothing special about them that is worth learning from)
  - canjobear 2y ago
    Taking notes forces your brain to process the information in a way that just reading or listening doesn’t.
sanderjd 2y ago
Ha yep, I bumped on that too. Like, what? Post the slides for future reference, who cares? What an odd bugaboo.
wickedsight 2y ago
> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. Also, the taking of notes is a distraction in a class. You can't pause the teacher while writing or rewind, so whatever the teacher explains while you're writing is just missed. This isn't true for everyone, but many people can't blindly type while paying attention to something else. I prefer to just listen and interact with the teacher over writing down what they say (and is already written on their slides).
mnky9800n 2y ago
Yeah I don't get that statement at all. How can a professor not just post their slides on their website? What exactly is so special about their slides? I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes. in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.
yvesyil 2y ago
100% agreed. When I was in Uni, I had a few lectures where going to the class was actually a waste of time for me (especially when I had to work on other time-consuming assignments) since I knew about the topic already. I passed those classes with high grades solely by going over the lecture slides.

kmoser 2y ago

I'm guessing you and your brother are both well above average, in which case I'd agree that you could get more out of studying on your own (if the material was even challenging to begin with). The students referred to in the article don't have the wherewithal to study effectively on their own; the lectures are their only hope for learning, assuming they were to take advantage of them. Also, many classes are not simply lectures, but an opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. By not coming to class, one robs themselves of that opportunity.

cyrillite 2y ago
In my experience it’s one or the other: attend all the lecturers and nullify the need to study more than that attendance and some specific exam revision if they drop hints or don’t attend but do the readings. I think a lot of being a successful student is cutting through all the duplicative work that gets thrown your way.
- jmye 2y ago
  > I think a lot of being a successful student is cutting through all the duplicative work that gets thrown your way. And being honest with yourself about which duplicative work you actually don’t benefit from (vs. which work is “boring” or interferes with sleep/whatever other excuses).

jenny91 2y ago

Fully agree as a "top student" from probably a school similar to where author is a professor. I would add that reading this piece and the attitude the author has towards students, I doubt I would want to attend their class (or possibly even take it in the first place, professors have reputations).

1932812267 2y ago

One thing that's changed in the past decade is that college professors are now competing against youtube. There are really bad lecturers in college (and also really good ones!). But now, when you encounter a bad one, that's okay--you can watch lectures online.

joshdavham 2y ago
Not to mention that there are now also LLM’s to help you understand difficult topics!
- beezle 2y ago
  I'm sure the average college student will know when the helpful LLM is hallucinating, misrepresenting or stating outdated material as factually accurate today, right?
  - MyFedora 2y ago
    Don't worry, professors do it too. I had one such professor in accounting. Typos, numbers from wrong year, copy/paste mistakes, forgot to turn on precision as displayed, mismatching account numbers, etc. The textbook (written by someone else) also had mistakes. At least not in every exercise, but enough to be annoying. Exams were also graded based on an incorrect solution, so you always had to fight for a revised grade.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Probably the worst thing you could ask to help you understand a topic you yourself don't understand and are encountering for the first time.
SamuelAdams 2y ago
Not just YouTube. MIT has an open course system that is available to anyone, for free, from actually employed MIT professors, lecturing real courses [1]. I went to a state university that basically copied Pearson slides and books into a course with minimal adjustments. Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples. And my course instructor hated me pointing that out. [1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/ https://ocw.mit.edu/

kayo_20211030 2y ago

How do you really know you're top students? Maybe you just got a pass.

joshdavham 2y ago
My median grade was an A+ and my brother got the silver medal for second highest GPA in the faculty.
- beezle 2y ago
  Congrats but was that on a curve? Do you think your A+ today would have been an A+ 20, 30, 50 years ago? Considering that you've just stated that your MEDIAN grade was an A+, I suspect not.
kayo_20211030 2y ago
I meant "pass" as in the sense of "Olé, here's an A+, so off with you to the rest of your life". But, seriously, how's that lack of engagement working out in "the rest of your life"? Meetings? Why bother? Seems like a lecture. Reply to Slack or Email? Does that sound like something you ought to do? Or a judgement call, based on your intuition of their value?

kibibyte 2y ago

I empathize with this. I went to one of those “top tier” universities and had a handful of classes where I regretted being one of the few (fewer than 10) goody good students who attended lecture, and subsequently fell asleep anyway. Over time, I realized that universities like these primarily prioritize faculty who can attract grant dollars over those who are excellent teachers. But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.

viccis 2y ago
>But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern. From experience on the professor's side, the problem isn't the brilliant students who show up to one class and ace the exam like everyone in here seems to have been. The problem is the students who miss most lectures and get 50% or lower because they (and, increasingly, most students these days) don't actually understand how to study from a textbook.
- silverlake 2y ago
  Long ago CUNY had a low admission bar and a high graduation bar. This meant, of course, that many students dropped out. In your case, students choose to pay tuition and not do the work. What is the external pressure on you or the dean or university to make things easier for these people? I think there should be a reverse feeder school idea: enroll in a university where standards are high, if you do poorly then transfer to a community college. That way a degree from that university is a signal for quality.
  - viccis 2y ago
    >What is the external pressure on you or the dean or university to make things easier for these people? Mostly that students are all giant piggybanks that spit out tuition every year. And, from experience, a lot of administrators view themselves as doing a service for marginalized students (who are often more likely to come in ill prepared and wash out like this). They are generally old and paternalistic (and sometimes a bit racist) and often just assume that all such students need lowered standards rather than what they actually need (a kick in the pants and plenty of resources to help them get their shit together).

ApolloFortyNine 2y ago

I had a lecturerer who recorded every lecture and posted it to a player you could control the speed of. So I could listen to lecture at 1.5x speed and skip any parts I thought were filler. Of course I didn't show up to class...

izacus 2y ago

You're top students and don't understand that a sample of two is a poor way to reason about social and human problems at scale? Across large population of individuals with different traits?

bielescope 2y ago

[flagged]

beezle 2y ago

Totally disagree. Lecture is an opportunity to directly ask your professor to clarify the material or perhaps extend to an adjacent area. It is also an opportunity to learn from your classmates who may pose insightful questions or comments. TFA omits this trend (seemingly since wide spread availability of the internet) to being solitary - the view that nothing of value can come from interactions with peers or superiors other than wasted time. [this is different from missing classes because of laziness which is implied].

joshdavham 2y ago
> Lecture is an opportunity to directly ask your professor to clarify the material or perhaps extend to an adjacent area. You raise a good point, but in this situation I would usually either: 1) go to office hours or 2) ask my question to other capable students.

snoppy 2y ago

[flagged]

slowcooked12_ 2y ago

> when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own. Unfortunately, some colleges doesn't value efficiency nearly as much as they do their self respect. Because of which we now have strict attendance requirements (75%) for every course.

sanderjd 2y ago

Yeah a lot of what this essay called out seems bad to me, but I always felt like professors thought their lectures were more important to the learning process than they were. Most of my courses had more workshop like class periods where grad students and/or upperclassmen would be there to answer questions, and those were universally more valuable uses of time than the lectures. Office hours with the professors, and of course textbooks, were also great. But lectures? Pretty skippable, honestly!

gspr 2y ago

I'm confused. At the universities I attended, or later worked at, lectures were absolutely, definitely, optional. That's how it should be. Universities provide a framework for students to learn. The university then tests what the student has learned in order to give them a diploma. How the student learned that is surely not important. (Things are of course different when there are practical considerations to the teaching, such as labwork, which of comes with a degree of associated testing anyway.)

weatherlite 2y ago

> I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own. Jeez I wish they would have uploaded all the material online, not everyone does that (perhaps thinking if they do it lots of people won't show up). And even if they do it , it is often sparse slides with half the material passed in person - so very missing. It's enough to not understand the first 10 minutes of the lecture and then you're completely lost for another frustrating 35 minutes ( or more, some lectures are double). It's enough not to fully remember the last lecture and you don't follow what the professor is talking about now. It's not a fun experience and happened to me a lot - the material is hard, my intelligence is good but nothing stellar so it's super easy to become lost. The truth is it's probably better for the average person to study at their own pace with an LLM or something like that, I had a real rough time following computer science lectures. I can ask the LLM to stop, to re explain, to re explain in a different way etc etc. If I'm tired I can stretch a bit. I think its the really bright kids or those with superior concentration and preparation skills that got something out of those lectures, the rest of us hated it.

deleted 2y ago

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zjp 2y ago

I regret this showing of disrespect, but I'm a little proud of the fact that I got an A in inorganic chemistry by reading the book when I felt like reading it and otherwise doing homework on my laptop all semester during lectures.

perrygeo 2y ago

I had a linear algebra teacher who would not speak to us. Literally conducted most classes in complete silence. His English wasn't great but manageable - that wasn't the issue. He would just walk into class without acknowledging us and proceed to solve out the previous homework problems. Then he'd introduce a few other problems (written on the whiteboard, nothing verbal) and keep writing. This was presumably similar to our next assignment, which he handed out at the end of class before leaving. Often zero words spoken for the 50 minute class. All of the solutions were available without going to class. So I didn't. If the university isn't going to invest anything in lecturing, why should I attend the lectures?