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I generally disapprove of any sort of testing this done this way. In the world, you have access to technology, the smart people use it well. If college is desi
by mountainriver 1y ago
I generally disapprove of any sort of testing this done this way. In the world, you have access to technology, the smart people use it well.
If college is designed to make you a productive member of society then they are woefully failing at it.
I don’t write my papers on a typewriter or use the Dewey decimal system to find books. Colleges need to get better at accelerating with the speed of society
- theamk 1y agoIt does not work that way. "No pain, no gain" - if you don't struggle doing something manually, you don't learn it. In middle school arithmetic, you are not allowed to use calculators. In high school calculus calculators are OK, but you are not allowed to use CAS systems. In college-level math, CAS is usually OK, but you need to derive its input by hand. It sounds that what you are wishing for is "vocational school" - no advanced education, just specific skills for a specific profession. As long as that profession does not change too much, students get to be "productive members of society" immediately after graduation. Colleges are supposed to be better, teaching the whole skill tree so that the student can go on beyond what's known. (Unfortunately they are only "supposed to".. in practice a lot of colleges are no more than more expensive vocational schools).
- mountainriver 1y agoThat's only true if you want to be a researcher. Everyone else goes to college to get a job, and we increasingly don't care if college actually prepares you for the real world
- theamk 1y agoJobs are different too. At the place I work in, we have many software engineers doing research-y stuff - nothing groundbreaking, but plenty of algorithms to be written, tuned and debugged. We would not want the candidates that cheated through college with AI. Other places might be different of course. I've heard many sentiments from webdevs that they never use any CS theory, and college is useless, so I suspect you don't really need college if all you want to do is web development.
- mountainriver 1y agoSure but I collaborate with AI all the time creating new algorithms in the ML space
- sgarland 1y agoIf you don’t learn _how to learn_, you’re going to struggle mightily in life. Not just at your job.
- djoldman 1y agoFrom the institution's perspective, mostly they want bigger numbers: more students, higher post-graduate grades, higher US News rankings, more prestige, bigger endowment, etc. etc. It seems to me that making productive members of society is hard to do let alone measure or define. It's also not something institutions seem to factor into their decisions much.
- mountainriver 1y agoBased on my local college, they absolutely don't. It has nothing to do with their success, it has to do with the college growing and looking better.