5 ms·

I can’t help comparing this to the system I grew up in (Italy), which is vastly different and it seemingly produces very good graduates. University was free an

• jmspring 5mo ago
  Having just shipped the kiddo into the real world, she's leaning liberal arts (her and her mom suck at math), but she has a benefit neither her mom or I had - EU deal citizenship. She's going to do a year here to figure things out - she's also been thinking about Europe. University in Europe, for undergrad, is different than the US. I think the large class model and a barrier of exams to advance makes sense in Europe. I've not been in the University of California system for years, but the school I went to - some classes didn't always hold up a level of academic rigor.
  • andai 5mo ago
    What is EU deal?
    • sillysaurusx 5mo ago
      EU dual citizenship Edit: if anyone’s confused, there was a typo in the original post. I corrected it.
      • canyp 5mo ago
        It's the new deal.
  • genxy 5mo ago
    No one has to suck at math. Any human can learn the majority of skills.
    • plemer 5mo ago
      Have you ever taught?
      • genxy 5mo ago
        I have! My favorite students were the 55+ returning education students that really wanted to finally learn algebra and calculus.
      • vnce 5mo ago
        Yes and I standby genxy’s comment. It was always a question of motivation, not ability.
        • genxy 5mo ago
          And motivation was often impeded by either trauma or not finding a way to make it relevant to the student. Those are prereqs for learning anything. The common denominator for people that are good at something is that they liked it, so they did it more.
          • vasco 5mo ago
            I know plenty of people that went through an engineering degree with me that do not like math, but they are competent at all the way up to what an electrical engineer needs to know, which is not research level math, but what most people would call advanced. I would never say I "like" math for example but I've always thought about it as something important to learn and get decent at to succeed in life. I have way more interest in history and philosophy but the way I figured is I can learn all of that on my own because all you need is to read. Math is actually hard so I better get "trained by someone" at it.
            • 5mo ago
  • quadrifoliate 5mo ago
    Does EU dual citizenship help with university if you are not currently a resident of the EU? I always thought the low EU-local fees for European universities were based on EU residency, not citizenship.
    • luckystarr 5mo ago
      In most of Germany neither is required (Baden Württemberg requires non-EU citizens to pay 1.5k€ per semester). Commonly though you have to pay from 200 to 300€ administrative fees. The harder problem is to enter Germany, but as you have EU citizenship, that's not a problem for you.
• jimbokun 5mo ago
  What about the demands on the time of professors from students who repeatedly try and fail the exams? Seems like that could get expensive for taxpayers. Maybe it doesn’t happen much in practice?
  • ziofill 5mo ago
    It did happen quite often to have to retake a few exams. Some students could never clear some particularly hard ones. But I have never heard any professor ever complain about it. Nobody wants a struggling student to finally succeed more than the professor who has to keep failing them.
  • shimman 5mo ago
    Probably less expensive than paying for an imperial war machine if I had to guess.
  • bawolff 5mo ago
    I can't imagine marking the exams was a significant part of the professors time. Especially because its probably the sort of thing they could get an assistant to do.
    • fastasucan 5mo ago
      No, professors mark their own exams.
      • prerok 5mo ago
        I've known this to differ between professors as well as exams. Lower levels and higher volume ones were almost always marked by assistants. The oral exam was always done by professors, though.
    • prerok 5mo ago
      Indeed, evaluating an exam does not take that much time that it would be considered expensive. That said, in my country (in EU), it's not indefinite tries. The fourth and later attempts (up to 8, I think) have oral exams in front of a panel of professors so that they can evaluate if there is actual lack of knowledge or if there is some sort of problem between the student and the professor. The student must by then pay for the attempt to pass the exam. It's not expensive, though, it's just another incentive to make the student really be sure to be prepared.
• trimethylpurine 5mo ago
  > "(Italy) seemingly produces very good graduates" Last I looked, China and the US account for 18/20 major contributions to chemistry annually in the last 8+ years and the US was leading for a decade before 2018. IUPAC works to keep exams international so you can't just say Americans are dumb. They are taking the same exams and the failing is permanent, not forgiven. So it's even harder to succeed in the US compared with Italy, based on your description.
  • prerok 5mo ago
    I believe they meant on average.
• try-working 5mo ago
  I studied engineering in Sweden. One of our courses had an 80% failure rate. A world of difference from Harvard where the average grade is A.
  • consp 5mo ago
    I'm glad one of my old profs in the Netherlands refused to bend and was fine with arguing his 40 percent first pass numbers (the target was 60 for some reason, hint: money). If everyone is exceptional, nobody is.
    • kazen44 5mo ago
      also, in my experience high grades are rare in the netherlands at all education levels. I did both mbo and hbo levels, and on both levels getting a "A" (10/10 or 9/10) was a very uncommon thing.
    • drnick1 5mo ago
      The point is that Harvard kids are all more or less exceptional. Harvard and other Ivy Leagues attract the best students in the world, not only mostly local talent like European schools. European universities are most similar to state school systems in many regards.
      • sitzkrieg 5mo ago
        you misspelled wealthy
  • rendall 5mo ago
    Apparently Harvard is introducing a 20% cap (plus change) on As. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/03/plan-to-rein-in-inflated-grading-explained/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/03/plan-to-rein-... No cap on A minuses though.
    • Gibbon1 5mo ago
      Looked at my collage that I went to 40 years ago. Back then they graded on a curve. Looking student grades for 2025. A's 30% B's 45% 2 out of 254 got an A+ I look at grade inflation still being a problem at elite schools and shake my head.
• stellalo 5mo ago
  Oral exams, what an experience
• whateverboat 5mo ago
  I think the problems are deeper. The problems are at school level. The variance in the level of schooling in US is huge compared to Italy in my experience. This factor means that school exams are not a good indicator of competitiveness. Furthermore, the social systems in Italy mean that the failure is not that problematic especially for kids from poor backgrounds. And therefore, risk of depression etc was much lower. In short what I want to say is that the university exam system is not as important as the social security/welfare state for better student outcomes. This also ties into Harvard's grade inflation. If you think about it, if only the countries best mathematicians are joining Harvard, it doesn't make sense for any of them to receive a D on a mathematics course just because they are not that good compared to the rest of the class but are still in top 2% country wise. The real problem here again is that US has a few good universities and a lot of bad ones. But this again, can just also be due to the size of US, but also is affected by social welfare state and equality.
  • znpy 5mo ago
    > The problems are at school level. Imho the problems are even deeper: they’re at culture level. But that’s where things get controversial, so i’ll hint at the problems and stop here.
    • bmm6o 5mo ago
      You mean the culture of cutting funding from under performing schools to enforce a downward spiral and divert money to private schools? If not you should be more specific.
    • AtlasBarfed 5mo ago
      [flagged]
    • znpy 4mo ago
      (The two sibling comments confirm i was right at only hinting at the problem and avoiding the quarrels. No one of the two commenters is trying to engage in a healthy and honest conversation. That’s another sign of a… cultural issue)
  • 4mo ago
• MrDresden 5mo ago
  > "We weren’t entitled because we weren’t paying customers." Having insight into the Dutch university education system I've noticed that the students here are incredibly entitled, and even cite "being paying customers" when they disagree with the difficulty of course work or the scoring they get and diagree with. My experience of my Nordic university time, some 20 years ago mirrors yours. Not unlimited retakes, but very hard exams and no one had this "customer" attitude. Just nose to the grindstone, very long days in the library, every single day of the week.
• SkiFire13 5mo ago
  This doesn't reflect my experience. You still pay for university depending on your income (technically what's called ISEE), although this is usually capped at around ~3k€/year There are still tests for enrolling in STEM degrees, most notably the TOLC-I test, especially for those degrees with limited numbers. I have also never seen beer or wine taps in my university. It is true however that some exams are generally hard and a lot of people fail them. Some are for good reasons, others because the professor is a dickhead. As always there is a lot of variability.
• znpy 5mo ago
  Can confirm (italian here as well). I took the cpu architecture and operating systems class exam about six or seven times. It was incredibly frustrating and demoralising at the time but looking back it made absolute sense and was completely worth it. I’ve been living off the learning from that course for the last ten years. And believe me when i say it’s definitely visible when you’re talking with somebody that took that course (or an equivalent one from a different university) and actually understood the topics.
• drnick1 5mo ago
  > I can’t help comparing this to the system I grew up in (Italy), which is vastly different and it seemingly produces very good graduates. That's funny because Italians seem to seize every opportunity available to study abroad, particularly in the USA, and especially at the graduate level.