At my uni lectures were recorded / livestreamed. I honestly dont think i went to one for my whole degree
that was one of the biochem class(for life science majors) i took, the professor dint teach at all, just repeat verbatim from the slides and the book without going into too much detail. i had to retake the class due to that because her tests did not match what she was saying on the POWERPOINTS whom she repeated. and i self-taught once i took 2 semesters later with a different teacher.
Like how can we know about CANCER biochemical metabolism when its not even mentioned in the whole lecture, eventhough the test mentioned how the “cancer” was shunting part of the metabolites to alternative pathway for energy thats related to what we know about normal metabolism which was in the textbook(very convoluted question) and it seems to be beyond the scope of the class, since beginners biochem isnt talking something as advanced as cancer metabolism. it was the reverse wharburg effect for cancer cells.
and that class has a large number of people confused about her teaching style and thier grades reflected that and since it was the last semester for most of them, she pontentially screwed people out of grad school. she claimed “SHE was busy person in her LAB”, translate i dont really have time for lecturing/teach students, her test were as hard as my CCollege org.chem courses(whom decided thier courses have to match ivy league colleges for some reason).
With the power of the Internet, now you can fail History 203 from the comfort of your crying corner.
This was my economics course. The professor would come in, play the textbook manufacturer provided PowerPoint on the screen, and read the slides word for word with little to no elaboration. It was the most boring course I had ever taken.
Had perfect attendance and got 55% on my midterm.
Gave up, skipped almost all of my classes to instead just sit in the library and study on my own.
Got about 87% on my final exam.
Mandatory attendance is stupid, if you can pass the course you can pass the course.
a bunch of my uni courses were taught by TAs doing that same regurgitation.
my first semester transferred into a UNIVERSITY a animal physio course, was just the professor barely lecturing while most of the semester hes researching in a tropical place, and the TA barely did anything because she had her own MS research to do, so everyone was like confused the whole time he was in the class, what he wants to teach us, because he was 90% more concerned about his own research.
I’m a flight instructor. We get prosecuted if we’re that bad at our jobs.
I feel like attendance is one of the most important traits for a pilot. These guys showing up and just sitting there doing not much for a class seems to resemble what pilots seem to do now mostly unless I’m mistaken. Chemist doesn’t show up on time and leaves late, doesn’t matter job done, no one should care. Pilot, people would probably be pissed if the pilot was late
Good thing my Uni doesn’t have attendance. Although I still try to attend all lectures.
i had to stop attending one of my courses in the morning, because too tired and had another course where i had to do research papers. i liked the class but i couldnt fully attend it, only did the papers for the course(luckily he dint enforce attendance, and it was a philosophy class.
Essentially my entire computer science bachelor’s degree was professors sending us the slides and expecting us to read it on our own. Then also mandatory attendance to lectures where they simply read the slides aloud with no additional context. And 90%+ of questions asked would be answered with “the test will only be on stuff in the slides”
Every class I gave at least a few weeks to see if the lectures would help at all but they never did. The only useful thing about them was being able to talk to the professor after class ended about homework clarifications.
You’re giving me flashbacks to this Unix class I had in junior year. The professor had (either prepared or stolen) a 100 slide deck, and as you said the final was based solely on the slides.
Well I did attend just to have him read the slides in broken English. (No shade on non-native English speakers btw, but if you’re teaching native English speakers you kind of have to put in the effort, and this guy was coasting on straight phonics as he read these slides and couldn’t answer any questions not covered by his slides.)
Then I converted the slides into a TTS audio file, snaked an earbud up my sleeve, took and passed the test.
you got it reversed if you want to really excel. You go home and teach yourself, then you go to class to review and see if you got it right.
That’s pretty in line with what I’ve read of cognitive science research around learning from lectures.
Though it’s not actually necessary to teach yourself first, at least not fully. The important part is to sandwich things together. You can get a lot of the benefits with just half an hour before and after a lecture.
The short version of it is:
- Before the lecture, write down what you already know about the topic of the lecture, and what you don’t understand. I can’t remember as much about this part, though, to be honest.
- In the lecture, don’t take notes, except perhaps extremely brief notes such as a reference that you want to look up later (i.e. if the lecturer references a particular paper verbally that isn’t on the slides). Focus on engaged listening rather than taking notes (and if you’re neurodivergent, “engaged listening” may involve doing something with your hands, such as crochet or fidget toys)
- The big one is that after the lecture, without looking at notes or your books, you should try to write down as much as you can remember from the lecture, as a free recall test. After you’ve done this, you can look up anything you couldn’t remember.
Though I should note that there isn’t a consensus on the best way to learn. There are some broad themes that research agrees on though. It does seem pretty close to consensus that splitting your learning up into multiple stages is best, and that free recall exercises like this are super powerful. A lot of the specifics are up for debate though
I’mma try that if I ever try for a 3rd time. Though second time around I had zero problems understanding any of the material since I’d been working in the field for 4 years, my ex just had a problem with me spending every other weekend in university instead of catering to her every need. First time I was just a moron who didn’t study at all and I had a pretty tough calculus course first semester and I failed it two semesters in a row lol
I used the “give a wrong answer in class to get the right answer” trick as an undergrad and only the econ and history professors got what I was doing. It drove the stats and humanities teachers up the wall
Once I understood this, school really started to click. Too bad it wasn’t until I had baked in a shitty undergrad GPA.
If anyone doubts me, my graduate degrees are at perennial number one schools in their field. And I didn’t mention my disabilities in my application.
A good chunk of early undergraduate education was designed as a filter for students. Can students, in a system that doesn’t care if they fail, make it through the system? A lot of the rest of it was leadership training with some technical classes bolted on.
#1 Spaced repetition, #2 quizzing, and #3 explaining it in plain common language without any technical words or phrases are 3 really good methods to learning something new. The lectures provide #1 if you study the material a few days before or after the lecture. Note taking can help focus on the material during the lecture to stay engaged and focused, and be useful when studying later to target what you have trouble with.
My 26 yo son recently went back to college to get a degree that might lead to an actual job, and he is shocked at how awful the younger students are. They watch YouTube and TikTok videos in class instead of paying attention, they are openly hostile to profs’ teaching choices, they think they know everything when they clearly don’t know anything, everything is too hard, etc.
And some of the Profs are just as bad.
Covid blew a big hole in our educational system, and messed up that whole generation.
our education has been declining for as long as I’ve been alive. I think it still succeeds in it’s systemic goal of creating drone slaves for the empire… anyhow dunning-kruger is a bitch. It’s easy to mistake information available to you through your phone as knowledge you actually possess, If I was in charge of educating people I would challenge those notions by putting them in situations where they have to apply that knowledge and how it’s dangerous to assume everyone with a platform is a credible source of information
27 here, back to university too for similar reasons and seeing the same thing.
I don’t actually blame the lecturers or teachers. A huge part of higher education is self motivated learning with access to people who are incredibly knowledgeable, who also happen to be your teachers / lecturers.any lectures are there to guide the topics of independent learning.
Until a certain point, the purpose of most education was education itself. The matter half of the 20th century into today has seen a shift of the purpose of university being for employment on the other side. This is an enormous difference, it no longer appeals only to people who are passionate about the subject. If 70% of the lecture theatre is there not to learn but graduate, it changes the learning itself. People by nature want to optimise their tasks to get their goal; if the goal is to be as educated on the subject as possible, then you’re motivated across the board. If the goal is to get a job and the degree is a checkbox in the process, or even if you’re going because “that’s what you do”, then the motivation is to pass. There is no bare minimum to learning, there is to graduating.
The goalposts move on difficulty too. Universities are for-profit companies, who sell qualifications. Inevitably the difficulty of the qualification will creep downwards, as the expectation of difficulty from the learner does the same.
I think this has been happening for long enough that in all but the most prestigious or passionate corners of higher education, the staff and teachers also first entered higher education in establishments where everyone was motivated by either employment or profit.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe plenty of people in higher education are motivated by education for the sake of it, but it’s no longer the default expectation.
Covid gave everyone who graduated in 2019 and earlier another layer of job security.
I was failing engineering probability and statistics until i stopped going to class and just read the book. Then i got an A. Professor was just horrible.
i had one in CC, in 09, where advanced alg teacher decided everyone should be doing matrices, adv calculus, and discrete math, which was wierdly in the textbook for adv algebra for some reason. half the class dropped out by the last withdraw date, only because i informed/ and noticed how the professor unilaterally dropped people from the couse without telling them. oh and the prof also called the students “terrible” paraphrased because they dont know math and said he it is the reason why people are graduating HS with such a low level.
the textbook in question was Pearson publishers how are people supposed to do math that is way above adv algebra, i also suspect he intentionally does this to make people drop the class so he doesnt have to teach.
I had one truly awful professor in college. I’m pretty sure he came in hung over multiple times. Regardless of speculation, he definitely DID Google the topic of the say and get notes from other professors from other universities to teach from and then also had the audacity to complain about them. The cherry on the shit cake was him falling asleep during the grad students’ presentations and then was weirdly aggressive and nit picky about what they said after waking up. I really laid into him on the student review. Supposedly their boss reads them all. I hope he saw some consequences. It’s one thing to sort of be hands off and say “you’re in college now, you need to teach yourself,” but it’s another thing to be an asshole and disrespect your students by falling asleep.
I took my college level statistics class during one summer and the teacher threatened to just never show up again and cancel the class after giving us a test where the average grade was a 48.
Bro gave us 8 hours of homework per night and expected us to have z tables memorized.
I didn’t like history, until I just sort of discovered it on my own. After that, I wondered why EVERY history teacher I ever had before or after, was so terrible at it. It’s the most fascinating subject, just stories of interesting people doing interesting things, how can you fuck that up?
And yet somehow History has to be taught in the most mind-numbingly way possible.
it’s because they don’t share their excitement, or they are stuck teaching a time period they absolutely could not care about if they tried.
i have a history professor friend who does women’s history in europe renaissance through… i wanted to say industrial revolution i need coffee and that doesn’t seem long enough. apparently she is the best person to go to prague with.
i took her european history class and it was the best history class i have ever had. made me change majors to history
“fun” little historical factoid on that. WAY back when the idea of national standards was being developed around 1992ish all the various disciplines started working on their stuff. A lot of them had agreed standards by 1994 or shortly thereafter. History/Social Studies took almost 10+ years to get that far because they were arguing over if dates/actions were more important or trends/impacts were more important. As it was explained to me at the time (2006ish) the issue was just stating facts or making them meaningful.
Disclaimer: I’m not claiming the above is scientific fact. That is what was relayed to me when taking a non-history course 20 years ago. Still, a fun thought experiment on what is truly important in learning.
I had one history prof in college who told us in the opening moments of his first class, that he didn’t really care about actual dates, and he’d never ask a date question on a test, which caused an audible sigh of relief in the room. He felt that knowing the CHRONOLOGY of events was better than the actual dates. It was one of the few insightful things I ever learned from a History professor.
Just yesterday there was a Jeopardy question about history, and I didn’t know the answer, but they gave a person’s name, and with that I was able to eliminate guesses that were after that person’s time. I didn’t know the exact dates of those eliminations, but I knew in general that they were after that person. That only left me with a few options left, and I wasn’t sure about one, so I guessed the other, and was right. It was an example of just knowing chronology was good enough.
Besides, if you need to lock down a strict fact like a date, we have a super computer in our pocket holding the entirety of human knowledge. Google it.
my history professor friend thought that if you could cork board and yarn it together, see what led to what and influence what, who cared if you got the dates slightly wrong. you had the tapestry and the big picture. you could get the letters and the individual stories. that’s history
PEPE SILVIA YES i haven’t seen her in a while but she loved this meme
Yeah, sometimes a date is important, and you end up remembering a lot of them anyway, but generally, just knowing the story is all you need, and that’s the fun part anyway.
Date Anxiety has kept more people from enjoying history than anything else.
I’ve never been to a lecture that took attendance. The only classes that did take attendance would sure as fuck notice that you got up and left.
Please take your AI trash tf out of here.
Am I going insane or do the two women in front middle have weird looking hands?
Mmmm
It’s slop. Coming to take yer jerb.
Now that you mention it, all of the hands look weird
Noup, probably AI generated picture as messed up hands are a rather stereotypical for AI.
My son just had to write a short screenplay for a class, and he has one woman confront another with a photograph, demanding to know who is in that photo, and the accused flippantly says: “Oh that’s AI, just look at the hands,” and the accuser glances at the picture and hollers “Their hands are NORMAL!”
Man, I’m glad it wasn’t like this for me. I went to school in the middle of nowhere North Dakota and nearly all of my professors were active and attentive. My genetics class was the only one where the professor was phoning it in, just reading the textbook as a lecture, but me and the other students complained, and he got replaced with another much better professor a few weeks into the semester.
If you are in the US you are paying for it, most likely with debt.
