Hacker News Reader

Comment by pingswept | Hacker News Reader

Sampling classes doesn't occur at all schools. I'm an engineer now, but I've taught a few college classes, and having students walking in and out of the lecture is intensely irritating. Maybe it would be better if professors liked being treated like a salad bar, but I understand the sentiment.

On the other hand, I wouldn't write an email like that (because I have better things to do (like argue about that email on Hacker News!)).

View on HN

> Sampling classes is a relatively new phenomenon

Here's a Harvard Crimson article from 1950 complaining about the slashing of "shopping time" from 2 weeks to 1 (as far as I know it's been 1 week since then). Clearly "relatively" is relative.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1950/5/6/shopping-time-poc...

That would certainly suggest that I'm wrong, at least about how long shopping has been common. But I still don't think it happened everywhere (at least it didn't at my school).

Yale has an officially-mandated "shopping period" described at:

http://www.yale.edu/yalecol/publications/transfer/general/se...

I can't tell if you're expected to drop in on classes in the middle of them or not. I read it as you can sample a large number of non-overlapping classes during the first two weeks of term, and then make an informed decision about which ones to stick with.

Any Yalies around who can add anything?

I can see how it would be irritating. However, you as a provider of educational service are not entitled to your students' patronage. Without checking to see what else is on offer, how can they make an informed decision about which class they should spend their semester on? Surely you don't expect them to trust their luck.

After the drop/switch deadline, I think this kind of policy would be fine (if a bit draconian).

Without checking to see what else is on offer, how can they make an informed decision about which class they should spend their semester on.

Personally, I would try to drop in on professors' office hours, contact them via email to ask for a quick chat to explain the course, or ask friends for a recommendation. I'm not sure exactly what one can get from 20 minutes of the "these are the books and this is the late policy" kind of stuff covered during the first lecture anyway.

Maybe so. I found that among the professors at my school only a handful had personalities that were at all engaging. The remainder ran the gamut from barely tolerable to completely unacceptable. You can get a sense of that factor in the first lecture.

You can also get a good sense of that factor by asking any person who has ever taken a class from that professor. This achieves the same objective, with a little more work and a little less rudeness from you (or whoever it is in this situation).

That's a good addition to what I said above. As a teacher, I'd be absolutely delighted to help students choose between classes, even if my classes weren't in the running. It's the, "I spent hours preparing this lecture, and now you are walking out in the middle of it," that I don't like.

I can't pretend to have familiarity with the subject taught in this guy's class, but as someone who teaches a subject that requires multi-step derivations, it can be really devastating to have interruptions. I do not have such a policy in my courses, but I can understand why someone might want this.

The autonomy of the instructor and his/her ability to set policies that will ensure the common good in their class is an important cornerstone of academic freedom. People who would complain about this probably don't understand this principle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com