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Comment by houseabsolute | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

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).

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.

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