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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

The thing that most struck me after signing up for a few college courses this past semester for the first time is how little emphasis there is on actually learning the material. Especially in math classes. The entire focus is on passing a test. It seems like the entire system is just set up as a means of "testing" whether you already know enough to pass a given course, rather than the focus being on learning and developing new skills.

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I have attended several different colleges, and my kids have all attended different colleges (than the ones that I've attended) and from that sample we discovered great variation in both the quality of the teaching and the focus of the teaching. From our limited data set (3 private liberal arts, 1 private "top ten", 3 different community colleges) the small private liberal arts colleges all had some classes that were taught by professors who cared that the students really understood the material, the community college classes were mostly taught to the exam, and my experience at USC was the big 'survey' classes (like EE101, CS203, etc) were generally taught to the exam (specific learning skills were 'taught' in the lab sessions) but the more specialized classes (like EE450 engineering calculus) were more focused on developing skills at using the material in your future life.

Bottom line is that it is really hard to generalize about colleges because colleges can be so different.

Can confirm that your experience at the top ten school applies to Purdue Engineering and Technology majors. First year starts out slow with mostly 100+ people classes (accounting had 1,100! 550 in the room at a time), but after that they get specialized and you normally find the more personable professors in the higher numbers since there are normal size classes of maybe 10-50.

Same here in Germany. Our CS faculty admits some 300-400 students who are sitting together in one lecture hall in the basic courses (math, algorithms, logic, information theory, electronics), with tutorial sessions for about 30-40 students per room. The specialized lectures in later semesters have 10-30 students and only one tutorial session.

I've found the smaller lectures to be much nicer since it allows engaged students to discuss the subject with the lecturer more freely. (Of course, it depends on the lecturer, i.e. if he/she allows questions and counterpoints from the audience, but most lecturers do.)

This is certainly true within the CS department at Purdue. There are some really passionate professors (Gustavo for my fellow boilermakers), however they're typically only involved in the upper level courses. It'd be easy to look at the first two classes in the program and assume that was the norm, but things really change as the degree continues to specialize through your 4 years.

I had to take a semester of philosophy last year and I had the same reaction you did. In fact, this might be quite sinister, it almost seemed like my professors didn't even want me to learn.

One section of the course was on Feminism and my professor started off the section by saying that if you're not a feminist you shouldn't come to the lectures. In fact, this was the perfect overture to a grueling 6 months of my professor soap boxing her political opinions instead of the actual critical thinking skills I thought I would be getting out of the course.

If "learning and developing new skills" isn't the exact same thing as test preparation, then the test needs to be fixed.

Good tests matter. Teaching to the test is the same thing as teaching the material needed, given that the test is decent.

Direct any complaints toward poor-quality tests.

Tests are the anti-cheat device though. Or at least it's easier to keep tests honest than coursework.

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