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Not the same, but I went from the Polish education system to a British university, and it also felt like it was a massive downgrade.

What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities - "don't assume prior knowledge of anything". It basically meant that on a CS course, they teach you basic level maths, basic programming skills, you spend the entire 1st year of university learning what we learnt in school around age 15-16. A Polish university absolutely won't be teaching you basic algebra,statistics or core concepts of programing on a CS course - you are simply required to know these things, otherwise wtf are you doing on a CS course.

Also in general, I find the elective system of subjects in British schools to be.....poor. As in, I was(and am) surrounded by perfectly normal adults who are good in certain subjects(the ones they picked) and who have zero knowledge in others(the ones they didn't pick). I feel like my own Polish education has given me a very broad understanding of a lot of different subjects even if I wasn't personally interested in them. Like, even though I went to a school with a "maths and CS focus"(which just meant these two subjects had 2x the number of lessons each week), we still had lessons in history, physics, chemistry, biology, Polish literature.....all of it was mandatory, you couldn't just decide to skip it. At the time, I thought it was useless, but in hindsight I am very grateful for it because it has given me at least basic level of knowledge in many different subjects, whereas my British peers just can't even have a conversation about basic chemistry for instance, since they never took it as a subject.

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> What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities - "don't assume prior knowledge of anything".

The rationale is that you want to give 18 year olds the opportunity to pick a field of study that they're excited about now rather than forcing them to choose something based on what kind of education their parents thought proper for them six years ago. If a single "intro to programming" course and a slightly easier first math course can onboard smart students who otherwise would be hopelessly lost, and the only downside is that a couple of better-prepared students feel a bit bored, that's a small price to pay.

That is just an excuse. You could easily take an "intro to programming" before trying to get into the school. All it does is lower the bar of entry and you can only teach so much in the time given so it will ultimately take time away in the other end.

What's wrong with a low bar to tertiary education? It lets disadvantaged kids get in and catch up. As long as the standards are high by the end everything is fine right?

In theory? Nothing at all.

In practice, some see the fact many tech employers give coding tests to people with CS degrees as a sign the standards at the end aren't as consistently high as one might hope.

This is a stupid argument. Is one to suppose that the brain teasers that were popular in interviews 15 years ago implied that universities weren’t teaching people to be clever or something?

I think a lot of interviewing style is fashion driven.

Also computer science isn’t necessarily about actually coding anyway. It’s mostly about algorithms and structure and complexity. Similarly, anyone who knows anything about university mathematics courses does not expect fresh graduates to be particularly good at arithmetic

The difference is that programming is an essential craft. Algorithms are fundamental here, but it seems like teaching „structure and complexity“ equals to teaching paradigms that where en vogue a generation ago. This kind of knowledge is distracting, pretentious and even harmful.

On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine you can make a multiple year degree out of just programming. Hence why the best courses will have a mix of both practical and theory.

It works in practice as well. That is what junior college is all about. About a third of Berkeley graduates came from JCs. Transferring in at the JC level is competitive and hard and getting out is always hard.

CS isn't programming, so I don't think it's unreasonable to make sure a candidate from a CS background has the basics down.

Nothing, if you let people who do not want to waste time (and tuition fees!) on repeating basic stuff skip ahead.

I also studied CS on polish university and I feel we had the best of both worlds:

Initial programming courses were electives, where you could choose between more basic or more advanced "intro to programming" course. Basic had python, while advanced had c and c++.

Similarly logic classes were in basic and advanced groups and it was easy to choose the group you want and switch groups during course.

In fact, I was the guy who came for CS degree after never doing great at math or CS in high school and it reaaaaaally helped me to get up to speed with the others.

If those people who do not waste time are so smart why they have to be hold by the hand and given curriculum? (tuition fees you can count as means for getting a diploma, but also if someone is soo smart, why does he need a diploma anyway?)

What I imagine really smart person would do is: go to people giving the course for additional work or talk with them to show where they are at. Skip classes, read something else while in a class. Take advantage of knowledge to not care about the course curriculum and do his own research.

But that is my idea and maybe people who think their time is wasted could be a bit more humble and learn to work with other people.

In principle, yeah. Read something else in class -- better to just skip it then. It is not uncommon for people to skip lectures and just do the exam.

>If those people who do not waste time are so smart why they have to be hold by the hand and given curriculum?

There's a culture of "rules apply to everyone" and people are not used to asking for special treatment. So if you don't make it super obvious, people will assume they can't ask for adjustments. Also, no tuition so weaker incentive to get your money's worth.

You did not get my point, if someone is truly exceptional they skip classes. If otherwise rules apply to everyone keep your head down.

People who think they are exceptional are mostly just casual. (wink wink instagram)

> go to people giving the course for additional work

Always seems to be the solution. It doesn't scale, even if you know how to make a PCB or a cupboard (for example), it doesn't take 0 time. That extra work would be extra time spent, which is nonsense if the goal is to demonstrate competency and reduce wasting time.

Does not scale in what way? Exceptional people are rare, just as I wrote if someone is really exceptional he will blow through all this with no issues and minimal time. There is loads of people who just think are exceptional just like all those people on Instagram.

Does not scale in the way that the day has limited hours, extra work might be okay for a few courses, but not for more because you simply run out of time. There's also the issue that that extra work is given the same grade in the end, but you've spent more time. And no, knowledge doesn't make things take zero time.

Plus, the extra work is still about the same course material - instead of one hello world you write two. It's not hard, it becomes depressing and demoralizing.

In my experience, it's like being sabotaged. If one has a previous interest in the subject but is forced to complete all the same courses it gets very very tedious. Akin to being forced to fill middle school worksheets - you can do it, but it takes time and is just mind-numbing.

I think US universities are forced to cover things again due to a failure in the K-12 system of schooling that precedes it, and the lack of adequate testing to weed out ill prepared individuals.

In many countries, these kids would probably not get into college in the first place due to failing preparatory tests. In the US there are many financial incentives to pull in as many kids as possible and that may cause a lowering of barriers.

An observation in the maths, many countries in Asia cover calculus at the middle school level and continue into high school, in the US I noticed many public schools categorize calculus as an advanced (sometimes elective) high school subject.

The total amount of a study program is limited, if you spend a year on repeating the basic concepts, that's a huge part of your "learning time budget" that you're not not able to devote on learning more advanced topics.

UC Berkeley (where I did my CS degree) follows this model after admission. There's CS61A, an introductory class for people with some math/computers background, and CS3, an introduction for people coming in with no background. Successful and interested CS3 students are then funnelled into CS61A.

Yes but minus the math; what math there was in 61A was easy. 61A didn't really expect much prerequisite either, but then it took off quickly. A lot of work but not intellectually very hard. It was then taught in Scheme which no one knew. Scheme is an elegant language which we never used again. SICP was the course text which no one ever read.

What I really remember was EE40 taking like a week to explain Ohm's Law. I thought, Ok, I think I've got this class. But then it just went exponential and then the prof just dumped a bunch of chapters on us at the end that he didn't cover and said that'll be on the final. EE40 covered about a third of 105. EE40 just had an insane amount of material and labs. FWIW, I think 16A+B covers better material than EE40 did although I have a soft spot in my heart for what was EE20.

BTW, Calculus 1A at Berkeley, if you didn't take AP Calculus in high school, was brutal. Pointlessly so, since most math in non-math courses was pretty straightforward.

But all the freshman courses at Berkeley were hard. You either got up to speed or you got out. Upper division was even harder, but you were prepared by then.

61A was easy in terms of math, but hard in terms of everything else. Every student I met who had never programmed before taking 61A found it intellectually quite challenging, both before and after the switch to Python; even without math, thinking in terms of computation and execution is not natural.

Given that second-hand experience, I found the excision of all of SICP's math from the curriculum to be quite a good choice, as adding advanced math as another prerequisite would have raised the barrier to entry even higher.

(Side note: your description of EE40 sounds like a professor who didn't schedule well, not intentional difficulty.)

(As you know) most of the lower div EECS courses inherit slide decks and the coverage is set by the department. CS70 has a wonderful set of notes which should be a book. I regularly go through the CS61C, CS152 and CS252 decks; those are great Berkeley classes. CS162 has a good set and then Kubi has his which even better. Hilfinger's CS61A notes were quite good. The deck the EE40 prof used was based on a previous semester and it was pretty good. It's just that the class is an insane amount of material and work.

There was an intent behind the work. All of the lower div classes are hard with a massive amount of content. But you can show up a Berkeley from a substandard high school on the wrong side of the tracks and blow it out of the water; a buddy of mine was like that and went to Columbia for his PhD. It's very simple. You just have to work. Immediately. Day one. I don't think Berkeley EECS rewards creativity. Indeed I think EECS punishes creativity. But EECS teaches its students to work their asses off, regardless of whether they came from Lick Wilmerding or Skyline.

Go Bears.

Don't know if the workload was all that hard compared to, say, the experience of my MIT friends, but the level of intellectual rigor and methodical thought was high.

Let's say lowering the bar has the result of making two courses absolutely useless for you, because you've already mastered everything there is to know about them. And let's say your typical bachelor's degree includes 30 or more courses. The time "taken away" from you is around 5%. Time that surely you could spend by studying for the other courses a little bit more diligently, by solving all the optional homework exercises, by going the extra mile for projects.

That said, if after your undergraduate degree you are unsatisfied by the amount of stuff you've learned thus far, there's an easy solution: continue on and pursue a master's degree.

In my case it was first two semesters. Being forced to write what are basically hello worlds what you wrote six years ago was so asinine.

Some universities will let you skip intro courses by passing a test.

In my opinion, British universities focus less on technical skills/knowledge, but more on research skills. Initiative is encouraged. You come out knowing more useful things, with experience in independent work/research, and with more confidence in yourself.

A Russian university would absolutely hammer you with technical knowledge (including in many irrelevant subjects), but when it comes to actually doing an independent research project plagiarism is rampant. As a student, you are belittled at every step. You are unlikely to get involved in any independent research, initiative is discouraged, you learn a lot of things that are not useful.

However, I agree with other posters that British universities bizarrely seem to often reward/celebrate athletics more than academic achievements. Somehow, the top of the social hierarchy are the kids that are good at team sports. In a Russian university, how you do at sports is for the most part irrelevant and if you are not involved in the sport yourself, you will likely never hear about someone's sporting achievements. That makes for a healthier social environment, I think.

> British universities bizarrely seem to often reward/celebrate athletics more than academic achievements.

I'm not sure how you get that impression.

American universities do this, but (with a couple of famous exceptions, like the traditional boat race between Oxford and Cambridge) British universities don't care about sport.

The social hierarchy was just separate, and had no bearing on anything academic. I didn't care for a second what the rugby team were doing (generally drinking themselves into a stupor), and they didn't care about me. That's just a reflection on British culture in general.

At Oxford, for instance, social life mostly happens at colleges. The way things are set up, you simply do not get to spend that much time with your course-mates - you do not interact with them during lectures, and then everyone goes back to their colleges.

And social life in colleges is (sadly) dominated by drinking at the college bar, drinking in clubs, and dinners in the dining hall, where everyone seems to sit according to some unofficial hierarchy (with being in the top sports team in a popular sport seemingly correlated with being near the top of that hierarchy). Inter-college and Oxford vs Cambridge competitions in all kinds of sports (but primarily rowing) are a massive part of college life. The university rewards athletes with awards of blues and half-blues, drawings on college walls celebrating sports victories, prominent mentions in college publications etc. Academics, on the other hand, are not given nearly as much attention - you would almost never know how good someone is doing in their studies, especially since they are probably studying a completely different subject to you.

It would be common to go and support your college sports team in, say, rowing; whereas nobody really cared so much about academic competition between colleges. Those academic victories were never really mentioned or celebrated.

I went to a mid-ranked UK university and while social life is definitely drinking and partying heavy, sports played basically no role in it at all, like not even a bit. I don't remember a single sports match even being advertised let alone having a major spectator turnout.

I do think it's worth adding, though, that from what I've heard (and given my own experiences), the culture in Oxford/Cambridge is not at all representative of University culture generally in British Universities.

True, yet they are some of the best universities not only in Britain, but in Europe and the world. So they are highly relevant in this discussion as we are talking about the top maths/physics education in each country for top students. E.g. when Russian universities/schools are mentioned here, it is usually Moscow State University or another top university or school that is assumed.

And in many ways, e.g. when it comes to drinking and partying, I would guess the culture in other British universities is even worse. In a top Russian university you simply would not have the time, and they would not hesitate to kick you out; graduating from university can be more difficult than getting into one.

The criticism, then, should be directed at Oxbridge, and not at [almost] all other British universities which don't do this.

I went to Imperial College. "Work hard, play hard" was some kind of motto. Most people followed the first part, the second part was optional. There was more "play" at weekends, and less during the week, compared with my friends at other universities. Mostly, it meant focussing on work during the week to leave time at the weekend.

I remember two mentions of sport: when a friend turned out to be on the hockey C team, and when the student newspaper announced that we'd lost some traditional cup [1]. You can see just how little attention was given to the game by the number of spectators [2].

(It would help the UK if the drinking age for beer and wine were reduced to 16. People can then get too drunk and do silly stuff with some oversight from their parents, and be a bit more mature about it at university. See Denmark for a similar Northern European country with this.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_Match

[2] https://twitter.com/hashtag/bottlematch2018

On your final point about the drinking age:

The minimum purchasing/public drinking age is 18 (other than a single pint with a meal), but there's no practical restriction on parents letting their kids drink in private. My parents encouraged me once I was around 16 to join in with the adults whilst they had drinks. This led to me getting silly drunk a couple of times but with proper supervision. Same thing with going to some college house parties with 6th form friends - their parents knew that at the end of the night all the kids we're being picked up by their family.

The problem is if parents don't consider this and just ban drinking for kids up until they leave the house and aren't under their control any more. That's what causes people to go out of control at Uni since it might be literally their first experience with alcohol, or at least more than "1 glass with a meal" etc.

My sister was at a private school in the UK and they were given drinks(a single glass of champagne) at certain events even before they turned 18, with permission from parents. Like you said, it's only illegal to buy alcohol under 18, but there's no problem with consumption itself.

I was given Buck's Fizz (Champagne and orange juice) when I was 5, at the birthday party of a super-posh boy who lived in the village. His grandfather didn't even ask my mum first. Upper class people apparently have different rules.

At Imperial, when the Google London office was new, the feedback from staff for why so few students hung around at their recruitment event was the lack of alcohol. Overturning this HQ-imposed very American policy apparently took significant effort.

In MSU of early 00's most students drank a lot. I certainly did, mostly with other people from schools #2 and #57 already mentioned in this thread. But there was another company with a reputation of "real crazy drunkards". They were from another excellent high school, distinct from the Konstantinov lineage: the Kolmogorov's boarding school. Most of them left parents' house at age of 15.

In a top Russian university you simply would not have the time, and they would not hesitate to kick you out; graduating from university can be more difficult than getting into one.

Are you sure? I studied math in MSU in early 00's. Most of my coursemates drank a lot. I took some silly pride in drinking a lot and still learning enough to get good grades, but a lot of us just weren't bothered by getting worse grades. You had to be exceptionally and repeatedly bad at the exams to be kicked out.

This is an American perspective but I think this could be an Anglo phenomenon so let me take a crack at it.

When I was brought up, the image of what a successful student was, was a very well rounded one. The perfect student was a diligent worker in all courses and always an athlete. Athletics was very very tied to the image of being a proper student because basically athletics = team and team = learning to work with others to overcome challenges and work towards a goal + being physically fit.

This is the gist of it, it's a bit hard to explain without living it. Also there is a religious aspect thrown in because America.

This was the image of the perfect young adult given to me by Boy Scouts and the image my private school friends were given by their schools. At my public school though everything was a bit watered down as we got far less development attention than private school kids would get.

For non-Americans reading: private school = good, public school = bad, in terms of education in the US(usually). I know this is flipped in some places.

> when I was brought up, the image of what a successful student was, was a very well rounded one.

I think this idea is dead, or close to it. Almost all the people I knew in college were there for a simple reason: to get a piece of paper that says they can now participate in the work force. Being educated was more of a side effect.

Plenty of people complain about gen eds or other requirements for degrees that are not explicitly related to the major.

> For non-Americans reading: private school = good, public school = bad,

This really depends on the university, the professors there, and the field. My school (USC, no, the other one) is #1 for international business, etc.

Athletics is extremely emphasized, though. I understand that colleges have to discriminate somehow to give people scholarships, and that sports make an insane amount of money for colleges, but it always struck me as odd that getting a full ride for being excellent at a sport is even a thing.

That is exactly it.

To me, that seems like an odd culture for universities to encourage/perpetuate, given that most top professors at top universities are unlikely to be particularly athletic, and the word "intellectual" is often used as almost an antonym of "athlete".

It varies by course and college. My college had a relatively small number of maths students and would give a prize to the top performers each year. We all knew who got the prize and what grade everyone got. Some of my friends were top athletes in niche sports, but none of us really cared about the boat race, varsity rugby, or anything like that. Social life was centred much more around drinking than sport. I don't think our dining hall arrangement had anything to do with sports teams, official or otherwise.

Possibly relevant quote from Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions (talking about the early '60s):

"The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to be brilliant without effort, or to accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. I took this as an invitation to do very little. I’m not proud of this, I’m just describing my attitude at the time, shared by most of my fellow students."

> What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities - "don't assume prior knowledge of anything"...

I think it is a good thing. There is a big difference between doing well on a test and understanding the subject. You may think you know basic algebra because you can find the correct value for x, but chances are that you don't really know what you are doing. So having a refresher course telling you what you are actually doing when solving an equation, and how it fits in the big picture is valuable.

The thing is: when you relearn these basic subjects, you do it with a wider field of view. For example, when I first learned derivatives, I knew it had was about rate of change, and I knew the formulas, but I didn't quite get the relationship between slopes and derivatives. It came back later, as I was more familiar with things like linear interpolation and how to manipulate curves in general.

Yeah, I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, just that I was really surprised by it. In the entirety of my Polish education it was drilled into our heads that we had to be super good at algebra for example, because "no one at university will wait for you to learn, you have to know it before you start" - and then I went to a British uni, and well, people did wait for us to catch up, which lead to me having a very relaxed 1st year, while I know from my friends that at Polish unis the 1st year is actually the worst one as that's where a lot of people get kicked out for failing exams and there is a lot of catching up to do. In a British uni it was the opposite - I have no idea what you'd need to do to get kicked out of the course in 1st year, I've never heard about that happening to anyone, while in some Polish courses the attrition rate is above 50% in the first year.

UK universities generally have a low attrition rate (at least to failing exams). If you struggle with the subject you may wind up dropping out on your own due to stress, but if you stick with it you'll probably still technically get a degree, just a third or an 'ordinary' (which is basically a fail: I don't know many employers which will count it as a degree).

Also, the way mathematics is taught at high school might not prepare you well for the way you use it at university.

Maths in high school focuses more on applying methods (taking a derivative etc.); maths at university (even on a CS course) is more about constructing mathematical models and arguments.

It can almost feel like a completely different subject.

It is interesting that you say that because I had huge variations in my test results, dropping from top of my class to the bottom in an instant, then back to the average.

At one point I met a guy who was working on ways for computers to solve math problems. He told me that early college level problems are actually easier to solve than high school problems for his algorithms. The reason is that while college problems have more steps, and are therefore harder for students, you essentially just need to string theorems together. High school level problems are simpler (less steps) but require significantly more intuition.

And that's what I think happened with my grades: I was never good at math, but I had good intuition. And the switch from using intuition to using actual rigorous mathematical thinking killed me. It was like a completely different subject, and it took me years to catch up.

I wouldn't say if was it was different when it comes to applying methods vs constructing models.

I also moved from the Polish to British system and I do agree with your first point, but not really with the second one. I really welcomed the ability to focus more (but not only) on things I was more into.

A major difference for me was the approach to grading. In Poland, you might attempt to pass an exam until you do pass it. In Britain, you take an exam and you either pass or not. You can even pass the year if you fail an entire subject. Universities specifically want a certain % of people passing so they do doctor the numbers.

The most important thing is the end result. And here, I believe, the UK universities are better: they actually give you way more practical skills, while Polish unis give you more knowledge. If you want to be a scientist you might prefer #2, but for having a good job #1 is way better.

One thing Polish education teaches is how to remember 100 random facts in 2 days and forget them immediately after the exam. This really trains short-term memory, but I don't think it's worth training it for 8+4+5=17 years so much :)

Also it teaches you that if you don't cheat the system on the subjects that doesn't matter to you - you will have worse grades than people who have the common sense to focus on a few subjects and cheat on everything else.

I guess it instills some healthy scepticism and antisystem attitude, but it can't be good for society if everybody first instinct is "is that rule for real, or bullshit like most of them?"

I noticed this when comparing American vs British degrees that the British ones seemed much much more focused on a topic.

American 4 year degrees require you getting a reasonably well rounded education.

I have a 4 year degree in comp sci but I was required to learn state history, Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Art, Communications, and probably some other things off the top of my head that I've forgotten.

My issue with the US system is that the universities in general are pretty good, but before university the education is garbage. All of these "well rounded" things I just mentioned they could have easily taught me in high school instead of wasting so much time on random things or reteaching the same things over and over.

Essentially because of the cost of US uni they wasted my money making me have to pay for my well rounded education and now upon writing this I just realized that despite the downgrade so to speak I would prefer a British degree as I think theyre shorter and if I'm to pay I just want to get what I came for which is CS skills.

I believe British kids(non-Scottish ones) have to pay some amount for Uni right? Do you pay in Poland? This could be part of the reason for the difference.

Polish universities are completely free. And yes, British universities are not free, they have recently gotten pretty expensive(£9000/year), with the exception of Scottish ones which have different rules.

"Pretty expensive" is a relative term. For comparison, one year's cost of tuition at Boston University is $53,000, plus $16,000 housing, plus $1,000 for books and supplies.

Don't forget parking. My university realized they could charge upwards of $400/semester for a spot in one of the few garages. With all the housing being built now I imagine in a few years it'll be $600+.

It pains me that my initial thought was "that's not expensive in the slightest compared to $50k/year". America sucks sometimes.

I appreciate general knowledge and wide interest Polish shools can give you, especially after I worked with people from UK, and I noticed I knew more about their history than they did, despite graduating computer science :).

But one effect the Polish education system has is rampant cheating. It was expected (if officialy discouraged) that kids good at "hard sciences" will cheat on "humanities". Kids who were good at biology and wanted to become doctors were supposed to care about math and language less, etc. But they still had to have good average grades, so they were cheating on everything that wasn't on the entrance exams for medical schools (nowadays there's final exam at school instead of entrance exams at universities, but it changes nothing - there's still a few subjects you have to be good at and everything else you just have to have good grades in).

In effect adults are saying "this you should really know if you want to be X, and everything else you should somehow have good grades in, I don't care how".

So kids cheated on the subjects they weren't considering important for their future. I had wide interests and treated most subjects seriously but still I cheated on some geography tests because they were absurd - teacher expected us to remember top 5 exporters and importers of each of like 30 different resources and foods. And to remember how many tons of X each produced...

It was literally remembering tables of hundreds of numbers for 1 test and then forgetting them immediately. And that test was the same every year (data was from like 10 years ago :) ), and we had the test and the answers from the previous year. I'm sure the teacher knew it, but making a new one was too much hassle. It was basically an exerise in cheating the system and showing kids how absurd it is and how dumb you have to be to follow the rules.

And then there were subjects that were unimportant for everybody (no entrance exams depended on them), so even teachers teaching them expected everybody to cheat. And that was like 30% of all the subjects in high school - stuff like economy, plastic art, music, philosophy, religion, ethics, defense training, politics and society knowledge, even computer science (because computer science entrance exams were all about math, and computer science in high school was mostly microsoft office tutorial and playing games while teacher pretends to teach).

This culture of the top hard sciences students cheating & not caring about the required humanities classes happens in the US too, at least at top universities/colleges that are heavily focused on match/science.

It was definitely a thing where I went to college. The humanities classes were very easy compared to the engineering/science/math classes. The school required them to try and round people out. But the humanities teachers were lazy or unskilled enough that it became exceedingly easy for people to cheat.

The canonical example is the humanities teacher who gives the exact same tests every time he/she teaches the class for 20 years. After a couple years every fraternity & sorority had a file in their study room that had every assignment & test problem that professor ever gave. So you'd have one student from the fraternity/sorority who was low on the totem pole go to class to collect the homework/requirements. Everyone else would just look at the test files to get the answers and then show up for the tests. Generally everyone would get an A, including the students who never went to class except on test days.

This was partly evil, but it was also partly students prioritizing their work hours on the vastly harder courses they were taking in their fields of study, namely the courses that were important to doing well in their field.

I graduated with a 3.7, I didn't really cheat like this, but I did put lower priority on getting top marks in the humanities class. If I got a B in a humanities class in order to allow myself to spend more time on a Computer Science class so that I could get an A in the CS class instead of a B or C that was fine with me.

At the high school level in the US everything is bifurcated into a two tier system.. one tier for the serious students who want to do well and go to college. Another tier that is state sponsored baby sitting for the students who don't want to do well and whose parents don't care.

It varies by university and study.

I went to a state university in the US, my science classes were pretty rigorous, with professors saying "you have 1 week to know everything up to Chapter 6, if you didn't get this in high school, tough".

In STEM curriculums, you have to choose an interdisciplinary science track, I chose Biology and Ecology because I thought it would be easier than Chemisty. It was much more complex than anything I was ever exposed to in High School and then spent 0 time on catching anyone up.

I don't regret it.

Yes. It is odd that in the British system at age 16 you can choose to study mathematics and physics and literally nothing else. (I blame this for my poor history knowledge.)

Well in the UK the subjects you select is very closely tied to which University you can go to. Some universities require maths and will not accept people who haven't done it (sometimes even more advanced maths is required).

Some universities don't require maths and so will teach it to everyone who's applied. Some don't require it but force you to take a year of it if you haven't done it. and others require it and reject you if you haven't done it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "never took it as a subject". In the UK you study Biologly, Chemistry and Physics up to and including year 11 (16 years old). I don't believe you can opt out of those, along with English and Mathematics. I wouldn't be surprised, however, to hear that what we did learn in those years was behind a lot of Europe/USA.

Right,ok, I wasn't aware of that. I'm just basing this on the experience with my own sister, who went to a British school at the age of 15 and immediately picked only the few subjects that interested her and didn't have to do anything else. By age 18 when taking her A-levels the school actually limited her to only taking subjects where she had a high chance of getting a good grade as to not accidentally lower the average for the school. So in her final year at school she only had like 3 subjects, where I at the same point at a Polish school had like 10 subjects.

Normally, people choose around 10 GCSEs (taken in the school year they turn 16, the school year starts on 1 September). They choose 3-5 subjects for A level.

For GCSE, "minor" subjects can be abandoned -- I stopped studying art, "technology" (design/engineering) and German (since I continued with French). At A level, the majority of students focus on closely related subjects (e.g. maths and science), which I think is the weakness of this system.

Harry Potter has essentially the same system (GCSEs = OWLs, A levels = NEWTs), this isn't something J K Rowling invented.

It's unfortunate your sister couldn't study more subjects. Parents who knew the system might have been able to push the school to allow her to study more, but I can't find anything online where parents/students are grumbling about this. (Again, Harry Potter has the same situation -- Prof. Snape says he only takes the best students into his NEWT class.)

This was not my experience with university education in the uk. I studied mathematics and we had perhaps two lectures of recap of the “further maths” A-level. One reason is that not all schools could provide all of this course so it wasn’t a hard requirement; another reason was to introduce consistent notation that would be used in the rest of the degree.

Similarly in the uk mathematics curriculum there are a bunch of “applied” modules and schools choose which to teach. Some students would have only done mechanics and some only statistics, for example, so the corresponding university courses would have to start at what might be already known for some students.

Probably this depends on the university, what they look for in students, and more generally the strength of the students they do get. There are a lot of university students in the uk but obviously some will be stronger than others and the distribution varies by university.

One part of this doesn't make sense to me. Can only talk about German universities, and I started in 2003, but...

They will start with math you already know, but only in the first semester, so from October until Christmas, from then on everything is mostly new. But... to be eligible to study you kind of have to have had math on that level at school. with no exceptions.

But for anything programming related? In the late 90s/early 00s there was ZERO mandatory programming in school, and if you were really, really lucky if there was any graded course. We had some elective courses but they were not really awesome and only there because one teacher wanted to do them.

So, I'm also against rehashing stuff you should know, but if you can't know it from school, why wouldn't they start at the beginning?

That's precisely the case with British schools/universities too. I know now that programming has been added to the curriculum, so in years time these intro courses might no longer be necessary, but the opportunity for prior CS/programming education depended heavily on which school you went to and that's a massive red flag for trying to enable people from all backgrounds to be able to study.

> What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities - "don't assume prior knowledge of anything".

My experience was that even if all of the students prior to university studied maths A-Levels, we all studied different topics. Before those two year A-Levels, we all studied different topics in GCSEs. There is so much time wasted giving everyone the same knowledge because of how our system is set up with different exam boards.

I don't know if this is the case in other countries.

You don't get to choose different maths A-levels in Russia. There is one state standard that every school and every student has to stick to. You can have accelerated or deeper "special schools" but you can't evade the state standard on maths or you won't get you high school diploma.

There is a state standard in England and Wales (and another standard in Scotland). It's called the National Curriculum, although I'm not sure if it has a different name for A-levels.

There are multiple implementations of that standard, in the form of exams that meet the standards. The government checks the exams satisfy their standards.

For example, an exam on history might by on the 20th century Britain, and a different one might use 19th century Europe.

Again, the Russian standard doesn't give you choices. Everyone has to know logarithms, derivatives and certain chapters of history.

The advanced maths selective school will hammer you with more complicated geometry problems, and some contents of the first few uni courses.

Everyone in England also has to know logarithms and derivatives. There's much less flexibility for maths.

For history, the government requires that they:

• develop and extend their knowledge and understanding of specified key events, periods and societies in local, British, and wider world history; and of the wide diversity of human experience

• engage in historical enquiry to develop as independent learners and as critical and reflective thinkers

• develop the ability to ask relevant questions about the past, to investigate issues critically and to make valid historical claims by using a range of sources in their historical context

• develop an awareness of why people, events and developments have been accorded historical significance and how and why different interpretations have been constructed about them

• organise and communicate their historical knowledge and understanding in different ways and reach substantiated conclusions

The topics should be:

• from three eras: Medieval (500-1500), Early Modern (1450-1750) and Modern (1700-present day)

• on three time scales: short (depth study), medium (period study) and long (thematic study)

• on three geographical contexts: a locality (the historic environment); British; and European and / or wider world settings

and "British history must form a minimum of 40% of the assessed content over the full course."

Beyond that, it's up to the people making the exams.

I think this is great -- everyone should learn the techniques ("to investigate issues critically" etc) but the school, teacher and student have some flexibility in their learning. At university or in life, it hardly matters whether I focussed on Roman Britain or European WWII history to achieve this.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

> There are multiple implementations of that standard, in the form of exams that meet the standards. The government checks the exams satisfy their standards.

In other countries, all students get the exact same exam.

Different exam boards is not the reason -- a single exam board can (and does) offer the flexibility of topic in areas the National Curriculum allows this, and sticks to what's prescribed elsewhere.

I think if you feel time is wasted for something like history, geography etc that people have uneven knowledge of, that's because they've failed to learn the techniques or fundamentals, and can only apply what they've learned to a single topic. There's little difference to everyone having to study WWII at GCSE, then only knowing what (not why) at A-level.

Science and maths have a lot less flexibility.

There's a big difference in quality of British universities

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