Hacker News Reader

Comment by buff-a | Hacker News Reader

FTA: Those fixed standards enable a world of variation. At Western Governors, students aren’t asked to sit in a class any longer than it takes for them to demonstrate that they have mastered the material. In fact, they aren’t asked to sit in a “class” at all.

This article seems to suggest that at other US universities, you actually have to show up to classes to pass them? Is that actually the case????

View on HN

While you may not have to show up to pass some classes at traditional universities, you still have to wait a semester to pass them. Under the WGU system you can simply pass the class whenever you feel ready and move on to other subjects.

This is highly dependent on the professor of the class in question. Professor's will sometimes offer a student the option of testing out of a class. It of course depends on the institution exactly what goes on the transcript in these cases, but usually it will not count towards the GPA an will be treated in a manner similar to AP credit.

That's exactly right. It doesn't seem right that one can receive credit hours for knowledge previously held. The only value added by GWU in that instance is some form of verification/certification. It seems more appropriate that if you already know the material you be placed into a higher level course, otherwise the educational system runs the risk of stagnating at a base level of knowledge rather than challenging students to excel.

>. It doesn't seem right that one can receive credit hours for knowledge previously held.

Sure it does. It shows you've met a bar of learning.

That's true, I suppose. But in a perfect world, I don't think universities should just be signing off that you understand a subject. They should be promoting the growth of their students. In my opinion, one shouldn't leave university the same person they were when they entered (plus a diploma).

> I don't think universities should just be signing off that you understand a subject.

There are many more considerably more transformative experiences than hanging out with a bunch of same aged young adults having lots of sex, parties, and experiences with new subjects.

You're not going to GW for the first two, and honestly, if you have valid knowledge about the degree, why shouldn't you be able to get it accredited somehow? Why must you use years of real life to sit in classrooms with protoadults who don't work?

Actually, it usually depends on the department not individual professors. In some departments you can test out of classes for credit, in others you can test out of prerequisites so you can move directly to more advanced classes but you don't get credit, and in others you can get credit for some classes but not others. From what I have seen, credit tends to be most available for math classes, many computer science courses will let you test out of lower level (especially language) prerequisites but often won't give you credit for them, and engineering departments will often let you test out of math and science and lower-level departmental courses, but limit the amount of credit you can earn this way. And some courses, especially English and other humanities, sometimes actually take roll and penalize you if you aren't filling a seat.

Attendance-based grading is the salve a mediocre instructor applies to keep up the appearance that they're creating value for the university.

Sometimes, however, attendance policies are also benevolent paternalism: I say this because I teach English comp at the University of Arizona. Students who don't show up tend to miss a lot of the material and don't do especially well—hence the attendance policy. And the stuff that's done in class (discussion, close reading, sentence construction, and so forth) is stuff that can't really be made up outside of class—as I tell students, if you could do it at home, I'd say, "Do it at home" and I'd do something else in class.

Yeah, there's a correlation != causation problem with weak students who tend to miss class being the ones who most need it, but the overall idea of class doing things that can't really be done otherwise still holds. There are also a certain number of students who say or believe, "I'm already a good writer; I don't need to take a composition class." Out of the ~300 I've taught, that's probably been true of one to five, or so, but far more seem to have believed it.

A school like the one listed sounds great. It also sounds like it'll work best for the highly motivated. One problem with the HN posts about how universities are wasteful, unnecessary, and so on, is that a pretty small percentage of people are willing to do university-caliber work without the structure of the university. HN posters tend to forget about the other 97% of the world. I tend to see them, and so do a lot of other teacher / prof types.

I find this very believable and would like to add that some people learn best by reading about a subject, some by performing exercises, some by listening and conversing and for some it's a mix of all of those. I wouldn't expect the typical 18 year old college freshman to be self-aware enough to know this about himself. That's not to say it's impossible, but I think for the majority, it's something they still need to discover. Graded attendance gives them an incentive to explore this.

From what I've noticed, the more you understand the subject, the better you learn from reading on your own and the less you learn from exercices, listening or conversing. I think the cause is that there is a difference in focus: With books, you can identify the things you already understand ( as-is or as an analogy to something you understand ) and focus on the new stuff, so the more you understand, the better you focus on the new stuff. The problem is that when you don't understand lots of things well enough, your concentration is not focused, so you end up with a superficial understanding and forgetting a lot as you go. The solution comes in the form of exercices, which provide an artifial focus, having your full attention until you understand them very well, which is good if you're a beginner, but redundant if you are experienced.

Often it's required of the prof as well. Mandating classroom attendance is a way for colleges to retain students through two means:

1): Making N% of the grade attendance based means that students have to do even less well to fail the course.

2): For a student who would need to learn the material to pass, there is a learning benefit to attending the class. Moreover, more people in a lecture hall is going to create an impression that you do need to show up to pass.

Baloney. It is a mechanism to keep the lower half of the bell curve in class and absorbing some level of information.

You are too charitable. I think it's a medieval tradition, dating back to the days when lecturers were real authorities on the courses they were teaching.

I'm not saying that lecturers are no longer competent at the stuff they teach, or that they aren't great authorities on something, but they don't have the edge that they used to.

If you want to understand the cutting edge of a field, you go to conferences, and listen to top researchers talking about their field. Perhaps that's what undergraduate lecturers used to be. But research gets more specialized and eclectic every year, while the foundations become more firmly bedded down.

Undergrad education is mostly a solved problem. Courses don't change much from year to year, except the useless faddish ones. New research gradually seeps down, but it's rare that you need an expert to bring it all together.

I'm speaking from experience.

edit:

I was a TA for early CS classes. Sometimes we took attendance, sometimes we didn't. When we did, more people showed up, and more people passed. Teachers have a responsibility to teach both sides of the bell curve, and generally pressuring people to learn helps the lower side pass. I understand that it's kind of old fashioned and authoritarian from the perspective of a top student, but it really winds up better for the bottom students in general.

I don't think this is generally true. I can certainly think of a few classes I passed while hardly showing up.

But there are some reasons you might need to regularly show up even without the case of a teacher who counts attendance (which the school might require of them if it's an intro sort of class). There might be unscheduled in-class quizzes (I think this is pretty rare). More commonly, though, the teacher may not have bothered to set up a course website, so without showing up you won't know what the homework is or when the tests are. The latter is something I remember quite a few cases of.

Even if you don't show up, the course still takes up time in the sense that you can generally only register for so many classes at a time.

rare? almost every one of my classes had random quizzes.

I was trying to think of a college or graduate level course I took that had random quizzes, and I couldn't think of any off the top of my head.

I remember there was one freshman level math class where you can drop off homework assignments and exams in the teacher's mailbox. I diligently completed every homework and exam, but didn't attend a single class. I knew most of the material already so I spent my time more productively elsewhere. To this day I don't even know what the professor looked like.

Are most universities in the US for-profit, or is it referring to for-profit online-learning companies?

The vast majority of US universities and colleges are non-profit. Kaplan and Phoenix are for-profit and mostly online.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Category:For-...

(Response to above, and most of its responses.)

I understand that you can not show up and pass a class, but why in the world would you spend all that money and time on a physical university if you aren't going to go to class? Why not just read a book and get a job?

Sadly, because of what a degree means. This goes doubly so for a degree from a "big name".

I strongly disagree with this sentiment, but I can't deny that a majority of people I meet will be impressed with someone who went to MIT, Yale or Harvard. Likewise, I think a majority of people (albeit a lesser-majority) will have reservations about someone with "only" a high school education.

In most industries, you won't find people saying "show me what you can do" before you show them you have a degree. The tech industry is far more egalitarian in this sense, which is awesome.

The question you should be asking: what is the marginal benefit of ass-in-seat time to a student?

Because you hadn't heard about Western Governors University, and thought you needed to enrol in a brick-and-mortar university to get a half-way credible degree?

Most of the benefits university provides are not gained in class, those being accreditation, networking, and being in a group of really smart people. Moreover a lot of people are spending somebody else's money through scholarships and etc.

I had a course split between low level computer architecture and networks. The low level part was awesome, but the guy who did the network part was reading from the powerpoint slides that came with the teachers manual.

It was so bad, I stopped going to the lectures. Ended up with the highest possible grade, so little was lost.

Not every class has a professor who is engaging, funny, presents the material in an intuitive way, and invested in his/her students' success. My college tuition was on a per-semester basis, and not a per-unit basis, so I took the required classes as well as classes I found interesting, but spent more time on the later than former.

at berkeley, or at least the college of engineering, there's no way to test out of classes (according to my adviser), so you have to take the course, but you don't have to go to lecture, unless the class has an attendance requirement.

Some (all? I don't know) schools and regulations tie up your financial aid with attendance in some way or another. It's often more concerning than the grades, but easier to game.

Good luck passing an in-class final without attending class at least once.

Lucky for me most of my undergrad classes had take-home exams.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com