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Comment by jorgeleo | Hacker News Reader

MY first class of calculus 1 we were about 80 to 90 students in the class, all ready to study and learn.

The teacher walked in look at us and said: The department only allows me to pass 7 or 8 of you, so either you are a genius, or you are doing this class for the Nth time.

At the end of the class, we pass 10, which makes it roughly a 10%. I talk to the teacher after the class about it and he told me that the department want it that way to filter out the people that does not make themselves responsible of their own learning.

I did pass, and I don't agree with the brutality of the rule, but I do agree with the principle.

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I could maybe see their point if it was just a really hard exam and only 10% happen to be able to pass it. But artificially restricting to 10% of the class is ridiculous. The goal should be to pass students that have the requisite knowledge, whatever the prof decides that should be. Judging only relative to peers is a lazy way for the prof to not have to make that distinction. It also creates a toxic environment.

That doesn't make sense to me. In a group of 90 people there can be more than 9 of them who strive to learn. I get not making classes an "easy A", but making an intro class that difficult arbitrarily seems against the entire point of education.

Others might call it "gate keeping", but that implies an intent that I don't think is really there. I think instead that the math professors think everyone else is like them, learn like they did.

I'm kind of dumb and so things as abstract as higher math have come to me with difficulty. I find I have to truly understand a thing before I can possibly expect to remember it or use it. And apparently I am not quick to understand things like differentiation, integration.

I think I only grasped matrix multiplication, linear algebra when I tried to write a flight simulator from scratch (well, from a book actually, but it had you start from scratch with your own Bresenham algorithm for line drawing, write your own polygon clipping code, face culling, etc.).

I have done pretty good (I must say) in helping my daughters get through high school math though since I do understand it (now). I think it helps that I probably approach teaching the concept as though it is to someone, like me, who is not going to make the mental leap to abstraction. I suspect many professional math teachers/majors don't suffer my shortcomings and don't teach from that vantage point.

I agree that there's a difference between learning and understanding, in a similar vein I wrote my own 3D renderer and really understood matrix multiplication.

But say you and I were in the same class, but only one was allowed to pass, even though we both now understand how things work. One of us has to take it again or change paths for no reason.

Which book it was?

I believe this one: https://archive.org/details/build-your-own-flight-sim-in-c-d...

Yeah, that is it. The year is about right too. I was programming Macs so I skipped over a lot of the PC-specific stuff. But the math is all there.

I think there is a major distinction between "we have a standard of expectations that roughly only 10% have managed to meet in the past" and "only the top 10% will pass". One pits student against standard, the other pits student against student. These create different environments and different levels of consistency in outcomes. Using the latter as a simple substitute for the former is a very disagreeable action.

>I talk to the teacher after the class about it and he told me that the department want it that way to filter out the people that does not make themselves responsible of their own learning.

This was my big mistake with college. I walked in expecting to be taught things, only to realize that teaching has nothing to do with a college class. It is simply a forum for you to express what you already know.

My wife took a child development course last semester and her instructor said the opposite: the school doesn't want me to fail anyone, so here's a bunch of makeup assignments and extra credit options.

Ha ha, three times was a charm for me and Calculus I.

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