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Comment by fallingfrog | Hacker News Reader

“the mechanism is that the student works all the problems they can and then asks in office hours or review session about the problems they couldn’t do”

Wait, really? You want all 150 students in all your classes to come to your office every time you give out a homework assignment?

I never went to office hours unless there was some kind of highly unusual situation going on, like when I had a migraine with aura during an exam and couldn’t read the questions. Or when my wife had a life threatening accident and I had to tend to her and needed an extension on an assignment. Were other students just going in and out of there constantly?

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>Were other students just going in and out of there constantly?

Not constantly, but fairly frequently, yes. But judging from how frequently I'd meet other students waiting in the hall, it was probably only 1/5th of any class who'd bother to do this.

For math specifically, if the prof I wanted to see wasn't available and I thought the question was quick, I'd sometimes pop in to another professor's office who'd taught me before. e.g., For Calc3 I'd sometimes pop into my Calc2 professor's office if his door was open.

>who'd bother to do this

I hate this mentality. If you have two hours of office hours a week and they're both during other classes I have, then I can hardly be held accountable for not showing up to your office hours.

Let's call it what it is: bad teachers trying to offload culpability for their inability to teach the material adequately during lecture by pretending the students are too lazy to come in after-hours for additional instruction.

Sorry, I didn't mean that in a pejorative way, probably poor choice of words. I just meant that it wasn't that common for students to come in. Some students I'd see more frequently at the university's tutorial centre than office hours, maybe because they preferred that format.

One interesting thing I remember though is that profs in science/math/engineering tended to have better attended office hours than humanities courses. Humanities profs usually seemed surprised to have someone show up during office hours, and I'd rarely meet anyone in the halls apart from humanities grad students.

> You want all 150 students in all your classes to come to your office every time you give out a homework assignment?

A class with 150 students should have like 2 or 3 TA, preferably more, so the workload is split. If it's a obligatory homework, the profesor and the TA may have to grade it anyway. It it's optative homework, many students will not write it down, but it would be nice if all of them do it.

Checking an exercise in the first years of the university is easy. If it's correct, you must only check 3 or 4 key points. It's harder if it has a silly numerical mistake and you must propagate the error to see if the answer is "correct" or there are more hidden errors. Also, the important part is to identify why the student was wrong and try to get actionable advice, like study the rule of a derivative of a division, or study the rule of the multiplication of the signs, and perhaps add a 5 minute personalized class on the spot.

We have a list optative homework, and it would be nice if everyone do them. It would increase the workload a lot, so we would have to imagine how to solve that. In particular in a long list the profesor/TA doesn't have to check every exercise, only the ones the student had a difficult time or the ones the profesor know that are prone to error. If there are 10 integrals of polynomials and the first 2 and the last one are correct, the other 7 are probably correct too. In case there is an error, the advantage is that the profesor can explain one or two and ask the student to redo the other and come again later or another day.

The long list of exercises is useful, but in my opinion it's more helpful to write in the blackboard an additional optative homework each class. There are more solutions attempt than just leaving the list to be downloaded from the web page. (And it's easier to check because all the students are doing the same exercise. Also I can check if they are writing correctly the solution, sometimes the students get the correct result but don't explain the intermediate steps with enough details.)

>Were other students just going in and out of there constantly?

YES. I didn't learn this until after college but apparently other people were going to office hours for all their classes whenever they could. It also helped them form deeper relationships with professors for recommendations.

I never would have guessed people would spend much time with teachers/professors outside of class. If I had to schedule more than 1 or 2 sessions I'd drop the class; clearly I'm missing something and may need to retake prerequisites instead of wasting time failing.

ummm, a lot of it depends on scheduling conflicts. not that simple.

I wish my profs had made that clear! I always felt like it was a big imposition to come in there and take up their time on what must have felt to them like a trivial problem. I would have been too embarrassed, I didn't want to be viewed as a needy or problematic student.

I was three years deep into my engineering degree before learning that many of my peers would attend office hours regularly. I was shocked. Like you, I was under the impression that you only attended office hours if you missed a lecture or something similar. I had always assumed "I don't get it" wasn't a valid reason for bugging the instructor.

My father and grandfather were both college professors and I didn't learn this until after I graduated.

Odd. In all my math and physics classes the homework counted for less than 5% which basically made it all optional. After the assignment was done all answers were posted somewhere.

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