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Comment by dbsmith83 | Hacker News Reader

I kind of don't like this approach. I grant there is a huge discrepancy between students in reading/writing ability coming into a class, but forcing everyone to put in the same effort didn't fly in my math and science classes, so why should it be different here? Instead of being able to use my extra time that I didn't need to use in my literature classes by studying other things, I had to put in more effort to make my writing "extra extra" good. Conversely, if someone was a math wiz, they could use the extra time not spent studying math to study literature, or whatever else.

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> Conversely, if someone was a math wiz, they could use the extra time not spent studying math to study literature, or whatever else.

If a math wiz can ace their math class without studying I'd question why they're not taking a harder math class. Alternately if the math wiz want to focus more on literature (or whatever else) this semester wouldn't it more efficient to skip the math class entirely?

Maybe in high school or mandatory undergraduate courses I could imagine a rationale for deliberately taking easy courses, but I've encountered students in graduate-level courses at an expensive private university that could have passed the final exam on the first day.

I can't fathom why anyone would waste so much of their own time and money on a class that isn't going to teach them anything.

When I was in university for engineering I didn't get a choice which classes I took. You took the classes that were part of your degree. You also didn't get a ton of flexibility in when you take a course. Courses were generally offered once per year as all students would progress at the same rate.

> If a math wiz can ace their math class without studying I'd question why they're not taking a harder math class. Alternately if the math wiz want to focus more on literature (or whatever else) this semester wouldn't it more efficient to skip the math class entirely? ... I can't fathom why anyone would waste so much of their own time and money on a class that isn't going to teach them anything.

I agree, but unfortunately you can't just test out of required classes much of the time.

The college typically requires a bunch of classes. You can't test out of them.

This was a pain for me when I started college at 23; I'd been programming as a hobby since I was 16, but was shoved into intro-level classes anyway. I spent the classes learning tooling, so it wasn't a complete waste of time, but it wasn't very productive.

That must have been disappointing.

I've also heard of the reverse part of that problem in which half of the students in intro-level CS classes end up feeling discouraged because half the class already has substantial programming experience.

I was good at pretty much every academic discipline growing up (except math when I got to calculus, ha). Being held to a higher standard in the things I was good at made me better at those.

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