Comment by Eeko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eeko | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"You seem to mainly address universities, which were out of scope for this article. OECD PISA is measuring 15-year-old students. There is a huge difference in the level of teaching at compulsory schools and universities in Finland."

Actually the opposite. The university system follows pretty much the same paradigm of equality and fair quality. There really is no shitty universities (at least within the institutions which claim the label...) nor spectacular ones. You get average quality. The university rankings tend to have an apex-fallacy (we are only interested on the ones at top), whereas the primary-education studies focus on national averages.

E.g. US has some spectacular private primary education facilities and some amazing higher education. But the quality varies highly across institutions. Finland has a very few private schools and even the best ones do not really perform significantly better the worst ones. The same is apparent in higher education. You get about the same degree from any university willing to give the education.

And whereas I used to think like you guys on catering for the individuals and the talented: I'm no longer quite sure on how it should be done. I've seen a fair share of different systems and products of those systems - some of which claim to address the problem of the gifted better than others. Yeah, you could do better to give greater challenges for the gifted. But there are so much other good and useful stuff people-who-get-bored-in-math-class could be doing. If you got the capacity, usually you end up using it, despite on how you are instructed to behave. You could be doing vector-calculus on the first grade: or you could be assisting your friends with the standard calculus. You could qualify for deeper math in high-school, but you could also spend your extra-time with arts, philosophy, student activities or just living your life if you don't have to worry about your school performance.

Hey, I remember you from HUT circa 2006.

I was comparing the level of primary and upper secondary school teaching with university teaching, not different universities. Seems like university rankings have little to do with that.

For what it's worth, I maintain that the quality of teaching drops by a whole lot in universities, if only because there are way fever universities around in Finland. My personal experience (some of which you share) is that in some common subjects (like maths) the group size in lectures more than quadrupled in the first year—way too many students for the lecturer to spare any individual attention, apart from answering some questions that came up in the class. Even the word changes from teacher to lecturer, reflecting quite well on the changed focus.

This duty of individual attention falls on TAs in smaller student groups, who usually have no pedagogical studies behind them and often resist taking any share of responsibility in how their students perform. The lack of attention to students is known and acknowledged, even marketed as 'academic freedom' and 'having to take responsibility for one's own studies'. While it's imporant to learn how to do that, the quality of teaching should not suffer as markedly as it does. Some struggling students banded together to overcome the steeply increased difficulty curve and others dropped out from the courses, often after the very first few weeks.

Speaking of catering to individuals, it would not take much to improve the life of an advanced upper secondary school student by a whole lot. Let the advanced students advance to freshman level concepts. Instead we faced the "it's not in the teaching plan" paralysis. It feels stupid to do three years of upper secondary level physics without touching vectors or calculus. Or bring out the matrices and linear algebra in maths (instead of showing a small glimpse in one elective course during the third year). Allow and even recommend some more advanced books on the topic. It must be better than playing Tetris on your Ti-83 calculator all day. Many currently bored students would regain some of the lost morale and momentum this way.

All true.

That is to say, that the average standards around the world are not that great either. Higher education could be better, but it is far from worst of what I've seen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com