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Comment by loganfrederick | Hacker News Reader

A big problem (from my experience) is the cultural shift from high school to university. Our high schools do a terrible job at preparing students for college. Just off the top of my head:

- High school classes are typically too easy

- So kids develop poor study habits which don't serve them well for college material

- And most high school teachers are bad at getting kids excited about the subject because they're exhausted themselves from babysitting and treat the work as a job. College professors can be bad at "teaching" but for different reasons (being researchers first and foremost). This disconnect in the reasons for bad education being different in environments is also not taught well to kids ahead of time (because who in this formula would? Requires good parenting or very self-conscious teachers at all levels).

There are definitely exceptions to this rule, but they are too few to solve the overarching problems.

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> High school classes are typically too easy

The UK based O/A system, which is used in many of the former colonies, is not as easy as the North American high school system. O levels is easy. But A levels content is almost as difficult as a typical first year university course.

Yet, students from those systems also face an equivalent huge shock when they switch to university. The reason is fundamentally different. In school, students are infantalized and their own education is not considered their responsibility. In university, nobody used to care whether you sank or swam. So students struggled. But that has changed quite a lot now. Many universities have almost a "no child left behind" policy - yes they do think child not adult who chose to attend university.

So even if students in the past used to attend office hours (I don't know), today they don't because it is no longer their responsibility to learn.

> Many universities have almost a "no child left behind" policy.

That's true, it's difficult to encourage independent learning at undergrad level and we often end up hand holding and spoon feeding material like in high school. This is partly because it's an easy fix to avoid the most negative student evaluations from the "I won't put in the work and when I fail it's the teacher's fault" types. There aren't many of those but the vocal few can really ruin evaluation average of an otherwise great course. The downside of the policy is obviously that the can gets kicked down the road and employers have to deal with the inability to learn independently.

IMO the more fundamental problem is that the examinations typically won’t measure how much students have learnt independently. If you want to do well in most university exams, then you need to pay very close attention to exactly what the professor wants you to learn and make sure you’re learning exactly that.

It is possible to design exams that actually grade people on their knowledge of the subject in general, but most universities seem to leave exam design to the course leader, so quality varies drastically.

There are benefits to this model too though. Centralized exam design will be slower to adjust and adapt as industries evolve and the skills needed change.

When individual professors write exams, the good ones will have exams that better match what students will need to learn today. The bad professors that can't write quality exams honestly should just be trained and/or let go if the problem persists.

I’m sure it depends greatly on subject, but my experience has been quite the opposite. If you do even a modicum of learning ‘outside the classroom’ many exam questions suddenly become a routine triviality. If you learn only what the lecturer intends you directly to learn, you end up at a point where the exam is optimally difficult.

Looking at textbooks and other universities’ lecture notes on your own is so effective it almost feels like cheating!

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