Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test.

In Germany, all exams are like this. Homework assignments are either just a prerequisite for taking exam but the grade is solely from the exam, or you may get some small point bonus for assignments/projects.

> But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class.

The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. Fail 3 times and you're exmatriculated.

This is because universities are paid from tax money in Germany and most of Europe.

The US will continue down on the path you describe because it's in the interest of colleges to keep well-paying students around. It's a service. You buy a degree, you are a customer.

View on HN

Germany isn't special, (almost) all exams work like that in the US as well. I don't know why he was implying otherwise. Almost all degrees have required courses in the US as well.

You point to a true failure in incentives. And yet, the US has the highest density of renowned universities.

For online courses it is no longer the case that exams are proctored in person. Most higher education in the United States is done at community colleges and regional state universities.

Once you have an online class with no proctored exams (or even biometric ID check) you don't know who took the class anyway. Frankly, that makes any "online degree" certification basically worthless without a proctored exit exam. That doesn't mean the education or study aren't valuable, they are to whoever is actually doing it.

I didn't realize that so many community colleges and state universities were basically online diploma mills.

A lot of colleges have become zombie colleges. Enrollment is way down. Gotta please the remaining clients.

Maybe the solution is to get rid of degrees and certifications, and just let the students who actually want to learn attend.

>And yet, the US has the highest density of renowned universities.

The renown has to do with a lot more than demonstrated ability of graduates.

Its actually similar in the US at many schools. At least for bachelors degrees If you don't obtain a degree within ~5.5 years (this was the standard in University of California schools, where I went at the time, not sure if its changed) you're kicked out and told you need to go somewhere else to finish. This is mostly to make room for other students.

And at least when I was in college it was the same with respect to classes, you can't take the same class more than 3 times. Additionally if a course is required you either take it or make the case for an equivalent class.

You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum.

Same in the U.S. but you can sometimes find an online offering. If you don’t know what you are doing or don’t care then always take the online offering. Much easier to cheat.

My ex-girlfriend is German. She cheated on her exams to get her agricultural engineering degree at university. This was in the 80s.

The main courses are mandatory in the US too, but you frequently have the choice between multiple professors based on time slots. Professors who are known to be strict, boring, bad at teaching, etc end up receiving fewer students as a result.

> This is because universities are paid from tax money in Germany and most of Europe.

Almost every university in the US takes federal money and relies on federal loan guarantees to keep the high revenues pumping through. In exchange, the schools are subject to requirements by the government and they impose many. I think the bigger issue is the size and scope of higher ed here and if it's actually a good idea to to tell every school how to run their exams (and enforce it).

Around 50% of higher education in the United States is done at community colleges. Tuition accounts for 2/3 of our budget. State subsidy for 1/3. In the past the numbers were reversed. Enrollment in higher education went through a decade long decline. It is now the case that colleges are chasing tuition dollars. Students are the client.

Ok, but as long as the institution is taking public money, the government can impose rules and regulations on the school.

That’s the Higher Learning Commission’s job. Partly their job. The HLC is a joke and an expensive farce.

> Around 50% of higher education in the United States is done at community colleges.

Sure, but they don't set the rules; sure, they do much of the education, but much of the demand for them comess from bachelor’s-degree bound students, so the course selection is set by what bachelor’s degree granting institutions accept.

Matriculation agreements are based on content covered not on whether or not the students learned the material. But since community colleges have less grade inflation than other institutions passing our classes means more.

The Higher Learning Commision is a farce. It’s purpose is for sinecures for its employees.

> The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum.

The course might be mandatory but which professor you choose isn't. What if multiple professors teach it? Word gets around and everyone chooses the easy profs.

After I graduated, I noticed that the people that chose the easy profs ended up with crappy jobs.

There were exceptions to this rule (in both directions), of course.

The same course can have the same exams for different professors. If faculty wants to solve this it is solvable.

I guess there is some sort of incentives that rewards institutions taking the easy way out.

In Germany, there's no such choice. There are no competing alternative courses that can substitute for each other, the very thought seems rather strange.

There is one Linear Algebra course. You have to pass it to get your degree. Typically, it's taught by the same prof for many years, but it might also rotate between different chairs and profs (but only one in each semester and the "design" and requirements of the course stays largely the same).

It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it.

You don't have the choice to not take the class, you just have choice with which professor you would like to take it with. And often you would have to get lucky anyway, since that session may be filled so you'd have to take it with the "harder" teacher anyway.

For example with the popularity of computer science and STEM in general, at my school there were often 2-3 teachers teaching linear algebra in any given semester. And same for popular classes like calculus or introductory physics. Students would often lookup online which teacher was considered easier, but they still had to take the class.

Why would you do that? It doubles the workload for the faculty and gains.. nothing? That's the whole point of a lecture: You have one person teaching many. Beyond very small lectures (<10 people) it really doesn't get to direct interactions anyhow (or it's really, really hard to get students to interact with you. I tried..).

Especially something like Linear Algebra can easily have class sizes of 800+ people at big universities. Yes there is typically exactly one lecture hall for that and you have 30+ exercise groups. But still only one faculty

Sorry I'm not implying I have any practical reason why this is the case. Its just how it was when I was in school.

But I'll say where I went to school, and I hear its even worse now since enrollment in STEM is way up, there were often multiple thousands of students every quarter wanting to take just one class, so they split it up because we simply didn't have lecture halls with enough seats. There would often be 3-4 classes each of 500+ students all full, and still students struggling to get in due to the maximum amount per course. Usually there was around two teachers splitting the sessions, and they also have their other more advanced courses and/or research.

So its probably just practicality in terms of their time and resources. This wasn't an issue with more advanced courses where there was usually only one teacher per semester offering the class.

Why would a university need multiple professorts seaching the same subject at the same time? A professor isn't a school teacher that needs to look after each student individually. And even for questions andexcercises those are often already handled by teaching assistants of which there can be many as needed.

Having the choice between different professors with supposedly different difficulties for what is supposed to be the same course seems absurd.

As I mentioned in another comment, I don't have any argument as to why. Just how it was when I was in school so thats what I'm used to.

But I also mentioned that there are often thousands of students all trying to take one course. And the schools simply don't have the space to fit all of them in one session since I believe the rules are basically that it needs to be held in a lecture hall big enough to fit every enrolled student, and teachers don't have the time to teach 4 different sessions by themselves on top of their other duties. Maybe class sizes are just smaller elsewhere, but where I went to school it was not unheard of to have multiple thousands of students needing to take one class that was required for practically every STEM major in a given semester.

> A professor isn't a school teacher that needs to look after each student individually

There's a line of research that shows that high quality one-on-one instruction gets you up to 2stdev gains in learning performance.

If you can afford to increase the professor to student ratio and make them available for office hours, you probably do see increases in performance. Is it due to better motivation? Seeing an academic up close? Actually better explanations you get from an expert in the subject? Hard to say.

Popular classes may have many hundreds of students enrolled, and schools may not have classrooms large enough to fit all the students in. Professor time is finite and may not scale to giving duplicate lectures, supervising tens of TAs and deal with the 5% of students who demand unusual attention.

So schools offer multiple sections of the same class to share the workload. E.g. in recent years Computer Science 101 - often the most popular class on campus.

As absurd as having them teach the same course year after year? Why not then just record their lectures and place them online.

> It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it.

Remember, in European countries students are admitted to study a specific subject at university, rather than being admitted to the university as a whole and expected to choose a major later on.

So there are multiple courses going on, with a lot of intersection between the topics covered. There's maths for computer scientists (heavy on the discrete maths), maths for engineers (heavy on the integrals and matrices), maths for social scientists (heavy on the statistics), and so on.

So both American and European universities split their year 1 maths courses so they can get a few thousand first-year undergraduates through the largest 300-500 seat lecture theatres. But in Europe it's a split by subject, rather than by choose-your-instructor.

> Remember, in European countries students are admitted to study a specific subject at university, rather than being admitted to the university as a whole and expected to choose a major later on.

This is true in the US as well. You can change your major, but you are admitted into a College in the University. Moving to another College is not guaranteed if you later change your mind.

I studied for a popular degree at one of the largest universities in Germany. I never had a course be taught by multiple professors. If a course had many attendants, the room just got bigger.

But that's just my personal experience. I don't know if it's different at other large universities.

Ironically enough, our lecture halls were simply not big enough. The space capped out at around 300-600 people and for popular topics such as programming 101 every semester would easily have 1500+ enrolled.

The difference is that in Europe, you apply to take a specific subject at university, like Computer Science, and there are only so many spots available so that effectively caps the class sizes. You don't have a bunch of other people taking the class that are not working on that specific degree.

This is also the case in the US. The majority of college courses are limited to people within a given major and can't be taken by outside majors with limited exceptions.

In smaller countries like Germany increasing the class size makes sense but countries like the US, it just doesn't scale. Just to give a better sense, my quick google-fu (so take it with a grain of salt) shows Germany having 2.8M people actively enrolled in college vs the US with 18.1M.

So roughly 6x the amount of students.

6x the amount of students, but also 6x the amount of universities, so each individual university has about the same count. At least that's what I assume; unless the USA have fewer universities for some reason?

>smaller countries like Germany

wat

> The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree.

Very strongly depends on the school and major; there are both narrow-path degrees with lots of mandatory courses and wide-path degrees with very few specifically mandatory courses (instead having several n of m requirements) other than lower-division general education requirements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com