Comment by JimBlackwood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JimBlackwood | Hacker News Reader

This is a fun article because while it discusses a real issue, it has just enough outdated views to distract people from the main point and focus on those.

Having recently finished studies and still being in contact with teaching assistants today, the problem is big. Attendance going down, participation going down, courses and curriculum simplified. I already noticed a big shift after Covid and I'm glad I missed the ChatGPT era.

Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding. In our efforts to standardise everything and come to objective exams, we've rewarded a culture that just intends to pass with the least amount of effort. Next to that are the burdens of being a student; if I didn't have to work most nights of the week, I'm sure I'd have put more effort into studying.

Lectures were often boring and questions would be answered by referring to pages in a textbook. Maybe with recorded media, we should revisit the use of lectures.

All in all, I don't see how academia can keep the standards high in current society. We'll see how it goes.

Perhaps it has to do with the reason people go to university, and the pressures they're under.

I remember being a poor student burning through my savings. I had no patience for humanities and anything that didn't directly help me get gainful employment.

Years later, I love those things, mostly because I am free to pursue them at my own pace, without worrying about maintaining a high GPA, courting companies that offer internships, building up my portfolio, and learning the things that are actually related to my job. That's on top of working my way through school, trying to make friends in a new city, and pursuing happiness.

I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.

Agreed. Having time and a mental health status where one can relax and peacefully read a whole book is a luxury. Having a job where you can apply any knowledge from your studies is a luxury too. Having space in your life to care about knowledge and learning for its own sake is a luxury

I didn't enjoy my studies because it was so stressful and i had to optimise for exams. I had no choice but to cut corners where i could. I was also forced to do many classes that i didnt really care about.

Though i have the feeling i can't begin to imagine the life of these people that are addicted to their phone, they kind of feel like a different species to me

In the university I optimized for exam. The degree was the only thing that mattered. Like you now that I’m older and wealthier I can lean for learning sake at my pleasure and deep dive things I care about.

For me it was extracting the most value for the money, which meant getting the best possible education within the boundaries of the degree. This involved taking graduate courses and substituting them for undergrad to get more of a challenge, taking more math courses both undergrad and graduate (I was a CS major), etc. Yes ultimately I was paying for a piece of paper, but when you're paying $15k/yr I wanted to be damn sure it was money well spent, and to this day I still feel shortchanged.

I felt shortchanged my senior year at my fairly well-regarded university when I was dealing with depression and doing what I saw as the bare minimum academically. I still got straight A’s despite putting in minimal effort.

> I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.

This was definitely the case for me.

However, it always left me with the idea of “then why did I study?”. To get a job, of course, but in retrospect a better path might’ve been to work and then study at a later phase in life.

Good points, but the other part of this is that back in "our time" (we may not be the same age - I was in University 1999-2005, but regardless) there was...basically no other choice.

If you wanted to work in CS, you had to get a degree. Then you'd get a shitty entry level job. Then eventually after a couple of years you'd be an "intermediate" engineer, have a good enough salary to live on your own (that's right - up until this point, you probably still needed to have roommates, if you are in a major city), take vacations, start putting in for retirement, etc.

Maybe if you were in Silicon Valley and already saw the dot com boom you saw another path. But most of the world didn't think like that.

Over the last several years you instead saw people go into CS thinking their first job will be 150k/year from a big tech, they'll be a senior within 3 years, and start working on their FIRE plan. And meanwhile they're surrounded by friends and peers who are either influencers, content creators, or have startup exit stories from the ZIRP era.

You and I remember endless work and drudgery. Those in our shoes today instead feel constant anxiety like they're already behind, they're not good enough, like maybe they missed their chance in the gold rush, and the only solution is to hurry up and dig faster.

I feel like that's another reason for the increasing # of shortcuts people are taking with their education.

> Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding

It doesn't matter. There is literally no assignment you can give students that they won't cheat on. In an intro college astronomy class, "Look at these pictures of planets, what do think is interesting about them?" or "Walk around your house and look at the different types of light bulbs, what kinds do you have?" Both of these will include 20% ChatGPT responses.

For a take-home exam or assignment, I’m sure this is the case.

The hardest course I took at uni had a final oral exam and weekly homework assignment. Your final grade would be the average of all the homework assignments, but the final oral exam decided if you passed (with previous mentioned grade) or failed.

I thought that was a great way to do it, you can cheat your way through the course but in the end you’ll fail the oral exam. However, it was more subjective.

As someone who teaches in humanities many students are really bad at reading and writing, use ai way too much and it hurts them, and rarely pay attention in class.

I’ve sat in other classes which were indeed boring but I don’t think this is the common denominator. Undergrads are just high schoolers with a different title.

The students from our schools foreign branch that come here for a semester or so are leagues beyond local students.

Agreed when the metric becomes the goal, it stops being a useful metric. College attendance seems to fall in that bucket.

>it has just enough outdated views to distract people

Haha, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It's great this guy wrote a textbook, but perhaps he should have authored a series of documentaries.

Perhaps reading dense texts isn't actually the best way to make an impression on a students mind, but that's just all we had up until about 20 years ago.

I think Khan Academy is really great because of the video content.

US school teaches how to be good at cheating.

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