Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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This, in general, seems like a great thing. The goal of a university should be to produce premium students, and nothing's better than a trial by fire.

We actually had this exact thing at my university. One sophomore level weed out class was a "self paced" electrical engineering class. It was called self paced because you were given a textbook and were free to work through it at your own pace. But to finish the class by the end of the semester you had to average 2 chapters completed per week, and completing a chapter not only included finishing a problem set and taking a test which you had to score 90%+ on (and were required to finish another problem set and retake it otherwise), but on occasion also demoing some skill in the lab.

It was brutal, but one of the most educational classes I've ever taken - and obviously not just because of what I learned about electrical engineering. Of course it seems modern universities have just become profit-driven degree treadmills. Weeding out students? That's reducing profit! And yeah looking back at my uni's page it seems this class is no longer self paced. Lol. And that's at a top 10 school. The enshittification of education.

Part of the issue is with the purpose as you describe it. Sure, at top 10 schools, a trial by fire would result in much needed “growing up” as the gifted but undisciplined (speaking for myself and many users of this site) students find their way to more durable motivations. But at the vast majority of schools, a trial by fire would end with a lot of students burned.

Perhaps that begs the question, if those kids can’t handle self-directed education, why are we putting them there in the first place, but that’s definitely a grey area, and there are hundreds of thousands of students who are smart enough to do well in higher education and skilled work, but weren’t disciplined enough to handle what you’re describing as freshmen.

Many employers pay a premium for predictably elite cadres of students. The schools want to try to pass off mediocre graduates as having some of the elite special sauce even though only a small number of students have what it takes. We know exactly what to do to produce elite cadres by aggressive sorting. But the incentives created by the federal government encourage the institutions to extrude mediocre students like a chicken nugget machine produces processed meat product. Every hot student-nugget is worth a tens of thousands of dollars a year in freshly printed loan money directed towards administrators and rent on dorms and apartments irrespective of quality; so the incentive is to stuff the students with filler.

The idea of "weeding out" students implies that many students are "weeds" who need to be uprooted and thrown away rather than grown.

A teacher who thinks this way is probably in the wrong profession. A university that operates this way is failing to educate the students it admitted.

Weeding out as I've seen it is a class that requires a certain level of commitment and ability to either plan your work or tough it out that a high school just can't really prepare anyone for. So in a way the student isn't a "weed" but their motivation or maturity might be and they're free to retake the class once they know that university will require them to put in more work than high school. If they can't put in the work then completing a thesis and graduating is going to be very hard and that happens the last year of uni so better to set the expectations early with a "weed out" class.

We have too many university graduates that can't get jobs in their fields, in a time where there is a growing deficit of people in trades.

Ideally it's not weeding out but distributing into education paths which fit every student.

From my experience studying electrical and computer engineering, I definitely prefer that they chose to put hard electrical engineering courses in the first semesters because I knew immediately not to focus on them because I didn't like them.

I think there should be a better onramp to EE, as there often is in CS.

Either the unfit and uninterested get weeded out at the education stage or they get weeded out by no employer being willing to hire them; the former seems kinder than the latter.

Who are the "unfit" students? Why were they admitted and what do you think should happen to them?

I think the problem is that no teacher has the time to babysit a student. If they just don't care about their education or can't put the time in, they shouldn't be wasting their time and money.

Some students also just don't have the aptitude for an Engineering or Computer Science degree. It's better for everyone if this is figured out early. I know plenty of people that dropped out of a Computer Science degree because they hated it or thought it would be a great way to make money and were in over their head.

We had classes that were for 'weeding out' students in Computer Science. They involved calculus because if you couldn't pass this class, you wouldn't be able to handle the 5 or so classes after this class that required it.

I studied computer science and have been working as a programmer for about 20 years. The downside is that you're filtering a lot of people who would actually potentially be great programmers but are for whatever reason not good at calculus.

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