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Comment by hypersoar | Hacker News Reader

I have a professor at a large state school who taught a couple of large (i.e. multiple hundreds of students) calculus classes a few years back. He assigned homework, but didn't make it part of their grade. It was just practice (the homework was through an online system). Lectures weren't required. Lots of students get stuck in these classes who shouldn't be, and he felt that they shouldn't be forced to sit through lectures that were a waste of their time. He left it up to them to decide whether they needed the lectures or not.

The result? Most of the students decided that they didn't need to do anything for the class aside from take the final exam. Most of them failed, including almost half of the engineering students (who, as a result, couldn't finish an engineering degree in 4 years), and there was a university-wide outcry.

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And lo, the students learned a lesson which will be more important to them in the real world than any amount of math would have been.

I really wish I could agree with you. My gut tells me that a good number of the students that failed probably decided that it must have been because they're not good at math or engineering.

Im sorry, but if you think that you can NOT attend a class and do well, you deserve whatever grade you get. It is not the teachers fault for not forcing you to go to class.

Well, I don't know. I had an upper division thermodynamic class where the professor was an admitted bad lecturer. He had two policies. One was if you had an A grade already based on the mid-term exam and weekly assignments, you need not take the final exam. The other was if your final exam grade was higher than your mid-term + homework, you get the grade from the final. I personally rarely attended the lectures and walked out with an A prior to the final. Friends of mine also did not attended, but passed the final exam. A number of people who regularly attended the lectures failed the class.

From this experience I formed the belief that a university lecturer can actually be counter-productive to the students learning the subject.

I've always been a very focused student. Lecturers usually provide good value to their students, but in three courses during my undergrad I went to two lectures before determining that my time would be better spent reading up on the material on my own. The lecturers were just very bad and obviously made an inferior job than the textbook.

This is what is so good about being a student: You are for the first time allowed to take responsibility for your own results. Unfortunately you have to be lucky or extraordinarily talented to get similar conditions when you get out in the real world.

Is it correct to assume that both you and your non-failing friends put in considerable work outside the lectures? Or, depending on the exact subject, at least skim Wikipedia? If so, that is certainly an even better way to learn than by lectures, but unfortunately will not be possible by the fourth or fifth year in university.

It could also just be that the smarter students were the ones more likely to feel comfortable skipping the lectures.

>upper division thermodynamic class ... I personally rarely attended the lectures and walked out with an A prior to the final.

You must either be quite a good student or that was quite an easy/poor class. Personally, I try to make sure students have as close to a knowable outcome by mid-terms, so they can drop with a W.

>where the professor was an admitted bad lecturer.

Sometimes this is a ploy in attempt to get students to take some ownership in the process. To paraphrase "Don't expect me to magic this crap into your head with my gift of prose."

>From this experience I formed the belief that a university lecturer can actually be counter-productive to the students learning the subject.

No no no. Maybe those who didn't already know thermodynamics, or have the discipline to teach themselves felt it was important to attend lecture.

Well, I suppose it could have been some kind of mind trick, but the lectures I did attend were real snoozers. The old man would open up with "So as I was saying ..." and then launch mid-equation into whatever he was talking about last time. Like literally "So as I was saying, delta-aich over delta-tee ...."

Well, I have to admit that I have met some folks who could turn even the most fun stuff into drudgery.

"or that was quite an easy/poor class."

That sounds like an easy class to test out of. If the prof provides an entire semesters homework, and you can provably ace "class A amplifier bias circuit design" without attending the lecture that supposedly teaches you how, then don't go. I never skipped entire classes but I certainly skipped lectures where I could prove to myself I knew the material.

This works really well in most engineering classes where you can check your work. In fluffy stuff like English Lit being "right" means knowing the prof's politics and personal belief system, so its a bit harder to know if you're right or not, so you can't skip that lecture.

Think you know "integration by parts"? Already did the homework and got it all eventually correct? Then not much point in attending lecture that day. This has a bonus in that you get a lot more out of a lecture if you already struggled with the topic for a couple hours rather than walking in cold.

"That sounds like an easy class to test out of."

I would support that idea for quite a lot of the curriculum.

CLEP tests rocked

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Level_Examination_Progr...

They're like $80 now... in the olden days they were something like $10.

A truly excellent startup idea which no one has apparently tried (that I know of) is a MOOC focused on the CLEP "curriculum", basically a semi-continuous monster study group. There's a giant hole in the MOOC industry for testing and credentialism. Well, there you go, take your CLEP test and they handle all the testing and stuff.

This also shows the ripoff of some industry specific cert exams. Why did a Cisco CCNP Routing test cost something like $200 a decade ago for a total cost for a CCNP of about $800 but a CLEP test in 2013 is only $80? I know there's economies of scale but this is ridiculous. Outsourced reasonable priced industry certs is another MOOC startup ripe for massive disruption.

Not sure what level of education we're talking about here, but at least in Norwegian universities lectures are mostly not mandatory. I never attend them. I do the required work and do well on the exam. The key is that: instead of spending 2 hours on a lecture where I'm sitting there passive, maybe not paying attention and the lecturer will only give the big picture and not the details (so I still have to read up on the subjects afterwards), I instead spend 1.5h reading/doing it by myself.

I had one instructor who was so completely useless that I stopped attending his lectures. I ended up with the highest possible grade and, as he smilling me informed me, that was because I had clearly paid attention in his class (he had to had noticed me because just before I bailed I noticed that there were only about 5-10 students left).

So how did I get that grade? Simple, I read the text book (and found it rather obvious and slow-going) and made many notes.

This is why you have multiple exams, and don't assign too much weight to the first one. The traditional role of first exams is a kick in the pants: "Hey kid! You thought you were passing this class? Well, you're not; get it together!"

This sort of thing is also popular with students, since it means that the final exam isn't all-important.

It seems like it would work better to have a two-problem quiz every week: one problem in what you supposedly just learned, and another on something from earlier in the course you might have forgotten. This seems like it would take only about twenty minutes per week and give the students much better information on their progress, so I wonder why it isn't widely adopted.

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