Even though I do not mean to suggest a better way of teaching, I want to spot some points of college education that I hated when I was a student. I had been a good student since I was 6 and I was the child that other parents tell their children to be like. I graduated with excellent grades both from high school and university, got honors, scholars and so on. It was the time when I was in high school that I realized something is wrong about the way of teaching. This realization hit harder when I was in college.
As a side note, my perspective might be limited to schools I graduated and Turkish education system, however a black board is a black board even if it is in USA, right?
It’s been always easy to blame professors on this subject, and so I want to start with professors.
Professors
I went to one of the best colleges in Turkey, which is a private college with excellent professors. They have great publications, high citations, and there is no doubt they are extremely good in their research area. However, when it comes to teaching, things are vice versa.
There are few things to spot:
- Simply, some of them are not interested in teaching, which is pretty expected. Professors have a contract with colleges based on a minimum hours of teaching per semester to get paid. So, they are forced to be a professor even if they only want to focus on their resaarch.
- CVs or resumes never reflect the ability of teaching, so professors get hired based on their technical skills.
- Professors spend so much time on their research which is an advanced topic. However, students are there for the fundamentals that professors do not remember when and how they learned them. The knowledge gap causes complexity in teaching the fundamentals.
- Some professors are too perfectionist to expect students spend half of their time for that course. If we consider that students take multiple courses, this perfectionism makes students lose their interest in learning subject and focus on passing the course.
Courses
Courses are the reason we enroll to colleges, right? There are fundamental courses, advanced courses, and area elective courses. They are the main resource for us to learn stuff. Unfortunately, it does not meet the needs because of the following:
- Courses are meant to teach fundamentals, and do not teach how to use this knowledge to build things.
- Courses are designed many years ago and are not suitable for modification.
- Courses use a book from many years ago, even if the latest edition seems current.
- We are taught the past and expecting to build the future.
- There are too much mandatory courses that most of the students are not interested.
I believe we need to be taught with the current technologies, and courses should keep up with the current updates.
We spend 14-15 weeks of a semester to learn fundamentals of an area which can be shortened and focus on advanced topics in the rest.
Plus, there are exams, assignments and other workloads that do not allow students to study on their own. It is frustrating that courses are not worth in terms of time spent.
Another point is that lecture sessions are fixed and arranged according to teachers' availability. There are people more productive at nights, or early mornings. The peak time of productivity varies between students. Also, some courses are one after the other, and students are usually tired to listen carefully.
Also, what is the point of making some courses mandatory? It is okay not to interest in all courses. However, it is not okay to be forced to take courses that you are not interested in. Colleges literally force students to burn hours of effort in exchange of nothing, and they still call this education?
Assignments
Since engineering is mostly a practical branch, it is the most usual thing to expect getting multiple assignments for an engineering course. The motivation to give assignments is to allow students to practice course subjects with current technologies. However, the real life scenario never fits into this motivation.
Engineering students usually choose these majors because they love to build things with creativity, and they expect these assignments to be an opportunity of showing their creativity. Usually, I expect assignments to be like:
- Implement a max-stack with an extra function max() that returns maximum value in stack.
- Test it to prove it works.
- Write a short report.
This kind of an assigment would let me to choose any programming languages and approach I want, and allow me to describe my approach. Unfortunately, practical assignments are usually 5-10 pages long and describing everything in like 100 steps. For example:
- First page: how to submit your code, cheating policy
- Second page: a hillarious story of Alice on why she wants to build a max-stack
- Third page: provided interface definition
- 4-7th page: how to implement a max-stack (which is the goal of the assignment)
- 8-10th page: how to write a report, report sections
Also, it consists restrictions such as:
- Use Java 11 or your submission will not be graded
- Submit your code as .zip folder or your submission will not be graded
- If no report, then your submission will not be graded
- Your program should pass all test cases, or you will get 0 (ZERO)
- Late submissions will not be graded
What do these restrictions have to do with the level of understanding?
The reason behind this is simple; to make grading simpler. Giving abroad statements on assigments creates an opportunity for some students to misinterpret those statements and object their grades. These dialect makes professors to give very precise statements. As a result, assignments become far and away from practicing a course subject. Also, it takes time, effort and puts pressure on students.
Grading
I believe that the goal of a professor should be teaching the course subjects described in the syllabus. The grade should serve both as an incentive to work hard and identifying hardworking students from others. The student’s grade should reflect their understanding of course subject.
Sadly, grading become the only way to measure the level of understanding and hence the motivation of education has become getting a high grade. Students focus on passing exams and assignments without interest in course subject, and even choose courses that are easy to get high grades regardless of the subject.
Participation
How childish is to give students a positive grade if they ask questions, right? What happens if a student understands the subject and does not need to ask any question? Well, participation grade is a way to encourage students to participate in class. However, does it really should be something graded? In most of the cases, students start asking obvious or irrelevant questions to seem participating. This behavior inhibits both flow of class and other students trying to understand the subject.
Grade Boundaries
All students get some grade like 89.5 at some point, and of course they knock the door of their professors for regrade. Unfortunately, it is not that common for professors to round it up. Why? Simple, rounding 89.5 makes 89.5 the new boundary for students who got 89. So, there is no equilibrium.
Then, students starts submitting regrade requests. Now, enjoy regrading all of those submissions and discuss many students for that 0.5 points. Is it really worth to spend this much time on 0.5 points? Does it enough to impact students' future? Or, how much a student’s level of understanding changes with that 0.5 point?
The problem is that performance is continuous and it should not be discretized into small number of bins.