The US university system is quite unusual (I believe Canada also has a similar system): at the undergraduate level you typically don't apply to a specific program; all students are expected to take a variety of classes (confusingly called "courses"), only some of which apply to a specific course of study.
Domain-specialized classes become an increasing proportion of your overall classes after the first or second year (when you choose a major) though never 100%. So while the school can get some idea of demand based on what people put on their application form, typically what you put on that form has little to no impact on whether you are admitted and doesn't actually bind you to a particular program.
I actually think this is a pretty good system, and was glad my own kid chose a US university (which luckily we could afford) rather than the free university education he could have chosen in either of his mother's or my countries. The theory is that you can get a broad foundational education to prepare you for a variety of possible futures, and also that there is more to education than simply work skills. Of course the reality isn't quite as utopian. It also means professions like law and medicine require whole additional degrees.
>Of course the reality isn't quite as utopian. It also means professions like law and medicine require whole additional degrees.
I kind of like the fact that in the US, doctors usually have some exposure to science outside of memorizing facts for their next test at med school. It makes them more likely to be able to understand studies, for one thing.
I might hazard to guess that if you study philosophy before going to law school (a very common path) you will be a better lawyer, but I can't attest to that with any first-hand knowledge.
Given the depth of knowledge that is generally imparted in 3 or 6 ECTS (average course length in europe, 75-150 hours of combined self/guided study) is fairly shallow, I’m not sure how much this would help the learner.
Why is this downvoted? Credits are based duration with an assumed correlation to workload (where workload actually changes pretty heavily with professor and field).
The LSAT is an interesting test. One big section is "analytical reasoning", which has you solving logic games. These are actually kind of fun.
After I took the LSAT, and scored pretty well (99.6 percentile), including a perfect score on analytical reasoning, I was in the supermarket and saw at the magazine rack, down in the section with the crossword puzzle magazines, a magazine of logic puzzles just like those from the LSAT. Based on the ads in it, the main audience for this was old ladies.
I bought it, and decided to start with a puzzle marked as hard, figuring it would be easy for me--I had just aced these things on the LSAT, after all, a test designed to make distinctions among the brightest students in the country. Obviously, anything old ladies could handle I could handle almost in my sleep.
It completely kicked my ass. So did all the medium puzzles. I think I was able to do a couple easy ones, with a lot of effort.
Relatedly: Bletchley Park deliberately sought out the very same (at the time, much younger) ladies to work on codebreaking tasks:
> The heads of Bletchley Park next looked for women who were linguists, mathematicians, and even crossword experts. In 1942 the Daily Telegraph hosted a competition where a cryptic crossword was to be solved within 12 minutes. Winners were approached by the military and some were recruited to work at Bletchley Park, as these individuals were thought to have strong lateral thinking skills, important for codebreaking.
Yes, price aside I really like the US approach of basically giving everyone a chance and slowly siphoning people into specialization (or out of university). In comparison to some of the "free" university systems where you end up with huge competition for a tiny amount of slots, the US seems to do better at finding those students that just didn't care about high school but are exceptionally talented in the one domain they are interested in.
I'm not sure how universal this is; I suspect that's the case at more liberal arts schools, but not the case at engineering schools. My undergrad was at Virginia Tech, and I applied to the CS program as part of my university application. I was in the CS program from day one. But I did part of my graduate school at William and Mary, and they are as you described.
While I was in undergrad, the chemical engineering major required over 200 quarter units, and was only barely manageable if you started right away and carried 4-5 classes each quarter for four years. There wasn't any time to chill out your freshman year and take fun classes, not if you wanted to finish in four years.
The system in Scotland is somewhere in between - atleast in the ancient universities. I was accepted as a BSc Math student and took Math, Compsci and Psych first semester. Second semester I switched to BSc Compsci and took two Compsci and a generic 'great ideas' module. It was generally up to three subjects first year, up to two second year, then your degree subject in third and fourth year. But you could only do subjects in your faculty, most subjects falling into Arts or Sciences, with a few such as Math, Psych and Philosophy being part of both.
That said they did limit some popular classes to only people accepted to those subjects but Compsci wasn't one last I checked - though first year Compsci in my fourth year had tripled in size from my first year.
It's important to point out the underlying reason for this: a US high school diploma is absolutely worthless garbage, so you need to continue generalist studies in university to bring people up to the standard of other developed countries.
E.g. someone with a French baccalauréat or enough British A levels can usually skip the first year or two of university in the US.
A US high school graduate with enough Advanced Placement classes can skip the first year of university (at least for public universities which accept those credits). But only well funded high schools can afford to offer that many AP classes.
Yeah, exactly. In France, getting a "baccalauréat général" (the high-school diploma leading to university studies) is optional, and not everyone does it. Just like AP tests are optional in the US.
There are two main differences.
Firstly, in France, this choice is available to everyone. Every student is able to go to a high school that offers it. It is not some unusual special thing that exists in rich neighborhoods.
Secondly, for people not enrolled in it, there are meaningful vocational options (bac technologique, bac professionel...), so they are still doing something useful. Contrast this to the US system, where your choice is between semi-serious academic work that kinda sorta approximates a European standard, and non-serious, waste of time babysitting.
This is because there's, for the most part, only one type of high school in the US. It's not split into academic vs. vocational. The US is one of the only countries in the world like this. I believe it expresses the idea that everyone has the ability to succeed if they try hard enough, so we shouldn't be sorting people into more and less prestigious tracks. This is a false myth, but it's so deeply implanted in the bedrock of American culture that saying common-sense things like "it's possible to figure out who the good students are well before age 18, and allocate resources appropriately" shocks a lot of people.
> But only well funded high schools can afford to offer that many AP classes.
No need. Study on your own then specially request the AP exam; it's what I did for the CS one, since my highschool didn't have a class for it. Ended up being the 3rd or 4th to succeed at my school, out of around 600 graduating students per year for over a decade.
When I was an undergrad (Finished in 2007) it was different. You were definitely assigned to a program which had required courses with a 1-2 half courses a yearyou could use for other courses. They didn't generally limit what classes you could take and I filled out my schedule with computer science courses. This changed in my last year where they switched to a specialization / major / minor system where you could combine courses to more or less create your own degree. I ended up leaving with a specialization in biochemistry and microbiology and a major in computer science.
That's the case in some liberal arts colleges, but is not typical, or at least wasn't in the early 00's when I went to school. Then most students did have to declare a major pretty early, usually when you applied for competitive majors like CS was back then. There was a "University Studies" major which you could be in for the first year if you were undeclared, but it was pretty important to declare a real major pretty quickly.
I don't know about other countries, but for non-professional degrees in Sweden a program is essentially only a guarantee to be able to take certain classes. Otherwise you can take whatever courses you want, at whatever school you want, as long as you in the end fulfill the degree requirements. Which usually means half your bachelors are credits in the same subject.
The rules states that you shouldn't comment about voting because it makes boring reading and doesn't make a difference. But it is both informative and does make a difference if you add new information, which I did. If the moderation team wants no comments about voting at all, they need to fix the issues of undue voting or change their reasoning. Until then I am going to act in the way that I think is best long term for a productive discussion. I don't have a problem people voting down an opinion, but when something is factual they should be called out on it. Because the people who do that are destroying the site for everyone. I don't see what your comment adds however, which should be the first rule of posting.
Domain-specialized classes become an increasing proportion of your overall classes after the first or second year (when you choose a major) though never 100%. So while the school can get some idea of demand based on what people put on their application form, typically what you put on that form has little to no impact on whether you are admitted and doesn't actually bind you to a particular program.
I actually think this is a pretty good system, and was glad my own kid chose a US university (which luckily we could afford) rather than the free university education he could have chosen in either of his mother's or my countries. The theory is that you can get a broad foundational education to prepare you for a variety of possible futures, and also that there is more to education than simply work skills. Of course the reality isn't quite as utopian. It also means professions like law and medicine require whole additional degrees.