Well certain university courses in STEM are "weeder" courses, designed to be much difficult than they should be to push out the people who aren't serious or talented enough. I think this happens in particularly popular majors, where there are far many more people interested than spaces available. That's actually too bad--policy wise, artificially limiting the number of people with high-value skills isn't smart.
That's pretty much what is going on here. Math 202 is a weeder course for engineering majors, and all it really does is teach you the existence of various linear algebra concepts and how to compute them. There are no proofs, no consideration of why you might care about the eigenvalues of a matrix, etc.
That's a peculiarly bizarre form of wishful thinking. Nope, as a rule, the course is not a "weeder course" by it's very nature - it's just very badly taught. It's not a good idea to be so complacent about low quality of teaching.
If you are asserting that university departments do not run courses that are designed to remove students from the major, you are wrong. I'm not going to bother to try to prove it to you--look it up if you want.
I think he got the purpose of weeder courses wrong or at least partially wrong. It's often about getting people out of majors that they won't be sticking with before they have put in a lot of time.
In a lot of STEM fields there will be one or more required courses in the 3rd or 4th year of a 4 year bachelor's degree program that are significantly harder than anything in the first two years. You can go through 2 or maybe even 3 years in a major thinking that this is the field you want to make a career of, then you hit those harder course and discover that the field is probably not a good career choice for you after all and you should change majors.
Changing majors at that point might mean you will need a 5th or even 6th year to get you degree in your new major.
If your STEM program includes a required hard course in the first year or two, something to give a good taste of what you'll need to get through 3rd and 4th year, you can find out early that this is not the major for you and switch to something you are better at and still get your degree in 4 years.
That makes sense. They need to find the right balance between coddling and abuse!
I remember my low level CS courses being difficult, but not unfairly so. Except for when the second assignment in my CS 101 essentially asked for a recursive-descent parser, haha. Wooops.
Anyway…couldn’t a MOOC be just as good as an on-site course at filtering?
> In a lot of STEM fields there will be one or more required courses in the 3rd or 4th year of a 4 year bachelor's degree program that are significantly harder than anything in the first two years.
Sure, but then the "weeder course" should directly relate to that challenging required material - perhaps by introducing it in a simplified, approachable fashion but with high-standards assessment. The OP's linear algebra class does not seem to be anything like that. I stand by my opinion that the "generic weeder course" pattern is most often a convenient rationalization for what is, at its root, a badly taught course. This doesn't mean it can't become somewhat intentional, but that's secondary.
