> “Serious” students are largely only found in degree programs that have weeder courses.
I went to a top 20 university, even higher ranked CS program. There were plenty of weeder courses. There were also plenty of students that were only there to get the piece of paper they believed, probably rightly, was necessary to get the job they wanted. All of the CS courses were recorded, attendance never mandatory for lectures. It was not uncommon at all for lectures to be less than half full due to students watching a months worth of lectures right before exams.
I'm not sure this is out of alignment with being a serious student, it's just out of alignment with how the uni wants to teach classes. This is how I did school in 2000, even when classes were not recorded.
This is a problem I have with online classes as well, the material is all done already, why are we running it temporally, instead of DVR style.
You can still weed people out and have a strong "certification" program without requiring real time in person attendance.
I'm a serious viewer of Better Call Saul, but I watched it all right before exam time.
How many programs weed out students anymore? None that I have heard of, and the notion seems unlikely given that most are happy to take their students’ money all the way through graduation.
I would say most of the STEM majors at my university (top 20 US school) pushed students to the absolute brink in the first year, jam packed with advanced math, physics, and chemistry. It was pretty normal to come out of freshman year engineering, CS, or chemistry with a sub-2.75 GPA and the joy of learning completely stomped out of you.
I don't know if it was intentional or just the collective effect of having a bunch of professors with no teaching skills and god complexes who hated engaging with undergrads, happy to assign 40 hours of work per week per class with no regard to the fact that students are in 3 other equally-difficult classes.
Mostly (that I know of) people didn't switch out though, they just took the terrible treatment as it was supposedly normal to have a terrible GPA and terrible time in the STEM majors there. Also there were a lot of international students in the programs - I doubt going to America to study engineering and coming back with a liberal arts degree was an option for them.
Personally, I switched into Industrial Engineering which had notably fewer hard sciences requirements. Still miserable, but less so.
I also managed to find a loophole where each engineering major had its own stats class that was 95% the same content, then vaguely applying it to a problem in that field of study in a final project. So I satisfied my Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, etc. requirements by just taking MechE Stats and ChemE Stats.
They closed that loophole by the time I graduated by having one unified Stats course for all engineering majors.
Some Googling tells me the average final GPA for an engineer there is between 3.3 and 3.4, meaning a lot of people are going to graduate with much lower grades than that. I eventually graduated with a 3.5, but I was below 3 for quite some time. I had two Cs, a fair amount of low As, and a lot of Bs.
What tended to happen was that your GPA increases throughout your time in undergrad because:
* classes are easier later in the major, or they seem easier because you're more directly interested in the content and your classes up to this point have built up the base knowledge, rather than being the freshman year survey of "all the hardest but largely unrelated science classes all at once"
* your study skills improve
This doesn't really excuse how the students are treated in my opinion, both by the professors and generally how the system was set up. Obviously hard things are hard, but there were many, many brilliant students in a very dark place because the school just throws them in the deep end and says "fuck you".
Something like MIT's first semester being pass/fail only could have gone a long way.
Also we were on the quarter system, and engineers needed an absurd 48 classes to graduate, which is a full 4-class schedule every quarter without a single drop or failure in order to graduate on time.
These classes are the same content as full-semester classes at other schools, but crammed into 10 weeks to fit the quarter system.
My school seemed to revel in how hard it was, kids and professors would constantly disparage other top schools saying they were practicing grade inflation. To what degree that is true, who knows. Anytime you go to a top-but-not-Ivy-league school, people are going to talk about oh why our school is actually more legit, etc, whatever. Seemed like half jealousy and half Stockholm syndrome to me.
My department's policy was a 3.2 curve. So half the students in every class got B+ or worse. 2.75 is a B-, most classes had at least 30% at or below there.
I taught university (big state school) about 10 years ago and it was department policy to flunk >= 40% of each calculus class. We curved to accomplish this and every class was told this was the policy on day 1. We got a mix of students at my school and this was to keep the dopes from designing airplanes and such. I personally would have been happier letting engineering do their own dirty work, but that was math's job and I like my plane flights to be uneventful, so yeah.
So when they're checking airplane parts for quality, do they just rank them all and throw out the worst 40%?
At my school, the engineering college was perpetually irritated because the Arts and Sciences college was using one of their required courses as a weed-out class for pre-meds, so there were perfectly good engineers failing prerequisites for no good reason.
> So when they're checking airplane parts for quality, do they just rank them all and throw out the worst 40%?
I have no idea about airplane parts, but I would not call an engineering student "perfectly good" if they couldn't make it through an engineering pre-med weeder. The level of technical ability I expect from an engineer is an order of magnitude greater than a doctor. They should be crushing it.
Decent bit! I can only speak to my somewhat recent experience but the CS program had like a 30% attrition rate for year 1 + 2 b/c each year had a weeder course
Georgia Tech retention rate for first year CS students is 60% IIRC. Now, many of these will go to other majors and not drop out. But these majors are widely known at the school (e.g. riding the management train). While many of these students will go on to graduate, 12.2% of enrolled first year students are not on graduation rosters 4 years later.
This. Our goal was to build a toy OS, from scratch, in x86 assembly, that could multitask execution of DOS COM files. God help you if you didn't already know ASM.
Fortunately we were graded at milestones, and our sins (bugs) were forgiven by replacing our individual buggy implementations with known working implementations that covered the concepts up to that point.
Many state universities are forced by state law to reduce the admittance requirements, especially for in-state students. State taxes are paying part of the university budget and it is politically valuable to keep those universities widely accessible. As a result, the schools are forced to do additional screening in the first year.
I think this is actually a reasonable policy since it allows for someone who has great potential but lacks the maturity to apply themselves in lower grades. They still have an opportunity to turn things around and become substantial contributors.
Your remark about in-state students really matches my experience at the university I went to. I can't think of anyone I personally knew who transferred out other than in-state students.
I was 'weeded' out of pre-med and landed in software. The problem with pre-med was the insane number of hours per semester I was going to have to take while I was also working. I had an interest in computers so tried out the first programming classes and it was relatively easy so the rest is history.
IIRC, for software/programming, any early class heavy with pointers/hardware/math served as a weeding function. So I'm not sure how students won't be pushed out at some point if they can't do the work.
It's been a while since I graduated but for those wanting a high demand major from a dept with limited resources, it seemed normal for one of the 100 level courses to be a step up in difficulty. Pushed out a lot of people from pursuing CS at my school.
Other schools make you apply to the major, and that process just weeds out those the dept thinks are not suited for the program.
There was an article here a month about this (related to an art program IIRC). Basically a number of schools "entry level" courses for certain majors aren't passable by someone with a general high school degree because they only accept students who already learned the groundwork before applying to the program.
I noticed this recently while looking at MIT's computer science program for a data structures class I could recommend to a family member.
Apparently MIT doesn't have an intro to data structures class. The I guess the assumption is that everyone applying to the program got their linked list/searching/sorting knowledge before beginning the program. They have a number of algorithm/datastructures classes but none of them teach the basic concepts. Similarly. I don't think they have an algebra I class (they have one called that, but its not what one learns in HS algebra, has calc/etc as prereqs). That might make sense because the basics of algebra are fairly consistent across HS curriculum and everyone takes it, but comp sci/data structures classes are all over the place, and I can see situations where a subset of students is scrambling to understand pointer linking/etc in the intro to algorithms class they have someone outside of the major taking their into to CS classes.
So, I haven't applied to MIT (lol). But some schools I applied to did ask what major I'd like to do. It could be that MIT doesn't accept applicants who want to do CS who haven't taken some level of CS fundamentals before.
My school wasn't that mean. I think the programming II class was the weed class, and I think the deciding factor was that the projects just took a lot more time than homework you're likely to get in other 100 level courses. I had no CS background but with enough time I got through the homework. Not everyone had the time or the interest.
I can only speak from my experience in Canada, but Engineering programs (I don't know about SWE) here still do so. I lost ~20% of my student peers within the first semester and nearly 30% by the end of the first year.
This was the same for me in Europe, but I’m fairly certain it had nothing to do with difficulty, and everything with people finding out that CS was just not for them.
I don't know about now, but when I was in college some couple of decades ago we were told during orientation that of the roughly 200 or so of us only about 3 would complete the degree. My degree is a BSCpE so not really CS. More like if CS and EE had a bastard child. I would guess they were off by a few, but no more.
1.5%?? That's insane. Either their bar is ridiculously high, or they're letting way too many students even start, with false expectations. Or both, of course.
This is not uncommon in places where getting into university is easy, but getting out (especially of a tough major) is very difficult. The attrition rates are high, and that is known by everyone going in.
I have heard that some European universities are this way.
My compsci program had an almost 50% drop out rate in the first two quarters. The classes were almost designed to destroy people, but if you did survive, you ended up doing pretty well career-wise.
My program does have this, two of the first semester classes have ~50% average (which is the passing grade), not including those who drop out and including 2nd time students.
> "Serious students are largely only found in degree programs that have weeder courses".
I am unconvinced by that logic. Serious students are there to learn from competent teachers- i.e. someone that is proficient in the art of conveying knowledge, not merely possessing knowledge or having successfully brought grant monies to their university. Weed out courses are not for serious students, but are a rite of passage that many times are themselves gamed.
> Serious students are there to learn from competent teachers- i.e. someone that is proficient in the art of conveying knowledge, not merely possessing knowledge or having successfully brought grant monies to their university.
These two are largely diametrically opposed.
- Any professor bringing in significant grant money is at an R1 school.
- R1 schools are famous for bad teaching by the tenured faculty, largely because quality teaching doesn’t gain them much.
- Quality teaching can be found, often in abundance, at small colleges. Some of these colleges do not have weeder courses. There are some serious students at these colleges. These are the rare exceptions, imho.
There's weeder courses and then there's weeder courses.
Some courses are just hard because the concepts are hard. If you're not down to clown, you're not going to make it past it.
Some courses are deliberate obstacles. The degree program at the university I attended had a single course that essentially pivoted you from the 200 level courses to the 300 level courses. It was always full due to it being a requirement and having a high failure rate necessitating people to retake it multiple times.
I never got a chance to take it because I ran out of lower level courses and electives to take to maintain full time status. Without full time status, I couldn't maintain my financial aid. Without my financial aid, I couldn't afford college.
A couple of years later, the program was restructured and the "pivot" was removed. As was other bullshit one was forced to take. If I had started the program a year later, I could have actually completed it. Or if I could have just taken the class. I never struggled with the material.
I don't necessarily disagree, but something I didn't consider until later when exposed more to the "sausage making" of academia was the extent to which the course creators are just incompetent at creating material "on level" for those students. Many just assume the material must be hard, when in fact it (often times) moves too fast as well. Also inability to teach complex concepts simply is another huge impediment. This was one of Einstein's pet peeves, and is one of mine as well. Teachers and students alike seem to want to cram/jam as much material into each course as possible, but I think it ultimately does a grave disservice.
For many/most degrees in the US, most folks are just going through the academic motions for the piece of paper and/or the college social experience.
“Serious” students are largely only found in degree programs that have weeder courses.