Is the first year of a degree a waste of time?

There have been a number of tweaks to A-levels, once the gold standard of secondary education, to make them easier to pass. For example instead of one exam at the end of two years, it is split into smaller modules, which can be repeated, lower marks can be discarded, there is a consolation prize of an AS level, and pass rates have been going up every year. There is even a whole new grade, A* above A - whereas surely A* is really A and A is really B, but that doesn't look so good on the league tables.

Yet all the time that grades are going up, lecturers are complaining that the quality of freshers is going down, in terms of the level of literacy and numeracy that would be expected in previous years, and that most of the first year must be devoted to remedial teaching, filling in the material that wasn't covered in A-levels.

The International Baccalaureate is operated by an independent non-profit organization in Switzerland whose reputation rests not on conning the voters but on being the real "gold standard". Education is too important to be trusted to politicians.

Schools in the UK have the power to do the IB instead of A-levels but are strongly discouraged from doing so via the central funding mechanism, this is for ideological reasons, the New Labour government felt it was "divisive". Hopefully the current lot, who are all about decentralized decision making, will allow it.

Hm, if i recall correctly my first year had: - A basic mathematics course, took us through some of the harder A-Level (pre-uni) stuff and a few more advanced things - Discrete mathematics, set theory and all that jive. - An introductory programming course, it covered basic Java programming and introduced OOP. Coursework was to write the algorithm for solving a maze - A basic hardware and lower-level concepts course - Data structures, ie what ones are available and their efficiencies - A unix programming module, basically we made some dead simple command line programs - Some functional programming (we used SML)

I hadn't really done any programming pre-university (other than some trivial Delphi apps that aren't really worth mentioning). So nearly all of this was new to me.

The second year was basically more of the same but harder. The 3rd and 4th years were where we got the bulk of the credit for the degrees, but we also got the most freedom over what modules we took. In the first two years, about 80% of the modules were considered 'core'.

I agree erikig.

1.) A part of it is also that one should choose the university one attends carefully - if that's possible. I went to a pure tech school my first year. There was no concern about wasted time in nonessential classes. We jumped right into the mix, taking what was relevant to our majors along with the typical foundational classes - chemistry, calculus and physics.

There is great political pressure in most countries to "improve" the education of the population. This runs into other political, demographic, and scientific realities and produces some ironic consequences. For example, in the US, we have a higher and higher percentage of the population entering college each year. That means that the average IQ of those entering college gradually declines. (It wouldn't if the Flynn Effect still functioned, but gains from the Flynn Effect in the US ended 20-30 years ago.) The top 10% has a higher average IQ than the top 20%, which is itself greater than for the top 30%, etc. The higher the percentage going to college, the lower the average IQ of college students, and the colleges have to adjust to avoid an embarrassing rise in drop-out rates.

I saw statistics a week or so ago showing a gradual rise in the percentage of students who take calculus in high school, a gradual rise in the percentage who take Algebra 1 in eighth grade (instead of in 9th, 10th, etc.), and other stats that would seem to imply a gradual increase in math ability for any given age cohort. Yet, within a day or two, I also saw stats showing a gradual decrease in math ability for high school graduates entering college. In 1995, the College Board could no longer continue with the old SAT and had to "renormalize" it to get the mean score back up to 500. They had to dumb it down, in other words.

I've seen stats and reports from other countries (including Japan) that show the same trends. People demand that the schools do a better job of getting kids ready for college by, for example, having more of them take algebra in 8th grade. So, it happens, except that they aren't really any better prepared than before, so to prevent the embarrassment of rising failure rates, the course has to be dumbed down. The apparent increase in math ability is achieved by a relabeling of what they do, not by an increase in how much they learn. There is now a growing trend in Illinois for students (I assume from Chicago) to take calculus in high school and then end up in remedial math in college. They're not learning anything, but for political reasons they are given classes labeled "calculus" to show "progress toward social justice". I assume Illinois is representative of many other places in many countries.

Having recently completed the IB there are some things that are not really great (they may still be better than the A levels). I can only comment for the subjects I took.

Physics- too much emphasis on theory and step by step problems. I think solving a complete, complex problem shows much more understanding of physics, than the present state, where you can spend a month learning the theory by hard and then solve quite basic problems with lots of guidance, and pass the final exam with a decent grade.

Maths - great, I liked, even if it was hard. Much harder than A levels

Languages B (there a A and B, A meaning that it is intended for native speakers)- they could be a bit harder. It is unnecessary to study to get a decent grade. One can get a 6 or 7 (grades are up to 7) by just attending class.

Languages A- awesome. We didn't lose time learning much about history (there was just enough) like I would have to in the national baccalaureate system in Slovenia, but learned to write and speak. This includes blogs, journal articles, essays, political speeches, presentations...

TOK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_knowledge_(IB_course) The way it was taught at our school it was a waste of time. Apparently the professors were not well trained to teach it. This subject could be of great use if well taught.

Geography was nice and greatly taught, but I think its similar to the national system and the A levels.

What is the outcome of the IB for me? Now I am studying Computing at the public university where I get to meet people from all backgrounds, schools and educational systems. I can tell that I have a much deeper understanding of maths and physics than everyone else who didn't do the IB. Many students don't even understand calculus, complex numbers and vectors. Not to speak about physics. Some went to CS high schools before, but apart from some programming knowledge they lag behind by much. The result is that I am bored in class. We've spent the first month revising what I did in the IB, and we are still gonna do it for quite some time. Plus we learn LESS than in the IB. We don't go as deep.

So yes, I think the first year of university/college is quite a waste of time if you were an IB student and you were quite good.

The first year of university seems to me as a catchup for the 'bad students'. We don't build on what we learned in high school, but instead relearn it with less insight into the principles of the subjects.