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At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

nytimes.com

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Re: At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

#41

Post by endtime »

coolnewtoy wrote: post #30
gravitycop wrote: post #11

And, in a virtual age, what is the point of a physical school? Answer: there is no point.

I've been reading Stanford's Engineering Everywhere lectures, and the thing I'm most impressed about is how much support there is for students: Course-specific computer labs with course-specific lab assistants to help you walk you through problems as you're coming up against them in learning to code! Sections with section leaders who grade your code in front of you and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your cod…

Agreed. I'm a TA for a CS course here and we have open office hours where the students can come and do their homework and ask questions as they come up, which I can then answer on the board (I'm not going to say if it's black or white so as not to alienate those who apparently feel strongly about this issue), benefitting not only the student with the question but also whoever else is there. I've had students help each other in my office hours too. That's not something you're going to get with SEE.

Re: At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

#42

Post by quantumhobbit »

bz wrote: post #6

The general sentiment about the TEAL classes (the ones with the clickers) is that they are really gimmicky. Supposedly, it gives the professor some feedback on what concepts are unclear and pushes the students to be attentive. The problem seems to be that it's just unnecessary structure for something that's typically dynamic. It at least partially devolved into an attendance system - students used to just press in fo…

I remain convinced that the only reason they require those clickers is to charge $70-$100 to each student for them.

Re: At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

#43

Post by mhartl »

joe_bleau wrote: post #27
mhartl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the tests are too easy. You might be right that much or most of the higher pass rate is due to higher attendance, but it's also possible that students were learning plenty from section, the book, and working on problem sets. When I taught the analogous course (Physics 1) at Caltech, many of the students skipped lecture entirely. The failure rate was typically under 5%, and I guarantee it wasn't because…

First year physics is mostly review for a lot of incoming freshmen, especially if they did one or more AP classes in high school. I'm not suprised that some would do great even skipping the lectures. When did they put freshmen on grades? When I was at Caltech years ago, first year was pass/fail. Back then, Goodstein taught phys 1a. Fine lectures, unless you had read the chapter in advance. Then you noticed that his l…

Highly qualified students have the option to test out of the different terms of Physics 1. (I know because I graded the placement tests for five years.) I suppose some of them take the course anyway to get an easy A, but this guy I'm talking about aced Physics 1c analytical track, an E&M course that uses Purcell, and very few high schools cover material that advanced. (It's well beyond even AP Physics C material.)

Regarding grades, here's how it shakes out nowadays:

  1st term: pass/fail
  2nd term: "shadow" grades
  3rd term: real grades
Shadow grades don't appear on your report card, and they don't count towards your GPA, but they are used for internal scholarship awards and recommendations.

Recitation section TAs in physics have been a mix of professors and grad students for as long as anyone can remember. Virtually without exception the best TAs were grad students (as measured by student reviews, section sizes, and exam results), though some of the professors weren't bad either. This jibed with my undergrad experience at Harvard: almost all my physics professors sucked, and by far my best instructor was the 22-year-old grad student who taught my freshman physics section.

Re: At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

#44

Post by mhartl »

nsrivast wrote: post #25
mhartl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the tests are too easy. You might be right that much or most of the higher pass rate is due to higher attendance, but it's also possible that students were learning plenty from section, the book, and working on problem sets. When I taught the analogous course (Physics 1) at Caltech, many of the students skipped lecture entirely. The failure rate was typically under 5%, and I guarantee it wasn't because…

The intro physics class at Harvard is graded something like: k * homework_score + (1 - k * homework_score) * (final_score^extra_credit) So you can do no homework and no extra credit as long as you ace the final.

It sure wasn't that way when I was there. ;-)

Re: At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

#45

Post by mhartl »

rw wrote: post #10
mhartl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the tests are too easy. You might be right that much or most of the higher pass rate is due to higher attendance, but it's also possible that students were learning plenty from section, the book, and working on problem sets. When I taught the analogous course (Physics 1) at Caltech, many of the students skipped lecture entirely. The failure rate was typically under 5%, and I guarantee it wasn't because…

1. - 0.2 = 0.8 is typically a B-. Is there a different grading scale there?

Basically all classes at Caltech are curved. It actually makes a lot of sense, because it means you can make the tests really hard and leave plenty of room at the top, which among other things helps reduce the variance due to careless errors. (If you make a couple minor minus sign mistakes, but nail a hard problem most people miss, you still come out ahead.) In Physics 1, typically 90%+ was A+, ~82-89% was A.

Re: At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

#46

Post by alex_c »

harpastum wrote: post #4

"As each semester progressed, attendance in [the professor's] introductory physics courses fell to 50 percent, as it did, he said, for nearly all of his colleagues...'I had poor attendance, and was failing 10 to 15 percent'" So, 50 percent of the students aren't coming to class, and they're only failing 10-15 percent? It sounds like the tests are too easy. If the tests were more demanding, more students would come to…

I got an A+ in one of my courses without attending a single lecture (it was in an inconvenient time slot... which is why I didn't even go to the first lecture), and I enjoyed the course a lot more than most of my friends who did go to the lectures.

Don't overestimate the value of lectures. Sometimes a bad professor can do more harm than good to the learning process, especially for something you actually find interesting.

Re: At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

#47

Post by JabavuAdams »

quantumhobbit wrote: post #42
bz wrote: post #6

The general sentiment about the TEAL classes (the ones with the clickers) is that they are really gimmicky. Supposedly, it gives the professor some feedback on what concepts are unclear and pushes the students to be attentive. The problem seems to be that it's just unnecessary structure for something that's typically dynamic. It at least partially devolved into an attendance system - students used to just press in fo…

I remain convinced that the only reason they require those clickers is to charge $70-$100 to each student for them.

You're joking! $70-100?
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