I’m tired of these college intuitions complain about cheating during COVID because people have scholarships, and tons of money lost on the line if they flunk a class.
Also because of COVID there are not much tutors available to help if you. Unless you spend more money for a third party tutor.
honestly there is no reason to not cheat as much as you can get away with in college, especially if you’re getting something like a business degree. There’s no real stakes to learning what is taught in college because you end up learning more on the job anyways. If it were an option I think most people would choose to just jump straight into careers and learn there.
But obviously in serving the interests of capital, college under capitalism is not to educate people, but to discipline them into better serving capital. It acts as a filter so people can’t just jump straight into careers and gain knowledge there, they must first prove they are worthy of being employed, prove they will be obedient and sufficient peons of the business. Idk what it is like in other fields, but my accounting degree was half becoming familiar with accounting terminology and basic practices, half learning the ideology of american business (freer the market, freer the people, the boss is always right, etc.).
And American college is even worse given how fucking expensive it is, locking the poorest people into the most precarious positions of wage slavery with little chance of escaping. And those who do go through college but are not from wealthy backgrounds are saddled with tons of unforgivable debt, essentially binding them to needing a certain level of income, pushing labor and wage negotiations even further in capital’s favor. What are you gonna do, quit? You have a debt to pay! Can’t afford to fall behind!
College is a fucking racket but it’s one you’re forced through if you don’t want work at walmart your whole life and can’t do trades. Nothing you learn there (in most degrees, certainly mine) can’t be learned on the job, so might as well cheat as much as fucking possible and make sure you graduate.
Places like Quizlet and Chegg make even more money desperate people that need to pass their classes. Chegg is really evil they have their “honor code” and will rat people out if you aren’t careful, and are not anonymous enough.
Not to mention the required homework access codes or online discussion forum services you’re forced to buy for each individual class, because the school has partnered with these services and gets kickbacks for forcing their students to buy them.
Man, I’m glad I’m in a country where we haven’t yet developed these technological advancements in fucking students over. Here the lecturers just directly give us links to pirated copies of the books (at least in the faculty I’m in, medical students are probably somewhat closer to this system, although we at least don’t have such a well-developed “education” industry so it’s probably not so bad with regards to integration with various services)
Colleges would look completely different if they were actually trying to educate people. There is a reason an entire industry of YouTubers have built their careers making educational videos. If college was good at thier jobs, YouTube would be full of just their lectures.
This doesn’t even touch how the classes are structured. You should be able to take the test as many times as you need in order to pass. Either you know Algebra or you don’t, the fact it took you an extra week to learn it shouldn’t matter.
You should be able to take the test as many times as you need in order to pass.
While this is true, I think you might be underestimating the sheer volume of time it takes professors to write, grade, and proctor (if the school does that) exams.
It’s possible to just phone it in with very basic things like Calculus or Linear Algebra or something, but a well taught version of those classes, and basically any version of upper level courses, requires an amount of prep and exam work from professors or lecturers (and TA, etc.) that students never realize.
A good professor will still have ways to avoid a “you pass or you don’t” situation with exams by doing things like drop X many lowest grades, offering one or two retakes, being flexible in accommodating individual needs. But what you’re describing requires an acceleration of the race to the bottom in instruction quality, unfortunately.
Spending 100x on professors, teaching aids, teaching materials, tutors, etc, would be a no-brainer to me. Flipping the format of the classes so that lectures are pre-recorded and available for free, then class room time spent doing problems and discussions. I would probably do something like 1 month “semesters” where if you failed to get it on the first pass, you would have to start that period over again, instead of the entire class. I mean, there is tons of obvious low hanging fruit that one could do to improve the “teach the next generation” function of colleges, but colleges (and schools more broadly) in America aren’t really trying to do that, like, at all.
Flipping the format of the classes so that lectures are pre-recorded and available for free, then class room time spent doing problems and discussions
This is basically what lectures are like with good professors at a good university. Active discussions, group work, etc., even for classes like calc that can be taught much more easily as infodump lectures.
But in general, I agree that the overall format of the college experience, with two semesters a year of 10-15 credit hours per semester, and every class graded and weighted equally (getting a C in some bullshit course required for your degree because you lost the luck of the draw and got some hardass prof with a chip on their shoulder will be considered exactly the same as the work you do to get an A in a difficult fourth year important course) is something that has just become entrenched. Like most institutions, it is removed from any historical context or genealogy of development and instead treated as though its structure is self evident. The capitalist contribution is to industrialize it, requiring things like a ton of different accreditation and qualification checklists for universities to be “real” universities. While it is important to have some method of evaluating institutions to prevent frauds, the checklists we have have the side effect of maintaining the status quo and not preventing obvious scams (SANS Technology Institute is regionally accredited and largely exists as a way to scam military dudes / taxpayers out of GI Bill dollars when they retire).
I would probably do something like 1 month “semesters” where if you failed to get it on the first pass, you would have to start that period over again, instead of the entire class.
I think MIT had a pretty good approach a while back (don’t know if they still do it), in which students could opt to do many courses as pass/fail. They could choose ones to be graded that they wanted to sink a lot of time into (thing that they expected to be interesting, useful to them, etc.). There’s much more room for mistakes and bad exams for a pass/fail course.
That doesn’t mean they’re easy. I mean that there’s a pretty well accepted baseline of things to cover in those courses. Less so with linear algebra, as some math purists throw tantrums about determinants and argue over how much of the course should be applied vs pure. But regardless of where you stand on that, there’s a textbook or two out there that has been widely taught and vetted.
Higher level courses often require far more prep time because you don’t have a bunch of existing syllabi and expectations you can draw from. There’s no widely aggreed upon standard on what should be taught in a distributed systems course, for example, and it’s not like you can just grab a textbook that everyone uses and pick chapters from it to cover. There will inevitably be some textbooks for it, but they’re usually awful and out of date, and relying on them will make your students miserable.
A great example of an easier course that’s not “basic” would be introduction to programming. There’s really no standard for what to cover, and teaching it in a way that makes its topics valuable and interesting to the students requires a lot of thought and time. And of course these classes are often taught by overworked adjuncts, TAs, or profs doing 4/4 teaching load, so they just find a textbook and make students do rote exercises with completely inappropriate methods (having students mix loop practice with GUI development by having them incorporate them into boilerplate heavy Java/C# GUIs for example)
Basic as in there’s a lot of lower year material for that stuff, not as in easy. Like stuff that have class sizes of hundreds because it’s a lower year mandatory course, that are usually taught badly because it’s mandatory for too many different degrees and isn’t narrow enough to be interesting for most of the students.
The classes where it’s like “this is all the math you need for your degree, cram it in all at once and then be sort of fucked if you didn’t understand it fully and need it two years from now”.
Basic is not the same as simple, and is not the same as easy.
The fact that weeder classes exist in a for-profit education system is an indictment of the whole thing.
For-profit education is a disgusting concept.
tangential thought
it’s crazy to me that people on athletic scholarships can lose it if they can’t play anymore because they get an inury, or the scouts overestimated their skills and they get kicked off the team. if they’re not going to be paid, the school should at least let them complete their education.
