What's the point of college?

Mandatory attendance makes sense to me. It's kind of like writing papers or doing mandatory assignments: these things don't necessarily teach you anything, improve your knowledge, or measure your competency, but in general, for most students, they help. Take jeffd: he is (I gather) in an English course where he is required to write papers which don't teach him much or improve his writing. If he decided not to write those papers his grades would suffer. That's not unfair, even though for him those papers have little educational value. I think it would be kind of unfair if students could pick and choose which of their obligations they will meet based on their subjective feelings about the value of lectures, assignments, and tests.

Those papers are doing something to improve his writing and he even said so, albeit begrudgingly and in a roundabout fashion (iirc), in one of his posts. Regardless of his or any student's feelings on the subject of mandatory coursework, mandatory attendance is a completely different beast, one which, by itself, renders absolutely no benefit; the only way to gain from attending every class is to have, in ascending order of importance, a schedule, a curriculum/labwork/coursework/lectures and a professor that meet your needs. Otherwise you're attending but you aren't really there, which is, I believe, one of the main things that LK has been pointing out this entire time. The other point being, I believe, that mandatory attendance is only considered "necessary" when students don't feel a draw to the education on offer, which speaks to an entirely different and horrible failure, one which won't be solved by mandatory attendance, only worsened.

I don't really follow you, Bryce. In what way do mandatory assignments necessarily convey a benefit to all students, while mandatory lectures do not ever convey a benefit? I don't see how they are different beasts.

I've completed a lot of tests, assignments, and papers from which I learned nothing and obtained no benefit. I've attended many lectures from which I learned a lot. My point is that assignments and papers can be ill conceived or unhelpful for a particular student, but they are still mandatory. So the fact that lectures can be ill-conceived or unhelpful for some students is not a reason to conclude they should be optional.

I agree that in general it is better that students attend lectures because they want to attend the lecture, rather than being effectively bribed to attend. But at the same time, I think it would be better in principle if students wrote papers of their own volition rather than being bribed with a grade. And yet I don't think writing papers should be optional.

Perhaps I don't have much sympathy, because (with the exception of working students and students with family, who should be accommodated), attendance is a pretty small thing to ask of a student, in my view at least. Just show up, pay a little attention, and you're good. Yes, sometimes it's boring, but "life, friends, is boring".

E: actually let me resile a little. I'm not in favour of mandatory attendance per se, but it is consistent with other mandatory student obligations like assignments and papers which are not of universal benefit to all students.

I'm not sure that I'm on board with the attendance-is-needlessly-burdensome consensus, logical though it is for the utilitarian gain of the student-as-paying-client.

To take an example where we'd usually scoff at imposing attendance, imagine a 400 student lecture in a sciences course. For the average student (leaving aside those special accessibility issues) it may be a good utilitarian option to just read the course materials, complete the assignments and do well on the tests if that's all practical without attending lectures.

In such a situation I'm ok with a competent instructor imposing attendance if they reasonably believe that the lecture has real added value and that the students who attend the lectures are more competent course graduates. Thinking not only of the utilitarian cost/benefit equation for the almighty student, but also the good of the discipline. I suspect LK will point out that every egotistical mediocrity is going to "reasonably believe" in their own academic added value and that this perspective licenses them to pointlessly inconvenience students. And talk of "the good of the discipline" licenses student-unfriendly elitism.

I suppose that's true, but it's also a good student's unwritten, underexplained responsibility to avoid shitty instructors, or courses in which shitty instructors' shittiness can't be gotten around. I don't like that sort of pointless blind hurdle, but I still have to side with giving the minority of good instructors the discretion to fight the erosion of undergraduate educational standards. In some cases that means making students come to lecture if you sincerely believe you're beating better education into a plurality of heads by doing so.

This is either outside my field, outside my country, or I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what a tutorial is. I'm assuming it's like a discussion session based on the context. So student were called on to ask an analysis question, and if they fucked it up they had to answer a further series of questions to get credit?

Yes, discussion. In some cases tutorials were delegated to TAs, although when I did my undergrad that was only the case with my language courses. I'm thinking the nomenclature may have drifted over from sciences/languages courses, since "lecture tuesday, discussion thursday" was actually what we meant by "lecture tuesday, tutorial thursday.

IIRC the prof's explanation of the process emphasized that students wanted to demonstrate that they'd done the readings, that a "correct" answer wasn't always necessary, but a good demonstration that one'd done the readings often coincided with a good answer to the questions. Short answer exam questions, say. I imagine he must've had to work up quite a lot of the questions for all the readings he used. Although of course some of them were generalizable - "what sort of evidence did [author x] use to look at [ABC]" sort of thing.

If one botched one's question in such a way that one might not have gotten credit, well, there was a bit of general discussion and you could try to demonstrate that you'd done the readings enough to get the little "did the readings" tickbox next to your name. I don't recall if there was anything other than a binary did/didn't do the readings list, for that part of the mark.

Unless there's actual value being delivered from in person - which I found rare in low level STEM - mandatory attendance is fairly pointless.

The point should be to ensure that society is furnished with well-educated, broadly capable, skilled adults who can participate meaningfully in both the workforce and broader life. Universities shouldn't be the whole answer to that problem, but they should be a major part of it.

In the highly class-stratified but reasonably stable societies of ~100 years ago, they performed their function pretty damned well. You were generally only admitted to university if you were capable of taking on the challenges it would throw your way, and the small proportion of people who went to university fairly well matched the small proportion of people who were needed to fulfill the specialised roles for which it prepared you.

Now, the situation is a mess. Western governments fell for the idea of the "mythical education year" (every bit as pernicious and fallacious as the "mythical man-month"), being that if you stick more people in more educational institutions for longer periods of time, you will get a more highly educated population, and these people will all have rewarding and highly-paid jobs.

There's... look, there's a certain amount of truth to it. It's a tragedy when someone from a working-class background with a brilliant mind ends up working retail all their life and thinking about what could have been, because the barriers to entry for education for them were just too high. Raimond Gaita's book about his dad - "Romulus, My Father" - gives some idea of how that situation did play out in past times.

What we have now, though... I've taught in a "normal" university, and the range of student ability runs from the astonishing to the mediocre. I've also taught in a "fake" university, for want of a better term, and the mediocre was the top of the range. There were 2nd-year and 3rd-year students handing in essays that simply copy-pasted large chunks of wikipedia and then exchanged a few words for synonyms. From their contributions to "class discussions", I wouldn't call this cheating so much as a sincere attempt to produce the best essays they possibly could, given the limitations they were working with. These kids weren't bad people, but it was a complete waste of time to have them in a university environment and expect these "education years" to add anything to them at all in terms of job-readiness or life skills or networking or whatever. It's a sick parody of "education", produced by a combination of self-seeking careerism on the part of the academics pretending to teach them something, governmental obliviousness, well-meaning but willfully blind do-gooderism, and a general social "qualificationary inflation" described so well 50 years ago by Ronald Dore in "The Diploma Disease".

Anyway. I think in some sense the problem is irresolvable. The universities of 100 years ago did a good job partly because the world the students were being prepared for was fairly stable and therefore could be fairly well understood. Who knows what the world is going to look like even 20 years from now? Meanwhile the universities are being turned into businesses, maximising their revenues and minimising their expenditures, and the hell with education except to the extent that academics and students are willing to strike for it - which is to say, if it only gets a little worse every year, instead of all happening in a lump, everyone will accept that the ongoing destruction of these places as a home for scholarship and learning is just the way of the world. If someone gave me a government post with the authority and the funding to re-engineer the whole damn system from top to bottom, I'd know how to knock a few of the sharper edges off it, but I can't see how one would get to the real core of the problem.

At my school, class time is separated into classes, where professors discuss a topic with minimal student interaction, tutorials, where either a professor or a TA has a loose lesson plan but ultimately the direction and substance of the discussion is up to the students, and labs, where hands on experience with the subject happens (most classes don't have labs). Tutorial attendance is usually mandatory and I'm fine with that since that is an excellent way to make 1 hour each week about either quickly assessing student performance or answering questions that students have. Mandatory lectures are ridiculous, since for some people it doesn't matter how witty, charming, or knowledgeable you are, we're going to learn more efficiently on our own.

In principle, that's true, but while you can force people to come, you can't make them listen, pay attention, take notes, or give a shit. The main effect is that you end up working harder only to generate resentment. I'm perfectly willing to put in a small attendance factor in the grade, if for no other reason than it allows me to fudge marginal cases up and down depending on how committed I feel the student is to understanding the material. But as you yourself admit, your incentives don't seem to be all that effective, which I think jives with my impression that heavy use of them is bad for you, annoying for good students, and ambiguous for bad students.

Well, there are a whole range of things that fall under the category of ensuring attendance, and not all of them are equally problematic. My general point is if your concern is improving what students get out of your class, attendance-oriented solutions are lowest common denominator approaches that will deliver results for a lowest common denominator curriculum. If that's the limit of what you are able to offer for reasons beyond your control, well, it's not exactly uncommon. But I would submit that a lot of that seems to me to be rooted in the mistaken impression that college professors have no control over their class design beyond inserting their own anecdotes and hilarious jokes into the same old block lectures.

Well, that's the puzzle for me. If you understand that your assessment strategies are inadequate, then look at the incredibly broad range of things you can give someone a grade for and add new ones. For instance, one person I worked with gave students a menu where they can choose how to shape their own assessment strategy from different groups, which provided them with genuine control over how they had to present the content without compromising instructional rigor. I've seen traditional test/paper/test/etc structures work fine as well, because the instructor puts in the methods and fundamentals instruction as a coherent part of the content part of the class in a manner that's appropriate to the level of the course, and because he is able to "fill seats" on the basis of being transparent about the relationship between time in class and outcomes. That is, you can not show up, but if you do show up, your work is that much easier.

Pre-quizzes are interesting in that they *can* be a good instructional tool *if* they are addressed substantively in class and the students see a clear rationale for how they think around a test. More often than not, they simply serve as a summary of what will be on the upcoming assessment, which is not bad but is something that should be integrated into the meat of the class in my opinion. It's in the same category as review sessions in that it's one thing if it's a substantive back and forth and quite another if it's really the precursor to a cram session that is their first real engagement with the subject matter.

In any case, pedagogy is hardly a settled thing and I'm not trying to make this more than it is. It's really hard to speak in abstractions about better or worse because some very traditional approaches have a lot to offer in the right hands and some of the best theory often goes horribly awry in the wrong hands. My main point is this: in assessments it's really important to think about what that question is actually measuring and whether you've taught the different things it's asking in reasonable proportions. Sometimes from the instructor perspective we've really gotten to the meat of the content, and the results from students tell you that in fact there was a clear conceptual gap between people who really understood compare contrast and the content and people who just had the latter under control (for instance).

How you keep people in class is much the same, in my opinion. You have to try to be self-critical about what different approaches are actually getting you, and if you're being too willing to see the marginal returns on band-aids for bad design rather than the big picture strategic options you really have before you. YMMV, etc.

After reading that I just realized my worst class ever was given the harshest attendance policy, for reasons beyond my control. I had three tests in a row where there was only one A out of roughly twenty people. People who clearly didn't give a fuck regularly attended, and they were regularly pissed about it. They refused to engage with the material, and I missed the opportunity to show them that lack of engagement leads to failure, because they came, didn't engage, failed, and didn't understand what went wrong.

You and Lizard King are right. I'm removing all intentional attendance incentives from my future courses.

I'm interested in this approach, but nervous about implementing it. What sort of options did they offer, and what did each option involve?

On the mandatory attendance issue...

Back when I was a biological science student as well, I skipped those massive lectures that I felt didn't add to my knowledge. I found reading the notes, textbooks and interacting with TA's and seniors during lab times and discussion times to be far more educational. Since I had direct access to certain lecturers and professors in specialized labs, where I was part of a small group of students pursuing our own educational objectives. The general lectures were trying to cover general knowledge and there was no way to cover all the important detail when you're trying to get 400 students up to speed, most of which probably didn't read the material beforehand. I never pursued that career in science.

I went to film school instead, where I skipped quite a lot of my film classes, or at least those that were fairly theoretical and the writing class. For various reasons, I didn't think they were interesting, I didn't like the lecturer, and I disagreed sometimes with the method of teaching. I used that time instead to go hang out with my cinematography teacher, who at the time, was actually a working cinematographer and helped me get hooked up with various crews around New York for a few days, or hours at a time. My class at this time was around 35-45 people, so my absence was definitely noted. It was definitely an issue with one lecturer, who I didn't get along with anyway, but smoothed over cos I actually knew my stuff before and after class.

Out of that class, I think I'm one of the few that still at the very least, making use of the my experience, or still possess the greater desire to learn about the craft and the skill.

I think there's value to be had by going to class, but that value is directly proportional to how good a communicator, and lecturer that class has. I was fortunate enough to have a few good ones, in which I continuously attended, but more often than not, there are lecturers who don't add value to their lectures.

I now teach at an Arts College which does practice a mandatory class attendance. Classes are small though, about 10-15 each, and absences are incredibly noted with exceptions. I try to add value to the lectures, treating each time as workshops and working with the students to get their issues squared away, or pointing them in directions that work for them. Smaller classes seem to have much better leeway for guiding individual students where they need to go. In contrast, when I was in larger classes, I sometimes felt it was a waste of my time when I could be learning at a faster rate, or be ahead of the curve in where I needed to be, and the lecture never addressed question I had, or issues I would like dealt with in the course of my education.

The TL:DR version is that I think class attendance depends quite a lot on the student. I don't like systemic implementation of mandatory attendance, but I also understand that many students learn at different speeds and at different capabilities. Lectures are a way to level the playing field for those who need it, but aren't great for the individual student's educational needs. If the point of college is for students to learn how to learn, I'm don't think mandatory lectures are the way to go, as I prefer a smaller group mentorship programs.

I had a few classes where attendance was not mandatory and missing lectures did not hurt your grade. But if you had a borderline grade and had attended all of the lectures the prof would bump your final to the higher edge, e.g. an 89%=B+ would bump to an A-. The idea is that if you were one of those guys who didn't need to attend to get an A, great; but if you did attend all the time and were close to a better grade, showing up helped you. These were not "lecture hall" classes with 200+ students but they did have 30-40 bodies.

To those college profs, if you class is 'easy'* enough that someone can get As in the class without attending, is there an option for the student to test out of the class? Cause it seems pretty obvious that there needs to be.

For everyone else with horror stories in this thread, both teachers and students, were these all intro-type classes? Cause I've slept through my share of 'dim the lights' intro classes and I've had my share of non-intro classes that I didn't dare miss a day of lecture cause the materials were that dense.

*- I'm not saying that the class is easy for everyone or easy at all. Some people learn best by just reading the material, and often, especially where there are huge amounts of material to digest, tests are more about reading comprehension than analytical thought.

I've done some teaching at the college level, albeit just a small bit. FWIW, if I was teaching, e.g., fracture mechanics, I would tell the students the first day what the final exam would cover. Such as "On the final exam, you will be expected to be able to be given a set of conditions and parameters and be able to calculate things such as the critical fracture length, energy of critical crack propagation, blah blah blah." I'd give them a pretty lengthy list of what would be on the final exam.

That's what I needed them to know, to display proficiency in, to pass the class. If they decided that they could go learn it all on their own, no skin off my rear. I was just concerned with them having a certain level of knowledge and capability when they finished the class. Now, I spent a lot of time in the class lectures teaching, explaining the "Whats" and the "Hows" and the "Whys" and hopefully teaching in a way that made it much easier to develop the proficiency by being in class, asking questions that I could answer or to which I could elaborate or expand a point, etc. And the students who attended class tended to do much better on the final and other exams than those who didn't. But if a student decided they wanted to learn it on their own somehow, and demonstrated that knowledge in the exams, fine.

The goal was the "What" - the knowledge and capability, not the "How."

I generally explain during the first class that I think class time is valuable, or I wouldn't bother showing up for it. I tell them I try to not just repeat what's in the book, but add value to it. I assume you've done the reading and build from there. So, yes, you can read the books I assign and do the assignments and maybe you'll do well, but if you just come to my office, I'll recommend some good books for you to read and you can use the slot to take some other class you think is more worthwhile. And then you don't even have to bother doing the assignments, you can just read the books.

Then I ask them if they ever just head over to the bookstore and buy some books from classes they aren't taking. None of them ever do that. I used to do that when I was in college. I figured if the books were good enough to be in some college course, then maybe they'd be worth reading for pleasure. Even some stuff that was pretty difficult reading was interesting enough for me to struggle through back then.

Turns out that most of my students don't read for pleasure. A few are voracious readers, but most only read five or fewer books a year that aren't assigned for courses. I cannot imagine not having a book going. I have been constantly reading something or other since I was about 10 years old. Even when I was trapped at summer camp with only a dog eared copy of The World According to Garp to my name, I ended up reading it twice (and I had already read it, it was thrown in the back of my parents' car and grabbed it when they dropped me off) just because it was there.

There's been research done that shows that "active readers" read about *a hundred* times more stuff than other people. If you're not an active reader... education is a whole different experience, to say the least.

Well, but on the other hand... let's just say that for most people, reading quantum field theory is a quick way to stop being an "active reader."

One of my papers had small, random in-class tests worth a small but not insignificant percentage. The tests themselves were 15 minutes and straightforward, the idea being that if you attended lectures (obviously, can't sit it otherwise) and did the readings you'd get a solid addition to your overall score. If you didn't come to lectures you could still pass comfortably, but getting a really good grade would be prohibitive.

I thought it was quite a good way to motivate attendance in a course where attendance is not a requirement.

Well, in theory, but it's far less trouble and it does reflect the students' understanding of the material to an extent. I don't really know how you would mark attendance in lectures without it being a disruption anyway.

That was by far my least favorite "attendance is mandatory" method in college. If your class is interesting and useful enough that showing up has merit then you don't need such tests. If it's not it's not, and some lame busy work pop quiz isn't going to change that. Somehow the good classes never had to resort to such methods... Whenever I saw such coercion on the syllabus I looked into whether I could instead take the class from another professor, or just some other class altogether -- such methods signal that your class is crap and the only reason to show up is because you might be randomly quizzed.

It's effectively directly penalizing students for missing class -- the pop quizzes are always easy, since their point is to get you to show up, not to teach you anything. Absolutely zero advantage over the classic midterm + final + lab work or papers if appropriate, at least as far as whether I got anything out of a class.

Coupled with the fact that not too many people would willingly spend $200+ plus on one. Also throw in the fact that of all the textbooks I've bought over the years, I can count the number of 'useful' ones on a single hand means there's absolutely no way I'd buy a random one from some other course for no reason.

I think maybe what lesslucid was talking about with "active readers" was not people who read academic tomes/anthologies in their spare time but people who just read a lot (in various forms, like essays, newspaper, fiction and nonfiction novels, etc [not one but all]) because they are compelled to/like reading. Maybe? I'm just guessing.

Also, the only books I count as useful from college (it's more than 3 hands) are novels or assemblages of poetry, so that method of measuring may not be so across the boards reliable.

On retrospect those aren't textbooks, but these words still stand.

And, what I'm saying is, reading certain subjects is so exhausting that they are almost guaranteed to crowd out other reading. For those who haven't done them, this is hard to imagine, but reading certain books is like a personal Groundhog Day: you start at the top of the page, and by the time you reach the bottom of the page 3 hours later, you have forgotten what is at the top of the page.

Some people, having done this, never want to look at another book again. If so, well, the world just lost another active reader.

Ok, yes. I've had to slog through one or two ridiculously long readers with end notes at the end of the whole fucking book. I can understand how being exposed to too much of that would darken your view of the world of reading.

I guess I am lucky (this is usually unlucky bla bla bla) to have focused on the humanities in college. It helped me to love reading even more.

I think the valid point Dean's making is that if you're an enthusiastic reader, you could find good books in the university bookstore, pre-filtered for quality/general relevance by their selection by the faculty. (Of course, the longer you're in school the more you realize that that some of the faculty suck, that the bookstore has monstrous markups, and that reading syllabuses and going to the library is the cheaper way of stealing extra college.)

I think head-crushing books about quantum theory are sort of on the "less relevant for people to read for fun" end of the spectrum. If one enjoys reading/learning there's lots of lighter fare.

What does sometimes make me a bit sad is that I know I could go online and download syllabuses for courses I've never taken, and fill them out for free with my alumni access to library databases. But I don't because I'm lazy. I still usually have some history books on the go but there's really no substitute for the rigours that grad school - or 3rd-4th year undergrad really - imposes. They make one "learn harder" than almost any autodidact.

Yeah, even though I really enjoy science, enough to spend almost 9 years in colleges studying it, there are quite a few books required for classes that I'd never read "just for fun." They typically aren't written for anything but learning what you need to learn to pass a class.

Jason T mentioned grad school: for me, that was a really different animal than undergrad. For example, in undergrad I learned a ton of chemistry, but in a couple of great graduate physical chem classes (which means a couple of great profs) we learned a lot more of the "why" of what we memorized in undergrad. I got my B.S. degree and thought we knew everything there was to know in science; in grad school I was struck at just how much we don't understand. Also, classes were a lot less of teh grad school experience, as the last years were almost all lab work and learning how to do effective research (and praying that no one would publish a paper somewhere in the world in my last year showing the work I was doing for my thesis!) Also, there was more of a relationship with the professors while in grad school. For better and worse. Instead of coming to class and then going back to your dorm room, in grad school you lived in the labs, 6 days a week, all day, and so you saw and interacted with the profs in the labs a lot. Grad school was a lot like "work" as opposed to school, in many ways.

The people who don't read at all unless it's mandatory do baffle me. I don't know how they get through life.

Difficult to relate to perhaps, but not particularly baffling, imo. If one starts out not reading much, it's not like LeVar Burton's going to stage an intervention at age 18 or something.

Compiler manuals.

Some of you might recall me pointing someone towards Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in one thread when a few people were advocating the position that you must have faith to be moral and/or capable of reason. There's just something great about when an entirely correct refutation and trolling coincide. (Kant's objective with that piece was to exhibit how you could, like, know things, man) I doubt any of them actually bothered to read it (EDIT: or the Cliffnotes version, for that matter) sufficient enough to understand it, likely a wise choice, though it didn't exactly help the level of discourse.

It's more that I don't understand how they stay out of jail, or bankruptcy, or accomplish a damn thing at work. Is it really that easy to fake it?

I don't think it's a question of faking anything; one can secure educational qualifications without reading for leisure. Erudition is a great help in building a better mind, but an executive vice president who owns no books might seem anything but ignorant if they browse their way through the Economist and FT the same way they did their business school coursework.

Conversely, my interior life is rich as shit and my bank statements make for sorry reading.

I can't speak for lesslucid, but the way I interpret his point is in terms of how literacy is measured and taught as a subject in and of itself. Active readers are people who engage with the texts they are reading (regardless of subject) using symbolic and practical means while they are reading. That means they are underlining, writing notes, recapping as they go, outlining on separate paper, checking footnotes and considering their validity, and so on. It starts as a time-consuming process, but quickly gives the reader a much more effective and diverse set of indicators by which to fish out important concepts from texts efficiently. It's analogous to active note-taking as a creative process involving paraphrasing and reorganizing ideas as you take notes, along with cyclical reexaminations of the notes where you process them into strategic narratives. Starts out as time-consuming, ends up being a lot more efficent.

This is off the top of my head so it's possible I'm missing something crucial; basically she took a very simple skeleton developed by another chem teacher of easy, medium, and hard assignments in a given grade bloc, where they could do more easy ones or fewer hard ones to get the same grade. But she took that and ran with, so basically she had 3 tiers, A, B, and C. A was carefully designed high level work including designing your own experiment and producing a truncated form of a paper, in differentiated parts. B would include things like surveying pools she'd created of actual cutting edge research on the topics at hand and then distilling them to plain English, graphics-heavy explanations of how they applied to current concepts being handled, as well as introduction to real lab book creation and detailed analysis and recording of results. C was the rudimentary stuff every other teacher at her level was doing (vocabulary lists, group participation in simple experiments as proof of concept, and so on).

You could basically construct your own grade expectation from what you took from each group. You could only get as high a letter grade as the highest group you'd done, but you could reverse it and do more with your higher level stuff and do less of the C-B level stuff. So students who were unwilling to do higher level work would still eke out a B and A assignment to give themselves a shot at an A, and students who were highly motivated or ahead of their peers could carry their A work right past it into events outside of the school and so on. In any case, both approaches were relatively successful in producing good results and keeping the students and instructors engaged at their comfort level with one another.

In essence, what I've retained from the process of surviving a real mess of a high school teaching experience is this: look at the forms of assessment you have to do in order to keep your job (group 1), and then look at the forms of assessment you would like to do in a perfect world (group 2). Then figure out how to staple them together in ways that don't get you fired and don't destroy your life. In one situation, I was forced to give only multiple choice exams as 40% of a student's grade, in a situation where instructors were incredibly smug about failing students and blaming them for not being good at the shitty, trap-filled ABCD exams they'd been inadequately prepared for. So I built deep multiple choice exams where it was expected that most students would not do that well, as they were reading intensive in ways they had not encountered before.

But the trick was that the corrections to the multiple choice questions in my class could get you to full credit in an answer if you unpacked the difference between (presumed) right and (confirmed) wrong answers in the form of an outline and wrote an analysis of what the key differences were, which eventually left me getting 80% initial pass rates on tests that had questions with ten (choose some, all, or none as the correct answer) responses that were often multiple sentences apiece, which would have been instant, uncritical failure before. Since all of this was transparently addressed in class as part of the routine, and methodology, reading comprehension, and efficient analysis skills were just as much a part of the class as content, it got good feedback from students in terms of their control over their fates. The scope of the corrections phase could be adjusted on a case by case basis with the student in order to ensure they were progressing according to their capabilities, and because it stuck to a pretty clear outline it was relatively easy to grade, moreso once I went electronic.

I'm not claiming this is something that would fit everyone or that it was optimal, but what I am saying is that I think a lot of teachers really underestimate how much control they have once priorities are clear. You have to build up to it by integrating the skills required into lesson plans, and you have to expect problems anytime you try something new just because it's hard to anticipate which aspects will need the most time and how. Why is it that people getting x degree as undergrads (nevermind the busy work that passes for most high/middle schooling) often do very little that resembles x as a career that actually does something meaningful? It's a tough question, I think, and one that you can only have so much control over as an instructor. But I think it cuts to the heart of the matter.

I would have added more but this post is ridiculous.

ly awesome.

I feel like I should go back and delete my post on the previous page so Jason T's one makes more sense, instead of ghettorized on a separate page. But I kinda like my post. Anyone else want to volunteer instead?

It's a quick group, they'll figure it out.

Because they all went to college?