Looking back I'm genuinely stunned at how little of anything *happened* in those classrooms, if you exclude monologues & bubble tests. Even student discussions were pretty bad, usually initiated by force by a professor & almost always about a profoundly uninteresting question
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Yes, there's great variance between universities, fields, programs, etc. I'm more interested in arguing about what x can reasonably look like with a room full of inexperienced people than trying to explain what "most" means, so please spare me
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I actually think this is a hard problem for universities. People seem to do most of their actual learning when they're either operating under direct mentorship/apprenticeship or building/practicing on their own and/or autodidacting with more limited direct mentorship
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University structure remains largely unchanged despite broad expert agreement that people don't learn very much that way, and I honestly think most admin think undergrads are too stupid for a real education. And anyway, they seem happy to pay 5-6 figs for lectures + bubble tests
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A lot of people *could* hire a very competent expert in their field for 10-15 hours/week to guide a more productive process, but they wouldn't be able to get loans for it, and depending on the field it may be legally or practically impossible for them to work
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If you want my maximally cynical take, it's that I think these places mostly exist to provide certificates to the sort of people who will later become major alumni donors, and the especially brilliant professors & prodigies are no less window dressing than the student athletes
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This wasn't my experience in an engineering degree at...all? Sometimes we were definitely operating at a degree of abstraction that obscured the subject, but that always felt like a pedagogical necessity, not a trick.
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It seems that the STEM subjects have their act together better than most of the rest of academia. If your core/gen-ed courses also weren't like that, then that's awesome and where did you attend?
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It's crazy how little math you can get away with majoring in biology
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sounds like you took some social science classes too! IME the better undergraduate classes were the ones that were *not* like this, and the undergraduate classes that fit this pattern solidified my opinion that basically a lot of college degrees are overpriced/bad product
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