6 ms·

Skills aren't taught at university; we develop them to cope with university

87 points by jeffdechambeau 15y ago

johncoogan 15y ago
I couldn't agree with this more, the education system seems to obsess over structure. Concepts get clumped together into classes, which are clumped again into majors. Prerequisites seem to cripple broad intellectual development and force specialization. I do see the importance of this changing, with increasing weight being given to public work shared over a blog or Github vs. academic transcripts. Hopefully institutional education can evolve to help individuals learn how to search, triage and analyze in a given field.
Yhippa 15y ago
I agree with his sentiment for the most part. The reason I imagine hiring managers prefer those with university degrees is that without knowing other information they have some idea that such a person has those coping mechanisms to deal with the rigors of university. This is of course not perfect but when you're looking at a stack of resumes I imagine this has to be a differentiator. FTA: "Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them? Even students singularly focused on learning for its own value would get so much more out of the experience." From my own experience my open book exams in Physics were ridiculously difficult. We would use all sorts of tricks to cram as many equations onto the double-sided piece of paper we were allotted. I feel if you agree to an open book exam the difficulty of the exam can (and should) increase dramatically. Be careful what you wish for ;-)
- jeffdechambeau 15y ago
  Real life is pretty hard too. We let so many people into university that difficulty almost necessarily has to drop in order to keep enrollment numbers up. Did your school push you nearly hard enough?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - Yhippa 15y ago
    Of course real life is difficult. My point was regarding open-book exams.
- endtime 15y ago
  > I feel if you agree to an open book exam the difficulty of the exam can (and should) increase dramatically. Be careful what you wish for ;-) Most exams at Stanford CS are open book/open notes. I much preferred this to my undergrad experience of having to memorize stuff.
- mr_mngr 15y ago
  I prefer college graduates who finished at the top of their class. This is not because I believe they have meaningfully more domain expertise (though they sometimes do), or that they're exceptionally brilliant (though they sometimes are). It's because to graduate with high honors you have to make give dozens of people what they wanted to see; this despite the fact that sometimes you weren't interested, sometimes they were unclear about what they wanted, and sometimes they were terrible teachers. If you graduate at the top of your class, I know you have a proven ability to identify what people want, and find a way to give it to them. And THAT is what I care about.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  Open-book exams should be ridiculously difficult, as they are intended to test understanding rather than rote memorization. Anyone can memorize a formula; figuring out when and how to use it is what the class should be teaching. Similarly, in a programming class, the exam should not be testing whether or not you've memorized the Java boilerplate code. Sure, if you use it enough you will memorize it, but that's not what makes a good programmer. Either provide the boilerplate or let the students look it up; the focus should be on solving the problem.
- reledi 15y ago
  > my open book exams in Physics were ridiculously difficult. We would use all sorts of tricks to cram as many equations onto the double-sided piece of paper we were allotted. Doesn't sound like it was an open book exam if you were just allowed a cheat sheet.
blahedo 15y ago
> Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them? Some of us do exactly that. Many of the exams I sat in grad school (Brown) were that way, and nearly all of the exams I have set are open-book, open-notes, open-internet, and take-home. I've always felt that's a better reflection of what I actually want to be testing anyway. I'm not the only professor that does this, but the cost is that exams take a lot longer to grade, generally. So it's impractical at scale.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  In my experience, a lot of students strongly prefer memorizing to thinking, and will penalize you on student evaluations if you force them to. My evaluations went up a full point when I switched from writing my own open note/open book exam to using the department's standard "memorize all the things and do mechanical transformations" exam. Students complained a lot less also.
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    Mechanical exams are compatible with cramming. That's why students like them; that's how they've studied for years. Eventually it stops working.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    I had a professor who offered a novel scheme that left me pretty happy with take home exams. Students are usually turned off because a good take-home is really, really hard. What this professor did was give you the exam, mark incorrect problems, and then if the class average was poor, give you a second copy. You would turn the second copy in a few days later, and you would get some fraction of the credit for any improvement in your score. (Say you got a 60 the first time and an 80 the second time, you might end with a 65-70) The result was that, after being challenged by difficult problems that require your complete focus, you are given some feedback on what you got wrong, at which point you go back to the book to work out what the real answer is. That revision step is key; the promise of some recovery points is mostly just motivation to take it seriously I felt like those exams were huge learning experiences. The caveats are: it is more work for the professor; this was an upper division course, so students were serious and the class size was small; the best problems are hard and open ended.
epenn 15y ago
In reference to memorizing material the OP writes: In the “real world,” having a copy of your notes is called being prepared. Instead, university exams expect us to tie one hand behind our backs and master a skill we’ll seldom if ever use again. The truth is in the middle of the dichotomy you setup. Yes having notes, referencing materials, etc in the real world is being prepared. BUT, even in the real world, there's a reasonable expectation that you'll store and retrieve as much of that information as possible in and from your own memory. For example, I'm a pretty adept with python. I occasionally need to look at the standard library reference; yet, I try to commit as much as I can to memory. If I didn't, I would spend the majority of my time searching instead of doing. It goes without saying that a person who knows something off the top of his or her head is more efficient than someone who doesn't. You're correct that in the real world you'll rarely be in a situation where you don't have access to a reference of some kind. However to say at the same time that memorization is a skill that you'll seldom if ever use again is incorrect at best and reckless at worst.
- nu23 15y ago
  The counterpoint here would be that memorization happens more naturally when practicing, as frequently used knowledge is automatically memorized. I remember school courses in history and chemistry where requirements of memorization was the largest component of the course credit. What I suspect is the real reason is that measuring student understanding and engagement is a hard problem, and memorization is easily measured proxy for the above. The problem is that it is easily gamed, learning decays into this gaming process and then, students promptly forget material after the exams. In my experience, though, universities mostly do allow for notes in exams.
  - gxs 15y ago
    Precisely. My math courses never tested my memorization outright. But if after pouring 40-50 hours a week into a class for a couple months didn't result in memorization of the important stuff as a byproduct, you probably weren't going to do well anyway. I'd like to be optimistic and say that that this is how memorization began to be tested in schools. Instructors noticed that the best students seemed to have things memorizes, so they started testing this as it's an easy thing to test. For some reason, the analogy of a doctor treating symptoms rather than the cause of the illness comes to mind.
RandallBrown 15y ago
I had lots of open book/note exams. They were also much harder. I even had an exam where the professor allowed us to use our laptops and the Internet. You can imagine how much harder that exam was. There were very few exams where I wasn't allowed a limited amount of notes (usually a full notecard or sheet of paper). The ones that weren't were in classes like intro psychology where most of the class is just memorizing things anyway.
leot 15y ago
(Relatively social) people also learn from the examples of others, which is why it can be so helpful to go to a school filled with smart high-achievers.
gomphus 15y ago
> Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them? In science, we call this a thesis or research project. I don't see the need for all exams to take the same format (although some do so successfully), as closed-book exams test something quite different - the depth and breadth of your internal, longer-term comprehension. > An “education,” whether for its own value or to help you get a job, is–at least to me–about developing the skills to find the information you need, assess its value, integrate it into the context at hand, and make a better decision than you otherwise could have. An education -at least to me- is about building up an inner edifice of knowledge, so you can work fast, and formulate original and hopefully brilliant ideas and insights, with the skills the author mentions being accessory to this (and something that should really be in place by high school). The author writes as if knowledge is something to be retained as fleetingly as possible, to make room for whatever the next task is. But information you have committed to long-term memory can cross-pollinate, become a greater structure, open up new horizons. Information that you merely load and discard cannot - at least not in the same way. > In the “real world,” having a copy of your notes is called being prepared. In my world, being (professionally) prepared means that you have authoritative mastery of a subject. Of course you often refer to notes, and have the skill to quickly and perhaps temporarily assess and assimilate new concepts. It does not follow that holding the detail of our degree subjects at arm's length is a virtue, and that having to rely on our own memories in examinations is somehow "bad education". Yes, the open book exam format has its place, but so does the traditional one. If you want a better education, try regarding your knowledge as something to be made more enduring, not more ephemeral.
icegreentea 15y ago
Mastery (or taking a few notches down, competence) has both a memorization, and application component. Can't get around that. The problem is that people assume that the memorization component must be learned by memorizing, and that the application component by applying. Rather, the memorization component comes from applying, and the application flows from memorization. You're ability to apply your knowledge to the world hinges on your ability to remember what your knowledge is. Even now, when you just 'google it', that relies on your memory of broad concepts and ideas. Recognition IS memory (a specific kind of memory anyways). So yeah, on one hand, over the top tests of memorization is ridiculous, since it just results in everyone cramming, and then forgetting 3 hours after the final, and then when the next course rolls around building on the knowledge, you lose 3 weeks doing review, you can't get away from memorization, or testing your memory in school.
nekojima 15y ago
I'd have hoped branding was a skill taught at "Western" and their top-notch Business School could have helped them avoid this disaster. Given I am in the same province as this university, I actually had to look up which school he was talking about, because I wasn't sure. Everyone in Ontario, and most of Canada, already calls this school Western, rather than its (now former it seems) official name, The University of Western Ontario. Calling it Western University is missing the point of what the Western brand is, party school or not, that isn't as an adult among the first few things that I think of when it comes to Western. As opposed to when I was an undergrad driving to their campus for a weekend party. While the naming issue is off-topic, and my apologies for that, I did find this helpful/humourous article on the re-branding effort. http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2012/01/26/thats-western-university-to-you/comment-page-1/ http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2012/01/26/thats-weste...
jacques_chester 15y ago
For those referring to open books, one of my law professors explained it to me this way. It's a trap for the unprepared. Poor students think that they can rely on the books in an exam, but there's just not enough time to read, parse and apply the source material. Either you learned ahead of time or you didn't. Students who learned the material use it as a reference, not a source. It also, he said, allows him to give "proper exams". I quit studying law, but it was still an eye-opener.
MarkTraceur 15y ago
I go to the University of Redlands. In the past two years, they decided to remove my major (Computer Science) completely from the curriculum for new students (so current sophomores are unable to join the department except to minor), they cut tens of professors from the faculty, and they cut down on several other costs. In the same time period, they spend tens of thousands of dollars redesigning the main website, several more thousand redesigning the internal student-facing website (based on Blackboard and Moodle in a bizarre zombie formation), and upgraded several nonfree services they provided (Outlook Web Access, Blackboard, Datatel). They also bought and paid for the construction of a park just south of campus, which cannot be feasibly used by students but serves to essentially advertise the university. They also purchased additional radio ads, several front-page ads in the LA Times, and well-placed billboard advertisements. Higher education in America has made its priorities clear, I think.
AznHisoka 15y ago
"Don't let your schooling interfere with your education"
j45 15y ago
It's not what your degree makes of you, it's what you make of your degree. University is as much about learning coping skills as it is learning to get things done under the silliest circumstances. Strangely, this has a bearing to real life once entering the workforce. Likewise for learning, as soon as we stop learning, we're no longer growing. Anything that no longer grows gets left behind. What skills do universities teach startups? If we're lucky to have the instructors who can spark our minds, anything.

I couldn't agree with this more, the education system seems to obsess over structure. Concepts get clumped together into classes, which are clumped again into majors. Prerequisites seem to cripple broad intellectual development and force specialization. I do see the importance of this changing, with increasing weight being given to public work shared over a blog or Github vs. academic transcripts. Hopefully institutional education can evolve to help individuals learn how to search, triage and analyze in a given field.

Yhippa 15y ago

I agree with his sentiment for the most part. The reason I imagine hiring managers prefer those with university degrees is that without knowing other information they have some idea that such a person has those coping mechanisms to deal with the rigors of university. This is of course not perfect but when you're looking at a stack of resumes I imagine this has to be a differentiator. FTA: "Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them? Even students singularly focused on learning for its own value would get so much more out of the experience." From my own experience my open book exams in Physics were ridiculously difficult. We would use all sorts of tricks to cram as many equations onto the double-sided piece of paper we were allotted. I feel if you agree to an open book exam the difficulty of the exam can (and should) increase dramatically. Be careful what you wish for ;-)

jeffdechambeau 15y ago
Real life is pretty hard too. We let so many people into university that difficulty almost necessarily has to drop in order to keep enrollment numbers up. Did your school push you nearly hard enough?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Yhippa 15y ago
  Of course real life is difficult. My point was regarding open-book exams.
endtime 15y ago
> I feel if you agree to an open book exam the difficulty of the exam can (and should) increase dramatically. Be careful what you wish for ;-) Most exams at Stanford CS are open book/open notes. I much preferred this to my undergrad experience of having to memorize stuff.
mr_mngr 15y ago
I prefer college graduates who finished at the top of their class. This is not because I believe they have meaningfully more domain expertise (though they sometimes do), or that they're exceptionally brilliant (though they sometimes are). It's because to graduate with high honors you have to make give dozens of people what they wanted to see; this despite the fact that sometimes you weren't interested, sometimes they were unclear about what they wanted, and sometimes they were terrible teachers. If you graduate at the top of your class, I know you have a proven ability to identify what people want, and find a way to give it to them. And THAT is what I care about.
redthrowaway 15y ago
Open-book exams should be ridiculously difficult, as they are intended to test understanding rather than rote memorization. Anyone can memorize a formula; figuring out when and how to use it is what the class should be teaching. Similarly, in a programming class, the exam should not be testing whether or not you've memorized the Java boilerplate code. Sure, if you use it enough you will memorize it, but that's not what makes a good programmer. Either provide the boilerplate or let the students look it up; the focus should be on solving the problem.
reledi 15y ago
> my open book exams in Physics were ridiculously difficult. We would use all sorts of tricks to cram as many equations onto the double-sided piece of paper we were allotted. Doesn't sound like it was an open book exam if you were just allowed a cheat sheet.

blahedo 15y ago

> Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them? Some of us do exactly that. Many of the exams I sat in grad school (Brown) were that way, and nearly all of the exams I have set are open-book, open-notes, open-internet, and take-home. I've always felt that's a better reflection of what I actually want to be testing anyway. I'm not the only professor that does this, but the cost is that exams take a lot longer to grade, generally. So it's impractical at scale.

yummyfajitas 15y ago
In my experience, a lot of students strongly prefer memorizing to thinking, and will penalize you on student evaluations if you force them to. My evaluations went up a full point when I switched from writing my own open note/open book exam to using the department's standard "memorize all the things and do mechanical transformations" exam. Students complained a lot less also.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  Mechanical exams are compatible with cramming. That's why students like them; that's how they've studied for years. Eventually it stops working.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  I had a professor who offered a novel scheme that left me pretty happy with take home exams. Students are usually turned off because a good take-home is really, really hard. What this professor did was give you the exam, mark incorrect problems, and then if the class average was poor, give you a second copy. You would turn the second copy in a few days later, and you would get some fraction of the credit for any improvement in your score. (Say you got a 60 the first time and an 80 the second time, you might end with a 65-70) The result was that, after being challenged by difficult problems that require your complete focus, you are given some feedback on what you got wrong, at which point you go back to the book to work out what the real answer is. That revision step is key; the promise of some recovery points is mostly just motivation to take it seriously I felt like those exams were huge learning experiences. The caveats are: it is more work for the professor; this was an upper division course, so students were serious and the class size was small; the best problems are hard and open ended.

epenn 15y ago

In reference to memorizing material the OP writes: In the “real world,” having a copy of your notes is called being prepared. Instead, university exams expect us to tie one hand behind our backs and master a skill we’ll seldom if ever use again. The truth is in the middle of the dichotomy you setup. Yes having notes, referencing materials, etc in the real world is being prepared. BUT, even in the real world, there's a reasonable expectation that you'll store and retrieve as much of that information as possible in and from your own memory. For example, I'm a pretty adept with python. I occasionally need to look at the standard library reference; yet, I try to commit as much as I can to memory. If I didn't, I would spend the majority of my time searching instead of doing. It goes without saying that a person who knows something off the top of his or her head is more efficient than someone who doesn't. You're correct that in the real world you'll rarely be in a situation where you don't have access to a reference of some kind. However to say at the same time that memorization is a skill that you'll seldom if ever use again is incorrect at best and reckless at worst.

nu23 15y ago
The counterpoint here would be that memorization happens more naturally when practicing, as frequently used knowledge is automatically memorized. I remember school courses in history and chemistry where requirements of memorization was the largest component of the course credit. What I suspect is the real reason is that measuring student understanding and engagement is a hard problem, and memorization is easily measured proxy for the above. The problem is that it is easily gamed, learning decays into this gaming process and then, students promptly forget material after the exams. In my experience, though, universities mostly do allow for notes in exams.
- gxs 15y ago
  Precisely. My math courses never tested my memorization outright. But if after pouring 40-50 hours a week into a class for a couple months didn't result in memorization of the important stuff as a byproduct, you probably weren't going to do well anyway. I'd like to be optimistic and say that that this is how memorization began to be tested in schools. Instructors noticed that the best students seemed to have things memorizes, so they started testing this as it's an easy thing to test. For some reason, the analogy of a doctor treating symptoms rather than the cause of the illness comes to mind.

RandallBrown 15y ago

I had lots of open book/note exams. They were also much harder. I even had an exam where the professor allowed us to use our laptops and the Internet. You can imagine how much harder that exam was. There were very few exams where I wasn't allowed a limited amount of notes (usually a full notecard or sheet of paper). The ones that weren't were in classes like intro psychology where most of the class is just memorizing things anyway.

leot 15y ago

(Relatively social) people also learn from the examples of others, which is why it can be so helpful to go to a school filled with smart high-achievers.

gomphus 15y ago

> Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them? In science, we call this a thesis or research project. I don't see the need for all exams to take the same format (although some do so successfully), as closed-book exams test something quite different - the depth and breadth of your internal, longer-term comprehension. > An “education,” whether for its own value or to help you get a job, is–at least to me–about developing the skills to find the information you need, assess its value, integrate it into the context at hand, and make a better decision than you otherwise could have. An education -at least to me- is about building up an inner edifice of knowledge, so you can work fast, and formulate original and hopefully brilliant ideas and insights, with the skills the author mentions being accessory to this (and something that should really be in place by high school). The author writes as if knowledge is something to be retained as fleetingly as possible, to make room for whatever the next task is. But information you have committed to long-term memory can cross-pollinate, become a greater structure, open up new horizons. Information that you merely load and discard cannot - at least not in the same way. > In the “real world,” having a copy of your notes is called being prepared. In my world, being (professionally) prepared means that you have authoritative mastery of a subject. Of course you often refer to notes, and have the skill to quickly and perhaps temporarily assess and assimilate new concepts. It does not follow that holding the detail of our degree subjects at arm's length is a virtue, and that having to rely on our own memories in examinations is somehow "bad education". Yes, the open book exam format has its place, but so does the traditional one. If you want a better education, try regarding your knowledge as something to be made more enduring, not more ephemeral.

icegreentea 15y ago

Mastery (or taking a few notches down, competence) has both a memorization, and application component. Can't get around that. The problem is that people assume that the memorization component must be learned by memorizing, and that the application component by applying. Rather, the memorization component comes from applying, and the application flows from memorization. You're ability to apply your knowledge to the world hinges on your ability to remember what your knowledge is. Even now, when you just 'google it', that relies on your memory of broad concepts and ideas. Recognition IS memory (a specific kind of memory anyways). So yeah, on one hand, over the top tests of memorization is ridiculous, since it just results in everyone cramming, and then forgetting 3 hours after the final, and then when the next course rolls around building on the knowledge, you lose 3 weeks doing review, you can't get away from memorization, or testing your memory in school.

nekojima 15y ago

I'd have hoped branding was a skill taught at "Western" and their top-notch Business School could have helped them avoid this disaster. Given I am in the same province as this university, I actually had to look up which school he was talking about, because I wasn't sure. Everyone in Ontario, and most of Canada, already calls this school Western, rather than its (now former it seems) official name, The University of Western Ontario. Calling it Western University is missing the point of what the Western brand is, party school or not, that isn't as an adult among the first few things that I think of when it comes to Western. As opposed to when I was an undergrad driving to their campus for a weekend party. While the naming issue is off-topic, and my apologies for that, I did find this helpful/humourous article on the re-branding effort. http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2012/01/26/thats-western-university-to-you/comment-page-1/ http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2012/01/26/thats-weste...

jacques_chester 15y ago

For those referring to open books, one of my law professors explained it to me this way. It's a trap for the unprepared. Poor students think that they can rely on the books in an exam, but there's just not enough time to read, parse and apply the source material. Either you learned ahead of time or you didn't. Students who learned the material use it as a reference, not a source. It also, he said, allows him to give "proper exams". I quit studying law, but it was still an eye-opener.

MarkTraceur 15y ago

I go to the University of Redlands. In the past two years, they decided to remove my major (Computer Science) completely from the curriculum for new students (so current sophomores are unable to join the department except to minor), they cut tens of professors from the faculty, and they cut down on several other costs. In the same time period, they spend tens of thousands of dollars redesigning the main website, several more thousand redesigning the internal student-facing website (based on Blackboard and Moodle in a bizarre zombie formation), and upgraded several nonfree services they provided (Outlook Web Access, Blackboard, Datatel). They also bought and paid for the construction of a park just south of campus, which cannot be feasibly used by students but serves to essentially advertise the university. They also purchased additional radio ads, several front-page ads in the LA Times, and well-placed billboard advertisements. Higher education in America has made its priorities clear, I think.

AznHisoka 15y ago

"Don't let your schooling interfere with your education"

j45 15y ago

It's not what your degree makes of you, it's what you make of your degree. University is as much about learning coping skills as it is learning to get things done under the silliest circumstances. Strangely, this has a bearing to real life once entering the workforce. Likewise for learning, as soon as we stop learning, we're no longer growing. Anything that no longer grows gets left behind. What skills do universities teach startups? If we're lucky to have the instructors who can spark our minds, anything.