On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 11:11:21AM +0100, David Kastrup wrote: > Graham Percival <gra...@percival-music.ca> writes: > > > But hey, it's my job to teach them > > at whatever level they're at, right? > > Nope. It is your job to teach them from the level they should have left > high school with. After two terms of electrical engineering, it was > expected of me to be able to deal with, say, Riccatti equations, vector
If I did that, then 80% of the first-year students would fail, 100% of the fourth-year students would fail, and the department would fire me. I don't think I can make you understand just how much of a difference there is between UK engineering students in 2012 and German engineering students 20-30 years ago. The whole "degrees and radians" thing arose because we were giving them an oral exam about resonant filters. "I have a system running at 20000 Hz, and I want to generate a sine wave at 15000 Hz [1]. Draw the poles on this unit circle in the s-plane." They all eventually got the answer of 1/2*pi and 3/2*pi (some of them needed a few hints, and two of them needed to be coached on how to divide 15000 by 20000 without a calculator!) But when it came to drawing them, 8 out of 14 students got it wrong. [1] telling us "that's impossible due to the Shannon-Nyquist theorem" was bonus marks. BONUS MARKS. We then asked those students to solve it for 5000 Hz instead, still giving poles at 1/2 and 3/2 pi. oh yeah, and this question? It was worth a quarter of their grades for the year-long course. No, it wasn't just one of 10 test questions for a midterm exam. > > (sure, 30% of the first-year students are a joy to teach. But the > > overall horrendous level of facebook and plagiarism tends to stick in > > one's mind much more than the students who actually work.) > > If you are interested in propelling people at a level where it makes > most of a difference, you'll be sitting at a 20/80 point in the bell > curve. If you are not supposed to be weeding out I wish I could. :( University in the UK and Canada is rapidly becoming, or has already become, the new high school. Over 40% of students in the UK go to a post-secondary institution; that figure was 5% in my parent's generation. This would require a huge shift in how universities deal with students, but I don't see that happening right now. If anything, it's worse -- universities are increasingly being run as businesses, and it doesn't make business sense to turn away customers, right? I need to walk a fine line between "what the administration will let me get away with" and "academic standards". In order to stay sane, I must fool myself into believing that I don't care how unprepared the students are, provided that they are willing to work to overcome such deficiencies. Simply filtering on "is obviously not working" weeds out as many students as I can get away with. :( - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
