

Is the first year of a degree a waste of time? - mayutana
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11676192

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gaius
The first year of a degree teaches students what 6th forms used to in the old
days. Fix the dumbing down in state schools first. A-levels have been devalued
by politically driven grade inflation, so let's take it out of the hands of
the politicians altogether and switch to the IB.

~~~
SiVal
There is great political pressure in most countries to "improve" the education
of the population. This runs into other political, demographic, and scientific
realities and produces some ironic consequences. For example, in the US, we
have a higher and higher percentage of the population entering college each
year. That means that the average IQ of those entering college gradually
declines. (It wouldn't if the Flynn Effect still functioned, but gains from
the Flynn Effect in the US ended 20-30 years ago.) The top 10% has a higher
average IQ than the top 20%, which is itself greater than for the top 30%,
etc. The higher the percentage going to college, the lower the average IQ of
college students, and the colleges have to adjust to avoid an embarrassing
rise in drop-out rates.

I saw statistics a week or so ago showing a gradual rise in the percentage of
students who take calculus in high school, a gradual rise in the percentage
who take Algebra 1 in eighth grade (instead of in 9th, 10th, etc.), and other
stats that would seem to imply a gradual increase in math ability for any
given age cohort. Yet, within a day or two, I also saw stats showing a gradual
decrease in math ability for high school graduates entering college. In 1995,
the College Board could no longer continue with the old SAT and had to
"renormalize" it to get the mean score back up to 500. They had to dumb it
down, in other words.

I've seen stats and reports from other countries (including Japan) that show
the same trends. People demand that the schools do a better job of getting
kids ready for college by, for example, having more of them take algebra in
8th grade. So, it happens, except that they aren't really any better prepared
than before, so to prevent the embarrassment of rising failure rates, the
course has to be dumbed down. The apparent increase in math ability is
achieved by a relabeling of what they do, not by an increase in how much they
learn. There is now a growing trend in Illinois for students (I assume from
Chicago) to take calculus in high school and then end up in remedial math in
college. They're not learning anything, but for political reasons they are
given classes labeled "calculus" to show "progress toward social justice". I
assume Illinois is representative of many other places in many countries.

~~~
jonnathanson
This is spot on, and in theory, it's why standardized testing was implemented
in the first place: to get at normative ways to compare knowledge in a given
subject across schools and learning environments. It was social engineering,
really: by convincing schools that their students would be held accountable to
universal standards, those schools would in turn up their games and make sure
students were learning the real deal.

Of course, what actually happened was twofold:

1\. "Teaching to the test," i.e., narrowing a broad subject area like Calculus
down to whatever aspects would be covered on a standardized AP exam.

2\. Following from the above, a reduction in foundational and principle
education in favor of problem-based education. Kids would learn the what of
the formulas, but not the why. Kids could calculate a derivative, but they
couldn't tell you what it meant or why they would ever need to do so.

The result? A vicious cycle. Subjects narrowed and became divorced from their
foundational purposes, which accordingly made them more about rote than about
thinking, which made them less engaging subjects, which in turn discouraged
student interest, which in turn led to declining scores. And the cycle
repeated itself.

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ig1
Generally the first year is a bridging year. You have students with a wide
variety of different backgrounds and they all need to be bought up to the same
base. It's also the first time many students will have to learn for themselves
as opposed to being spoonfed.

So while you do learn less in the first year than the other two, it still has
a lot of value, because you learn how to learn and many other personal skills
which are critical for university and later life.

~~~
nspiegelberg
Maybe the UK experience is different than US, but this sounds like 'no child
left behind'. Let's make 50% of the students do inane coursework for a year so
the other 50% don't feel bad about requiring an extra year to finish
university. We'll call it 'personal improvement'. While it definitely takes a
year to adjust to being on your own, the average US freshman experience
calcifies the mind.

Example: I had 2 dorm friends with 1600 SAT scores that wasted their life away
that first year because they already knew the material (like most of us). They
got cocky and promptly got a 1.0 the next year when they finally had to work
but didn't realize it, losing their scholarships. Freshman year is the best
time to pump students with work because they are expecting/wanting a
challenge. The first year should be about inspiring students to learn, not
teaching them how to deal with insane amounts of free time.

~~~
aidan2
This! Exactly! I'm currently in my first year and bored out of my skull with
the material we're covering. Last week we spent going over the Data Protection
Act in comp sci... the DPA is part of the standard grade course and I learnt
it inside out in S3. I came to uni expecting a challenge - a new level of
learning, but I'm so far left wanting.

~~~
stoney
Which means you are in an excellent position of having too much time and not
enough to do. Don't waste this opportunity!

It takes a very long time to become awesome at something, so I'd suggest you
start now while you have plenty of spare time.

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stoney
The quality of UK university courses varies tremendously. I studied
engineering as did lots of my friends. The standard course length for an MEng
is 4 years, I think that might even be a requirement to get the course
accredited.

But what happens in those four years can be very different - if you are at a
less good university, you will probably be working less than 20 hours a week
on your engineering degree. If you are at a top university, you will work at
least full time if not more.

So if this proposal was followed through you could end up with a slightly odd
situation (or maybe a good situation?) where the less good universities
offered shorter courses than the good ones. So the brightest students would be
in uni for longer.

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robchez
In AU, my first year in my mechanical engineering degree was a complete waste
of time. They call it a "common first year" where you do little bits of every
type of engineering. It was a complete waste of time and money.

In theory it sounds great, and I was quite excited about doing some electrical
engineering. But in fact it was just a 6 month long, highschool physics course
on electricity, drawn out more than I thought possible. Spending an entire
week on Ohm's law in University engineering is stupid.

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robryan
I don't know, I feel that I got as much out of first year as the other years,
sure you could say it wasn't as focused on the central theme of the course but
I didn't go to uni just to focus on one thing and get it done asap.

Some of the maths was repeated but really helped me get a better grasp on it.
The physics class was the only physics I got exposed to in uni and was hard
but rewarding, same with the circuits stuff for electronics. As opposed to
some of my recent 4th year classes, which have actually been a waste of time.

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hwolf
For me, it was my first time away from home, and I wasn't certain of my major.
So it was useful as a self-discovery experience.

But my friend, who is going to school in his town is finding the first (and
even the second) year pretty useless. And it was sad that his freshman English
class consisted of determining correct comma placement. I hope it's just the
school and not the dumbing down of education across the board. So scary.

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andrewingram
For my degree (Computer Science at Warwick), the first year did count towards
my final results. Even without it counting, I feel it would have been fairly
difficult to adequately teach Computer Science without the 'extra' year at the
start.

~~~
ecaroth
So how much were you able to actually get into CS your first year?? I was
limited to mostly programming 1 & 2... you couldn't get into any higher level
CS studies until you had those two classes completed, and you couldn't take
them at the same time. That led to a lot of fun side projects, no doubt, but
that was when I wasn't falling asleep in my under-water basket weaving class.
I often wonder if a technical program at a computer-specific school would have
yielded the same results for much less dime.

~~~
andrewingram
Hm, if i recall correctly my first year had: \- A basic mathematics course,
took us through some of the harder A-Level (pre-uni) stuff and a few more
advanced things \- Discrete mathematics, set theory and all that jive. \- An
introductory programming course, it covered basic Java programming and
introduced OOP. Coursework was to write the algorithm for solving a maze \- A
basic hardware and lower-level concepts course \- Data structures, ie what
ones are available and their efficiencies \- A unix programming module,
basically we made some dead simple command line programs \- Some functional
programming (we used SML)

I hadn't really done any programming pre-university (other than some trivial
Delphi apps that aren't really worth mentioning). So nearly all of this was
new to me.

The second year was basically more of the same but harder. The 3rd and 4th
years were where we got the bulk of the credit for the degrees, but we also
got the most freedom over what modules we took. In the first two years, about
80% of the modules were considered 'core'.

~~~
ecaroth
Wow... you were already in discreet math & shell programming in your first
year. I was stuck with calc 1 & 2, and didn't get to touch a unix shell until
my second year "networking" class where we spent two months setting up
subnets. I didn't get to touch on any harware stuff until year 3, where we
mapped out ALUs, RAM chips, etc. Sounds like your universities CS program had
it's shit together a little more than mine. Oh well though.. the lack of
interesting topics for the first 2 years only drove me to learn on my own and
do side projects, which ended up ok in the end.

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dhume
Depends where you go, I guess. My university was willing to acknowledge
advanced coursework I'd done in high school, so I didn't waste the entire year
repeating material I'd already covered (calculus, introductory programming,
etc.).

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frou_dh
A few classmates of mine knew more about the subject in 1st year than I did
when I graduated in the 4th year. I received the same First Class Honours
classification that they did.

That's one messed up ramp.

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yread
The first year was the best year! And I went on for another 6 ones. I didn't
know much programming at that time and just the feeling of working and being
around really smart people was really good.

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icegreentea
Currently attending engineering at u of waterloo in Canada. In my own
experience, most of first year was a waste of time. Due to my luck in
highschool as well as my own personal interests, I found 80% of first year to
be review, or ridiculously slow. The most important part of first year for me
was a relatively low stress environment to make friends with (particularly
important in my program).

But I saw with many (not all) of my classmates just how important that first
year was. Unfortunately, the differences between people's high school
educations were just so much (there were some people who were having problems
with limits... I was breezing all the way up to multi variable calculus and
linear algebra) that as useless as individual courses may be for individual
students, taken as a whole (as a class), all those 'review' classes were
definitely necessary to prevent massive massive 2nd year fail rates.

Unfortunately this is not a problem that can only be solved by universities.
They have their role to play, but so does our (by this I mean our province's)
high school curriculum. In Toronto (where I grew up), we had integration (and
almost derivatives) ripped out of standard grade 12 calculus (as well as a
series of similar neuterings in other subjects). To get that stuff at all,
your school had to offer honors, AP, or IB calculus or w/e. I lucked out with
AP being available (which despite all the taunting I directed at the College
Board did actually set me up for my first year university courses). But many
bright smart kids just aren't lucky enough to attend to a school with such
programs. Or even just average or slightly above average kids weren't pushed
by the challenge, or dragged along by their smarter classmates.

In the end, (at least in Canada), I cannot see first year becoming any harder
(or useful) until universities know that enough of their enrollees will be
knowledgeable enough. Because ultimately, they are run as businesses on some
level, and have to keep a float. Which is the biggest shame.

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sliverstorm
I like the move to summer classes. It hampers the classic 'work part-time
during the school year, full time during the summer' for people bearing the
full brunt of their educational bills, but otherwise I think it's a good idea.
Summer, to me, is just a waste of time in which to forget what you learned.

Coincidentally, I have not taken a summer break from classes for 3 years now.

