

Could Grad School Be Fixed? - asimjalis
http://false-epiphany.com/2009/08/could-grad-school-be-fixed/

======
etal
A gem:

 _The better part of learning is making mistakes, and most grading penalizes
mistakes._

This is true; it makes students unadventurous. Fortunately, most science PhD
programs already work nearly the way he's proposing:

\- Students are attached to a lab early on, and mentored by a professor for
the rest of the program

\- Classes related to the degree usually allow enough flexibility in the
assignments that a student can find a way to apply their lab's line of
research to the current topic

\- Students take 2-3 lecture-style courses and a scattering of seminars each
semester for the first two years or so, then focus entirely on research
(mentored, of course) for the rest of the program

\- Grades are implicitly just a formality. Maybe not everyone figures this
out, but you're doing things properly in science course, you will get an A.
Don't even worry about it; just focus on your research and let the prof know
you're learning something. In a PhD program, your report card is really your
list of publications -- and that's another can of worms.

The biggest departures from this I see are in law, business and med schools,
where there's a secondary goal of filtering students up front. (And they
charge so much for the honor. Science grad school isn't so much a hefty up-
front investment as a temporary oath of poverty.)

My program is a mix of CS, math/stats and biology, and it's interesting to see
how the disciplines collide in the curriculum committee. CS and math/stats
teachers _do_ have a lot of material that simply must be lectured to students,
with lots of targeted exercises along the way -- these professors push for
more core courses. Science teachers constantly try to trim the core
requirements so students can spend more time in the lab, doing real research,
without distractions. I don't think this dynamic would have evolved if the
department was simply following the rote lecture-and-exam tradition.

~~~
bkovitz
This is quite a good observation: something reasonably close to apprenticeship
is already in place.

Grad students are given enormous flexibility in their assignments—a little
trick to buy them time to try out their own research ideas long before they
get to the thesis. Grading is extremely lenient; it's just a formality to keep
things within reason. Professors are always eager to help you work on
something publishable.

------
jorleif
Having both worked in industry and academia, I think the author considers so
called "real world knowledge" as the only kind of useful knowledge. For
example, a working programmer might learn Ruby on Rails very well by working
with the framework but be completely oblivious to other frameworks or
programming languages, not to mention theoretical computer science.

Academia, on the other hand, focuses more on a high level knowledge by
focusing on publishing results in the form of short papers with the most
central results and references to the most central knowledge about the problem
in research literature.

I think that for someone who wants to work as a programmer grad school is
indeed "broken", since it underemphasizes the first kind of knowledge. On the
other hand, many advances to technology come from academia, so apparently that
system also has its advantages.

~~~
dmolnar
I disagree that the author considers "real world knowledge" the only kind of
useful knowledge. If you read the preceding entry on "The Agony of Grad
School" it clarifies that the main problem here is this person has a really
high cost for context switching, plus a really low tolerance for distraction.
That's a bad combination, because you end up thrashing all the time. In the
preceding entry, he talks about how he wants to know what's going on in a
theory of programming languages course (not really "real world knowledge" ;)
but he can't due to the context switch overhead from real analysis.

It sounds like the author unfortunately hit a place that requires more classes
and teaching before getting to the point where research becomes the full time
100% job. It also sounds like the author was trying to take several courses
and be a teaching assistant at the same time. That's a lot of work for anyone,
even people who are good at multi-tasking.

~~~
jorleif
I suppose I was wrong about the author's reasoning, but I still think my
description applies to many people.

Personally, I think both camps have their problems. Academic people can be
quite annoying when they talk about something like they know everything about
it just because they've read some paper about it. On the other hand
programmers knowing only one language and framework are equally limited in
their view.

------
Fixnum
This post is interesting but hard to take too seriously. First, I don't
understand the author's hostility to the idea of graduates taking courses.
Grad courses supply general knowledge not acquired in undergrad and in-depth
knowledge to prepare the student for research. There are reasons why these
courses follow the format they do - certain disciplines are best learned by an
approach closer to 'lecture than to 'project (Real analysis? Lambda
calculus?). The author claims: "You pick up all that needed stuff by doing
real work. When you find a gap in your knowledge, you fix it. The instructor
might give you an exercise to help you fix it." But this is not always
feasible in abstract disciplines - try to pick up real analysis in this way,
and you'll probably end up doing a lot of proofs that look very much like the
standard real analysis sequence but seem a lot more frustrating. This isn't to
say we need to sit in classrooms for six hours a week, but teaching certain
subjects (but not all) via projects is a waste of time.

The call for 2-week sessions instead of semesters seems to be based -- like
several other suggestions -- on the peculiar preferences of the author rather
than on sound argument.

It's easy to come up with one's own wish list of how graduate school should
operate, and the author is rightfully cautious about the implementation. But
it seems to me the problems raised aren't fundamental to graduate school.
Maybe the classroom lecture is becoming obsolete; it arguably helps demoralize
students by removing from them responsibility for their own edification. But
this doesn't demand top-down reform of everything but the thesis.

We should save that for the undergrad programs.

------
tallanvor
"Lecture-and-exam classes don’t work. We’ve been doing them for hundreds of
years now, so there is no more doubt about that."

That's funny, they seem to have been working fine for hundreds of years. I
know they worked fine for me, even if they were a bit boring at times.

Seriously, though, at the end of the day, no single system will work for
everyone. Many colleges have tried different educational models. Many of them
failed, and those that survived mostly went back to the traditional model for
a reason: it works.

~~~
known
And students asking "why" is a taboo in current educational model.

~~~
tallanvor
That's simply not true for the most part. Sure, some professors don't like to
be questioned, but most do try to encourage this. Almost every educator I've
had or worked with wants students to ask the hard questions because it
generally shows that they're listening, learning, and thinking.

------
dmolnar
From the article: "Ph.D. students should spend most of their time doing real,
publishable research alongside their professors, working as apprentices."

Most computer science PhD programs I know of have as a goal to get you to this
point. Well, sometimes you end up working alongside your peers instead of
seeing your professor. Different places do have different ideas about how
early in grad school you finish classes and how many you need, but after that
research is your full time job.

~~~
alexgartrell
yeah, everything I know about CS Grad School says that classes are a necessary
formality. For the most part, TAing is too. Grad students live to do research

------
bkovitz
Not included in the extensive list of objections is the fact that any
redefinition of the semester schedule would meet gigantic political
resistance. Colleges have been doing that lecture-homework-exam thing for
centuries now, and they're not going to change just because it doesn't work
and some guy on a blog has pointed out an obviously better way.

Really, the current system does work. It just works somewhat poorly. But well
enough to get stuff done. As bad as U.S. universities are, they are the envy
of the world, and their list of accomplishments is truly vast and magnificent.
That's why there would be so much resistance.

The political battle might take ten years or more of relentless effort, and
still might not dislodge "the first mover". As usual, marketing trumps
engineering.

