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Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 09:18:39 -0700
From: Rich Lemert <RLemert@continet.com>
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Subject: Re: Quality of education  Was: ...
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As far as I'm concerned, this post has exposed you as a fraud, or
a dillettente at best.

sockeye wrote:
> 
>   I have audited courses. In general, I found auditing courses a much
> better way to learn than taking them for credit, principally because
> when auditing, I could skip prerequisites and take a chance on something
> esoteric, or way over my head.
>

  Did you ever wonder why they call them "prerequisites". It's not just
a rite of passage. The people familiar with the field have analyzed
the contents of the course and have determined, with good reason,
what you should know before you enter the course in order to understand
the material being presented. Grades have nothing to do with it,
comprehension does. Without any expertise in the field, you have 
suddenly decided that you know more about what is or should be expected
than the people who have spent most of their professional life working 
with that material.

> If I worked my butt off to get 50% of it,
> I didn't need to sweat failing.

  You wind up understanding half of the material presented, and yet
you claim to have become educated? Bullshit.

> If you are taking classes for credit,
> you must keep the grade in mind at every stage of the game. It doesn't
> escape the attention of most students that the surest way to good grades
> is to take an easy course load.
>

  I find the newsgroups this is being posted in amazing. Here is 
someone posting to groups in which there is a well-defined body of
knowledge that is generally regarded as necessary for one to be
considered competent in the field, claiming that students will seek
the easiest path. If they were to do that, they would not have gone
into any of these fields listed physics, math, astronomy, chemistry,
languages, economics) with the possible exception of misc.education.

  In my field, chemical engineering, we wish we were able to offer the
students a broader range of electives, both within and outside of the
field. However, there are only so many credit hours available in a
four year curriculum, and we are subject to so many constraints. In
addition to the material needed to produce a chemical engineer, we
have a certain minimum of electives in 'cultural', 'humanities', or
'arts' areas so that are students can be considered "educated". Note
that subject only to fairly mild constraints, the students are free to
select these courses in whatever area they wish.

>         Auditing is a partial solution to the problem of stealing an education,
> but not a perfect one. In my opinion, the classroom environment -
> etiquette, curriculum, the whole shebang - is just a stage for the
> ritual of grading. In other words, a classroom is not a good place to
> browse for new knowledge; it is set up to force students to grind for
> credentials. Sometimes a little learning takes place around the edges,
> but it is almost incidental. Most instructors have convinced themselves
> that when *they* walk their "kids" through the syllabus, it's learning;
> when others do it, it's boring. Most of them are wrong.
>         It must be said that some courses, well chewed, can be nourishing, but
> an interested student has to nibble a lot of shoots to find the tasty
> ones. In practice this means trying out a lot of courses, and abandoning
> most of them. Universities hate this practice, and enact policies that
> make it difficult. Taking classes through any formal procedure - for
> grades or not - entails paying for a class and having less than two
> weeks [at U. Colo., Boulder; also U. Washington, Seattle; the only 2
> colleges I've attended] to decide whether you will commit to the whole
> semester. If you bail out late, you cannot "add" another class.

  Again, there happens to be a very good reason for this. Most students
cannot jump into the middle of a subject, two or three weeks behind the
other students, while carrying a full load of other classes, and expect
to catch up. Also again, grades are irrelevant to this argument, but
your precious "education" is. And like it or not, there are too many
people seeking these courses (for whatever reason) to offer them 
"on demand", which seems to be what you're asking for. Offering classes
for a fixed period, with people expected to begin at a designated time,
seems like a reasonable accomodation to guarantee access to the 
greatest number.

> If you
> are auditing, you have to pay for the class you have abandoned, and if
> you are taking the class for credit, you get a black mark on your
> transcript. This means, in effect, that you must commit to four months
> in a class with very little foreknowledge of what to expect, and no
> freedom to leave should the class or instructor prove disappointing.

  You can leave the class any time you damn well please, provided you
are willing to accept the consequences. I've left a course in the 
middle of a final. Under extenuating circumstances, the instructor
often has a lot of leaway in dropping someone from the class. However,
it has to be a good reason for me to consider dropping someone. I have
little patience for someone who says "I just didn't get anything out
of it" when they haven't put a damn thing into it.

> The simplest solution to this dilemma is to connive a way into the
> classroom without dealing with the registrar. One method is to enroll in
> the course, begin attending, then drop before the deadline but keep
> showing up. At this point you are "under the radar", and can choose
> whether to attend entirely on the basis of the content of the course(and
> the whims of the instructor). For oversubscribed courses, put your name
> on the waiting list, start attending, and pay no attention to whether
> your name ever hits the top of the list. Lastly, you can always get hold
> of the prof and ask him in plain English at point-blank range to let you
> sit in. Some universities are pretty lax about this (CU Boulder is
> great) and some have policies forbidding it (U. Washington is one).
> Private schools, in particular, are reluctant to give away to one person
> what another pays $20,000 a year to get.

  So now you are advocating fraud and theft! Believe it or not, there
is a cost to the school for providing the lectures you attend. The
school has every right to expect that people attending a course have
paid for that course. Try going over to your local megaplex movie
theater and explain to the manager that you "want to learn more about
Woodie Allen's use of metaphors in film, so please let me attend this
showing of Annie Hall for free."

>         Most of the people who post here are teachers or instructors, survivors
> of the great grade sweepstakes, and believers in the good intentions if
> not good works of formal education. I'm one of the casualties. I have
> never climbed far enough up the academic food chain to stand in front of
> a roomful of people and tell them how they can please me enough to be
> rewarded with an 'A'. Most likely I never will. Several times I have
> enrolled in the University, made an energetic attempt to recover a
> meaningful education from the position of an undergraduate, and finally
> concluded that learning can seldom flourish sandwiched between an 'A'
> and an 'F'.
> 

  If you're so anti- the education establishment, and you have a track
record of not being able to get what you want from academia, then why
in hell are you wasting time with it? Go to the nearest library, get
to know the people in the inter-library loan department, and start
teaching yourself from the books. It's horribly inefficient this way
(you have very little guidance as to what comes before what and why),
but it can be done.

  I would also maintain, again based on your comments in this post, that
for all the noise you spout off about education that you are NOT an
educated person. An educated person is someone who has both a breadth
and a depth of knowledge (i.e. knows a little about a lot of things,
and a lot about a few). You seem to have focussed only on the breadth.
Based on this post, I would say you don't give a damn about how
thoroughly you know any subject, just how many subjects you know.

Rich Lemert
