The average college student today

In the 90s we had the "Plato" system for chemistry. It was a question/answer terminal in the library. Our Chemistry TA advised us to use it to study for exams as it had a lot of sample questions. It was really good because if you got it wrong, it actually gave you a detailed explanation of how to solve it. It was so helpful to have that. When I used the system, I made a bunch of mistakes but ended up learning from them, and it really helped for the exams.

1990, "PLATO reached it's maximum enrollment, with 4,029 course seats and approximately 30 courses and other applications." Plato was decommissioned in 1994.

https://www.umass.edu/it/it-timeline

Honestly as an engineer some of schooling was learning enough just to get by. We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by.

For me the Masters Degree gives a better chance to dive deep into a single topic.

I graduated (admittedly many-many years ago) from a good but not top-notch university. I remember a somehow similar situation: obviously learning was considered a good thing, but both the students and the professors realized that it's the diploma what brings most students there, not a pursuit of pure knowledge.

So I quickly realized that, unlike, say, elementary school, a university is not a push system, it's a pull system. If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source. There's still plenty, but nobody is going to force-feed it to you. I read quite a lot beside the required books. I practiced quite a lot beside the lab practice (fortunately wielding a soldering iron or writing programs was a marketable skill; still is, but used to be, too). I asked my professors questions that were not entirely in the books; often that was during a few minutes after a lecture / classes / labs, so I got from them ideas and pointers to new directions to learn by myself.

Was it helpful in my career? Certainly yes, I started doing contract jobs three years before graduation, and then joined a bunch of interesting companies where that knowledge was somehow useful, mostly as a foundation of more specific skills.

I was certainly not alone; I knew (and often was friends with) a bunch of other students who craved knowledge and skills, and we helped each other shake these out of the university, past the transactional bounds. It wasn't all that hard, but it required a conscious effort.

Very certainly a large number of other students did more coasting than knowledge-mining. They got their diplomas, got some white-collar jobs that did not require such deep knowledge of engineering, I suppose, or started unrelated businesses.

This is really unfortunate, and I think your instructor should read it.

It sounds like your instructor has confused homework with quizzes, and the cheating issue demands some rethinking of the course pace and assessment system.

In physics and related fields, I have found fully worked problems to be very valuable. If your textbook includes some of these, I recommend reviewing them and working similar practice problems if possible. I wonder if things like supplementary texts, khan academy, or tutorials on youtube might help as well.

As you note, systems like ChatGPT could be helpful for explaining or working through problems, but obviously you won't learn anything if you rely on them for doing your own problem sets.

I started college at the CC level (having no HS diploma) to get into a State school. And from a series of poor choices and ignorance on my part needed to take a several years gap before returning to finish up.

I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.

CC students have always felt more motivated in my opinion. But good Lord the quality of the education at the State level is abysmal. I am not saying there aren't quality professors and classes. There are.

There is however an alarming high number of poorly designed classes, nearly broken technology, poorly edited and badly written assignments, and questionable instruction.

I have to compare the quality and price with what I experienced in CC and it just makes me sad and depressed.

Interesting. When I was an undegraduate we had textbooks which were at least 25% problems and solutions, allowing for near endless self practice.

I am currently holding my copy of "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by Griffiths in my hands; somehow it is rarely more than a metre from where I work!

Are such textbooks still popular and used (i.e. mandatory to purchase) in courses like this?

The best homework system i ever experienced was high school calculus.

4 points per assignment. Pass the assignment to a peer for grading. If they wrote down the problem and attempted it: 3 points. One more point if the logic and steps were followable, even if wrong.

The answers were in the back of the book. The homework grade should reflect attempts and practice, not mastery as that is what exams are for.

You are right, what degraded is not simply the students attention and motivation, it is the whole institution. They keep pushing ineffective approaches all over. You are right to blame LMSes, they are absolute disasters, poorly designed and ineffective at anything except save time for professors (and let's be real here, they also do social media and unrelated to their work activities so they are trading their teaching opportunities for leisure). Those LMSes are probably as detrimental as PowerPoint has been for communicating to an audience. It is as if everyone is trying to avoid doing what they are here to do. They replace thought, exchanges and discovery with miserable tools just so they can go waste their time on something else.

I remember this frustration clearly. It's valuable to be challenged and struggle and overcome, but the value of a perfect GPA is a lot more salient.

Nah. Humanities professors keep claiming it's phones because that's visible to them when they lecture but read what they're saying carefully and the actual cause is obvious: students don't take it seriously because the professors don't.

The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price.

It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.

The transactional nature hasn’t always been the same, though. It hasn’t always been that way, or at least the nature of the transaction has changed. Decades ago, surveys showed the predominant reason people went to college was “to develop a philosophy for life”. Now the main reason is “to get a good job.”

I wonder how many people here (outside of college) spend lots of times on their phones (or their other types of screens)

It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention.

Do people actually quit their addiction?

Yeah... There are exponentially more legacy applicants to colleges today than there were 30 years ago. By definition.

You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points?

But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.

Do you think this might be tied to a person’s financial situation?

Grow up with a safety net, you’ll enjoy the process.

Grow up poor and/or with people depending on you and you focus on the end state?

> Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.

I really love this. I'll try and bear this in mind over the next few years.

I'm a mature-aged student going for their second degree (CS the first time, science this time). I am loving the subject but it's hard at the beginning because the amount of new stuff I have to absorb is overwhelming. At the times when I have a bit of a breather -- either when I'm "getting it" or during mid-semester break -- I find the subject (biology) wonderful.

Agreed. I always felt my computer engineering degree taught me how to approach a problem and logically solve it, weigh the pros and cons, etc. As well as introducing me to the hardware side of things - I already knew by high school that I could learn any programming language given enough time (already had Basic, C, SQL, a couple of DSLs and knew at least in part, 3 different human languages). I wanted to force myself to get a similar "baseline" for hardware.

Of course, it has impacted all parts of my life - I think differently than I did before studying engineering, and I sometimes try to apply this problem solving in non-technical parts of life with.. mixed results.

I'm confused with your comment, because you start here:

> If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process.

> Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.

But then follow that with:

> Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.

Like... I guess it depends what precisely you mean by "workers" but in my mind at least, if we're thinking similarly, that would be white-collar office workers. And what you describe in the previous quoted section is, IMHO, a perfectly reasonable breakdown of what college is preparing them to do. But then the subsequent line feels like a criticism of the output of that.

The process underneath is busy work to make some learning criteria milestone for accreditation

Yep. I gave a similar speech on the first day of every English 101 class I ever taught. (Though, damn, I wish I'd had as concise a formulation as your list of skills. Nicely done.) In my case I largely hoped to head off the resentment that STEM majors frequently expressed about how come they were required to take something so irrelevant to their eventual careers as writing. It sometimes worked.

"Things changed" is the part I disagree with. The students just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. My cohort ~15 years ago would have used just as much chatgpt if it had been available, and our spelling would have been just as bad if AIM had autocorrect when we were kids.

When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students.

Don't hate the player — hate the game.

Because the universities themselves have been constantly lowering standards. It was always a transaction but there was a price. That price is locked in a race to the bottom because administrations and professors don't care about standards.

I have interviewed prospective employees who come in with no academic credentials all the way through to those who have completed degree programs at one of the top 50 universities. Regardless of university, students are individuals and shouldn’t be given more or less credit because of the name of the school they attended.

Full. Stop.

That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one.

As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it.

Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.

I agree that the trend is not sustainable, but that's not the students' responsibility — they're just responding to incentives.

Either institutions maintain their standards or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential, and both are difficult coordination problems until the moment it becomes too late. I don't see a third option.

Agreed. A course that did not distribute slides / lecture notes 35 years ago when I studied (well known engineering school in Canada) was considered annoying / the prof trying to force students to attend.

The degree is still highly preferred (if not a hard requirement) for basically all white collar/middle class jobs. It's still, generally, a +EV proposition, so I don't think it's a convincing claim that it's just a post hoc rationalization.

The technology may be amplifying the effects because that's what technology does but it is not a change to the underlying dynamics.

"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. They just have better tools to respond to the same incentives.

I'm not saying it's good - it's clearly an unsustainable trend, but the students are not the ones driving it, so they're not equipped to stop it.

The transaction has changed a great deal though. GPA used to be more heavily weighted and professors used to be more essential for references. You might bring your transcript to an interview. Now, it seems to be all about projects. Coursework has dwindled in relevance.

Please raise this with the university, be it 'Fachschaft' or the ombudsman for academic integrity. This is not representative for CS education here as far as I know. Other teachers or faculty want to know.

Besides that, these are ridiculous claims from the teacher. LLMs are powerful but in the end they are still a tool with random output, which needs to be carefully evaluated. Especially Python is my personal view much more subtle than people assume on first contact. Especially the whole numpy universe is like a separate language and quite complicated for a beginner if you want to write fast and efficient code.

I've had courses where LLMs where allowed for projects but we had to provide prompts.

> I am currently a CS student in germany and our python lecturer told us at the first lesson that "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways and we will not be writing any code after we graduate. He then encouraged us to use AI on all assignments he gives us. He even allows us to cheat at the final exam by using LLMs.

> I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause.

Knowing the education system in Germany rather well, I ask myself in which (kind of) educational establishment this happened, since I'd consider this to be rather unusual for at least universities (Universitäten) and Fachhochschulen (some other system of tertiary education that has no analogue in most countries).

You do not have to put up with this. Your lecturer is significantly undermining your education (which you pay for!).

You should bring this up with the department chair of your study. The purpose of your CS degree is to build a strong theoretical foundation, replacing programming with prompting directly goes against this.

Don't believe them. I was also going to university in Germany and had to work so much to compensate for bad lecturers. Until now I can say I needed 100% of what I learned in university. Even the most esoteric stuff came back to bite me. For LLMs, they are close to useless if you can't review the stuff. Maybe at some point in the future they are better and can reason about their code, but as in fusion, self-driving, etc., you never know when this is. And there will always be people who have to develop this.

> but isn't the ideal outcome that you actually know the language by the end?

Given that it is billed as a Python course that is reasonable.

But, to be fair, the intent of the course is almost certainly to provide background in the tools so that you can observe CS concepts learned later. Which is kind of like astronomy majors learning how to use a telescope so that they can observe its concepts. If Google image search provided the same imagery just as well as a telescope, the frustration in being compelled to teach rudimentary telescope operation is understandable. It is not like the sciences are studied for the tools.

You're being cheated out of an education by your feckless lecturer.

> "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways

Wow! I think this is an extreme comment to make. I get it.. but WOW! It really makes you wonder about the future of universities. If the answer is to let AI do our work.. even to cheat in final exams... what is the point of universities? Not only are we talking about Software Engineers dying.. but so if his lecturer job!

Anyway..

I am developer for over 20 years.

I have kids -- both are not even teenagers... but there are times I think to myself "is it worth them learning XYZ" because of AI?

By the time my eldest get his first job.. we are talking (atleast) around year 2032. We have to accept that AI is going to do some pretty cool things. HOWEVER, I still "believe" that AI will work alongside software developers. We still need to communicate with it - to do that, you need to understand how to communicate with it.

Point is, if any of my kids express interest in computer programming in the next year or so, I will HAPPILY encourage them to invest time in it. What I have to accept is that they will use AI.. a lot.. to build something in their chosen language.

I can see this being a typical question for new coders:-

"Can you create a flappy bird game in python"

Sure.. AI might spit something out in a matter of minutes and it might even work, but are they really learning? I think I would encourage my kids to ban using AI for (around) 4 days a week.

At the end of the day it is very difficult to know our future. Sometimes I have to think about my future.. not just my kids. I mean, would my job as a software engineer be over? If so, when? What would I do?

Overall It doesn't not bother me because I do think my role will transition with AI but for the younger generation, it can be a grey area understanding where they fit in all this.

I try to be optimistic that the next 100 years will be a very exiciting time for the human race (if we do not destroy ourselves beforehand)

To counter your lecturer, I am reminded of a John Carmack quote: "Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul"

Not even low-level -- any programming. If you really like to code, you are going to learn it whether in School, College, or University. To me, the best times I learned was outside of official education, shutting myself away in my bedroom. "Official education" is nothing more that doing what you are told for a peice of paper. What is its worth these days?

Whether AI exists or not - those that like coding will invest the time to code. This is what will seperate average to good programmers or developers. What seperates a good programmer to a great programmer will be their lack or AI generated code... to DIY!

Thats my view... but this is a large topic and I am only scratching the surface.

Well, he has a point about Maths :) But, the difference is that basic Maths skills are enough to live a decent life for someone who doesn't do Maths for a career. Basic programming usually isn't enough to pass job interviews and one needs to know the language for a career, atleast for now. I'm actually learning a lot of basic Maths concepts now that I have a kid I need to teach sometimes and have some money I need to invest and understand about rate of return, compounding etc.

> Ask the LLM for a solution, paste it in, get an error, paste that in, get a new solution, get another error, ask for a fix again, etc. etc.

That's exactly what I've seen as well. The students don't even read the code, let alone try to reason through how it works. They just develop hand-eye coordination for copy-pasting.

> Rather than simple laziness, it was often because they felt intimidated by their lack of knowledge and wanted to be more productive.

Part of it really is laziness, but what you say is also true. Unfortunately, this is the nature of learning. Reading or listening is by itself a weak stimulus for building neural pathways. You need to actively recall and apply, and struggle with problems until they yield. It is so much easier to look up a solution somewhere. And now you don't even to look anything up anymore -- just ask.

Just a funny, or depressing, aside - and then a point about LLMs.

Real coding can, unfortunately, be as bad as that or worse. Here is one very famous HN comment from 2018, and I know what he is talking about because participating in this madness was my first job after university, dispelling a lot of my illusions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

I went into that job (of porting Oracle to another Unix platform for an Oracle platform partner) full of enthusiasm and gave up finding any meaning or enjoyment after the first few weeks, or trying to understand or improve anything. If AI could do at least some of that job it would actually a big plus.

(it's the working-on-Oracle-code comment if you didn't already guess it)

I think there's a good chance code becomes more like biology. You can understand the details, but there are sooo many of them, and there are way too many connections directly and indirectly across layers. You have to find higher level methods because it's too much for a direct comprehension.

I saw a main code contributor in a startup I worked at work kind of like that. Not all his fault, forced to move too quickly and the code was so ill defined, not even the big boss knowing what they wanted and only talking in meta terms and always coming up with new sometimes contradicting ideas. The code was very hard to comprehend and debug, especially since much of it was distributed algorithms. So his approach was running it with demo data, observing higher level outcomes, and tweaking this or that component until it kind of worked. It never worked reliably, it was demo-quality software at best. But he managed to implement all the new ideas from management at least.

I found that style interesting and could not dismiss it outright, even though I really really did not want to have to debug that thing in production. But I saw something different from what I was used to, focus on a higher level, working when you just can't have the same depth of understanding of what you are doing as one would traditionally like. Given my Oracle experience, I saw how this would be a useful style IRL for many big long-running projects, like that Oracle code, that you had no chance of comprehending or improving without "rm -rf" and a restart which you could not do.

I think education needs to also show these more "biology-level complexity" and more statistical higher level approaches. Much of our software is getting too complex for the traditional low-level methods.

I see LLMs as just part of such a toolkit for the future. On the one hand, there is supplying code for "traditional" smaller projects, where you still have hope to be in control and have at least the seniors fully understand the system. On the other hand, LLMs could help with too-complex systems, not with making them understandable, that is impossible for those messy systems, but with being able to still productively work with them, add new features and debug issues. Code such as in the Oracle case. A new tool for even higher levels of messiness and complexity in our systems, which we won't be able to engineer away due to real life constraints.

I agree with this.

I've used AI as a crutch for a time, and felt my skills get worse. Now I've set it up to never have it give me entire solutions, just examples and tips on how to get it done.

I've struggled with Shader Programming for a while, tried to learn it from different sources and failed a lot. It felt like something unreachable for me, I don't really know why really. But with the help of an AI that's fine-tuned for mentoring, I really understood some of the concepts. It outlined what I should do and asked socratic questions that made me think. I've gotten way better at it and actually have a pretty solid understanding of the concepts now (well, I think).

But sometimes at work I do give in and get it to write an entire script for me, out of laziness and maybe boredom. Their significant advances as of late with "extended thinking" and the likes made them much more likely to one-shot the writing of a slightly complex script... Which in turn made it harder to not just say "hey, that sounds like boring work, let's have the AI do the biggest part of it and I'll patch up the rest".

It is one thing to get code explained to you (which can also be good) but another to engage in finding a solution, explore the problem space, fail a couple of times and learn from your mistakes also, and of course the embodied process itself of writing the code. Learning is an active process; having stuff explained to you is not bad but it does not lead to the same depth of understanding. Granted, not all subjects and cases benefit the same from deeper understanding and it is impossible to get into depth with everything. So this is a trade-off in each case to decide how much one may want to go in, and it is great that we also now have this option to not go in the same depth. But imo one should be mindful about it, and make conscious decisions on how they use LLMs in case where they may think that understanding a subject more is also important.

There are still ways that LLMs can be used in that case, eg having them review your code, suggest alternatives to your code, eg more idiomatic ways to do sth, when you delve into sth new etc, and treat their output critically of course, but actually writing one's code is important for some kinds of understanding.

> In one case it acts as a tutor

This can be very useful when you are learning programming.

You don't always have a tutor available and you shouldn't only rely on tutors.

It might be useful when you start learning a new programming language/framework, but you should learn on how to articulate a problem and search for solutions, e.g. going through stackoverflow posts and identify if the post applies and solves your problem.

After a while (took way too long for me) you realize that the best way to solve problems is by looking up the documentation/manpage of a project/programming language/whatever and really try to understand the problem at its core.

I wonder how much even this approach would help. I would liken it to studying past exam papers with the solutions on hand. My experience is you actually have to solve the problems yourself to actually properly absorb the concepts, rather than just copy them into your short term memory for a short while.

Ai will make experts more effective and remove most people who are going to grow into experts.

Basically most people will be idiots, except for the mental exercise type people who like using their mental muscles.

So education will stop being a way to move up in life.

I agree - the truly curious will be rewarded while those who couldn’t care less will mindlessly copy and paste. Maybe that will give the rest of us job security?

It's just Google (web search) v2, if you are able to input the right terms and interpret the results critically you'll be accelerated. If not, you're just another mark.

I wasn't unemployable as a graduate, I found a job after all. But I was near enough useless and started from the ground up.

I've always felt my real education in software engineering started at work.

20 odd years later I lead a large engineering team and see the same with a lot of graduates we hire. There's a few exceptions but most are as clueless as I was at that age.

The "no devices in school" rule has been tried, scientifically tested, and it doesn't really improve outcomes: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

The real damage is in the brains and attention spans, traditional school just can't compete with the massive dopamine overstimulus of System A thinking students get every day for an average of 6-8h outside school, by simply requiring focused System B reasoning on tiresome and (comparatively) dull tasks while enforcing dopamine withdrawal.

Well, I see an e-bike analogy around the corner. People dont want to invest the energy anmore, now that they can buy expensive batteries to help with the pedaling. That is pretty much the human nature.

They were, but that vision was killed as soon as the phrase you quote was spoken.

LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly. Anyone can just go to chatgpt.com or claude.ai to access a tool that will understand their problem, no matter how clumsily formulated, and solve it, or teach them how to solve it, or otherwise address it in a useful fashion. That's pure and quite general force multiplier.

But don't you worry, plenty of corporations and countless startups are hard at work to, like with all computing before, strip down the bicycle and offer you Uber and theme park rides for your mind.

Full self driving Teslas for the mind

We have robots do physical chores for us: washing machine, robo-vac etc, so why can't we have robots that do mental chores for us? For most of us, our jobs aren't a pleasure, but a chore necessary to earn money to pay rent. How many factory workers do you think enjoy bolting the same car parts to a car over and over again till retirement?

So if I can outsource the mundane, annoying and repetitive parts of SW development (like typing the coding) to a machine, so that I can focus on the parts I enjoy (debugging, requirements gathering, customer interaction, architecture etc), what's wrong with that?

If the end product is good and fulfills the customers needs who cares if a large part of it was written by a machine and not by a human?

I also wish we can go back to the days we were coding in assembly in stead of say JavaScript, but that's not gonna happen professionally for 99% of jobs, you either use JS to ship quickly or get run over by the companies who use JS while you write assembly. ML assisted coding will be the next step.

> but increasingly we want them to think for us

Which is understandable. All societies are constrained by lack of experts / intelligence. Think about how relatively inaccessible healthcare is, even in rich countries.

Unfortunately, they got batteries for greater mobility and are now more like e-bikes for the mind.

Personally I always ask for lecture/presentation slides - it's common practice in computing and related fields. Technical conferences (be they industry-focused like Nvidia GTC or more research-focused like Usenix ATC) routinely provide presentation slides and recordings. Both are extremely valuable.

I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)

Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.

A professor's lecture notes would never be good notes for a student to learn from. They are simply reminders to the professor to talk about certain topics that they know the ins and outs of.

Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.

I’d post that straight lecture is a crap way to teach/learn. And the large auditorium classes that are common at most state Us are fundamentally broken. Interactive discussion is probably much better for most students.

I loved it when lecturers made the PowerPoint slides available before the lecture, as it meant I could read the slides ahead of time and thus keep up in the lecture. It made it easier to take meaningful notes.

I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.

> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.

Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room.

The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts.

In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty.

The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures.

Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable.

Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.

It is not interactive because the professor has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter and thoughts, ideas and suggestions of the students are an order of magnitude less of less value than that of the professors.

Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.

Agreed, when I was at uni a few years ago, having the lecture slides was a handy reference EVEN when I wrote my own notes during lectures.

One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.

Yeah I don't get that statement at all. How can a professor not just post their slides on their website? What exactly is so special about their slides?

I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes.

in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.

In my experience it’s one or the other: attend all the lecturers and nullify the need to study more than that attendance and some specific exam revision if they drop hints or don’t attend but do the readings. I think a lot of being a successful student is cutting through all the duplicative work that gets thrown your way.

Not just YouTube. MIT has an open course system that is available to anyone, for free, from actually employed MIT professors, lecturing real courses [1]. I went to a state university that basically copied Pearson slides and books into a course with minimal adjustments.

Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples.

And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.

[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/

Not to mention that there are now also LLM’s to help you understand difficult topics!

>But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.

From experience on the professor's side, the problem isn't the brilliant students who show up to one class and ace the exam like everyone in here seems to have been. The problem is the students who miss most lectures and get 50% or lower because they (and, increasingly, most students these days) don't actually understand how to study from a textbook.

Agreed. Having time and a mental health status where one can relax and peacefully read a whole book is a luxury. Having a job where you can apply any knowledge from your studies is a luxury too. Having space in your life to care about knowledge and learning for its own sake is a luxury

I didn't enjoy my studies because it was so stressful and i had to optimise for exams. I had no choice but to cut corners where i could. I was also forced to do many classes that i didnt really care about.

Though i have the feeling i can't begin to imagine the life of these people that are addicted to their phone, they kind of feel like a different species to me

> I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.

This was definitely the case for me.

However, it always left me with the idea of “then why did I study?”. To get a job, of course, but in retrospect a better path might’ve been to work and then study at a later phase in life.

For a take-home exam or assignment, I’m sure this is the case.

The hardest course I took at uni had a final oral exam and weekly homework assignment. Your final grade would be the average of all the homework assignments, but the final oral exam decided if you passed (with previous mentioned grade) or failed.

I thought that was a great way to do it, you can cheat your way through the course but in the end you’ll fail the oral exam. However, it was more subjective.

Totally agree. Unless the use of the computer is integral to the material at hand (learning to program, learning to solve problems numerically, modeling) it is superfluous. Tons of dough spent on making it "modern" just for the sake of it.

> Obviously not for classes like CS

Why is this obvious? Unless you’re talking CS = Programming a specific language, I think it’d be better for the K-12 version of CS to be completely analog save for maybe a “lab” for students in later years of high school.

It's fiction, but the NEAL Stephenson novel Anathem explored this idea.

> outright banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit

I think it should be fine to outright ban them in certain contexts, like classroom learning; just as they are outright banned (usually) in theaters or playhouses or places of worship.

And to cite your example, even in the most liberal jurisdictions I think it's not acceptable for students to take drugs in the classroom. Phones are basically the same thing.

"We need to explain..."

From my own experience and that of fellow parents that I talked to, explanations will be dismissed outright by the all-knowing teenagers, and any attempt to have a rational conversation on the topic will fail. Just like any addict, kids will deny that they are addicted. I had to act once the smartphone addiction reached a disaster level. What worked the best for me was "no you cannot bring your phone to school or use it before the homework is done, that's my decision and I don't have to provide you with any explanation." Did this generate some resentment and a few tantrums? You bet, but I got the result I wanted, peace of mind and homework done on time. I disagree with you.

> If history has taught us anything, outright banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit.

They may be 'forbidden fruit', but does that means that it would lead to more use of them?

Do you think people drank more in 2020 or 1920 during prohibition?

Do you think people smoked more weed in 2025 or, say, 1985 when it was less legal?

Do you think there is more gambling in 2025, or in 1925 when the laws banning it were still fresh?

I think you'll reach the conclusion that outright banning does in fact reduce the usage of the vice.

OP didn't say ban. They said restrict. Moderation is what's needed here.

> It really feels the same as weed/nicotine/alcohol/sex/other vices ... banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit.

How many 10 years old smoke weed, have sex, and drink alcohol ?

10 years old spending hours per days on their phone on the other hand...

There was no mention of an outright ban, merely restrictions on use. Much as we have restrictions on where and when one can indulge in weed, nicotine, alcohol, and so forth.

Are laptops also banned?

Yeah. I was coming here to state this. It is working.

It's surprising that this isn't done everywhere.

Note, kids from year 4 (9 years old) in many parts of Australia do have a Chromebook.

For what goal? Just for them to get instantly addicted once the ban is lifted? For them to lack any communications with their friends and to be excluded from their social circles discussing the newest tiktoks or whatever?

I think you chose well

It should be enforced by the schools: put the phones in a tub in home group and hand them back out at the end of the day. If there’s an emergency call the office or the office calls you. Use exercise books for note taking, etc.

Lead by example, and show there is much fun to be had away from phones etc.

I make sure that my daughter (6) sees me writing in my notebook, reading, making things etc. More often than not, she then wants to join in.

I will hold out giving her a smartphone as long as possible, and up until she has one, I will try and show her all the other fun things.

The "social pariah" thing is FUD. It's just people repeating what other people claim to be afraid of, and then becoming afraid of it themselves. Kids can be shitty--if they want to exclude someone or bully them, they're going to do it whether or not the victim has a cell phone. Conversely, if people will only be friends with you if you have a cell phone, then I have some bad news for you: They're probably not genuine friends.

It depends on the model, some universities are easy to get in but have weed-out classes, some are hard to get in but comparatively easy to finish, and some are both hard to get in and hard to finish.

Discrete maths back in my days was one of those almost universal weed-out classes which got rid of people with limited abstract thinking ability who weren't willing or able to get over that with hard work. Very heavy correlation between how well you did in that class and core CS subjects.

In my EU country, lots of first year students are kind of lost and are picking their major more or less at random (or very unprepared). Very low passing rates in first year are very common. It gets better in 3rd year and after.

Unfortunately, my uni was free admission, so the first year helps filter out unprepared students.

I might suffer from a bias, but what I did was study to pass the test. I don't expect everyone to pass every exam as I don't expect everyone to get a degree. Universities need to be hard if they want to keep their reputation and not be outlived by online courses on YouTube. A degree, more than a certificate that the student attended some classes, should prove that a person is capable of thinking, studying and doing hard work.

The top marginal tax rate was 91% from 1945-1963. It was still 70% up until 1981.

> Free revenue for universities.

Many years ago when I went to university my state created a fund to pay a certain portion of a student's credit hours. This was implemented in my second or third year from what I remember. I noticed that my direct out of pocket cost (or really how large the loan I took out was) never went down from before this program and after. The university was pretty flush with funding though.

> When you convince employers to require degrees for middle class wages, this is what you get.

Yes, that.

Also how did this happen?

And also, middle-school (high-school? what is it called on the US?) children are supposed to be able to read a small text and understand it too. This is one of those things everybody should be able to do, and employers have good reasons to require.

Goes kind of deeper than that though.

How is a college realistically supposed to reject a guy with a clearly qualifying 28 or 29 on the ACT? You're going to have to give a helluv-an explanation for that, because I can guarantee, you do that to too many kids and the politicians are gonna come after you.

The problem is enormous. That kids can pass these entrance exams without being truly literate is what makes this issue so intractable.

To me, the only politically and socially acceptable option is to fail them in their college coursework. We don't do that though. Most students live by the "curve".

> trade school, while potentially viable for a single person to fix their own situation, is not the answer to the overall problem at a societal level

Isn't it? Isn't being realistic about your skills in relation to the rest of the world in the current time and place (as opposed to some idealistic past that may or may not have ever existed) a way to "fix this" at a societal level?

Whether or not it's easy or even possible to live a middle-class without starting a business or getting a college degree is irrelevant to whether or not we should be giving college degrees to people who submit this as an answer to a final exam:

> > With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives [sic] we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase [sic] life is short and you never gonna [sic] know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause [sic] sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

>Most parents either are not interested or don’t have the time and resources to provide the at home educational support kids need. Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers).

My central question is what are other countries doing that we aren't? Because other countries aren't seeing such a dire and systematic drop in student's academic ability. Germany being the most notable for how it directs its resources, even though its a fairly rigid in many respects.

I don't get the sense that parents in Europe are overwhelmingly more involved in the schools either, but I have limited purview into that specifically, having only had the pleasure of meeting europeans of different backgrounds (UK, Sweden, Germany most specifically) via work, its a limited subset of understanding, however most of the folks I've worked with who grew up in any of these European countries really seemed to believe in hands off parenting even more so, and experienced it often in kind.

I have one theory, which is that education is highly politicized in the US in a way that perhaps its not in other western countries. This has been happening since the 1960s but it really accelerated in the last 30 years or so.

>Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid

One could make the argument that they can't even do anything. They exist at this point mostly because if they didn't, we'd have packs of naked feral 10 year olds roaming the streets and butchering any human they found for cannibalism. Have you ever seen a reddit thread where someone randomly thanks the gods because the kids finally school age and they can stop spending $40,000/year (or more) on daycare?

But, I think, in the coming decades all these problems will evaporate like some nightmare that fades away upon waking... public schools will continue to close at ever-increasing rates as our population rapidly ages.

If you ask peolle whether they're stressed of course they say they are. But they are objectively living in less stressful times than parents in the years in which young men were sent off to die in the trenches, but their younger siblings and young children still got better educations than kids are getting today. So maybe self-reported parental stress isn't actually the issue. Maybe we need to accept the issue is low standards at every level of education and teachers being unwilling to teach basic grammar, spelling, arithmetic, etc. because they are seen as "old fashioned"?

>When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.

I you even know how often I've heard students complain about "having my A taken away from me". It's insane, but it's also what to expect from a society just like you described who has been told that the point of school is to get good grades.

Now, a lot of students here are discovering that minmaxing to get a high GPA in a degree like compsci lands them firmly in jobless land if they failed to use those 4 years in an environment of learning to actually learn things. Doesn't even have to be from courses, things like student groups and competitions, research opportunities, etc.

Employers don't really want people whose sole interest is to do nothing and be rewarded for it.

Maybe I’m biased because I grew up in a family where my dad at one point was a musician and my siblings and I all pursued competitive careers at one point in our lives (academia, acting, business, music, sports), but I don’t know if Americans in general are averse to competition. In fact, I’d say Americans love competition. Americans generally love sports, for example.

I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”

I wonder if, as inequality increases and the social safety net disappears in the USA, this will change. My parents told me “do what you love, as long as you work hard you’ll succeed and be fine.” I did what I loved (the arts), worked my ass off and succeeded, and wasn’t fine. Thank god I learned to code in the 20-teens, when competition was lower.

I most certainly will transmitting a different set of values to my kids. Not going to go full straight A’s psychopath because I’ve seen what that’s done to some peers, but unless I win the lottery my kids will not be being told to just “do what they love” (unless they happen to love applied math lol)

Who do you think worked harder in high school?

A) the median university student in the USA?

B) the median university student in China?

Hint: in China, university admissions is based in large part on students's performance on the 高考, a national entrance exam, taken at the end of high school.

Of you summarize yourself what the professor said and write it by hand there are more chances you will remember it.

Same. My professors did this because they wanted you to not be spending your time and energy writing notes during class but instead following the lesson and asking questions.

But why wouldn't you just give them the slides? Isn't it the students problem if there is stuff missing?

My psych professor twenty years ago gave out the slides with strategic blanks in them, that way you didn't have to write the whole thing down, but you did need to listen at least to the point where you could fill in the missing bits.

> you end up with lossy notes

Notes are definitionally lossy. If they weren't lossy, they'd be a transcript.

The act of compressing a lecture into notes helps students learn. Merely transcribing does not imply understanding.

I was in school (2011-2016) and almost all professors had a wiki or moodle where we could find all their slides and documents.

I noticed that the rare few professors who didn't upload their powerpoints, were mostly the ones who would just recite the content of their slides in class (almost) word-for-word.

You're not wrong. Another part of the problem is that industry itself is rampantly anti-intellectual in many ways. I can't tell you how much of an uphill battle it can be to get coworkers to even acknowledge a useful idea from academia or read papers, even at good companies.

Hell, the "industry languages" are just now more broadly adopting good language design ideas that have been around in academic contexts for decades.

I'm not sure how to do it, but we really need a return to a society in which intellectual curiosity and sophisticated debate are viewed as worthwhile—our incessant desire to just maximize profit as quickly as possible over anything else and the sharp division between "the intellectual domain" of academy and "the real world" of industry needs to blur and evaporate.

Back when I was a product manager in the late 80s and 90s, I had a ton of meetings where I would often have to walk to a different building and sit through an hour of meeting with no laptop/connectivity even if only 20% was relevant. You really couldn’t multitask.

If a visit from a Ivy League school is the difference from submitting a App or not, that's not really the schools problem.

Elite in the economic sense. Places like Harvard are anti-progressive and serve to gate keep opportunity and wealth.

Based on the intro of the article, the university where this professor works is likely below median. Each year the typical student at his/her university is worse because the best students go to better schools