D in the ix magazine about "programming today"

[Nick Sabalausky]

"retard" <re at tard.com.invalid> wrote in message 
news:hhg67l$1ljq$2 at digitalmars.com...
> Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:13:07 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
>> "Sean Kelly" <sean at invisibleduck.org> wrote in message
>> news:hhetss$26er$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>
>>> Intro courses in the sciences are often intended to weed out the people
>>
>> There's a *lot* of things wrong with the way schools work. Deliberate
>> "weeding out" is a clear red flag that a school cares more about their
>> own statistics (graduation ratio, etc)
>
> In fact many schools have made the courses much easier nowadays to get
> better statistics. The graduation ratio doesn't matter that much if it's
> a public school - they get funding based on the amount of people who have
> graduated. I think this model is much more common in Europe, at least.

It all depends on things like what metric they're going for and how they 
expect things to work, but it almost always (if not always) boils down to 
being insincere or otherwise disrespectful to the students. A few examples:

1. Public colleges these days, at least in the US, want money, and thus 
overbook and accept beyond their capacity (ex, when I was at BGSU, they 
required all non-commuting freshman and sophomores to live in the 
dorms...but they brought in more than they had room for and stuck the 
"extras" in dorm lounge areas. And, of course, they charged them full 
room+board and didn't relax the must-be-in-a-dorm requirement, because "all 
our students live in a dorm for two years" is one of the things they like to 
brag about - so yea, their ability to boast definitely outweighs basic 
respect and living conditions for their own students.)

This large number of students means low entrance criteria (which I don't 
necessarily have a problem with, but it depends on *what* the criteria is, 
and the criteria used I often disagree with), and thus a high percentage of 
students who don't have the slightest clue what they want to pursue. So, if 
they weed out students in introductory classes, they hope that those 
students (who are likely to be "undecided" majors anyway), will be pushed 
towards the areas they can sail through the easiest (not necessarily what 
they would actually like the most or be best served by), which maximizes the 
throughput of their revolving-doors. Of course other things are used to 
lubricate the revolving-doors too, for instance, extra credit and various 
other forms of grade-inflation.

2. For "Ivy League", one of their primary goals is to maintain their 
"Cadillac" status (and the astronomical tuition they can demand as a result 
of that), so they don't want to "waste" any resources on students who aren't 
guaranteed to sail through advanced material without the instructor having 
to exhibit any higher-than-average teaching ability or effort (note also, 
that they take much of their bragging rights from their research, and a 
professor who's good at research may or may not be any good at teaching). So 
for these schools, their bottom-line is, again, best served by as much 
"weeding-out" as possible (ideally, anyone who doesn't already know the 
material inside and out).

3. For a school that doesn't grossly overbook sardines (or at least doesn't 
get enormous amounts of "undecided" majors), but also doesn't have "Ivy 
League"-ish status, their revolving doors get greased by not doing any 
weeding and hijacking quality by making grades and credits as easy to obtain 
as possible.