What Scala?

[Walter Bright]

dsimcha wrote:
> == Quote from Walter Bright (newshound1 at digitalmars.com)'s article
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> If there's one thing my
>>> school experience taught me, it's that teachers are only interested in
>>> focusing on the low-to-mid-range students.
>> That wasn't my college experience at all (Caltech). I was a
>> low-to-mid-range student there
> 
> ...Which kind of proves the point that the way knowledge/learning in college is
> measured is pretty flawed in that it doesn't predict who will be successful
> afterword.  I just finished undergrad a couple years ago and I feel that the kinds
> of multiple choice exams you get in huge lecture-based classes are good at testing
> rote memorization and superficial understanding and the ability to get inside the
> professor's head, where as what's important is the ability to take your knowledge
> and apply it to something useful or use it to create more knowledge.


Multiple choice exams were against the rules at Caltech (even though we 
did have a few huge lecture-based classes).

I'll still hold forth, however, that you're going to get out of it what 
you are willing to put into it. If you're only going to target getting a 
degree, I wouldn't hire you. If you are in college to get the most out 
of the experience (and there are huge opportunities for that in 
college), your results will be far better.

90% of the classes I took I selected because they interested me and I 
thought they were important. I made sure I understood front to back 
every single homework problem, and every exam problem I got wrong. I 
also paid for most of it out of a part time and summer job, and I'm sure 
that paying the tuition bills influenced my attitude as well <g>. I 
wanted my money's worth.

Another factor was the attitude that Caltech had towards its students. 
It treated them like adults. I had never experienced that before. 
Caltech does not proctor exams, does not have curfews, does not attempt 
to control what goes on in the dorms, professors are not allowed to take 
attendance, etc. Most of the students quickly responded to that and 
behaved like responsible adults.

And then we had great events like Carl Sagan coming to dinner at our 
dorm, guest lectures from folks like Richard Feynmann, and the people 
running the JPL probes, etc. If all you got out of all that was a 
degree, too bad, so sad <g>.