- #71
twofish-quant
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FYI the guy that invented the term meritocracy...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
twofish-quant said:It's not stupidity, just a certain type of teaching that I think works well. I've found that students in other schools get really offended if the prof puts things on the test that weren't directly covered in class, but this happens less (i.e. students getting offended) at MIT.
All of the tests for the physics courses at MIT are online so that you can see how the teaching works.
flyingpig said:Only the lectures, the recitations videos are a bit unorganized
HeLiXe said:Yeah I have to agree. I would use it more often if it were better organised.
That's how college exams work in many countries anyhow. E.g. In the UK an A corresponds to a mark of 70% and someone ever getting close to 100% is exceedingly rare in an individual exam, let alone consistently, would say the average is usually around 60%. Everything's still based on the syllabus/what's taught, but some questions will typically be extensions or generalisations of things taught on the course and there isn't much time, making it very difficult to complete everything perfectly.thegreenlaser said:^I have to agree with that kind of idea and I wish my school had a testing policy more like this. I wish that studying for tests didn't involve blindly memorizing formulas/theorems. I understand that they want to see if people have learned the bare minimum, but I would love a few questions that were truly challenging, and not just regurgitation of class exercises. Questions where you have figure out how you can use what you know to solve a problem you've never seen anything close to before. Sure, grades might hurt a little and people would complain endlessly about how unfair the whole thing is, but I think if you're throwing the same thing at everyone, it's not unfair in the slightest. Not to mention it would develop skills that are actually useful in a real-world problem solving environment.
twofish-quant said:Also part of the reason I talk a lot about MIT is that OCW provides the skeleton for the MIT curriculum, but it's important to provide the muscle. One thing that MIT tries to do that is interesting is that at most schools, if you learned everything the teacher taught you, the teacher has succeeded. Part of the MIT philosophy is that if you learned everything that the teacher has taught you then the teacher has *FAILED*, because the point of MIT is to teach people to go beyond what they were taught, and to come up with new ideas and insights that were not taught in class. You are supposed to come up with new and original stuff, and if you just can repeat what you were taught, that's not acceptable.
You can sort of see how this deep ideology fits in with testing policy.
viscousflow said:Also I've heard of perfect A students speaking of a pressure vector. High grades doesn't mean you know everything, it just means you know how to pass a test expertly.
lsaldana said:Well said, I know many students like this. Just working for the high grade but have no general knowledge of what went on in class all semester.
Vanadium 50 said:I think you are lumping "industry" into too big a category. Maybe GPA and coursework doesn't matter in finance, but it is commonplace for these to be important considerations in entry-level engineering hires.