Re:We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)
by PaulHoule on Sunday April 02, 2017 @09:56AM
(#14017175)
As somebody who got a PhD from Cornell I've found that the opinions people have about the classes at Cornell are across the board.
I was involved in teaching introductory physics classes and I was proud of what we did. If you took a class oriented towards engineers you'd wind up with lectures in a big class with absolutely great demonstrations (we had a full time guy to maintain the hardware) and a large amount of material and support available so that a new prof could take it over pretty easily. Usually you'd get an experienced prof who was pretty good at it and maybe even a Nobel Prize winner to boot. On top of that you had sessions of maybe 20 students led by a young graduate student, a lab class, etc. Lots of office hours and the prof and grad students are very accessible.
We also had a (rare) autotutorial class aimed at premeds that works people very hard, forcing them to take each test multiple times until they get a passing score. Students who take this class do very well on the physics section on the MCAT. In particular, many students struggle silently through a conventional physics class and end up passing with a D or a C and have little mastery of the subject. The autotutorial class will kick the same students in the butt, make them work very hard, and they often end up with a B+ and a pretty good grasp of the subject. I've seen students from "disadvantaged" backgrounds struggle with the course but ultimately succeed in a way that they would not have in a conventional course.
A friend of mine got a PhD in computer science at Cornell and he teaches now at a Jesuit college and he was not so happy with the state of undergraduate education. I told him that I liked Jon Kleinberg's new algorithm book and that I thought he was taking undergraduate education seriously and my friend seemed skeptical of that.
I was involved in teaching introductory physics classes and I was proud of what we did. If you took a class oriented towards engineers you'd wind up with lectures in a big class with absolutely great demonstrations (we had a full time guy to maintain the hardware) and a large amount of material and support available so that a new prof could take it over pretty easily. Usually you'd get an experienced prof who was pretty good at it and maybe even a Nobel Prize winner to boot. On top of that you had sessions of maybe 20 students led by a young graduate student, a lab class, etc. Lots of office hours and the prof and grad students are very accessible.
We also had a (rare) autotutorial class aimed at premeds that works people very hard, forcing them to take each test multiple times until they get a passing score. Students who take this class do very well on the physics section on the MCAT. In particular, many students struggle silently through a conventional physics class and end up passing with a D or a C and have little mastery of the subject. The autotutorial class will kick the same students in the butt, make them work very hard, and they often end up with a B+ and a pretty good grasp of the subject. I've seen students from "disadvantaged" backgrounds struggle with the course but ultimately succeed in a way that they would not have in a conventional course.
A friend of mine got a PhD in computer science at Cornell and he teaches now at a Jesuit college and he was not so happy with the state of undergraduate education. I told him that I liked Jon Kleinberg's new algorithm book and that I thought he was taking undergraduate education seriously and my friend seemed skeptical of that.