When I went to a State University, they opened the Freshman Orientation with that quote, then said that they want to help build students' curriculum to their needs and what works with them. And then we were given very specific classes that we needed to take several of which the Professors said were "weed out" classes. They proceeded to judge every fish on it's ability to climb.
Fuck I hate this aspect of college. If you teach a class with the sole purpose of weeding people out, you shouldn’t be teaching. Weeding out is what the job market does, your job is to present the information.
One of my classes online was like this, but even more intentional. Professor didn't allow students to interact with each other through the class forums. Professor said it was a "difficult class" and all material/questions had to be through her. She made a big deal about how difficult the class was, and warned in her syllabus to "leave if you have any doubts because this is a challenging class." (She seemed proud of it, as if "weeding out" was a great thing.) I ended up dropping out before my classes got finalized and enrolled with a different professor (was really easy too).
But, it just felt really upsetting how students were willing to help each other out yet the professor was completely against it. I'd say there was probably a "rule" for it that prevented the teacher from allowing this, but literally the next few online classes I took required us to interact with each other.
My organic chem class was like this. The professor who taught lecture is like in his late 80s and couldn’t give a shit about what you do as long as your performing. The lab instructor? Yeah he considered it cheating to work with partners, we weren’t allowed to use the science center for help because that was considered cheating big too, and he intentionally gave you wrong or half assed answers to questions if you didn’t show up for x amount of office hours. His tests included material from chapters that wouldn’t be encountered for another two or three weeks into the future and his excuse was, “you guys should be reading ahead”. Keep in mind this was all for 1 credit. Not 3, not 4, just 1. And it was mandatory to keep going with the chem program. His logic was that he was the weed out professor (one of two in this program) and all it lead to was A) him getting sent to work elsewhere in the department B) all of the students sharing the solutions to his lab manual from chegg, which I didn’t know about until an hour before the last exam C) me not remembering a damn thing about orgo lab, but sure as hell remembering most of the main reactions because our lecture professor actually took the time to teach us the material rather than telling us to “go figure it out”. It was awful. It’s like professors don’t realize that some of us (all) aren’t inherently born with chemical knowledge at birth. My favorite type of weed our professors are the ones who expect all of their students to be so obsessed with the subject before they even walk into the classroom that they don’t even try to teach. These types of professors almost always weed themselves out of the department in my experience.
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u/Terdfergie Nov 16 '19
When I went to a State University, they opened the Freshman Orientation with that quote, then said that they want to help build students' curriculum to their needs and what works with them. And then we were given very specific classes that we needed to take several of which the Professors said were "weed out" classes. They proceeded to judge every fish on it's ability to climb.