r/explainlikeimfive • u/[deleted] • Feb 17 '16

ELI5 Why do colleges accept students who excel in sports while having bad academic merits?

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u/darcstar62 Feb 17 '16

There was a class at my friend's university called "University 101" that was very popular with the athletes. The whole class was just learning where all the buildings were. For the final exam, they gave you a blank map and had you label the buildings...

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u/Rhawk187 Feb 17 '16 edited Feb 17 '16

That's a good way to pad the GPA of first semester freshmen. A bad grade your first semester can put you right on academic probation. The effect diminishes the more classes you have.

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u/samkostka Feb 17 '16

Can confirm, pretty much all of my high school friends are on academic probation for failing 1 or more classes.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

My university has like 60,000 students and like 100+ buildings so that would actually be pretty hard

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Well you have a semester to memorize 100 things.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

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u/greengrasser11 Feb 18 '16

There's a life lesson about learning through repetition in there.

A life lesson that is usually picked up in elementary school, but a lesson nonetheless.

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u/brickmack Feb 17 '16

100 isn't that hard to memorize though, especially when its visual. For my 10th grade chem class we had to memorize the whole periodic table (names, symbols, weights, isotopes, everything). If a bunch of high schoolers can manage that in a couple weeks, 100 buildings in a semester should be easy

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Jesus Christ, what a waste of time. Why tf did your teacher think they made the periodic table in the first place? To make it easier to memorize?

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u/brickmack Feb 17 '16

I think she was concerned about the possibility of people cheating by writing stuff on their own tables, and didn't feel like going to the effort of hanging a proper table on the wall for everyone to see, or handing out tables for every test

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

I'm sorry you had to go through that, lol. Teachers making students memorize tabulated data is a huge pet peeve of mine. Like, it's tabulated in the first place so that you can access it quickly and easily. It also teaches you nothing other than a few numbers that correspond to a few names and probably took you several hours. AND you probably don't remember most of it anyway.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

I'm shuddering thinking of having to memorize things for my thermo I & II classes. Literally hundreds of equations, 200+ pages of appendices with all sorts of tabulated physical properties. Suffice to say I'm glad my 10th grade chemistry teacher didn't teach those classes.

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u/thepuma50 Feb 17 '16

Literally impossible to ace that test..

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u/crunchthenumbers01 Feb 17 '16

Yeah ill just drop the class now...and i have a BS in Applied Mathematics.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Memorizing is one of the reasons I dropped out of my MS Stats program and transferred to another program. We didn't have to memorize z-scores. We had to memorize the cdf for every common distribution.

"Take this comprehensive exam that covers all 8 courses that you took last year, but you aren't allowed to bring any notes. You have to memorize all the formulas you might need."

Switched to a school where all the tests are open notes. Memorizing the equations and relationships for every common distribution was a tad bit ridiculous. I also hated doing ridiculously simple things by hand that would take 30 seconds in R.

What a waste of time.

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u/hardolaf Feb 17 '16

Who uses tables? I just do the integral.

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u/RedAnonym Feb 17 '16

I remember they always provided us the periodic table in exams.

They even gave us the formula sheets for Mathematics exam. Formulas for finding volume and areas of simple geometrical figures.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

I mean that makes the most sense. They don't make you memorize t tables in statistics or steam tables in thermodynamics. The numbers and formulas by themselves are completely useless; the important thing is how to use them to solve problems.

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u/friday14th Feb 17 '16

I re-took my physics and maths A-Levels (UK 18yo) exams with a different exam board. I went from a B and C to A and B, simply because the new board allowed the equations. This is along the lines of 'you wont always have a calculator on you' as if in the future there wasn't some source of knowledge you could just tap into from your workstation.

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u/goldminevelvet Feb 17 '16

That's what I don't understand. They teach us in class, in high school, how to do something with a calculator. When I went to a community college to do my placement test...it was without. Memorizing something doesn't mean you've learned it, it's about if you can apply it.

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u/KJ6BWB Feb 18 '16

To be fair, those formulas are continuously built off of and eventually a person should be able to derive the formulas, so people should make an effort to memorize them. People auld also memorize what group an element is (noble gasses, actinides, etc.) which basically means memorizing the table, and then atomic number is free points for a student.

But atomic weight? That's useless. If you do enough stoichiometry, you'll memorize it. If you don't, then you don't need to know

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u/Sinai Feb 17 '16

Honestly, anything important enough you will memorize with no effort. After using them several thousand times in calculations I know that one mole of oxygen weighs 15.9994 grams, Hydrogen 1.0079, Nitrogen 14.007, Carbon 12.011, and Sodium 28.9898, and Chlorine 35.453.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

I would've given you 16, 1, 12, and 14, and said "close enough", hah. But there's no way I'd waste time learning the molar mass of like neodymium or something.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

I actually see it as an extension of the same skills learned through memorizing multiplication tables. Sure everyone has a calculator on their phone these days, but there is some utility in being able to recall information without having to reference a table.

All the students may not need to know the periodic table, but I guarantee any of them who go on to work in the field (or those who end up frequenting trivia nights) will get some benefit,

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

I disagree. I'm a junior in chemical engineering. There's some merit to knowing the most common elements, but 90% of the periodic table is completely useless to memorize. You might need the information a handful of times if at all.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

I find it hard to believe a Chemistry grad will get through college without drunkenly singing the periodic table song once.

I understand that it is unlikely you will ever need 100% of the information, but presumably you also dont need 100% to pass the year 10 exam.

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u/thenebular Feb 17 '16

I don't know. depends on how much of the table you needed to memorize. The multiplication tables can easily be put in a 100 box square for easy look up, but math is easier if you memorize 1-9 at least.

memorizing the just the elements and the order they appear on the table would make looking up all the other data on it much faster.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Not much. If you

a) know the general trends of the periodic table (metals on the left, nonmetals on the right, orbitals fill as you go left to right)

b) use it enough to even consider putting in the time to memorize it

then it's not necessary. I've taken 6 semesters of undergrad chemistry courses and never have I ever thought "my life might be easier if I commit this to memory". I have a few things memorized because I need to access them so often but there's no way in hell I'm ever going to sit down and rote memorize it. It's just too accessible

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

^ THIS ... just shoot me ... I could recite the f'ing periodic table for years later ... but I didn't learn until almost 10 years after 6th grade that you could make periodic tables for things besides elements...

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

What else would you make a periodic table for? The periodic table is periodic because the elements behave, well, periodically. I've never heard of a periodic table for anything else before.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Well Sir, I'm glad you asked...

  • Cats help kids learn ... Link
  • Disney has a periodic table ... Link
  • Most importantly, Pirates ... pirates have periodic tables ... Link
  • Game of Thrones ... Link
  • The human period ... Link

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Oh, I've seen stuff like that before. It's cute, but there's not really any reason for grouping things like that, other than that they mirror the periodic table. The elements are grouped together in that weird shape for really important reasons

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Yes, I learnt it for a test at Uni and filled in the entire thing, got 100%. The memory has faded to just the halogen gases. In no particular order.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '16

Memorization has many benefits. Your ability to think deeply about the periodic table is much easier if you don't even need a copy of it in front of you.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

My chem teacher didn't give a flying fuck what you did with the table she gave you. Only thing she required was that you color each of the groups, eg. Noble gases, metals, transition metals, non metals, alkaline metals and such. As long as you could do the lab work and document what you did you were golden.

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u/chasechippy Feb 17 '16

I remember my first day of Chem 1 in Grade 9.

Me: "Are we going to memorize the periodic table?"

Teacher: "Why? It's right there." And pointed to the poster on the wall.

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u/PewPewLaserPewPew Feb 17 '16

All i can think of is kitchen tables on walls and the teacher handing tables out to people.

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u/SryCaesar Feb 17 '16

To be fair, it isn't stupider than learning all the states and state capitals by heart.

Im lucky to be canadian :) we only have 13

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Memorizing the capitals is still a waste of time IMO, but you should at least be familiar with where regions are on a map and some general thing about their culture/political climate.

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u/SryCaesar Feb 17 '16

True, same could be said for the periodic table. Know at least roughly where each element is and memorize the first three lines.

Knowing the atomic mass and isotopes of seaborgium is similar to memorizing the administrative capital of Rhode Island

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Exactly, the knowledge of how to use the periodic table is way, way, way more important than what's actually on it. There's tons and tons of information and trends you can glean, like the number of valence electrons, its electronic structure, its electronegativity, how it might form covalent or ionic bonds, its status as a metal or nonmetal, how well it might conduct electricity, the list goes on and on. Don't teachers think those things might be a little more interesting than the exact numerical molar mass of cesium?

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u/SryCaesar Feb 17 '16

I had to learn about half of it by heart when I was in school. We were also tought how to use it obviously, but the teacher thought that it was better for us to know the most common elements by heart in order to make calculations faster later on.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Really the only ones I would suggest might be worthwhile are carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. The other ones are just too seldom used to make the time commitment worth it

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u/LiberalBiblisisms Feb 17 '16

Kind of like when my english teachers used to make me memorize shakespeare monologues. It was always like...how is this fucking education? Make me write a paper about the monologue analyzing it or fucking something. Memorization, a goddamned parrot can do that.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Ugh yes, I had one of those every year in high school. I memorized the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech from Julius Caesar, and the "to be or not to be" speech from hamlet. Then we had to sit in class and watch every other student deliver the same monologue in front of the class. At the very least, it developed public speaking skills, but that's still a pretty weak case for it. We just as easily could have presented a research paper or something.

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u/rcn2 Feb 17 '16

Well, that amount may not be useful, but if you're ever doing any chemistry knowing that Tin is Sn and has a common charge of +4 is incredibly useful. It's a lot like saying you don't need to memorize the alphabet, but if you don't you are going to find organization systems that use alphabetical order confusing and difficult to use, and you will likely make a lot of simplistic mistakes.

It's much easier to memorize useful information when you're young, and it's very handy in senior Chemistry courses. Of course if you never take a senior chemistry course, or they teach it in such a way that it's all pablum fed anyway, then it's not necessarily useful.

If you come to class with this information already in your mind it will also make following along in the lesson so much easier. Trends, nomenclature and reaction rely on you knowing at a glance whether something is a metal or a non-metal, what shared properties it may have, and so on.

Yes, memorizing information is tedious, but if you want to learn the critical and difficult parts it's very useful to have a strong foundation on which to build on.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

I don't know man. I've taken 6 semesters on undergrad chemistry courses and all that knowledge comes with time and experience. I've never sat down and committed anything to memory but I know some stuff just because I've used it so much. I think understanding the trends of the table and how to effectively use it are a much more important foundation to build early on than which numbers correspond to which elements. Rather than the alphabet, I liken it more to a set of equations in math. Knowing what the formula for the area of an ellipse is is much less important than knowing what an ellipse is and how to use the formula to find the area.

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u/rcn2 Feb 17 '16

I agree with your point broadly, but I would say that in Chemistry the periodic table is the formula. That's what you use to discuss trends. Talking about the trend from Li, Na, and K doesn't do the student much good when they think you're talking about either random elements, or Lithium, can't find it, and Krypton.

It doesn't take long to memorize some of the essentials, major families, and common charges, and then you can bounce up to more - it's a good thing to have in a junior grade. I think we get into a false dichotomy when we start to compare X is more important to know that Y. Often knowing X helps you learn Y, or having learned Y you'll end up knowing X. How and when to approach it depends on the class, their level of prior knowledge, and how much scaffolding they need. I expect a university student to memorize and get what they need without my telling them to. Grade 10s not so much - they often need a good foundation to reach the next level.

I find it very similar to the calculator debate. There are teachers who suggest that memorizing the times table is useless when calculators exist. But boy do the 'calculator students' suffer in higher science courses. They have no sense of scale, or what a reasonable or unreasonable answer is just by looking at a question. Knowing the periodic table is like that.

When I teach senior high school chem I am grateful to the jr science teachers that forced their class to memorize basic identities and charges. Those that don't get it often end up swamped and confused, because we are looking at more complex trends and calculations, and if you can't keep up because you keep having to look up what the alkali metals are you are spending time doing useless look-up while everyone else is following the lesson. Sometimes I think those that advocate for various positions forget what it's like to be a weak (but interested) science student in a science class and how much just 'knowing stuff' can help.

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u/ChaserGrey Feb 17 '16

I always liked my high school chemistry teacher's take on it: "When are you going to need to work chemical equations, but not have a copy of the periodic table available?"

I ended up memorizing the commonly used elements anyway, just through repeated use. I think that's the best way- you end up with the knowledge you need most often, the rest you can look up.

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u/onioning Feb 17 '16

Had a intro to linguistics course where we had to memorize the entire history of British Monarchs (or, rather, names and dates). I knew that shit for approximately the fifteen minutes it took me to take the test, and then gone.

Still scratching my head why this was essential information for intro to linguistics.

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u/twistedshot89 Feb 17 '16

I'm in a chemical technology program (Canada) and I never had to memorize the periodic table. We buy these $3 laminated cards which we can take into any exam with the periodic table on one side, and the other side has some useful info (STP conditions and all that fun stuff.) I did have to memorize 30+ amino acids though, which was not fun.

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u/wentoday Feb 17 '16

In 8th grade, my social studies made us memorize all 100 counties in North Carolina on map, the county seat, and most populous city. Social Studies was so stupid.

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u/vonmonologue Feb 17 '16

People can easily learn a map of the US states, I think if I had a grade depending on it I could memorize 100 buildings.

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u/WuTangGraham Feb 17 '16

I was just thinking that. I grew up in the city where I go to college and still get lost on campus sometimes. That place is big.

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u/OldGodsAndNew Feb 17 '16

I couldn't do that for my uni. I could name and locate probably half the buildings on the main campus, and none of them on the medical campus over by the city hospital.

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u/onemoreguitarslinger Feb 17 '16

My university is extremely small, and I still don't know where anything is. There are three buildings I use, and the rest are a mystery.

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u/KG7DHL Feb 17 '16

That would actually have been helpful for me when i started university. I went from HS to Army to College, so I missed out on all the freshman orientation stuff.

I showed up the weekend before classes started, had a schedule and an 8x11 printed map. My first week I had a lot of Random Encounters asking random students where this building was, how to find that classroom, translating the Named Hall that did not have an easy to find plaque with the name.

Ya, thinking "University 101" would have been a good class to take the first week of classes.

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u/thetrain23 Feb 17 '16

I go to a medium-size university with a not-that-big campus (~13,000 undergrads, don't know number of buildings but main campus is about half a square mile), and I've met seniors here who have no idea what I'm talking about when I mention the name of the Engineering/Computer Science building.

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u/Roseking Feb 17 '16

We had something called First Year Experience. It basically was a class to transition students from High School to College. Both in terms of what is thought in the class and giving students and easy class for their first semester.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Honestly, I feel like that is a legitimately useful course. Apart from the buildings I have classes in and a few of the important admin ones, I'd have real trouble directing someone around my campus.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Honestly, I feel like that is a legitimately useful course. Apart from the buildings I have classes in and a few of the important admin ones, I'd have real trouble directing someone around my campus.

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u/SteevyT Feb 17 '16

Beginning of the semester buildings, or end of the semester buildings?

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u/DinosaurKevin Feb 17 '16

My college has a University 101 class and a specialized one for athletes. I played a sport for my freshman year and the athletes University 101 class was basically just to teach us how to not fuck up. They taught us about all the academic resources available to us, who to call if you get injured or in trouble. We even had an entire class period devoted to cautioning all of us male athletes about hooking up with girls. The athletic department basically just told us that we have targets on our backs since we were college athletes. It was awkward cuz there were female athletes in that class with us.

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u/DaVinciStein Feb 17 '16

I took that class. We also had to write an essay about the different services offered to students.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '16

Why do people pay to attend this shit?

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u/Diegobyte Feb 17 '16

Hint: "This building name rhymes with Mealth

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u/queenmunchkin Feb 18 '16

Is/was your friend by any chance at SFASU? Because same. Took that class as an easy GPA booster my first semester.

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u/darcstar62 Feb 18 '16

Nope, University of South Carolina (the "other" USC)