Is the first year of a degree a waste of time?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11676192

by mayutana • 16 years ago

18 31 16 years ago

bbc.co.uk

gaius4• 16 years ago

The first year of a degree teaches students what 6th forms used to in the old days. Fix the dumbing down in state schools first. A-levels have been devalued by politically driven grade inflation, so let's take it out of the hands of the politicians altogether and switch to the IB.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

The situation seems to be the same as in the US, where a high-school diploma no longer guarantees mastery of remedial English and math skills. Forcing colleges to front-load that education before moving forward.

HS graduation rates may be higher today but I'm not sure that correlates with greater mastery of basic intellectual skills.

This also helps explain the increasing reliance on college degrees (any degree) as a necessary prerequisite credential for many office and knowledge worker jobs.

Shamiq• 16 years ago

Apologies for my American-centered knowledge of an education system. Could you provide more background about this issue? A-levels vs IB (Internaltional Baccalaureate I think)?

gaius4• 16 years ago

There have been a number of tweaks to A-levels, once the gold standard of secondary education, to make them easier to pass. For example instead of one exam at the end of two years, it is split into smaller modules, which can be repeated, lower marks can be discarded, there is a consolation prize of an AS level, and pass rates have been going up every year. There is even a whole new grade, A* above A - whereas surely A* is really A and A is really B, but that doesn't look so good on the league tables.

Yet all the time that grades are going up, lecturers are complaining that the quality of freshers is going down, in terms of the level of literacy and numeracy that would be expected in previous years, and that most of the first year must be devoted to remedial teaching, filling in the material that wasn't covered in A-levels.

The International Baccalaureate is operated by an independent non-profit organization in Switzerland whose reputation rests not on conning the voters but on being the real "gold standard". Education is too important to be trusted to politicians.

Schools in the UK have the power to do the IB instead of A-levels but are strongly discouraged from doing so via the central funding mechanism, this is for ideological reasons, the New Labour government felt it was "divisive". Hopefully the current lot, who are all about decentralized decision making, will allow it.

SiVal• 16 years ago

There is great political pressure in most countries to "improve" the education of the population. This runs into other political, demographic, and scientific realities and produces some ironic consequences. For example, in the US, we have a higher and higher percentage of the population entering college each year. That means that the average IQ of those entering college gradually declines. (It wouldn't if the Flynn Effect still functioned, but gains from the Flynn Effect in the US ended 20-30 years ago.) The top 10% has a higher average IQ than the top 20%, which is itself greater than for the top 30%, etc. The higher the percentage going to college, the lower the average IQ of college students, and the colleges have to adjust to avoid an embarrassing rise in drop-out rates.

I saw statistics a week or so ago showing a gradual rise in the percentage of students who take calculus in high school, a gradual rise in the percentage who take Algebra 1 in eighth grade (instead of in 9th, 10th, etc.), and other stats that would seem to imply a gradual increase in math ability for any given age cohort. Yet, within a day or two, I also saw stats showing a gradual decrease in math ability for high school graduates entering college. In 1995, the College Board could no longer continue with the old SAT and had to "renormalize" it to get the mean score back up to 500. They had to dumb it down, in other words.

I've seen stats and reports from other countries (including Japan) that show the same trends. People demand that the schools do a better job of getting kids ready for college by, for example, having more of them take algebra in 8th grade. So, it happens, except that they aren't really any better prepared than before, so to prevent the embarrassment of rising failure rates, the course has to be dumbed down. The apparent increase in math ability is achieved by a relabeling of what they do, not by an increase in how much they learn. There is now a growing trend in Illinois for students (I assume from Chicago) to take calculus in high school and then end up in remedial math in college. They're not learning anything, but for political reasons they are given classes labeled "calculus" to show "progress toward social justice". I assume Illinois is representative of many other places in many countries.

jonnathanson• 16 years ago

This is spot on, and in theory, it's why standardized testing was implemented in the first place: to get at normative ways to compare knowledge in a given subject across schools and learning environments. It was social engineering, really: by convincing schools that their students would be held accountable to universal standards, those schools would in turn up their games and make sure students were learning the real deal.

Of course, what actually happened was twofold:

1. "Teaching to the test," i.e., narrowing a broad subject area like Calculus down to whatever aspects would be covered on a standardized AP exam.

2. Following from the above, a reduction in foundational and principle education in favor of problem-based education. Kids would learn the what of the formulas, but not the why. Kids could calculate a derivative, but they couldn't tell you what it meant or why they would ever need to do so.

The result? A vicious cycle. Subjects narrowed and became divorced from their foundational purposes, which accordingly made them more about rote than about thinking, which made them less engaging subjects, which in turn discouraged student interest, which in turn led to declining scores. And the cycle repeated itself.

stoney4• 16 years ago

The quality of UK university courses varies tremendously. I studied engineering as did lots of my friends. The standard course length for an MEng is 4 years, I think that might even be a requirement to get the course accredited.

But what happens in those four years can be very different - if you are at a less good university, you will probably be working less than 20 hours a week on your engineering degree. If you are at a top university, you will work at least full time if not more.

So if this proposal was followed through you could end up with a slightly odd situation (or maybe a good situation?) where the less good universities offered shorter courses than the good ones. So the brightest students would be in uni for longer.

ig1• 16 years ago

Generally the first year is a bridging year. You have students with a wide variety of different backgrounds and they all need to be bought up to the same base. It's also the first time many students will have to learn for themselves as opposed to being spoonfed.

So while you do learn less in the first year than the other two, it still has a lot of value, because you learn how to learn and many other personal skills which are critical for university and later life.

ecaroth3• 16 years ago

I agree mostly with this statement, however for most schools (including the one I attended) where you are going for a Bachelor's degree, you are required to take a certain number of general elective credits and required basic classes. Supposedly this makes you a more well-rounded human, more of a broad thinker, what have you.. But for a major like mine (CompSci) it makes you wonder if it's really worth it in comparison to a 2 year degree or tech schooling. Was falling asleep in geology 101 every day for a semester and ending up with a bachelor degree and more loans worth it, when I could have been in the work force 2 years earlier probably doing the same thing? Who knows.... but universities should take more emphasis off general electives (badminton anyone?) and offer more major-related classes to those who are interested.

erikig• 16 years ago

Yeah, if a university education is a gleaming skyscraper the first year is like the foundation that holds it up: often unappreciated, but necessary.

candre717• 16 years ago

I agree erikig.

1.) A part of it is also that one should choose the university one attends carefully - if that's possible. I went to a pure tech school my first year. There was no concern about wasted time in nonessential classes. We jumped right into the mix, taking what was relevant to our majors along with the typical foundational classes - chemistry, calculus and physics.

nspiegelberg• 16 years ago

Maybe the UK experience is different than US, but this sounds like 'no child left behind'. Let's make 50% of the students do inane coursework for a year so the other 50% don't feel bad about requiring an extra year to finish university. We'll call it 'personal improvement'. While it definitely takes a year to adjust to being on your own, the average US freshman experience calcifies the mind.

Example: I had 2 dorm friends with 1600 SAT scores that wasted their life away that first year because they already knew the material (like most of us). They got cocky and promptly got a 1.0 the next year when they finally had to work but didn't realize it, losing their scholarships. Freshman year is the best time to pump students with work because they are expecting/wanting a challenge. The first year should be about inspiring students to learn, not teaching them how to deal with insane amounts of free time.

aidan2• 16 years ago

This! Exactly! I'm currently in my first year and bored out of my skull with the material we're covering. Last week we spent going over the Data Protection Act in comp sci... the DPA is part of the standard grade course and I learnt it inside out in S3. I came to uni expecting a challenge - a new level of learning, but I'm so far left wanting.

stoney4• 16 years ago

In the UK it's also likely that the students are living away from home for the first time, which takes a bit of getting used to for some.

It's difficult to strike a balance between not boring the brightest and losing the less bright completely.

gaius4• 16 years ago

The less bright should not be there in the first place.

University isn't supposed to be merely a continuation of secondary education.

andrewingram2• 16 years ago

For my degree (Computer Science at Warwick), the first year did count towards my final results. Even without it counting, I feel it would have been fairly difficult to adequately teach Computer Science without the 'extra' year at the start.

ecaroth3• 16 years ago

So how much were you able to actually get into CS your first year?? I was limited to mostly programming 1 & 2... you couldn't get into any higher level CS studies until you had those two classes completed, and you couldn't take them at the same time. That led to a lot of fun side projects, no doubt, but that was when I wasn't falling asleep in my under-water basket weaving class. I often wonder if a technical program at a computer-specific school would have yielded the same results for much less dime.

andrewingram2• 16 years ago

Hm, if i recall correctly my first year had: - A basic mathematics course, took us through some of the harder A-Level (pre-uni) stuff and a few more advanced things - Discrete mathematics, set theory and all that jive. - An introductory programming course, it covered basic Java programming and introduced OOP. Coursework was to write the algorithm for solving a maze - A basic hardware and lower-level concepts course - Data structures, ie what ones are available and their efficiencies - A unix programming module, basically we made some dead simple command line programs - Some functional programming (we used SML)

I hadn't really done any programming pre-university (other than some trivial Delphi apps that aren't really worth mentioning). So nearly all of this was new to me.

The second year was basically more of the same but harder. The 3rd and 4th years were where we got the bulk of the credit for the degrees, but we also got the most freedom over what modules we took. In the first two years, about 80% of the modules were considered 'core'.

yread• 16 years ago

The first year was the best year! And I went on for another 6 ones. I didn't know much programming at that time and just the feeling of working and being around really smart people was really good.

frou_dh• 16 years ago

A few classmates of mine knew more about the subject in 1st year than I did when I graduated in the 4th year. I received the same First Class Honours classification that they did.

That's one messed up ramp.

robchez• 16 years ago

In AU, my first year in my mechanical engineering degree was a complete waste of time. They call it a "common first year" where you do little bits of every type of engineering. It was a complete waste of time and money.

In theory it sounds great, and I was quite excited about doing some electrical engineering. But in fact it was just a 6 month long, highschool physics course on electricity, drawn out more than I thought possible. Spending an entire week on Ohm's law in University engineering is stupid.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

I like the move to summer classes. It hampers the classic 'work part-time during the school year, full time during the summer' for people bearing the full brunt of their educational bills, but otherwise I think it's a good idea. Summer, to me, is just a waste of time in which to forget what you learned.

Coincidentally, I have not taken a summer break from classes for 3 years now.

robryan• 16 years ago

I don't know, I feel that I got as much out of first year as the other years, sure you could say it wasn't as focused on the central theme of the course but I didn't go to uni just to focus on one thing and get it done asap.

Some of the maths was repeated but really helped me get a better grasp on it. The physics class was the only physics I got exposed to in uni and was hard but rewarding, same with the circuits stuff for electronics. As opposed to some of my recent 4th year classes, which have actually been a waste of time.

icegreentea• 16 years ago

Currently attending engineering at u of waterloo in Canada. In my own experience, most of first year was a waste of time. Due to my luck in highschool as well as my own personal interests, I found 80% of first year to be review, or ridiculously slow. The most important part of first year for me was a relatively low stress environment to make friends with (particularly important in my program).

But I saw with many (not all) of my classmates just how important that first year was. Unfortunately, the differences between people's high school educations were just so much (there were some people who were having problems with limits... I was breezing all the way up to multi variable calculus and linear algebra) that as useless as individual courses may be for individual students, taken as a whole (as a class), all those 'review' classes were definitely necessary to prevent massive massive 2nd year fail rates.

Unfortunately this is not a problem that can only be solved by universities. They have their role to play, but so does our (by this I mean our province's) high school curriculum. In Toronto (where I grew up), we had integration (and almost derivatives) ripped out of standard grade 12 calculus (as well as a series of similar neuterings in other subjects). To get that stuff at all, your school had to offer honors, AP, or IB calculus or w/e. I lucked out with AP being available (which despite all the taunting I directed at the College Board did actually set me up for my first year university courses). But many bright smart kids just aren't lucky enough to attend to a school with such programs. Or even just average or slightly above average kids weren't pushed by the challenge, or dragged along by their smarter classmates.

In the end, (at least in Canada), I cannot see first year becoming any harder (or useful) until universities know that enough of their enrollees will be knowledgeable enough. Because ultimately, they are run as businesses on some level, and have to keep a float. Which is the biggest shame.

dhume• 16 years ago

Depends where you go, I guess. My university was willing to acknowledge advanced coursework I'd done in high school, so I didn't waste the entire year repeating material I'd already covered (calculus, introductory programming, etc.).

hwolf• 16 years ago

For me, it was my first time away from home, and I wasn't certain of my major. So it was useful as a self-discovery experience.

But my friend, who is going to school in his town is finding the first (and even the second) year pretty useless. And it was sad that his freshman English class consisted of determining correct comma placement. I hope it's just the school and not the dumbing down of education across the board. So scary.

Is the first year of a degree a waste of time?

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