Should third-level education be more study-oriented

gaybitch

PurpleFistMixer wrote: »

Well, if you take time in lectures etc. as "study" time, 8 hours a day isn't really very long at all...

God, that shows the difference between students from the Hamilton and the Arts block. 8 hours a week could be all the lectures an Arts student has - it's not much less than what I have, including tutorials.

PurpleFistMixer

gaybitch wrote: »

God, that shows the difference between students from the Hamilton and the Arts block. 8 hours a week could be all the lectures an Arts student has - it's not much less than what I have, including tutorials.

Yeah... I think I have 8 hours a DAY, one day. : )

Jonathan

I have an average of 6.2 hours a day :cool:

andrew

Do science people get much reading on top of lectures?

gaybitch

They've a crapload of understanding to do, from what I can see. My two friends from school that went down Hamilton way both have dropped out. One from Computer Science and the other from Engineering. I hate to add more strength to the cliche, but they're much harder degrees than anything humanities-related.

thebman

Most Art students seemed to have about 8 hours a week when I was in college.

Did computer science, had about 32 hours of lectures a week including labs and tutorials and then we had assignments to do on top of that.

andrew

Would sci degrees be easier to get a first in though since they're less subjective?

Boston

No
1) You're competing against your class mates
2) Science isn't without its own subjective aspects
3) Hard is Hard whatever way you cut it.

PurpleFistMixer

Less subjective also means if it's wrong, IT'S WRONG.

pisslips

You're subjective

Also,
Whats this about competing against your classmates. Surely not, otherwise a 2.2 from one year could be as good as a 1st from another in the same course, I mean the group changes from year to year.
Also, if I do an exam and get all the right answers how the hell are they going to take marks off me.

gaybitch

Probably conforming to a bell curve marking system, I'd imagine.

Boston

pisslips wrote: »

You're subjective

Also,
Whats this about competing against your classmates. Surely not, otherwise a 2.2 from one year could be as good as a sch from another in the same course, I mean the group changes from year to year.
Also, if I do an exam and get all the right answers how the hell are they going to take marks off me.

I've only once sat an examination which had a completely binary marking scheme. Marking schemes are adjusted to achieve certain grade rates. This is most pronounced in final year. I myself was told to make ensure everyone passed when I was grading an assignment. This requirement determined the minimum a correct answer was worth.

If you're a high first student you'll be getting a first regardless, simply because most of your answers will be perfect. However if you're one of those people one the boarder between grades being in a stupider year will be to your advantage.

pisslips

claire h wrote: »

If you're going to use historical examples you might at least try to take account of their historical context and what was attainable without formal education then as opposed to now.

What does this mean other than,'history is something that happened in the past'' AND ''take into account the value of formal education now versus the past''

What point does that make?

claire h wrote: »

Specialist vocabulary and methods, the specialisation of knowledge generally, makes it very very difficult for anyone trying to be an expert in their field without formal education, not to mention the barriers in place without the associated piece of paper.

How have things changed in the last hundred years then? Do you think the specialist language that an Indian mathematician with no formal education used to prove over 300 hundred new theorems was common place in the late 19th century?

Do you think it was commonplace for some Iranian guy to build an observatory to figure out how the planets and the sun moved in relation to the earth?Years before the birth of christ?
Many hundreds of years before galileo.
Do you think geometry was common place back then.
People haven't become more intellegent over the past 10000 years,we're still genetically the same, it's not surprising that the Egyptians built pyramids or that newgrange was aligned with the winter soltace.
Some guy who does something groundbreaking in string theory has not achieved anything more abstract or amazing than the egytian guy who aligned the pyramids in a time when irrigation was the height of technological advancement.

In fact if history tells us anything it's that when people say things like,''it's very difficult for anyone trying to be an expert in their field without formal education'', they're usually proven wrong.

I mean statiscally your correct but then there's nothing to prove that formal education is the reason.
I mean there's nothing that a university can offer you that the internet can't apart from subjects involving specialist equipment like experimental labs and certain techniques.So it's even more accesible now than it ever was.

pisslips

Boston wrote: »

I've only once sat an examination which had a completely binary marking scheme. Marking schemes are adjusted to achieve certain grade rates. This is most pronounced in final year. I myself was told to make ensure everyone passed when I was grading an assignment. This requirement determined the minimum a correct answer was worth.

If you're a high first student you'll be getting a first regardless, simply because most of your answers will be perfect. However if you're one of those people one the boarder between grades being in a stupider year will be to your advantage.

When I correct assignments i'd imagine the mean is around 89-92%, hopefully noones going to bring me up on that.

Boston

pisslips wrote: »

When I correct assignments i'd imagine the mean is around 89-92%, hopefully noones going to bring me up on that.

Assignments are an exercise in giving students marks. The mean mark in assignments is often far higher then the mean mark in end of year examinations.

thebman

andrew wrote: »

Would sci degrees be easier to get a first in though since they're less subjective?

No most people don't get some of it and so are marked down. They can be flexiable on how hard they mark you down to conform to the bell curve.

They had a print out of the bell curve on the door of one of our lab doors for the previous years classes.

Boston wrote: »

No
1) You're competing against your class mates
2) Science isn't without its own subjective aspects
3) Hard is Hard whatever way you cut it.

I found my course hard but got a good mark. Almost killed myself to get it though. More than one person in the class cried, breaking under the stress and plenty dropped out because they couldn't take it anymore. Over half our class was repeats from the previous year.

I haven't met many arts student that have had the stress of the course I did and I've lived and met plenty of them. Mostly when you tell them about your course they just stare at you in disbelief.

You can say all this but if you want to do really well in arts or any other course and want to go on with your studies, you also have to work damn hard. Most people are content taking their average mark though which makes things easier for them.

claire h

pisslips wrote: »

What does this mean other than,'history is something that happened in the past'' AND ''take into account the value of formal education now versus the past''

What point does that make?

Not actually going to get into a debate about the nature of history with you, but, honestly, I'm always sceptical of people dragging up random examples of people from a hundred, two hundred, thousand years ago to prove a point about the contemporary world. It's assuming that if Person X did something great in the past then of course Person Y can do it now, without any consideration of how societies have changed, how worldviews have changed, what resources Person X might have had access to, whether it was easier or more difficult or just simply different when it came to being regarded as an expert or well-informed in a particular area.

I am not a mathematician, obviously, but I do know that it (including physics in this to some extent, though again I am not well-informed enough on the subjects to know where exactly a line would be drawn) is a particular area where people can achieve great things regardless of formal education; it's an area where there are plenty of prodigies (that is something I have read up on a lot). I don't think that success in that field can be assumed to be applicable to other fields. In the humanities a lot of the most up-to-date research comes shrouded in theory, not to mention there being so much of it that it would be very difficult to know where to begin without the kind of structure and guidance formal education can provide.

thebman wrote:

I haven't met many arts student that have had the stress of the course I did and I've lived and met plenty of them.

Arts courses are not stressful, or shouldn't be, if all you're looking to do is pass. What a goal. Anyone with any sense should be aiming for more than that.

rjt

claire h wrote: »

I am not a mathematician, obviously, but I do know that it (including physics in this to some extent, though again I am not well-informed enough on the subjects to know where exactly a line would be drawn) is a particular area where people can achieve great things regardless of formal education; it's an area where there are plenty of prodigies (that is something I have read up on a lot). I don't think that success in that field can be assumed to be applicable to other fields. In the humanities a lot of the most up-to-date research comes shrouded in theory, not to mention there being so much of it that it would be very difficult to know where to begin without the kind of structure and guidance formal education can provide.

I'm not sure how much this still applies. When was the last breakthrough made by an amateur mathematician? I can't think of any in the last 75 years or so. Mathematics really has exploded in terms of content in the last 100 years or so, and to get to a stage where you can understand most open problems, you practically need a formal education. I admittedly know very little about the history of maths, so I could well be wrong here.

Powerhouse

pisslips wrote: »

How have things changed in the last hundred years then? Do you think the specialist language that an Indian mathematician with no formal education used to prove over 300 hundred new theorems was common place in the late 19th century?

Do you think it was commonplace for some Iranian guy to build an observatory to figure out how the planets and the sun moved in relation to the earth?Years before the birth of christ?
Many hundreds of years before galileo.
Do you think geometry was common place back then.
People haven't become more intellegent over the past 10000 years,we're still genetically the same, it's not surprising that the Egyptians built pyramids or that newgrange was aligned with the winter soltace.
Some guy who does something groundbreaking in string theory has not achieved anything more abstract or amazing than the egytian guy who aligned the pyramids in a time when irrigation was the height of technological advancement.

In fact if history tells us anything it's that when people say things like,''it's very difficult for anyone trying to be an expert in their field without formal education'', they're usually proven wrong.

I mean statiscally your correct but then there's nothing to prove that formal education is the reason.
I mean there's nothing that a university can offer you that the internet can't apart from subjects involving specialist equipment like experimental labs and certain techniques.So it's even more accesible now than it ever was.

You have moved the goalposts considerably since the start of the discussion ragarding how employer look for formal qualifications.

But this question of yours "How have things changed in the last hundred years then?" is staggeringly basic.

Things have changed in that these days third-level education is quite commonplace. A hundred years ago it was confined to an elite stratum of society. In fact, you wouldn't have to go back 100 years for this. It has opened up dramatically in the last 15 years never mind 100 years, certainly in this country anyway.

It was more likely that someone without formal education would come up with something out of the ordinary back then as the proportion of those without formal education was so much higher in those days, though a well-educated chap like Einstein seems a strange example for you to conjure up in defence of lack of formal education.

It is still quite possible that if someone with no formal education could prove that there were little green men running around on another planet, the world would sit up and take notice. However, if such a person (without formal education) was to apply to for a routine job at a place where they study the planets they would be most unlikely to even be interviewed.

You may feel it ought to be otherwise but unfortunately it isn't.

claire h

rjt wrote: »

I'm not sure how much this still applies. When was the last breakthrough made by an amateur mathematician? I can't think of any in the last 75 years or so. Mathematics really has exploded in terms of content in the last 100 years or so, and to get to a stage where you can understand most open problems, you practically need a formal education. I admittedly know very little about the history of maths, so I could well be wrong here.

I said prodigies, not geniuses. Basically I know that it's an area where you do get far more super-smart-types at young ages being able to grasp concepts or do things whether or not they've any formal exposure to them; which of course is not the same thing as being able to make revolutionary breakthroughs, by 'great things' I meant more so being able to do that kind of stuff than anything else. But it makes a lot of sense that maths would be like all the other fields which have gone nuts and expanded and become so specialist, so that examples from Ye Olden Times just don't hold up.

dan719

rjt wrote: »

I'm not sure how much this still applies. When was the last breakthrough made by an amateur mathematician? I can't think of any in the last 75 years or so. Mathematics really has exploded in terms of content in the last 100 years or so, and to get to a stage where you can understand most open problems, you practically need a formal education. I admittedly know very little about the history of maths, so I could well be wrong here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney_Gallivan

Hi Josh. I am going to say that my above example is a very liberal claim of 'important breakthrough in mathematics'.
Couple more examples of chess players who made pretty big contributions to maths, although high level chess players will tend to have done some pretty high level math also.
I also reckon John Nash could claim to be an amatuer economist since he had no formal training apart from one undergrad course on International Trade.

In terms of the increased level of specialisation of maths, I feel it is a consequence of Hilbert's drive for specialisation, and also Godel's theorems, along with the so called axiom of choice. All of these were a result of, and led to an examination of the very foundations of the subject, and led to an explosion of research in this area. Obviously such research into the roots of a logical system will be very technical and not open to those not trained in the subject, but other areas such as number theory will continue to allow those with little formal training but huge talent to make real and definitive contributions to mathematics.

pisslips

claire h wrote: »

Not actually going to get into a debate about the nature of history with you, but, honestly, I'm always sceptical of people dragging up random examples of people from a hundred, two hundred, thousand years ago to prove a point about the contemporary world. It's assuming that if Person X did something great in the past then of course Person Y can do it now, without any consideration of how societies have changed, how worldviews have changed, what resources Person X might have had access to, whether it was easier or more difficult or just simply different when it came to being regarded as an expert or well-informed in a particular area.

Well, my previous random walk about Egyptians, Iranians and an Indian was supposed to support the claim that human behaviour and thought process have remained the same throughout recorded history.


Despite increased and more complex information and communication structures, human nature is pretty constant.
By nature I not only point to superficial social or political behavior but to the thought processes that people follow. As i see it, the complexity and structure of human knowledge might always grow and people will always say things like,''this is too sophisticated for an untrained mind to understand'' but that the paths that people take are analogous to the previous paths and that someone with a good intuition of the basic root logical processes on which human learning is based can definitely make an impact intellectually, if they can spot a pattern or two.

The definitions, the precise language, the encyclapedic knowledge are superflous to understanding, they're just useful to standardise communication.

There's a real danger to specialisation and thats the weakening of peer review and the loss of perspective.
I mean I thought education was to help people understand the whole world not to help them become specialists in one area.

Oh, and I'm definitely not talking about employment credentials anymore.

rjt

dan719 wrote: »

In terms of the increased level of specialisation of maths, I feel it is a consequence of Hilbert's drive for specialisation, and also Godel's theorems, along with the so called axiom of choice. All of these were a result of, and led to an examination of the very foundations of the subject, and led to an explosion of research in this area. Obviously such research into the roots of a logical system will be very technical and not open to those not trained in the subject, but other areas such as number theory will continue to allow those with little formal training but huge talent to make real and definitive contributions to mathematics.

Going way off topic here, but anyway: number theory is as bad as everything else these days though. Most modern texts will assume a very in-depth knowledge of abstract algebra. Even though the problems are easily understood, the machinery to approach them is often pretty specialised.

pisslips

woops, wrong thread, how'd i end up here?