<p>@CalBearsMom: sure, I’ll give some examples. I won’t mention the name of the school here, because someone searching for the school on CC may see this comment out of context and I don’t want to give the impression that the undergraduate education here is a disaster. Again, I was spoiled at Rose, so I don’t think it’s a fair comparison. I will PM you with the name, though. </p>
<p>Because my undergrad was in EE and not CS, I’ve taken 3 upper-division undergrad CS courses in addition to my graduate coursework. So I wasn’t an undergrad here, but I feel like I have some basis for comparison. I’ll try to give some examples:</p>
<p>In one of my undergrad classes here, on the first day of class the professor said that this is a research school and he would not really be teaching the material, and that if you wanted to learn the material for that class you would be better off reading the textbook or watching videos online. Sure enough, the teaching was terrible. I even had the TA suggest to me that if they were taking the class they would just read the book and not go to lecture because the teaching was so bad. I’ve only had six professors here, but two of them have easily been the worst teachers I’ve ever had (counting my whole undergraduate at Rose-Hulman). At Rose, you might encounter a bad teacher, but they typically at least care about teaching and are trying to improve; if they don’t improve, they don’t last long. Here, being a poor teacher and not caring about teaching seems to be acceptable. All of my professors at Rose cared about teaching, and for the most part were good teachers.</p>
<p>In the undergrad courses, TAs aren’t responsible for the bulk of the teaching but they typically are in charge of homework assignments. In one of my programming-heavy undergrad courses, the TA seemed out of the loop with the programming projects that we were doing and was utterly unhelpful. One of my friends took a class where different TAs gave flat-out contradictory information about the requirements for the exact same homework. In general I’ve felt that my workload has a significant overhead involved with just sorting out incorrect instructions and mismanaged assignments as a result of poor TAs, which reduces the amount of time I can spend on real learning. At Rose, professors come up with assignments, are the primary contact for homework help, and care about teaching. At Rose I felt like my work was going toward solving homework assignments and learning - not trying to decipher unclear and contradictory instructions or worrying about things like inconsistent grading. </p>
<p>In my experience, the computing resources here have been frustrating. There was a computing package (MATLAB) required for one of my classes, and it had restrictive licensing such that you could only run it on the school servers. But, the network storage allocation for each user was so small that I was unable to properly run my code on their servers. I ended up buying a student license for the software just to avoid having to deal with the ridiculous licensing and computing policies. At Rose that same software package was available to download on my personal computer for free; although I did have Rose-Hulman computing facilities, I never needed to use them because the software licensing was not nearly as restrictive. Additionally, here you only have access to that software package if you are enrolled in a class that specifically requires it - at Rose, everyone had access to it. That meant that at Rose I could experiment with that tool on my own, outside of any coursework - not possible here.</p>
<p>These are just a couple things. I won’t even go into the more well-known disadvantages to larger research schools, such as larger class sizes and less professor accessibility. That’s not to say that where I am is terrible, because it isn’t. Undergrads here can get a great education. But, coming from an environment at Rose where teaching was the priority and student learning was paramount, I can immediately see the difference.</p>