<p>You fell for the Boston Globe’s catchy title. The article has a split personality. It confuses in-class attempts to find out if students are following the lectures so that the instructor can instantly adjust his or her lecturing with attempts to impose a NCLB-type testing to find out if the students have learned anything. As far as I know, no state-mandated test under NCLB uses buzzers.</p>
<p>I just want to emphasize that often classes at Harvard morph into very large lectures specifically because of the (often world famous) profs that teach it. This semester, my son is taking a class taught jointly by Alan Dershowitz and Stephen Pinker (sp?). It is a large lecture for sure. Also possibly the most inspiring educational experience my son has ever had. The notion that any student taking their class would want to have other professors to make the class size smaller is absurd.</p>
<p>I’ve heard that the whole thing was drafted in order to get a few (1? 2?) departments to shape up. It evidently was thought that sometimes a sledgehammer is needed to crack a nut, especially when the hammer-wielder is unwilling to identify the specific nut that needs cracking.</p>
<p>In fairness, I have to recuse myself from that one. Ever since his work on the OJ defense team, I throw up in my mouth at the mention of his name. It wouldn’t be right to let my personal revulsion cloud your point.</p>
<p>Putting that aside, in your choice, who is writing comments and reviewing the student’s papers with them in conference?</p>
<p>I tend to agree about Dershowitz. So how about Michael Sandel? Or Jonathan Spence at Yale (which has distribution requirements rather than a Core Curriculum)? Our tour guide gushed about both the requirements and about Spence (the size of his class that year: 400).</p>
<p>Still, who cares what or how students learn at Harvard or Yale. The article is about testing whether students have learned by the time they graduate: same thing as what NCLB is supposed to test.</p>
<p>I have no problem with a “rockstar” lecture series. Or, a great way to handle that would be to have junior professors in the department lead the discussion sections, conference with students on their drafts and papers, and then bring in the rockstar for the weekly lecture.</p>
<p>As for NCLB, I honestly have no idea how you would implement it. College isn’t really about what you learn (that’s largely irrelevant). It’s all about learning how to learn, and analyze critically, and write, and communicate.</p>
<p>Teaching to a standardized test would be an incredible waste of $40,000 a year. Frankly, you might as well get the discount package at Kaplan Test Prep for that.</p>
<p>I looked up the amount of federal dollars in the annual budget at Swarthmore. I’m pretty sure that, if such a testing program were mandated, they would just just tell the government, “keep your money”. I think quite a few big endowment undergrad colleges would opt out. Two percent of the annual budget isn’t enough to justify the headaches and opportunity costs of wasting teaching resources on nonsense.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, did you see his talk about Israel at Brandeis? You might change your mind. (I’m not thrilled with his behavior at the OJ trial either). </p>
<p>Marite, you held out on me. I bet you have the Harvard bumper sticker on your cars too. :)</p>
<p>“College isn’t really about what you learn (that’s largely irrelevant). It’s all about learning how to learn, and analyze critically, and write, and communicate.”</p>
<p>The test idea is a very, very bad idea, to put it mildly.</p>
<p>No. I’m serious. I get physically ill just seeing or hearing the man. I’m sure he was very learned and all, but when someone is that morally bankrupt, why should I care what he says.</p>
<p>It’s not even being a part of the defense team that bothers me. It was the ease with which he made the rounds day after day after day on televsions telling what were, for all intents and purposes, bold faced lies. Playing the race card was reprehensible.</p>
<p>So now I just figure everything he says is a lie.</p>
<p>Junior faculty in American universities are not meant to be clones of the tenured profs but to have their own areas of specialization. Take Jonathan Spence at Yale. Not one of the other profs specializing in Asia (a vast continent, to be sure) could possibly lead sections on Chinese history because they’re not specialists in it. They have their own areas of expertise: Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, India… Why should they lead sections in Spence’s class?</p>
<p>Yale does the same thing Harvard does: have graduate students lead sections. The big difference is that Yale graduate students frequently go on strike and Harvard’s don’t.</p>
<p>Precisely. But that’s what the article is trying to be about (when it does not go off on a tangent about Mazur’s pedagocy). There have indeed been efforts to hold colleges responsible for student learning. One can only hope that they’ll realize soon enough the futility of their agenda.</p>
<p>You are telling me that the world’s best professors are so specialized that they are utterly incapable of preparing to lead undergrad discussion sections and work with them on their writing. To such an extent that first year practice teachers can do a better job?</p>
<p>If so, then then these universities are focused even less on undergrad education than I thought. I think you are selling the Harvard and Yale professors short. Not only are they capable of a little cross-specialization teaching, they would be excellent at it, and would benefit from it themselves. One of the knocks on higher ed is that the increased specialization has made it less and less capable of communicating ideas to a broader audience. A litte cross-fertilization is an excellent remedy for that.</p>
<p>Again, the money is there to hire whatever professors they need to provide interactive education for all of their undergrads. Yale and Harvard’s per student endowments (looking only at undergrads) is at least as much as Pomona’s or Grinnell’s and their per student revenues are higher. Why not go hire three more Chinese History PhDs if that’s what it takes to meet the demand?</p>
I bet you have the Harvard bumper sticker on your cars too. :)</p>