How students today view college

frazzled2thecore
Sat, 03 Dec 2011 05:27:28 +0000

^^^^^Seems to me as well that how a student performs in freshman calc courses and whether or not they are retaking calc 1 can depend on whether they had a good high school experience or not, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the freshman calc courses are taught all that well, either. . Graduates from our high school report that having taken AB, calc 2 at most elite schools should be a breeze, and after calc 2, calc 3 should not be too hard, since the high school teacher generally goes a good bit beyond AP requirements. (Students at MIT do report that their classes are a challenge regardless…)

BTW, my own issues with foreign-born instructors when I was in college wasn’t the accent, but that they came from educational systems that placed a much heavier emphasis on memorizing how to solve problems and then practicing new problems with memorized solutions (very effective if the goal is to get a high score on a multiple choice exam), or in memorizing dozens of proofs, than in understanding concepts (more useful in other types of evaluation.) Not that both aren’t important, as American instructors often did not seem to realize the importance for all but a few students of taking the time to do lots and lots of practice problems, beginning with the easiest and gradually moving up in difficulty…

In any case, I would encourage any student lucky enough to have access to really good high school math instruction to take full advantage of this opportunity before college and to try to max out on math and CS classes. Students who do so seem to have a real advantage as they can either qualify for much smaller honors sections if they are very interested in math, or draw upon prior preparation if they find themselves in a large classroom with spotty access to good TA’s.