Comment by sansnomme
6 days ago
They need to get rid of the concept of weed out courses. It's bad for learning. If you are paying 30-50K a year for an education, course availability should be a given. Don't use the bell curve as an excuse to deny students an education, or if you are going to use a threshold, use a fixed one, not one that limits by percentage of students. The fat cat admins and professors need to be fired. Too many schools take the students' money and plow it into research and other areas, with zero regard for undergraduate education. "You are in university now, it's sink or swim. Can't make it? Too bad." This attitude is especially prevalent in the state/public unis, especially places like Berkeley where demands exceeds supply. Your traditional private colleges like Dartmouth and Harvard don't have this problem.
Ideally people who can't handle the course should get filtered out before being accepted to the college, so they don't waste any money. But since it's impossible to filter reliable at that stage, surely it makes sense to also filter early on in the course. (from the perspective of the student. If the college wants to take more of their money they could still direct them to a different, easier/more suitable subject).
A lot of schools these days weed out at the application level: if you have a great portfolio from middle school through high school, great! You have it made.
I sort of like the change to redeem yourself during the first two years of your university if you didn't have the ideal secondary school experience to get into a hot department of a hot university. CC can do that as well, I guess, but it is a much harder hill to climb.