Comment by template_error

As a student in the UK, admittedly at a very middle of the road non RG, I partially agree with this.

Absolutely, the lack of engagement by my peers I see is insane. We have a Discord group for our cohort and the lack of basic problem-solving ability and engagement is disheartening. I especially remember during my Software Engineering class (in year 2, so they have had three programming classes in year one + the whole summer to explore), only three of my group out of eight actally engaged to a serious extent.

I had to write a parser for a game file format in said class - just ASCII text. Some of the non-engaging group members couldn't be bothered, or maybe they were scared, to read the nice error message I gave for my parser. I designed it to be nice and readable, tells you what the issue is (e.g., "extraneous comma" or "unknown tile type {}") and the line and column, but I effectively had to be support for these people, who just could not read the error message.

There's also a massive fear of even basic mathematical analysis (e.g., in an algorithms class we were analysing traditional graph search algorithms, not that we were asked to prove anything ourselves, but were shown lemmas and relations and I recall my cohort reeling at it).

Part of this is definitely AI, most people cannot program without GPT, even to a basic extent.

I'm not particularly intelligent, I just work and engage with my studies. I can't imagine just going to university and coasting (though the UK loan system incentivises that, but that's another story) I think we have too many people going to university (I blame Blair) because it's the societal expectation, and a loan is given instantaneously to anyone who applies.

This may be part of just going to a mediocre university though. I plan to do a postgraduate, ideally at a much better university, hopefully my peers there will be significantly more engaged.

Attendance is a big thing, and I fall into this myself. My university has a policy of recording all lectures, so why go? I know it's 'wrong', but I feel I learn more efficiently with a recording, and due to the lack of engagement I mentioned earlier, it's not like there's a seminar style where we all come having read a research paper or something and discuss it, or go through exam questions (honestly, I would love that and actually attend - but I doubt that many students would do the reading). It is just a lecture which I can just watch at home. This does hurt the community spirit of the university, but honestly I'm not that bothered.

However, I completely disagree with the textbooks (though let's be real, if students wanted to read them - many could just pirate them, but they don't) section, as well as the slides. I also agree that note-taking is important, but to completely lose the original content seems unnecessary (I appreciate the argument that in the workplace meetings are only taken down as minutes vs a recording though).