Comment by joshdavham
20 days ago
> What has changed exactly? Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class.
My brother and I graduated from university a little over 4 years ago and we were both top students (he studied music and I studied applied math). There were classes where he and I (without exaggeration) skipped more than 90% of the lectures.
I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.
I think this is a good point. I found the following sentences of the article shocking:
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes.
It makes you wonder whether the lecturer actually values the time of the students. Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
Personally I always ask for lecture/presentation slides - it's common practice in computing and related fields. Technical conferences (be they industry-focused like Nvidia GTC or more research-focused like Usenix ATC) routinely provide presentation slides and recordings. Both are extremely valuable.
I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)
Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.
>The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)
This is massively true IMO. Taking detailed notes during a lecture is an absurd waste of attention - we have universally-available recording technologies. Use them.
They're used professionally too, and there's essentially zero chance that they'll go away, it's much more realistic to use them in classes. This is something that has changed with phones and computers becoming universal - college needs to adapt to it.
Use lecture time to do things you can't do with a recording: interact.
(Yes I'm thoroughly aware that student interaction is a myth and it pretty much never happens - I've zoned out in classes with attendance scores too. Except for those handfuls of classes that many people can remember where it does happen, those don't count and there's surely nothing special about them that is worth learning from)
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Having a copy of slides open during lecture is a total game-changer for technical classes.
You can follow along and keep 2-3 slides open at a time to have a better sense of the context, skip back to review an idea, screenshot and get clarification with AI, there are so many possibilities which enhance the lecture.
Some professors also write/diagram right on top of the slides and then provide them after class.
A lot of CS classes have switched to GitHub, with basically entirely open course materials.
Even on closed systems like Canvas, it's typically an entire library of content that you have access to.
I personally love lectures, but I'm also not doing a typical degree program, where I'd be forced to take 3-5 courses per semester. If I was under that much workload, I can't imagine having the time to absorb all the material, do all the work, sleep, and go to every lecture.
A professor's lecture notes would never be good notes for a student to learn from. They are simply reminders to the professor to talk about certain topics that they know the ins and outs of.
Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.
Agreed that the notes are usually not so great for learning from. But in this case the “notes” are actually the slides, which are explicitly intended to be consumed by the students.
Even so, a set if slides is a great reminder of whatever the professor talked about.
This is conflating written jots with information presented to the students.
The author is talking about PowerPoint slides that were presented to the students as valuable information.
I’d post that straight lecture is a crap way to teach/learn. And the large auditorium classes that are common at most state Us are fundamentally broken. Interactive discussion is probably much better for most students.
Pretty much everyone but the actual students agree that would be better. We can't do that since the students typically refuse to do the necessary prep.
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The one course where I showed up to every class was a discussion class. It was on AI and each lecture was a 10 minute topic intro, 30 min of group discussion and research, and 10 min of presentations.
The courses I never attended a single class for were reading screenshots of a textbook.
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Study groups were my replacement for this, but that requires a critical mass to get going.
> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room.
The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts.
In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty.
The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures.
Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable.
Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.
I vaguely remember the philosophy classes I took oncr upon a time as all being lectures and then extensive papers for homework, with real discussion only happening in the 400-level ones around when I finally stopped taking them because the endless paper-writing rhetoric in circles was just terminally boring by that point.
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I loved it when lecturers made the PowerPoint slides available before the lecture, as it meant I could read the slides ahead of time and thus keep up in the lecture. It made it easier to take meaningful notes.
I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.
It is not interactive because the professor has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter and thoughts, ideas and suggestions of the students are an order of magnitude less of less value than that of the professors.
Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.
It's much easier to learn if you can ask questions and try (and fail) to make your own connections, and this has nothing to do with whether or not your own ideas and suggestions have any merit of their own.
I don't engage in class to show off or try to contribute, but because it's an incredibly valuable part of the learning process for me.
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A class that is not interactive then doesn't have to be a class. It could be a book or a set of slides with an audio narration and that'd have the same result.
Teachers that can only read their notes and write stuff on a board without ever interacting are of the most useless kind. They're completely replaceable by course material.
Agreed, when I was at uni a few years ago, having the lecture slides was a handy reference EVEN when I wrote my own notes during lectures.
One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.
Yeah I don't get that statement at all. How can a professor not just post their slides on their website? What exactly is so special about their slides?
I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes.
in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.
The physical act of having to take notes helped me understand and remember them. Being given a handout doesn't work that well.
Nobody is stopping anyone from taking notes during class. Even you should appreciate the slides because they’d give you an opportunity to review before big exams and make sure you didn’t miss anything.
> This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
I understand that one could jump to such a conclusion; and I’ve attended more than my fair share of talks where the speaker over little more than I could glean from looking over the printouts for a few minutes.
But here, can we truly come to the conclusion that the slides are being read verbatim, or whether they are placeholders for a richer discussion that comes out verbally in class? We obviously cannot know, but I can’t say that I’d pre-commit to skipping before knowing more.
> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time.
Also, the taking of notes is a distraction in a class. You can't pause the teacher while writing or rewind, so whatever the teacher explains while you're writing is just missed. This isn't true for everyone, but many people can't blindly type while paying attention to something else.
I prefer to just listen and interact with the teacher over writing down what they say (and is already written on their slides).
100% agreed. When I was in Uni, I had a few lectures where going to the class was actually a waste of time for me (especially when I had to work on other time-consuming assignments) since I knew about the topic already. I passed those classes with high grades solely by going over the lecture slides.
Ha yep, I bumped on that too. Like, what? Post the slides for future reference, who cares? What an odd bugaboo.
One thing that's changed in the past decade is that college professors are now competing against youtube. There are really bad lecturers in college (and also really good ones!). But now, when you encounter a bad one, that's okay--you can watch lectures online.
Not just YouTube. MIT has an open course system that is available to anyone, for free, from actually employed MIT professors, lecturing real courses [1]. I went to a state university that basically copied Pearson slides and books into a course with minimal adjustments.
Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples.
And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.
[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/
I think that's the biggest disruption of all, and goes well under the radar. Universities were originally guilds of students who hired masters of fields to profess their knowledge.
Now anyone with a computer connected to the internet can have access to the best lectures in the world. People talk a lot about employment, diploma mill mentality, student and professor ethics in this thread.
But I think the silent revolution, one that has nothing to do with AI, is that nowadays anyone can learn and acquire basically any knowledge based skills they might want. I have always lived by the maxim "don't let school get in the way of your education". And I also think that education is a life long journey. Fretting about the state of complex systems is an exercise in futility. Educating oneself has never been easier and I love it!
> And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.
That is shameful. Instead of doing that, they should have given that out upfront and then spend the class discussing it and helping those who still had doubts/questions.
Not to mention that there are now also LLM’s to help you understand difficult topics!
I'm sure the average college student will know when the helpful LLM is hallucinating, misrepresenting or stating outdated material as factually accurate today, right?
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Probably the worst thing you could ask to help you understand a topic you yourself don't understand and are encountering for the first time.
I'm guessing you and your brother are both well above average, in which case I'd agree that you could get more out of studying on your own (if the material was even challenging to begin with).
The students referred to in the article don't have the wherewithal to study effectively on their own; the lectures are their only hope for learning, assuming they were to take advantage of them. Also, many classes are not simply lectures, but an opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. By not coming to class, one robs themselves of that opportunity.
In my experience it’s one or the other: attend all the lecturers and nullify the need to study more than that attendance and some specific exam revision if they drop hints or don’t attend but do the readings. I think a lot of being a successful student is cutting through all the duplicative work that gets thrown your way.
> I think a lot of being a successful student is cutting through all the duplicative work that gets thrown your way.
And being honest with yourself about which duplicative work you actually don’t benefit from (vs. which work is “boring” or interferes with sleep/whatever other excuses).
> I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.
Jeez I wish they would have uploaded all the material online, not everyone does that (perhaps thinking if they do it lots of people won't show up). And even if they do it , it is often sparse slides with half the material passed in person - so very missing. It's enough to not understand the first 10 minutes of the lecture and then you're completely lost for another frustrating 35 minutes ( or more, some lectures are double). It's enough not to fully remember the last lecture and you don't follow what the professor is talking about now. It's not a fun experience and happened to me a lot - the material is hard, my intelligence is good but nothing stellar so it's super easy to become lost.
The truth is it's probably better for the average person to study at their own pace with an LLM or something like that, I had a real rough time following computer science lectures. I can ask the LLM to stop, to re explain, to re explain in a different way etc etc. If I'm tired I can stretch a bit. I think its the really bright kids or those with superior concentration and preparation skills that got something out of those lectures, the rest of us hated it.
I had a linear algebra teacher who would not speak to us. Literally conducted most classes in complete silence. His English wasn't great but manageable - that wasn't the issue. He would just walk into class without acknowledging us and proceed to solve out the previous homework problems. Then he'd introduce a few other problems (written on the whiteboard, nothing verbal) and keep writing. This was presumably similar to our next assignment, which he handed out at the end of class before leaving. Often zero words spoken for the 50 minute class. All of the solutions were available without going to class. So I didn't.
If the university isn't going to invest anything in lecturing, why should I attend the lectures?
I empathize with this. I went to one of those “top tier” universities and had a handful of classes where I regretted being one of the few (fewer than 10) goody good students who attended lecture, and subsequently fell asleep anyway. Over time, I realized that universities like these primarily prioritize faculty who can attract grant dollars over those who are excellent teachers.
But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.
>But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.
From experience on the professor's side, the problem isn't the brilliant students who show up to one class and ace the exam like everyone in here seems to have been. The problem is the students who miss most lectures and get 50% or lower because they (and, increasingly, most students these days) don't actually understand how to study from a textbook.
Long ago CUNY had a low admission bar and a high graduation bar. This meant, of course, that many students dropped out. In your case, students choose to pay tuition and not do the work. What is the external pressure on you or the dean or university to make things easier for these people? I think there should be a reverse feeder school idea: enroll in a university where standards are high, if you do poorly then transfer to a community college. That way a degree from that university is a signal for quality.
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I had a lecturerer who recorded every lecture and posted it to a player you could control the speed of.
So I could listen to lecture at 1.5x speed and skip any parts I thought were filler. Of course I didn't show up to class...
Agreed. In college I would always go to the first class, see if the lecture was useful and probably 80% of the time I wouldn’t go again.
Although I do sympathize with many of the author’s broader points.
> when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.
Unfortunately, some colleges doesn't value efficiency nearly as much as they do their self respect. Because of which we now have strict attendance requirements (75%) for every course.
Fully agree as a "top student" from probably a school similar to where author is a professor.
I would add that reading this piece and the attitude the author has towards students, I doubt I would want to attend their class (or possibly even take it in the first place, professors have reputations).
I'm confused. At the universities I attended, or later worked at, lectures were absolutely, definitely, optional. That's how it should be. Universities provide a framework for students to learn. The university then tests what the student has learned in order to give them a diploma. How the student learned that is surely not important.
(Things are of course different when there are practical considerations to the teaching, such as labwork, which of comes with a degree of associated testing anyway.)
Yeah a lot of what this essay called out seems bad to me, but I always felt like professors thought their lectures were more important to the learning process than they were. Most of my courses had more workshop like class periods where grad students and/or upperclassmen would be there to answer questions, and those were universally more valuable uses of time than the lectures. Office hours with the professors, and of course textbooks, were also great. But lectures? Pretty skippable, honestly!
I regret this showing of disrespect, but I'm a little proud of the fact that I got an A in inorganic chemistry by reading the book when I felt like reading it and otherwise doing homework on my laptop all semester during lectures.
You're top students and don't understand that a sample of two is a poor way to reason about social and human problems at scale? Across large population of individuals with different traits?
Totally disagree. Lecture is an opportunity to directly ask your professor to clarify the material or perhaps extend to an adjacent area. It is also an opportunity to learn from your classmates who may pose insightful questions or comments.
TFA omits this trend (seemingly since wide spread availability of the internet) to being solitary - the view that nothing of value can come from interactions with peers or superiors other than wasted time. [this is different from missing classes because of laziness which is implied].
> Lecture is an opportunity to directly ask your professor to clarify the material or perhaps extend to an adjacent area.
You raise a good point, but in this situation I would usually either: 1) go to office hours or 2) ask my question to other capable students.
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How do you really know you're top students? Maybe you just got a pass.
My median grade was an A+ and my brother got the silver medal for second highest GPA in the faculty.
Congrats but was that on a curve? Do you think your A+ today would have been an A+ 20, 30, 50 years ago? Considering that you've just stated that your MEDIAN grade was an A+, I suspect not.
I meant "pass" as in the sense of "Olé, here's an A+, so off with you to the rest of your life".
But, seriously, how's that lack of engagement working out in "the rest of your life"? Meetings? Why bother? Seems like a lecture. Reply to Slack or Email? Does that sound like something you ought to do? Or a judgement call, based on your intuition of their value?