"retard" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:13:07 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > >> "Sean Kelly" <[email protected]> wrote in message >> news:[email protected]... >>> >>> Intro courses in the sciences are often intended to weed out the people >> >> There's a *lot* of things wrong with the way schools work. Deliberate >> "weeding out" is a clear red flag that a school cares more about their >> own statistics (graduation ratio, etc) > > In fact many schools have made the courses much easier nowadays to get > better statistics. The graduation ratio doesn't matter that much if it's > a public school - they get funding based on the amount of people who have > graduated. I think this model is much more common in Europe, at least.
It all depends on things like what metric they're going for and how they expect things to work, but it almost always (if not always) boils down to being insincere or otherwise disrespectful to the students. A few examples: 1. Public colleges these days, at least in the US, want money, and thus overbook and accept beyond their capacity (ex, when I was at BGSU, they required all non-commuting freshman and sophomores to live in the dorms...but they brought in more than they had room for and stuck the "extras" in dorm lounge areas. And, of course, they charged them full room+board and didn't relax the must-be-in-a-dorm requirement, because "all our students live in a dorm for two years" is one of the things they like to brag about - so yea, their ability to boast definitely outweighs basic respect and living conditions for their own students.) This large number of students means low entrance criteria (which I don't necessarily have a problem with, but it depends on *what* the criteria is, and the criteria used I often disagree with), and thus a high percentage of students who don't have the slightest clue what they want to pursue. So, if they weed out students in introductory classes, they hope that those students (who are likely to be "undecided" majors anyway), will be pushed towards the areas they can sail through the easiest (not necessarily what they would actually like the most or be best served by), which maximizes the throughput of their revolving-doors. Of course other things are used to lubricate the revolving-doors too, for instance, extra credit and various other forms of grade-inflation. 2. For "Ivy League", one of their primary goals is to maintain their "Cadillac" status (and the astronomical tuition they can demand as a result of that), so they don't want to "waste" any resources on students who aren't guaranteed to sail through advanced material without the instructor having to exhibit any higher-than-average teaching ability or effort (note also, that they take much of their bragging rights from their research, and a professor who's good at research may or may not be any good at teaching). So for these schools, their bottom-line is, again, best served by as much "weeding-out" as possible (ideally, anyone who doesn't already know the material inside and out). 3. For a school that doesn't grossly overbook sardines (or at least doesn't get enormous amounts of "undecided" majors), but also doesn't have "Ivy League"-ish status, their revolving doors get greased by not doing any weeding and hijacking quality by making grades and credits as easy to obtain as possible.
