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....This month, the US Department of Education is working with accrediting agencies to design new rules, pushing to require colleges to produce evidence that they're making progress with students and to require accreditors to compare the results of similar schools.....</p>
<p>Charles W. Eliot, Harvard's president from 1869 to1909, once quipped that the reason Harvard was known as the nation's greatest storehouse of knowledge was that "the freshmen bring so much in, and the seniors take away so little."</p>
<p>Nearly 100 years later, Harvard and other universities have few ways to prove Eliot wrong....
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<p>One of these ways includes the the Collegiate Learning Assessment which the Spellings commission lauded as a prime example of how colleges could measure and evaluate information about both entering freshmen and college graduates. Wheaton College and other lesser-known colleges believe they have more to gain with these types of evaluations than uber elite institutions like Harvard because "they often take students with mediocre academic records and turn them into great scholars." Wheaton College intends to post results of the evaluative tests on its website in order to provide information to prospective students and parents.</p>
<p>I got a laugh from this:
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Charles W. Eliot, Harvard's president from 1869 to1909, once quipped that the reason Harvard was known as the nation's greatest storehouse of knowledge was that "the freshmen bring so much in, and the seniors take away so little."
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Nothing ever changes! </p>
<p>Honestly, I just don't know how you would can test outcomes. I went into college with a solid prep school education. I could write well, I'd had math through calculus, I was poorly educated in the sciences (girls school in the dark ages), and knew a whole lot of European and British history. What did I get out of college? I wrote no better, I took a Chinese history course, I got a complete education in architectural history courses, I took a bunch of studio arts courses, one film course, a physics and a computer programming course, (but still knew very little biology or chemsitry), and a course in political theory. The best course I took was Chinese Landscape Painting in the Sung Dynasty. What test would prove that I was better off at the end of those four years? And was I? I had to go to grad school to learn to be an architect. (And you could argue about that education as well!)</p>
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Some caution against putting too much stock in certain tests because Harvard students -- so smart to begin with -- likely would progress if professors did nothing.</p>
<p>"You could put every Harvard student in a subterranean vault for four years, and they'd still grow," said Louis Menand, a Harvard professor of English, American literature, and language.
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<p>mathmom: He could have been talking about you!</p>
<p>I find the whole idea of dumbing down the higher educational system with NCLBish types of government laws and regulations absolutely horrifying.</p>
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I find the whole idea of dumbing down the higher educational system with NCLBish types of government laws and regulations absolutely horrifying.
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<p>Me, too. In fact, I think it might be more instructive to mandate critical thinking tests for the government officials, although I suspect that Fred Fielding would have everyone invoke Executive Priviledge....or plead the Fifth.</p>
<p>BTW, is anyone else sick of reading how great it is that Harvard uses TV game show buzzers to "connect" with students in 100+ seat lecture halls? Good grief. With a $30 billion endowment, hire some professors, you know, so you can actually talk with your students.</p>
<p>last fall, S2 took a class whose enrolment had been estimated at 30+. It ballooned to 300. Why? because students WANTED to take it. Should Harvard have hired 10 profs to teach the exact same class (not an introductory, mandatory class)?</p>
<p>S1 was shut out of required classes at his LAC. S2 has not been.</p>
<p>There is no excuse for classes with 300 students at a university with a $30 billion endowment. The nuts and bolts of how a university solves that problem is not the issue. It is either a shortage of faculty (11 to 1 is not a terribly impressive ratio for a school with that endowment) or inefficiencies in the distribution of courses being offered.</p>
<p>Maybe the students who shop and decide which offer of admission to accept really think that it is a better deal (for THEIR learning) to attend the lecture course with 300 really smart classmates and world-famous professor rather than a seminar course with a smaller number of classmates. I wouldn't gainsay their decision unless I had a lot more information about what's on offer at other colleges--both as to available professors and available classmates.</p>
<p>Nope. It was one of hundreds of courses, some of which had as few as 3-4 students. It was the choice of 300 students to take that particular class with that particular prof. Who's to say that they were wrong?</p>
<p>If they want that prof, I think they are stuck. He can either insist the course stay small and many kids won't get to take it, or he can teach a million (well ten) sections of it, which most profs would consider unacceptable. I had some wonderful lecture courses that really didn't need to be wonderful seminars.</p>
<p>This thread is about testing at the college level; it should not be about Harvard-bashing or about universities vs. LAcs (guess what, attending Harvard changes lives, too. It certainly changed mine).</p>
<p>Past a certain number, it does not make sense to go around a table to ask each and every student what the correct formula is for a particular physics problem. Even if you had only ten students in the class, for each student to take up one minute to come up with an answer would take ten minutes. And how would one ensure that the students did not copy one another? Through devices such as Mazur has been using. With the availability of such devices and the technique that Mazue has pioneered, it does not matter whether there are 10 or 100 students in the same class. </p>
<p>And as many have said, they'd rather be in a class of 400 listening to Jonathan Spence lecture on China than with 20 18 year-olds opining or, worse, "feeling" their way through Chinese history.</p>
<p>The largest class sizes at Harvard in Fall 2005 were:</p>
<p>Justice: 1028 (capped)
Principles of Economics: 692
Life Sciences 1a: 482
Cosmic Connections: 335</p>
<p>I believe that all of these are "Core" courses, so would not be entirely accurate to say that students are expressing free will in selecting these course.</p>
<p>It is true that there are hundreds of small courses. But, the flip side is that the enrollment in "Justice" alone means that 15% of the entire Harvard undergrad population was enrolled in a 1000-person lecture course that semester. If you look at it from the freshman class standpoint, it is likely that more than half of Harvard's undergrads are taking courses of this size during their four years at the school. With a $30 billion endowment and not limitations on their ability to hire the best faculty, it surely is possible to offer sufficienct numbers of attractive courses to bring the class sizes down.</p>
<p>Apparently the committee on curriculum reform perceives a problem, but they could be wrong.</p>
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With the availability of such devices and the technique that Mazue has pioneered, it does not matter whether there are 10 or 100 students in the same class.
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<p>Agreed. Mazur's buzzers would be a great way to pass along the reduced price of a lower-cost education to the consumer. In fact, probably has intriguing applications for online education. Imagine the possibilities, a joint venture between Harvard and the University of Phoenix!</p>
<p>You do not address the issue, and you continue to use this thread to bash Harvard. And did you not argue in some other thread that Harvard's $30 billion endowment was not available in its entirety for undergraduate education? So why trot it out now? Do you really need to have your Harvard-bashing fix? </p>
<p>Your D had classes that had 20 students, right? Would it have been fine to spend the whole hour( not counting homework, mid-term, finals, etc...) asking each and every student whether s/he got whatever science concept was being discussed? Or would it have been more efficient to hand out 20 gizmos, and spend only 3 minutes on this mini-quiz then moved on, leaving the rest of the 55 minutes to actually cover the materials?</p>
<p>But hey, it's a free country. Bash Harvard to your heart's content while the DOE tries to impose testing on colleges whether their name is Harvard or Swarthmore.</p>
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I believe that all of these are "Core" courses, so would not be entirely accurate to say that students are expressing free will in selecting these course.
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<p>Harvard doesn't have a mandatory-course-list core, but a smorgasbord core. In other words, students can fulfill their core education requirements by taking courses other than those listed. And of course students can choose to matriculate at colleges other than Harvard. That's sounds enough like free will to me. The students in Life Sciences 1a (said to be quite a good course, by the way) at Harvard chose that knowing the course's characteristics, and chose Harvard knowing its characteristics.</p>
<p>
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Would it have been fine to spend the whole hour( not counting homework, mid-term, finals, etc...) asking each and every student whether s/he got whatever science concept was being discussed? Or would it have been more efficient to hand out 20 gizmos, and spend only 3 minutes on this mini-quiz then moved on, leaving the rest of the 55 minutes to actually cover the materials?
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<p>Mazur teaches intro Physics, right? My daughters first semester freshman Physics (special relativity and quantuum) class had 12 students (the Professor taught three sections). It met once a week for 3 hours. As part of that 3 hours, six teams of two students each presented a problem set to the class in addition to the group problem sets related to the reading and lecture for the week. Outside of class, there was a Sunday night study group and the students, in teams of two, went to the Professor's office the day before class to review their understanding of their problem set. Lab sections were taught by three professors in the department. Completely different teaching model. And a little unfair. The basic intro Physics course at Swarthmore for non-majors is a large lecture format class with 35 students.</p>
<p>By the way, my "bash" was not of Harvard but of reading about what a great thing it is to use TV game show buzzers to make large lecture classes better. This is about the fourth time the Boston Globe has trotted that out without asking the obvious question: If professor/student interaction is desireable and you have the money and you can hire any professor in the world, then why do it with TV game show buzzers?</p>
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BTW, is anyone else sick of reading how great it is that Harvard uses TV game show buzzers to "connect" with students in 100+ seat lecture halls? Good grief.
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<p>BTW, is anyone else sick of Interesteddad's kneejerk reactions to all things Harvard, even when it's not what the thread is about?</p>
<p>We know. Your kid went to an LAC. All things bright and beautiful happened there. Give it a rest.</p>
<p>I'dad class size is not always the primary determinant defining the quality of a particular class. Heck the most famous college course of all time was the Intro to Modern Physics classes taught by Richard Feynman at CalTech. They were huge by CalTech standard, taken by upwards of 200 students.</p>
<p>A great course is often defined by an inspired/inspiring professor and an inspired/inspiring syllabus. One of the most memorable classes I ever took was social cybernetics taught by Prof Dinitz. The lectures were amazing and I still have the heavily annotated and dog-earred primary text he assigned on my bookshelf(The Triple Revolution-Social Issues in Depth).</p>
<p>A class lead by a poor instructor will be of little lasting value if the students number 5 or 500. The only advantage of the smaller class is that the pain is inflicted on fewer students.</p>