<p>I agree with RacinReaver, and will also add that I do think there are students and faculty who are working on this problem. There have been a lot of proposed changes to core. How many of them will actually get implemented, however, remains to be seen.</p>
<p>Also, there is somewhat of a selection bias. I don’t often go to office hours because I want to understand the material on my own. Thus, the TAs don’t really get a counter-example of people who aren’t trying to tool them.</p>
<p>Who’s a TA??</p>
<p>A lot of people? I’m a TA…</p>
<p>-shrugs- Caltech feeds more than is humanly possible for most people to learn and fully master in a decade, into two years. Welcome to core.</p>
<p>I don’t really have the same thoughts about core as a lot other people, I think. I don’t actually believe you’re supposed to learn the material in core, but rather, you’re supposed to learn how to learn in core.</p>
<p>The way that I think about it, core is basically a rundown of the current view of many branches of math and science, it takes you through the thought processes that people have thought about problems in the past. The homework sets, are all solved problems, often times with multiple solutions (especially so in math). If you have time to develop a creative, personal solution, great! If not, oh well, you’ll at least have learned different approaches to the problem. Core is also often graded on a relatively low curve, so honestly, as long as your approach is solid, even if you don’t get the problem completely, you’ll probably end up with a B or higher in the class. I think the people who just go around asking for answers, are just shooting themselves in the foot, especially since you don’t need to get the right answer 100% of the time to get an A in the class. And even less, if you’re okay with a B. </p>
<p>With that said, after core is over, I definitely find that it’s helped a ton, not necessarily material wise. (I don’t remember much of core, tbh.) But rather, I do remember different approaches to problems. My junior and senior level classes are rather proposal based, with very open ended questions, and homework problems and test questions that are NOT solved problems. And in that instance, being familiar with multiple attacks to the same problem is more useful than knowing and fully understanding quantum mechanics. Regardless of what field you’re in, you will use problem solving skills (if you are in science and math). You may not use Quantum Mechanics, but you may find yourself using some of the same thought processes that people used to solve quantum mechanics, in whatever field you end up in.</p>
<p>With that said. That’s only my two cents, from a senior, nonetheless. (btw, if you guys get a chance, you guys should all congratulate lizzardfire/wish him luck, even with the ungodly amounts of time he spends telling y’all about caltech, he’s still managed to be a Hertz finalist, I’m so happy for you, man!!!)</p>
<p>PS: I’m also a TA. We’re here to help, but- honestly, people who whine and complain about learning annoy me a little bit. You are always in control of your own learning. Always. The best thing about Caltech, is that there are a million people you can go to who are all very bright and can all teach you stuff, I learned my Phys 2a and Phys 2b from a senior who lived down the hall who’s now a grad student at Harvard. If you only open up your brain to the prof, and not to the TA’s, the other students in your dorm, the other people in your lab, it’s your loss. Caltech is seriously a phenomenal place when it comes to a concentration of people who really know their **** when it comes to science. <- that is really just an aside for people who complain about poor teaching, which while is not excusable, poor learning is really just as inexcusable, especially with all the resources you have at your beck and call at a place like Caltech.</p>
<p>Anyways, Cheers from England guys!!</p>
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Maybe so, but my point was that if you’re one of those people who actually wants/tries to learn all the material, core is going to be a miserable experience. Also, I don’t think your interpretation of core is the intended one. Caltech likes to talk about the breadth of knowledge all its students get from core–I think they are crazy enough to think we’re actually learning all that they’re throwing at us. Besides, if you want to teach critical thinking and problem solving, there’s no reason to cram so much material into those five terms. I think we’d be better served having less material and more time to think about the problems if that were core’s intended purpose. </p>
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No offense, but I think this attitude is what keeps Caltech from improving its teaching quality. As long as you can point your finger at the students and say “well, you should have gone to a TA or the person down the hall if your prof was bad,” then the profs never have to get any better. I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn from people other than profs. But I think this should be a supplement to what you learn in class, not a replacement. It’s perfectly valid for people to be irritated if the teaching quality is bad so that they have to seek out information they should have learned in class from another source. It’s not other students’ job to teach you what the prof should have, even if they’re willing to do it (which they usually are).</p>
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<p>This probably would support the contention that core should be less heavy of a workload, with an emphasis on doing a few <em>core</em> things within each field it seeks to investigate well. I find often that the approaches I learn to a problem stick best if it was something I spent a long time on, and at that could and *was encouraged to * spend much time on. That is, if the core is meant to expose one to several modes of thought rather than cover specific material.</p>
<p>Sorry, I don’t really know how to quote properly. But here are some really quick responses.</p>
<p>“Maybe so, but my point was that if you’re one of those people who actually wants/tries to learn all the material, core is going to be a miserable experience. Also, I don’t think your interpretation of core is the intended one. Caltech likes to talk about the breadth of knowledge all its students get from core–I think they are crazy enough to think we’re actually learning all that they’re throwing at us. Besides, if you want to teach critical thinking and problem solving, there’s no reason to cram so much material into those five terms. I think we’d be better served having less material and more time to think about the problems if that were core’s intended purpose.”</p>
<p>I never said that my interpretation of core is the intended one, but it’s a mindset that has helped me a lot, personally, and so I used this opportunity to share it, so that the incoming freshman/applicants aren’t super saturated with the bitter, demonized view of core that many techers on cc seem to have. Again, I’ll be frank in saying that I haven’t spent any time really thinking about better ways of improving core, I spent most of my time either in lab, reading papers or thinking about chemistry. But I’m just offering a counterexample, that while I think core can certainly be improved, I don’t think it’s this hellhole that everyone describes it to be, and I went through core back when it was “harder.” without the option of prac physics without labs. And it might also be my looking back as a senior, whereas I’m farther removed from just staying up late to finish the problem sets, and have more opportunities to really see how many different modes of thinking have assisted me in thinking about problems in my research.</p>
<p>Again, I commented that in my view, one of the main points of core was to expose you to many different ways that people have solved problems in the past- by asking you interesting, tough, but ultimately, solved problems. I don’t think it’s such a big deal to ask freshmen and sophmores to think through thought processes that previous great scientists have thought through. And again, if they come up with a novel solution, great! If they don’t, that’s fine too. And so the more problems you see/solutions you see, the better. </p>
<p>“No offense, but I think this attitude is what keeps Caltech from improving its teaching quality. As long as you can point your finger at the students and say “well, you should have gone to a TA or the person down the hall if your prof was bad,” then the profs never have to get any better. I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn from people other than profs. But I think this should be a supplement to what you learn in class, not a replacement. It’s perfectly valid for people to be irritated if the teaching quality is bad so that they have to seek out information they should have learned in class from another source. It’s not other students’ job to teach you what the prof should have, even if they’re willing to do it (which they usually are).”</p>
<p>No offense, but you should read more carefully what I said. I never said that poor teaching was excusable. In fact I said it was inexcusable. But again, I will reiterate that poor learning is also inexcusable. Students who really want to learn the material should go find a way of learning it, that’s our responsibility as students and as future scientists. By all means, we should comment and get angry when there is poor teaching- but we shouldn’t let it stop us from learning. And I also disagree about it not being a replacement. Different people learn things differently, some people don’t learn well at all by lecturing, and instead use the lectures as a supplement. Especially at a place like tech where there are so many bright people, who all have very different ways of thinking. </p>
<p>I’m not saying that you can’t be irritated. I didn’t complain about students whining about poor teaching, but rather about their own learning. Students have a right to say “Professor X sucked at teaching class A.” But in the real world, in grad school, in a real lab, people aren’t going to care whether or not Professor X sucked at teaching class A- but rather whether or not you learned the material in class A. And the only one who has ANY control over whether or not you learned the material in class A is you. If you care about learning the material, no matter how good the teaching, you’ll learn it. If you don’t care about learning the material, no matter how good the teaching is, you won’t. I firmly believe that this is all in your hands. </p>
<p>I’d like to stress, I’m not giving teachers a free pass, they certainly need to be help accountable, but there are avenues for this, we have TQFR’s, we have a SFC conference every two years, and I’ve sat on the committee for chemistry, and we do talk to the professors and go over the TQFR’s and the biggest complaints. We have ombudsmen, we have the ARC. There are so many avenues by which you can complain about poor teaching. And so the professors are NOT getting a free pass for poor teaching, but students should NOT get a free pass for not learning the material. </p>
<p>Anyways, feel free to disagree. But I feel like you’re arguing against points that I never made. I hope this response clarifies things.</p>
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FYI, I’m a Junior, so I also didn’t have the option of prac phys without labs or whatever that’s made core “easier.” I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I do think that your interpretation of core is better for sanity’s sake, but I don’t think I’d have been able to pull it off as a frosh/soph. I wanted to learn the material, and I couldn’t, and that left me frustrated most of the time. I’ve been stressing from the beginning that how you feel about core is going to depend on what type of person you are. If you’re the type that can accept that you’re not going to understand everything and just sit back and enjoy seeing a lot of interesting problems without getting upset with yourself for not being able to solve them all, or even most of them, then more power to you. Enjoy Caltech.</p>
<p>I sat on the SFC Committee for EE (which saw substantial organizational change and even some curriculum change) and I currently sit on the Caltech Core Curriculum Task Force. </p>
<p>I agree that there are problems with core, and I (with a bunch of other professors and students) are working hard to fix them. That being said, a core curriculum in any state is only going to be ideal for some subset of students that are qualified to attend Caltech. Some people are not going to be served by any core; some people don’t want to be forced to take difficult coursework in areas they don’t care about. These people should not attend Caltech. It’s not like we hide our core curriculum, or the difficulty of our school. In fact, they were big selling points for me, and while I didn’t love core 24/7 I am incredibly aware of the beneficial effect it’s had on my academic knowledge (and that’s something I am thankful for). </p>
<p>IMSAgeek, do you really feel that students going through core are not able to solve most of the problems they see? I’m not sure if I’m reading you correctly here, but this seems somewhat unrealistic. Most of my friends were able to solve correctly the vast majority of problems they faced in core, regardless of major or genius-level. </p>
<p>You additionally state that core will be miserable for students who “want to try to learn all of the material”. I guess I believe you, but I’m not really sure why this is hard to adapt to. It seems to in some way suggest that having less material is better because it is easier to learn it all. I’d much rather be exposed to a very large amount of material that allows me to pick and choose what I want to focus on more deeply.</p>
<p>There’s a professor at Caltech who says that one of the largest problems with Caltech today is that students are too focused on grades. Of course, this is somewhat due to a greater focus on grades in grad schools, and med schools, but still there is some responsibility on the shoulders of the student. This prof, who is a Caltech alum, always said that when he took a course that he was not interested in, he just took a B and didn’t worry too much about it. This is a philosophy I rarely see at Tech today. I feel like a lot of students now gain self-worth by acing classes. It’s not enough to learn a lot, they have to master the class and get an A. This grade-focused mentality keeps students from walking away from a course they worked really hard in, and still got a B, with a smile on their face–it keeps them from objectively identifying just how much they may have learned from that course. </p>
<p>This has been sort of long and rambling, but I’ll conclude with this:</p>
<p>Core is difficult. Core has issues with it that need to be solved. The overall idea of core is going to suit some people with a particular learning style and not suit others with a different learning style, regardless of implementation.</p>
<p>Caltech is one of the few schools left that has a strong core, and by doing so, it offers an optimal learning environment for those suited to it. If being forced to take difficult classes in a large variety of areas is not what you’re interested in, don’t come here. If you’re obsessed with grades, don’t come here. If you want to be exposed to as much as possible and be challenged through it all, well then, you might just like it here.</p>
<p>P.S. Thanks for the well-wished Benji :)</p>
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You did, though.
I understand that you said that poor teaching is inexcusable, and I think now that you have clarified the above we are mostly in agreement, though I do think that there is still a big difference between a student who attended all the lectures complaining that they didn’t learn anything and a student who didn’t attend anything complaining that they didn’t learn anything. If a student puts a reasonable effort (attending lectures, asking TAs for help sometimes, completing all the homework) into learning the material in a class and doesn’t feel like the professor put in their share of the effort into teaching the class, I think that’s its reasonable that they would complain about their learning for that class. Yes, no one in grad school or lab or whatever will care whether you “tried” to learn the material, only whether you actually did. But I’m not an employer or a PI, so I do care.</p>
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Agreed.
Sorry, my wording was ambiguous. When I said “or even most of them” I meant that students would have to get used to being able to solve less than most of the problems (say, they can solve 60-70% of them instead of the 90-100% they were used to in high school). Not that they would not be able to solve most of the problems. Ugh, I’m not sure that made it any clearer. The essential point was having to get used to not knowing how to solve everything.</p>
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I’m not saying it’s better objectively. It might have been better for me, and I go back and forth on that, but it will certainly be better for some people. It’s up to each person considering Caltech whether they are one of those people or not.</p>
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I agree with this, but caring less about grades is a lot easier said than done. Caltech students are all people who are used to doing really well and having it get them where they want to go. Trying to make these people be okay with working their butts off to get straight Bs and settle for their 2nd, 3rd, 4th choice grad school is not an easy job and can border on insensitive. </p>
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Agreed 100%. Said much better than I’ve been managing lately. Gah.</p>
<p>Summary: Caltech is difficult and requires a LOT of work. Some people think this is not optimal.</p>
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<p>After reading through your kind analyses, I just have one last question in mind.</p>
<p>Do undergraduate alumni of Caltech, generally, continue with their dream of pursuing scientific/ mathematical research after graduating, or do they switch careers? </p>
<p>I know this question is terribly phrased, and is perhaps vague and ambiguous. But I’d really appreciate any Caltech grad’s take on this question. Thanks :)</p>
<p>I would say most Techers continue to do math and science. Some go into finance, which seems to be more than tangentially related. I actually don’t know many who go into a completely unrelated field.</p>
<p>I would say the vast majority of Techers stay in science/math/engineering. In the past couple years there have been a number who go into finance (mostly because it was so lucrative), but my impression is that that has gone down due to the current economy.</p>
<p>Might I suggest that the one point that has come up around here that’s really worth bringing up is that somehow not acing core classes shouldn’t be a stress factor right? I think this is really what the administration might best do. I agree with lizzard as an outsider from a very different kind of school that core probably best functions to make lots of material wash over one’s head, so that one can focus what to go into in more depth, but that’s exactly what wouldn’t happen with students getting into the mentality of acing classes. Maybe a pass/fail system for those classes would be nice, I don’t know.</p>
<p>Another little point is that wonderful folks like lizzard, IMS, etc really making some effort to tell students what the core is like might be one of the other best fixes – hopefully the more reality is spoken of, the less people get into something that’s not right for them.</p>