<p>Specifically, CS courses but we can discuss any types of courses. I just started an introductory C++ course (only has differential calc as a prerequisite) necessary for my major and was wondering if I'd landed myself in a weeder, but having spent my first year-and-a-half of college at a CC where there are no weeders and everybody teaching is an actual professor, I'm not sure how to recognize the signs of weederness.</p>
<p>So far it's basic programming, but my suspicions were aroused when I learned the procedure for our labs: we sign onto our Windows workstations in the lab using one username and password, then do a remote log-on to a Solaris server somewhere on campus with another user-name and password, and do all of our work in this UNIX terminal. We have CDE of course, but we use the terminal to create directories for our lab projects, copy executable files from another director to ours, use emacs and g++ to edit and compile.</p>
<p>I actually think that using emacs combined with g++ and using a CLI interface (for just those tasks) is simpler and easier to use, but it's been made extra difficult by this remote terminal business. You'd think we'd either have bona-fide UNIX workstations or if we're on Windows, we'd have Visual Studio, wouldn't you?</p>
<p>I was just wondering if they had added these extra steps to weed out people who aren't competent with computers. What do you think? For those of you who took weeder CS courses, what were they like? (really difficult 2nd or 3rd year classes like "UNIX systems programming" or something aren't what I'm talking about, I'm talking about the first few programming classes that have been weederized).</p>
<p>My son, usually a very strong student, dropped his introductory C++ class this past spring. He’s taking a class in C++ at a community college this summer and will retake the required class in the fall. He’s going to get an upperclassman to tutor him, also. He said a LOT of people struggled in it. These are kids who had to gain admittance into a very selective program, so I have the feeling this is a weeder class. I can’t give you any specifics, though. Ha, I learned Basic and Fortran when I was in college! :)</p>
<p>In my experience, a weeder has the following characteristics:</p>
<p>-High withdraw rate</p>
<p>-Low curve with no reason other than to increase competitiveness</p>
<p>-Intentional lack of resources to help students learn the material (IE No problem sets or no answers to problem sets, few office hours, intentionally vague explanations of material) </p>
<p>-Grading not based on understanding of the material (IE grading that is just picky and not based on any apparent understanding of the material)</p>
<p>-Hardest problems seen in the class are on the tests rather than homework (this ****es me off more about a class more than anything else)</p>
<p>By the first midterm you should be seeing some of these clearly if the class is a weeder class.</p>
<p>My intro CS class also used a remote UNIX terminal, and it was most definitely not a weeder. The above post pretty accurately describes the main features of a weeder.</p>
<p>I don’t think that it’s done as a weeder thing–I think they are just making you use linux just because CS guys like linux. Running a remote server is probably cheaper and easier to maintain than a bunch of workstations, so that’s probably why they did things that way.</p>
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<p>This sounds like students whining. Why would a professor go through the trouble to make a class artificially hard when he could just teach more and/or teach at a higher level?</p>
<p>All courses which are key prerequisites of more advanced courses are “weeders” by default, since there is pressure to ensure that students learn enough to be able to use what they learned in the more advanced courses. Otherwise, the instructors of those courses will get flak from both the instructors of and students in the more advanced courses about why the students are so unprepared to do the material in the more advanced course even if they got good (or at least passing) grades in the prerequisite course.</p>
<p>As far as logging into Windows to login to Solaris or whatever, couldn’t you just ssh to the Solaris computer from your own computer at home (or any other computer) and do your work?</p>
<p>If the setup seems excessively complicated, it may just be due to poor IT rather than intention to make things needlessly more difficult.</p>
<p>Yeah, I can ssh from home, but a <em>lot</em> of people were baffled by the command line interface, how compiling works, how to interpret error messages (line numbers), how to work the programs (many of them seem to have zero experience with CLI-interfaces, one guy entered “a.out” as the radius of a circle cuz he didn’t realize the program had started).</p>
<p>So far we haven’t heard the words “header file” or “linker.” The TA just says “you have to include iostream because it includes cout,” and that’s about as deep as his explanations get. If I hadn’t studied this all years ago I’d be screwed.</p>
<p>Is the intentional use of TAs with mediocre English part of the weeder philosophy?</p>
<p>To this day I’ve still not gotten a decent explanation about headers in any class. I, like most others, at some point looked it up. </p>
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<p>That’s probably more of an issue of convenience. I don’t think they’re intentionally looking at two otherwise equal TA candidates and picking the one with worse English. </p>
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<p>There’s no denying it if a class has no problem sets or answers to problem sets. This isn’t an opinion. Maybe it’s easier for a professor to do it that way. Maybe the department wants to keep the number of kids in the major low.</p>
<p>To me, the courses of academic programs where your are required to achieve a certain GPA and complete a certain set of courses before “being admitted” to your junior/senior years in the program are weeders. It is one of the reasons why I am in favor of bigger schools with a lot of majors because it allows students alternative majors to still study something close to their intended major.</p>
<p>Some students need to get the high GPA and everything else to succeed in a certain industry while others only need the something similar and a degree and can take off from there.</p>
<p>I don’t think the SSH thing, by itself, would make an introductory programming course a “weeder”. I mean, that’s the kind of thing that students can ask each other about, presumably without any penalty.</p>
<p>You’ll be able to tell weeder courses when e.g. you have a two semester sequence, and the enrollment trends roughly like…
1st semester (beginning): 100
1st semester (midterm): 50
2nd semester (beginning): 25
2nd semester (midterm): 20</p>
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In my experience, some professors don’t particularly enjoy teaching and would much rather spend their time doing research. You’d be surprised how much easier it is to teach at a lower level and grade harder than it is to teach at a high level and grade leniently… particularly if you’re shooting for a specific kind of grade distribution.</p>
<p>No, there are a lot of international graduate students in CS because people in other countries care more about engineering-ish degrees than law, business, and medicine degrees.</p>
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<p>I can deny it. I’ve taken a class where homework wasn’t collected, and it wasn’t a weeder. I’ve taken a bunch of classes where there were no posted solutions. A lot of professors refuse to post solutions because students get old solutions and cheat on homeworks. These are probably the same students that whine about weeders and how the professor doesn’t care about teaching.</p>
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<p>I studied engineering at a large research institution and have never run across a professor that taught a class like this. I have taken a few classes where the professor has not put as much effort in the class as he should, but these classes weren’t harshly graded. The classes with strict grading were the well-structured classes. Maybe my experience is unusual, but I still maintain that this is something that students tell themselves so that they don’t feel bad for not doing well in a class. </p>
<p>It’s a lot easier to grade more easily than it is to grade harshly, based off of my own experience. I don’t see how it would be that much harder to teach at an advanced level. Professors are capable of doing that–they’ve been studying their subject for a while.</p>
I have the opposite experience. If you assign hard problems and demand perfection (no partial credit, legible handwriting, etc.), grading becomes almost mechanical, and students complain much less frequently. Granted, the grading - per se - is not usually an issue for professors, since graduate assistants usually do most of this kind of thing. Still, when grading is more lenient (more partial credit, different people getting slightly different points for similar answers, etc.), that can only mean more work for the professor. </p>
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Professors do study these things a lot, but it still takes time to prepare lectures, review material, assign problems, etc. Also - especially at the undergraduate level - professors aren’t always necessarily teaching things they are particularly interested in or knowledgable about. While teaching at an ordinary level might require minimal preparation, teaching at an advanced level can actually require that the professor take the time to learn the advanced material himself/herself… and while professors generally appreciate the opportunity to learn new things, there is a certain sense that they have already paid their dues.</p>
<p>I don’t even know what you’re saying. If a class has no problem sets then there are no problem sets. If a class doesn’t give answers to any problem sets (whether they be homeworks or practice tests or whatever) then there aren’t any answers.</p>
<p>I hadn’t thought about that, but I don’t think that offering partial credit is that much more work for the professor. Granted, I don’t have experience on a course staff where written homeworks comprise a lot of the class. In any event, grading homeworks like you say isn’t necessarily:</p>
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<p>On things like papers and projects, though, it is easier to not be super thorough about standards and grade easily, than to grade harshly.</p>
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<p>I still get the feeling that holding students to a high standard and then not holding yourself at that same standard almost requires a sort of malice, and this is not something that I have seen in any of the professors I have taken classes with.</p>
<p>Not posting solutions isn’t done to make the classes artificially harder–it is done to curtail cheating. Your professor isn’t reclining in a high chair, and cackling that students don’t have solutions to the homeworks and now he’ll be able to assign more C’s in his class.</p>
<p>Not collecting homeworks is probably done out of convenience, but arguably, you’d be doing the same amount of work and at the same level anyway if the problem sets were collected, it is just that you have more motivation to do the homeworks if they are part of a grade.</p>