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To Keep Students in STEM fields, Let’s Weed Out the Weed-Out Math Classes

Anonymous Tue 29 Mar 19:08:47 2022 No.14347151 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>14347153 >>14347155 >>14347188 >>14347413 >>14348235

>All routes to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees run through calculus classes. Each year, hundreds of thousands of college students take introductory calculus. But only a fraction ultimately complete a STEM degree
Are you doing your part to 'weed out' math which is preventing our brightest minds from getting STEM degrees?

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 29 Mar 2022 19:09:22 No.14347153 Report

Quoted By: >>14347973

>>14347151
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-keep-students-in-stem-fields-lets-weed-out-the-weed-out-math-classes/
Forgot link

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 29 Mar 2022 19:10:51 No.14347155 Report

Quoted By:

>>14347151
we already had this thread last week

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 29 Mar 2022 19:25:54 No.14347188 Report

Quoted By:

>>14347151
imagine being filtered by 400 year old math

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 29 Mar 2022 21:15:12 No.14347413 Report

Quoted By: >>14347774

>>14347151
Weed out classes never made sense, the method of them is normally due to:
1) Content is too hard
2) Lecturer is shit and can't teach the subject
3) Lecturer purposely makes the course artificially harder by leaving out information
4) Lecturer makes the exam hard by going beyond the scope/expectations set within the course

(1) normally isn't the reason since the degree is meant to churn out hundreds of students a year, clearly it's not hard for an everyman to do it. This means that (2-4) tend to be the cause of weed-out courses, which just sounds like an excuse to do shit teaching rather than actually teach students the topic and set reasonable standards.

The only other reason to have weed-out courses seems to be due to a matter of ego and gatekeeping, where the lecturer gets off on the idea they specialise in something so many people fail (origami can be as hard as control theory if you don't explain anything, give red herrings, and generally make things convoluted, and make a test of absurdly hard origami to make), but that's just rebranding a pretentious lecturer to make it sound like they're good for the degree.

Even the idea that it filters the students of a university to only let the best get a degree, making the uni look better, doesn't work in modern day since everyone has a degree and now employers want work experience, degrees are more of a hoop to jump through rather than something that makes you outshine everyone else

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 29 Mar 2022 21:23:25 No.14347426 Report

Quoted By:

Counterpoint: Boeing.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 29 Mar 2022 23:56:04 No.14347774 Report

Quoted By: >>14348236

>>14347413
You forgot the real answer: most undergraduates are fucking retarded.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 30 Mar 2022 01:18:48 No.14347973 Report

Quoted By: >>14348242 >>14348444

>>14347153
I actually read the article. It's very buzzwordy and the title is fucking retarded (blame editors since they decide titles), but the actual content is reasonable enough.

It's basically, we should be teaching STEM students discipline focused and application focused math and not boring them with math they hardly will use or appreciate until later in their career. This is actually a real problem with most math courses in undergrad, they're interesting and foundational but also fucking USELESS without some sort of application focused course as a follow up.

I'm of the firm opinion that math education should almost entirely be focused into applied math and computational math up until grad school. For example, A traditional PDE undergrad course should teach the heat equation as a motivating analytical problem and then IMMEDIATELY jump into finite differences and finite elements.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 30 Mar 2022 03:55:15 No.14348235 Report

Quoted By:

>>14347151
>weed-out classes

Weed-out classes don't exist.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 30 Mar 2022 03:56:16 No.14348236 Report

Quoted By:

>>14347774
Thank you for stating the obvious.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 30 Mar 2022 03:59:35 No.14348242 Report

Quoted By:

>>14347973
>math they hardly will use or appreciate until later in their career.

I am certain that there are some very useful things I learned in undergrad but I have forgot about them.

Some people need an extra year or two to learn and properly grasp the same material, needing extra time beyond this and you're beginning to see the lost causes who should be doing something else.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 30 Mar 2022 06:21:02 No.14348437 Report

Quoted By:

Are you trolling or just stupid? You really want a bunch of retards to just waltz past early hurdles into STEM and think they have what it takes? Waste of time and resources NOT to make them go through it. Plus they waste their own time being misled instead of facing reality that they should pursue other paths in life.
This shit is why the world is in trouble.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 30 Mar 2022 06:26:12 No.14348444 Report

Quoted By: >>14348447

>>14347973
calculus really isn't that hard. they're not asking you to solve the hardest integrals, and its better to be familiar with it early than to get stuck later. if you can't understand basic calc then you really shouldn't be getting a degree. they're not asking a lot of you by asking you to take calc.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 30 Mar 2022 06:29:21 No.14348447 Report

Quoted By:

>>14348444
I don't disagree, but I think it is largely useless without application. Consider that you can get through an entire stem degree without ever taking an application focused math course and you can see the problem.

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