Re: My opinion on the Technion - revision 1.5

On Thu, Mar 22, 2007, Shlomi Fish wrote about "[hackers-il] My opinion on the Technion - revision 1.5":
> http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/education/opinion-on-the-technion/

For the sake of fairness, I would mention the department you studied in.

Because my experience in the Math department couldn't be more different than
the one you encountered. Most (although unfortunately not all) of the
professors were excellent teachers, and I really admired both their knowledge
(which you also admit is good) and their teaching method. I got the feeling
that most of them really loved teaching, loved the material they teach, and
cared about the students.

Of course, the fact that most Math courses had 5-30 students in them - not
the hundreds you probably had in many of your courses - did a lot to improve
the situation. Sometimes even with a good teacher, if you're in a "stadium"
of 200 students, you feel neglected and lost, and it's easy to blame the
teacher. I know I have (in huge courses like Physics 1M). Of course, with
a really gifted teacher, you'll enjoy even a course in a stadium, but these
are obviously rare.

My other comments about your essay:

Your section about the faculty is confusing: did you find them enlightened,
or not?

I agree with you about the *huge* load during my studies (many days I
did not go to sleep before 3am...), but in previous discussions here, we
agreed to disagree about the merits of "pair programming" ;-) The most
basic problem with this method is that it's *not* pair programming - usually
the pair doesn't work together, but rather divide the exercise and do each
part separately. I wrote about my more fundamental problem with this approach
in http://nadav.harel.org.il/homepage/musing/educooperation

What you write about the test difficult baffles me. Do you claim that working
hard on the exercises should be enough to get a 100? Should it be enough to
be a "hard working" to finish the university with a 100 GPA? Shouldn't the
tests really be just hard enough to differenciate between people who work
hard (and have a lot of free time...) but have a shallow understanding, and
"geniouses" who got deep understanding of the material?
You know, there's an even an opposing view which says that the tests should
not be too similar to the problems encountered in the exercises (which is what
you suggest). The problem with that suggestion is that it strongly emphesizes 
memory - not understanding or even hard work; Your best way to pass these
tests is to memorize all the exercises - if you do, you'll finish the test
in an hour and get a 100, but if you don't, there's a high chance you'll do
something wrong and get less than a 100.
In fact, you can even memorize exercises which you never did yourself. I'm
sure that you know the (assumed) difference between P and NP, right? Solving
an NP problem is hard, but once you know the solution, verifying that it is
correct is easy (polynomial time). Math homework (for example) is the same -
solving it is hard, but once you see the solution, reading it, memorizing it
and even understanding it - is easy. Practicing the skill to understand someone
else's proofs is *not* the same as practicing to create new proofs.

> Note that I still haven't added the section "Should I study in University", 
> where I basically say "I don't know.".

I think the answer is obvious, YES with a capital Y E S. Even if you think
that it didn't change the way you think for the better (I believe it did)
then at least it changed the way that employers think about you, which is
important in today's job market...

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Thursday, Mar 22 2007, 3 Nisan 5767
nyh-TS7m/[email protected]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I used to work in a pickle factory, until
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |I got canned.