Re: [Israel.pm] My opinion on the Technion - revision 1.5

shlomi - i think you're a good example for a student that went to the 
wrong faculty.

everything you seem to find interest in, falls under programming. you 
should have gone into the CS faculty instead. you didn't know that in 
advance, i imagine (hardly anyone does) - but i think that once you 
realized this, you should have had the courage to make the switch, 
instead of forcing yourself to continue suffering. even if you have done 
that after 2 years, you could have completed a 3-years BA in CS in the 
same time you studied EE overall (it took you 5 years, right?).

i would have added this to your criticism - to put it in context ;)

--guy

Shlomi Fish wrote:
> Hi Nadav!
> 
> I'm BCCing this message to my friend, co-student and former partner from the 
> Technion.
> 
> Thanks for your email! I'll reply to your comments here and later integrate i 
> into the article. (to prevent further critique).
> 
> On Thursday 22 March 2007, Nadav Har'El wrote:
>> 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-t
>>> echnion/
>> For the sake of fairness, I would mention the department you studied in.
>>
> 
> Right.
> 
>> 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.
>>
> 
> Indeed. It is possible that the lecturers didn't seem enlightened and seemed 
> narrow-minded to me, while in fact they were to some extent enlightened only 
> they did not show it. Like I said I find it hard to believe that someone can 
> become a professor in the EE department, without being very intelligent, as 
> even graduating with a B.Sc. is hard enough. Many of the professors probably 
> were just trained not to become an authority on anything except their fields 
> of interest, and so delegate stuff to other professors with this particular 
> field. That or after being enlightened students they were crashed 
> by "reality" as they grew older:
> 
> http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/advice-for-the-young/#growth_death
> 
> In a sense like I said I gave up on some of my aspirations, and decided to 
> study material I mostly have the knack for. I'm not saying I was crashed by 
> reality - I'm still excited about stuff, learn a lot everyday, have an ever 
> growing list of things I'd like to write or read about, etc. But I gave up on 
> the Technion's EE faculty on teaching me things that I did not know nor had 
> the knack for, and which were not part of the corriculum. For example, I took 
> the course "[Elctromagnetic] Waves and Conduits", which was badly managed, 
> without any good reference material, without a website, with an unclear 
> lecturer, with a good T.A., but whom without him I would not have been able 
> to solve the homework, and with two tests that I did not know how to solve, 
> and as a result recieved a close to 0 grade. After it, I decided that 
> Maxwell's equations and their manipulation into optics scared me, and so 
> eventually did not take any course in Electro-optics, which I intended to 
> learn. (And is supposedly a very hot topic nowadays, optical fibers, optical 
> computers and all considered.)
> 
>> My other comments about your essay:
>>
>> Your section about the faculty is confusing: did you find them enlightened,
>> or not?
> 
> I found most of them un-enlightened. Many T.A.'s seemed more englightened and 
> less narrow-minded than most of the lecturers with a Ph.D. or Prof.. It is 
> possible that what I consider being "rehav-ofakim" (wide-minded, the antonym 
> to narrow-minded) has a generation gap, because the lecturers were not 
> interested in the same things that I am when they were B.Sc. students. So 
> they may not know a lot about UNIX or XP or OOP&D or FP/Scheme/Haskell/etc. 
> or dynamic languages (Perl, Python, Common Lisp, etc.) or all of the latest 
> hacker culture and technologies, but they are knowledgable about the hot 
> technologies of their day.
> 
>> 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
> 
> I read it and let me try to convince you why are wrong, as I wrote then:
> 
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/hackers-il/message/3493
> 
> It's better to reach a real agreement than to agree to disagree.
> 
> 1. First of all let's see what's the worst case scenario is. One partner does 
> all the work. The other one slacks. Then test day come. The one partner 
> passes (hopefully with blazing colours), and the other one gets 0. Test is at 
> least 60% of the grade. So the other student fail.
> 
> 1b. The slacker prepares for the exam intensively close to the end of the 
> semester, while not learning before that. So he passes. Does he deserve the 
> grade? I suppose - as he still knows the material and worked hard.
> 
> 1c. So if someone slacks he still fails the course. (factors and other 
> monsters non withstanding.)
> 
> 2. Is the Technion should do anything that it can to prevent students from not 
> doing their homework properly? After all, they can just copy from references. 
> At a course I did - "Image Analysis and Processing" (I told you about it 
> extensively) , my partner and I sat for days on end solving each of the four 
> exercises. Since we didn't do some things properly (or according to what the 
> one who graded the test expected - ;-)) we were graded below 94 and above 80. 
> But there were many 100's in the grades list. So my guess was that they 
> copied it from a reference.
> 
> I don't think a university should be concerned with that, because there are 
> many ways to cheat, and the grader's time is precious.
> 
> 3. You do agree that when the two partners are compotent and they both sit 
> down to solve it, there can be wonderful synergy. I've experienced it first 
> hand many times. Often I was more successful at getting the exercises right 
> and often the opposite (varying from course to course and from exercise to 
> exercise) but we both had an easier time, and we both learned a lot from each 
> other.
> 
> 4. And it's more fun, than solving it all by alone. Man is a social animal. 
> One is alone, two is a company. Psychology matters.
> 
> 5. I'm not implying something stupid like it will prepare people for pair 
> programming in their work (which may or may not happen). People can get used 
> to pair programming or pair solving very quickly because it's natural.
> 
> 6. As an analogy, most scientific articles have more than one writer.
> 
> 7. I believe people will have enough chance to "work on their own" during 
> their studies, as you say. There are many such courses, and some students 
> solve each their own version and then compare it, for peer review and 
> criticism. (There's a documented teamwork "pattern" for this too.) 
> 
>> 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?
> 
> Maybe. However, don't you think hard work and spending a lot of time should be 
> as equally rewarded as talent and "genius". Usually hard work will result in 
> understanding at least in most EE courses. This is not Medicine, where all 
> you have to do is memorise a lot of things by heart. Or humane studies in 
> many universities (but not all) where you can easily fake it very well:
> 
> http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html
> 
> (look for "physicists" and "French literature").
> 
> So if he worked hard he deserved it. Tests should quantify the knowledge and 
> understanding of the material, not your intelligence level, however you want 
> to "measure" it. If you already knew the material (say Theo de Raadt (hi 
> Elad!) taking a Technion's "OS Design" course.) and slacked off completely, 
> and then aced the test, then he also deserves to get 100%.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I agree that tests should tests should not show exact exercises that were 
> shown in class. After all, you need to be able to understand it enough. But 
> in the Technion they are many times completely off-tangent. Here's an 
> example:
> 
> I took the "Intro to Algorithms and Data Structures" course which a crash 
> course on basic and more complex data structures (up to a hash), graph 
> algorithms and other algorithms for EE students (who cannot take the CS 
> course due to Technion politics.) There were almost no correction proofs 
> which to be done correctly are very tedious and require more sophistication 
> and mental prepartion. The exercises were satisfying, the lecturer conveyed 
> the material well (at least I thought so), and the test was fair. I received 
> 100, as I spent some time before the test explaining the material to a 
> friend's friend who relatively slacked off, and teaching is the best way of 
> learning. He receive a grade in the 70's and 80's
> 
> Now a different friend of mine took the course, did all the homework and when 
> he came to the test it was littered with having to do correction proofs. They 
> weren't shown and they weren't prepared for that. Maybe 
> Cormen-Leiserson-Rivest covers them somewhere superficially, but it's not 
> what you expect from a "Hashmelator" (= Electrician) (not that CS students 
> are better when they come but they are better prepared in the course for such 
> proofs.). So this is one case where it doesn't hold.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I hate memorising stuff. I had bad memory. I can never remember if it was -1 
> or 1 in what context. I want to have pages and I want to have all the 
> material at hand. I don't want to have to recreate a 10 page proof in a Game 
> Theory exam (which I understood, but would be damn if I remember). A math 
> student I knew (a friend of OrrD) told me she once memorised a proof, and 
> wrote it down at the test, and that after she recieved the test back she 
> compared it to what was written in the notebook and she said they had been 
> virtually identical.
> 
> Math is not about memorising a lot of obscure proofs and theorems. That's what 
> books and formulae pages are for. While important, I don't think you can 
> expect someone to recreate a 10 (or was it 20) proof in the duration of a 3 
> hours test. Math is about remembering concepts, knowing how to attack 
> problems, applying these problems, doing analogies, implementing what you've 
> learned elsewhere (including more real life situations). If you thought a lot 
> about a problem (say this one: 
> http://www.shlomifish.org/MathVentures/3d-outof-4d-mathml.xhtml or its ASCII 
> art version http://www.shlomifish.org/MathVentures/3d_outof_4d.html ) then 
> later you will remember its technique of solution everytime and can utilise 
> it as a tool in your growing mathematical arsenal. But passively reading a 
> long proof from a book or copying what the professor said is not as effective 
> as doing it yourself. I don't suggest you prove everything from scratch, but 
> you gain more insights from the exercises you solve, and so memorising the 
> proofs you've passively digested is suboptimal.
> 
> Another thing is that those who are good at maths (people with audible memory, 
> who remember sounds, speech, songs, etc. very well) have worse and more 
> accurate memory than people with a visual or even photographic memory. I once 
> briefly tutored someone with a photographic memory who could memorise entire 
> pages for a time (until he forgot them). He had no problem acing his History 
> Matriculation exam where he memorisd the whole book.
> 
> But then when he did 5 units of Physics, he kept finding he had a small amount 
> of time to do the tests properly. I initially thought his teacher was a nazi, 
> but then after looking at the returned test saw that he did it all wrong, and 
> she was right in grading him improperly. Now I would have found this test 
> relatively trivial and come up with an accurate solution (minus some typos), 
> because I have a better knack for math, partially because I have an audible 
> memory.
> 
>>> 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...
> 
> Well this question is more complex. What should I learn? CS? EE? Math? IE? CE? 
> SE? Philosophy? Linguistics? Physics?
> 
> Should I do it straight out of high school? Should I work before that?
> 
> Nadav, FYI, Ori here never went to university. And on the ride to and from 
> Haifa he was fully aware and understood the data structures and algorithms I 
> used in Freecell Solver (hi Muli!), version control systems, etc.  He was 
> very computer literate, that even many EE graduates can learn from.
> 
> Also, Randal L. Schwartz wrote this:
> 
> http://use.perl.org/~merlyn/journal/29946
> 
> It's not so simple, Nadav.
> 
> -----------
> 
> Thanks for your response. This email was a braindump and too much verbose and 
> recursive. I'll put the relevant parts after repharsing back into the article 
> to clarify it, but I'm in no condition to do it now.
> 
> And I'll finish with a joke (from an IRC conversation:
> 
> EE studies. In the Technion. Been There. Done That. Forgot a lot. Remember too 
> much.
> 
> Rashi:
> ------
> 
> Forgot a lot of useless stuff (but also important stuff). Remember too much 
> useless stuff.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 	Shlomi Fish
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Shlomi Fish      shlomif-ik1l9ssToec+JF/[email protected]
> Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/
> 
> Chuck Norris wrote a complete Perl 6 implementation in a day but then
> destroyed all evidence with his bare hands, so no one will know his secrets.
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