When you ask how you get an “A,” they’re likely to be annoyed because you’re indicating you don’t care about learning, which is the best way to earn an A.
I cannot stand it when a professor says that the best way to get an A is to learn. It shows a fundamental ignorance about their own system of instruction.
If there is anything I've learned about universities, it is that learning is at best orthogonal to getting an A. More often you have to actively sabotage your actual learning in order to get an A.
When you get excited about a subject enough to explore it on your own, you will almost inevitably end up either spending too much time on one part of the curriculum or neglecting the rote memorization and tedious busy work that is necessary to get an A. Classes are just small factories, treating and evaluating every student the same way. It is and ever was a game of points and percentages. If you want "learning" out of this, you need to balance it with playing the game.
Professors have either never known this or have completely forgotten it. They constantly whine about how students seemingly strive to get the least out of their education as possible by taking as many shortcuts as they can. What they fail to realize is that all of their classes are set up as silly little point games, and each student has about 5 or 6 of them. Then they give out so many busy work assignments and so much reading per class that it is impossible to accomplish it all. The students are essentially learning how to prioritize and cut out all of the unnecessary fat in order to maximize their points. They're kept so busy that they don't even know that they're not really maximizing for learning. Learning is not what the professors tell them to do. Learning is not what the professors hold over their heads. They live by points, and die by points. It takes a special student to pull his/her head out of this firehose of tasks and decide to pursue their own education.
So Bob the student comes into class and he hasn't done the reading. Why? Because he has spent 102% of his time on the various homeworks and deliverables for this and other classes -- the stuff that actually has an effect on the bottom line: his grade. He'd sure like to do the reading, but he knows that he can get the assignments done just as well without it, and so it goes to the bottom of the priority list. He will never get around to doing the reading, because the list of grade-impacting busy-work deliverables will never cease.
The professors then complain about the students like Bob, who don't seem to want to actively explore their subject. They complain about the work of their own hands, the inevitable result of their own system. The professor actively molds students to be this way, and then they complain about it.
It sounds like Bob overloaded his schedule. Or, more likely, he's been partying all night and placed his priorities elsewhere. Most students tend to procrastinate to the last second then whine that they "didn't have time" to get the assignment done, muchless the reading. And that is the sad truth.
Anyhow, points are a game that even the best students get sucked into playing. We are not passionate about every subject, obviously. So, play the points game for subjects you don't care about, then really try and learn for the subjects you do care about. It will only help your grade, and you might find some friends and supporters along the way too.
Some, certainly, but not all by any means. Try doing well in an art / music field, both of which require many many many hours outside of class - typically more than 2x the hour load - and learning more abstract skills like math or coding. The stuff you can sacrifice a little becomes the stuff you sacrifice.
For instance: across two projects in two classes, I've clocked over 1000 hours. Both classes had 3 (shorter) projects, and I had three other courses at the same time.
And that wasn't my busiest semester. That one had 21 credits - one of which was an internship - and a part time job. (not recommended under any circumstance, btw)
Every time a professor complained, "you students worry too much about grades and not enough about learning," I wanted to respond, "and you teachers worry too much about tenure and not enough about teaching." Of course I never actually said it, being too worried about grades....
Perhaps other people are different, but I rarely learn important things or acquire deep understanding without doing a certain amount of "busy work".
It took me a semester of physics homework to actually understand vector calculus. I had to write philosophy papers in order to see the beautiful arguments in my head fall apart on the page. I tried to learn a language by immersion alone -- but that left gaps it took hours and hours with a textbook to fix.
Even points aren't a terrible idea: I'm very good at overestimating the depth of my understanding, and I often have to do a certain amount of grinding to uncover the deficiencies in my knowledge. During my undergraduate career, points (when properly applied) were very good at getting me to realize how important some of the pointless-seeming work was.
Good professors will probably give you some "busy work". Whether they're assigning the right work, and providing the right incentives, is another question.
I think that part of the problem is that each professor believes their classes to be the most important, and students have wildly varying workloads.
Personally, my favorite setup is what one of my math professors does: recommended homework, which can be submitted to get feedback, and which 1/2 of the test questions are pulled from. If you do it all, it's a lot, but you're not required to do any. Predictably, most people do little, but the people who need it / actually care still get the benefit of homework, and the flexibility of a lack of deadlines.
I had a calc teacher in high school who did the "recommended homework" thing.
It was amazing, as I could devote however much time I needed in order to be able to identify and then efficiently and effectively solve a given problem type.
This was still at the level where it was a lot closer to arithmetic than actual math (even the most complicated problems rested on just one or two methods which we already knew, and all had an objective, known solution), but the flexibility that it offered me was very useful, given the busy-ness of my schedule that year.
I like the sound of that policy -- for some courses, it would work fine. For other, there might be problem:
* Some courses are hard enough, and many undergraduates are undisciplined enough, that a lot of students would end up failing. Of course, when this happens, the professor gets a whole bunch of reviews back telling him that he taught badly.
* Sometimes exams aren't the best setting for evaluation.
1) I dislike the current organization for college+ level schools. That's an entirely different issue. And, given that this approach is a bit... liberal in its views of students, it's less likely to be taken by anyone without tenure. In which case they're nearly immune to feedback like that if they can demonstrate their system. At least, in my experience.
2) Yeah, but then you're in an entirely different style of class, and it probably doesn't have a lot of busy-work homework like objectively-testable (if there is such a thing) classes can generate. Though please, point some out to me if you've had any, I'm quite interested in how education is handled :)
One of the best classes I've ever taken was a class on set theory at the University of Washington. It was a philosophy course taught by a law professor, even if it was, for the most part, a math course.
The way he had setup the class was that he'd give lecture for three days out of the week, give us two week long assignments, and nothing else.
These limits were extremely reasonable, he went far and beyond in explaining a lot of concepts in easy to understand language, and he was a tough grader. But everyone came away anyway with at least a 3.5 or higher in the class.
Why? Because he was also very very reasonable with the workload. The assignments were anything but busy work - he gave two weeks because he really wanted everyone to absorb the material before tackling the mind crushing assignments.
There was another math class I took in college (that I failed miserably) - it was a senior level analysis class. I think within the first week or two, I was on the list to give a proposed solution to a problem in the problem set. Within two or three seconds of giving a solution, a fellow student shot me down and the professor said in front of everyone that "it was alright, it just meant I didn't understand the material." Never went to class after that.
Seconded. I flunked out of lots of classes where I was the one who learned the most. My attitude was pretty undisciplined, but it was also intense. I drove my professors to despair by failing the introductory courses and getting A+ on honours courses.
I'm not saying that makes me amazing or anything, but it's quite possible to fail university out of sheer love of knowledge; in fact far more likely than doing so out of ignorance. Someone who is determined to stay ignorant is going to do very well in university, since their attitude will be realistic; they'll quickly figure out the shortest route to getting a good mark. Actually learning is not the shortest route.
Also, professors have to realize that at least 4 times out of 5 you are just taking the course because of the bizarre credit requirement system, which is in part designed just to funnel students to every bloody department, whether people are interested in it or not.
I cannot stand it when a professor says that the best way to get an A is to learn. It shows a fundamental ignorance about their own system of instruction.
If there is anything I've learned about universities, it is that learning is at best orthogonal to getting an A. More often you have to actively sabotage your actual learning in order to get an A.
When you get excited about a subject enough to explore it on your own, you will almost inevitably end up either spending too much time on one part of the curriculum or neglecting the rote memorization and tedious busy work that is necessary to get an A. Classes are just small factories, treating and evaluating every student the same way. It is and ever was a game of points and percentages. If you want "learning" out of this, you need to balance it with playing the game.
Professors have either never known this or have completely forgotten it. They constantly whine about how students seemingly strive to get the least out of their education as possible by taking as many shortcuts as they can. What they fail to realize is that all of their classes are set up as silly little point games, and each student has about 5 or 6 of them. Then they give out so many busy work assignments and so much reading per class that it is impossible to accomplish it all. The students are essentially learning how to prioritize and cut out all of the unnecessary fat in order to maximize their points. They're kept so busy that they don't even know that they're not really maximizing for learning. Learning is not what the professors tell them to do. Learning is not what the professors hold over their heads. They live by points, and die by points. It takes a special student to pull his/her head out of this firehose of tasks and decide to pursue their own education.
So Bob the student comes into class and he hasn't done the reading. Why? Because he has spent 102% of his time on the various homeworks and deliverables for this and other classes -- the stuff that actually has an effect on the bottom line: his grade. He'd sure like to do the reading, but he knows that he can get the assignments done just as well without it, and so it goes to the bottom of the priority list. He will never get around to doing the reading, because the list of grade-impacting busy-work deliverables will never cease.
The professors then complain about the students like Bob, who don't seem to want to actively explore their subject. They complain about the work of their own hands, the inevitable result of their own system. The professor actively molds students to be this way, and then they complain about it.
That is what I wish I'd known as a freshman.