University STEM Weed-Out Courses

I think the problem is not so much the low standard, but the lack of reliable tests for the personal aptitude, and this should not only be a problem in CS. Universities should spend a lot of effort prior to someone beginning their studies, to find out if the person really wants to do what they chose, in a way that the person itself realizes that quickly. This phenomenon is still huge in Germany, I started studying CS in 2002 and after one year, 60% of the people in my year had quit, mostly becau

They need to get rid of the concept of weed out courses. It's bad for learning. If you are paying 30-50K a year for an education, course availability should be a given. Don't use the bell curve as an excuse to deny students an education, or if you are going to use a threshold, use a fixed one, not one that limits by percentage of students. The fat cat admins and professors need to be fired. Too many schools take the students' money and plow it into research and other areas, with z

My university, another state school, did the same sort of thing. They have something like a 50% graduation rate, and employ the same sort of washout techniques in science classes. My freshman CS classes dropped to less than a quarter of their initial size by the end of the first semester. The math department is very selective about transferring credits too, to stop people from taking an easier Calc class at a community college.

The only elite college in the US with a failure rate higher than 2% is Cal Tech. Everyone else provides ample opportunities to switch to less rigorous majors with lower standards. Given that they're admitting 18 year olds with no previous experience of living away from home they're not realisitically going to approach elite professional school levels of graduation unless they make it really easy to pass.

I wouldn't be surprised. I attended the neighboring SF State and it's bad over there too. Many people fail out of the CS 101 course (including aspiring CS majors), and the Calculus 1 course offerings all the time. What I find more troubling however, is that we have a significant portion of the student body failing and retaking remedial Algebra I and II classes (to the point where sections for those two classes alone outnumber pretty much all other math classes -- despite Calc and Stat

they're hyper-selective, but there's no particular reason to arbitrarily fail 1/3 of their students. you could just make the classes harder until this happens, but employers/grad schools seem to be pretty happy the way things are, so why do it? Yale students even mostly get As in most classes and it works out fine for everyone.

> It does not really even indicate aptitude in the discipline.I don't know what standards are like in the U.S., but at least where I went to university a good 30% (of those who were in the top 20% of the highly selective entrance exam) ended up getting kicked out because they didn't pass enough courses in their first or second year.Yes, for some people it was an inability to concentrate, but I also know a few who put in more than the minimum hours but for some reason it just d

This feels false on two counts. At the top engineering schools, a significant portion of the currently admitted students entering those majors end up dropping that major in their first year due to the difficulty. Berkeley’s computer science program is widely known for having a large culling early on. It doesn’t seem realistic to claim tens of thousands of other students who can’t get admitted today somehow have the necessary aptitude.Another issue is that the degree is valuable because it is

Shouldn't the market take care of this? Apparently there are colleges willing to "dumb-down" their curriculum to maintain graduation rates, but those colleges will become a black mark on one's CV and so the good students would choose not to attend those colleges, right?

I'm sure many degree programs in the US are inflated, but it wasn't my experience in the US where engineering professors brag about how many students they failed that semester. "You only had 1/3rd your class drop? You must be getting soft." I had AP Calculus in High School (took school seriously) and had to give 110% to pass engineering school. I never partied and basically lived in study hall. Not everyone has to put in that much effort, but I never ever felt grades wer