Okay setting aside that I’ve never ever seen someone try that and actually succeed, why would someone shell out for a college lecture if they’re going to do that anyways? My syllabus is good, but it’s not all that useful for independent study time. (You also can’t replicate lab or seminar time on your own, so I’m just not sure what you’re basing this on.)
Some classes don’t require labs. A handful of people that I’ve seen will only show up for quizzes and exams and still pass the class. Why they do it? No clue.
In particular, the classes I’ve seen this happen usually provide a semester-long list of what textbook chapters will be covered in which weeks. If the textbook is thorough enough and the course adheres to the text, it’s doable.
You know, I’ve had students attempt this every quarter and I’ve still never seen it actually work. It might be a reflection of how teaching has had to shift as a result of the changes brought on by AI + the pandemic, though. I started professing only a little bit before then, so I never really saw the era where you could get away with such strict adherence to the textbook.
Hi, I have been to lectures fewer than 10 times throughout my entire master’s. No AI, no textbooks, just lecture slides and doing the (ungraded) weekly assignments.
It probably wasn’t a smart idea (incl. for my social life), but it also wasn’t hard to do.
Hmm. If you don’t mind me asking, what field was your masters in? During my grad work, you’d have been thrown out after a week if you did similar, but assignments were very much supplemental to the lecture and didn’t overlap with the lecture material much at all.
Computer Science (at a rather “prestigious” university for CS, for that matter, at least as far as that’s a thing here). Not in the US though, and none of the three universities I’ve studied at had mandatory attendance, for anything (exception: seminars, where attending talks by your fellow students was mandatory). As a result, I’ve never seen any prof take attendance.
A lot of comments on this post say that attendance was called esp. for freshmen classes, but frankly, I don’t see how that would even have been possible here, with sometimes 500+ students in a lecture hall.
In regards to assignments, at least in my experience, studying the lecture material and consulting it while solving the exercises was usually the fastest way to understand them and get them done.
Okay setting aside that I’ve never ever seen someone try that and actually succeed, why would someone shell out for a college lecture if they’re going to do that anyways? My syllabus is good, but it’s not all that useful for independent study time. (You also can’t replicate lab or seminar time on your own, so I’m just not sure what you’re basing this on.)
Some classes don’t require labs. A handful of people that I’ve seen will only show up for quizzes and exams and still pass the class. Why they do it? No clue.
In particular, the classes I’ve seen this happen usually provide a semester-long list of what textbook chapters will be covered in which weeks. If the textbook is thorough enough and the course adheres to the text, it’s doable.
You know, I’ve had students attempt this every quarter and I’ve still never seen it actually work. It might be a reflection of how teaching has had to shift as a result of the changes brought on by AI + the pandemic, though. I started professing only a little bit before then, so I never really saw the era where you could get away with such strict adherence to the textbook.
Hi, I have been to lectures fewer than 10 times throughout my entire master’s. No AI, no textbooks, just lecture slides and doing the (ungraded) weekly assignments.
It probably wasn’t a smart idea (incl. for my social life), but it also wasn’t hard to do.
Hmm. If you don’t mind me asking, what field was your masters in? During my grad work, you’d have been thrown out after a week if you did similar, but assignments were very much supplemental to the lecture and didn’t overlap with the lecture material much at all.
Computer Science (at a rather “prestigious” university for CS, for that matter, at least as far as that’s a thing here). Not in the US though, and none of the three universities I’ve studied at had mandatory attendance, for anything (exception: seminars, where attending talks by your fellow students was mandatory). As a result, I’ve never seen any prof take attendance.
A lot of comments on this post say that attendance was called esp. for freshmen classes, but frankly, I don’t see how that would even have been possible here, with sometimes 500+ students in a lecture hall.
In regards to assignments, at least in my experience, studying the lecture material and consulting it while solving the exercises was usually the fastest way to understand them and get them done.