The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered.
Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics.
I suggest that a society only interested in the workings of machines rather than the workings of people will soon treat people as mere machines. Let the nightmare begin.
The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach “how.” Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect.
Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows you to write accounts explaining and putting in context historical events in a way that is pursuasive to other people. But they are not falsifiable.
I agree with holding the former in higher esteem. Being able to communicate with people is important, but it’s an impoverished basis for an education. It’s terrifying that many students manage to graduate without much exposure to the world of objective reality and truth that exists around them (and which makes their lifestyles possible).
For anyone interested in learning more about people (and yourselves) I highly recommend Jordan Petersons' lectures on youtube. I believe he has started working on an online university for the humanities with all the money he's bringing in from patreon (he wisely hid it recently but it was close to 60k per month last time it wasn't)
He’s an engineer or scientist. The world needs engineers and scientists, and it makes them feel good to assert their superiority.
At the end of the day, these guys always work for somebody, who is usually some sort liberal arts or business major. It’s something to keep in perspective when somebody asserts that math and science run the world.
I don't think he was that harsh, and he actually praised the "knowing what" subjects. He simply meant that at MIT, the "knowing how" is more important.
I'd argue that "learning how" to write good texts or understanding a person psychologically, for example, is a rather valid example of a soft science having a real impact on the world that can easily compete with engineering problems. It's a bit like arguing that construction work is more valuable than planning architecture, which might be true in a hierarchical sense but ultimately it's just a matter of perspective and scale.
"Begin"? The prior century is replete with horrific examples of societies, spanning - perhaps defining - the modern ideological spectrum, which behaved in precisely such fashion.
I agree that the study of history is the best method yet found for recognizing the errors which produced those enormities, in order to avoid repeating them. But I'm not sure how effective undergrad history courses, or even history specializations, are likely to be in equipping their students with the tools for such study. Granted I've never taken such a course myself and so cannot speak with authority on even one example of the type - but I have found it not at all unusual for people who do have such education to be surprised in even so elementary and recent a matter as the American origin of the eugenic idea. Quite aside from being in my opinion a necessary antidote to the idea that the United States are somehow blessed with a permanent immunity to such enormities as we here discuss, such ignorance, on the part of so many supposedly educated in history and - if you're to be taken at your word - historical analysis, does not inspire enormous confidence in the value of such education.
>>A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics.
Context matters. If you are studying history when you are about to be promoted to be the general of your army, or pursuing a career in diplomacy these things make sense in the context of your career.
For general folks the value of this information for all practical purposes is zero. Compared to say an education in STEM where many concepts can readily used applied across other disciplines, as its just Math at the end of they day.
For this very reason, some civil engineering graduate can pick CS way easily than say with a graduate degree in history.
It's also releveant that the author feels perfectly justified in making recourse to a hypothesis about history which far from easy to test: “The idea of genius elaborated during the Romantic Age (late 18th and 19th centuries) has done harm to education.”
Compared to what? Clearly he doesn’t know how to make a historical argument — perhaps he considers such arguments beneath him.
> [The author] characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered.
Indeed. I owe a significant amount of my professional and financial success to being able to communicate my/my teams' ideas and breakdown and communicate company strategy to my teams.
After a certain base level of excellence in engineering or another technical field, the distinguishing characteristic among levels of accomplishment seems to be communication, not a further 0.5% better at engineering. I see so many great technical people who are unable to communicate effectively and suffer badly from this.
An MIT professor can be naive. A history major learns how to read and analyze documents...and how to write. An art major learns how to create art. An even more significant difference between these and many contemporary STEM subjects is that an undergraduate is expected to know how to create original work...there's no copying art homework especially not in an advanced class.
These days I think that the creative element of programming is why software is eating the world at the pace it is. Undergrads can look at each other's code and say Wow! while one titration is fungible with every other.
>I suggest that a society only interested in the workings of machines rather than the workings of people will soon treat people as mere machines. Let the nightmare begin.
So far the society that treats people as mere machines is constantly mouthing platitudes about the humanities to itself, chanting, "Think about people! Think about philosophy!" as though this will actually alter the balance of class power.
USAians already take more humanities courses in a STEM degree than almost anyone else in the world. It doesn't seem to accomplish much to turn everyone into fluent humanists.
Ya, lots of history courses have a discussion along side that teach how to interpret texts instead of fact memorizing. These skills are surprisingly useful.
> Lesson Six: You must measure up to a very high level of performance. I can imagine a propective student or parent asking, "Why should I (or my child) take calculus at MIT rather than at Oshkosh College? Isn't the material practically identical, no matter where it is taught, while the cost varies a great deal?"
Is there any truth to this? Because it seem like classical university jingoism to me. "My institution is better than yours." Anecdotes like "All MIT graduates I've met were dumb" or "All MIT graduates I've met were smart" does not count.
Because I looked at the DE course he taught (18.03) and I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. I'm sure many other HN readers have too. I wonder if there is some test you can take to see if you are just as good as an MIT graduate?
The EU has done great work in this area by trying to standardize the university curriculum across the union. What that means is that a master's degree in computer science from the university of München is mostly comparable to one from Madrid, so name-dropping your university "does not work." It also means that it is trivial for a Spanish student to study one year in Germany and then come home to Spain (see Erasmus). The US system, where some colleges are rated higher than others for irrational reasons, is strictly worse.
I can't speak for MIT, but I can speak for a couple of Ivies.
The content covered in the curriculum and the speed at which it is covered is one potentially challenging aspect of one school over another.
The more important aspect, imho, is your peers. Speaking for myself and what I have heard others experience, peers can push your thinking to more sophisticated levels -- this can be in terms of something like elegance in problem solving (which has valuable real-world applications), the ability to apply the knowledge in a wider range of contexts, etc.
This is also often reflected, rightly or wrongly, in the assessment stages. If you take a class with wicked smart peers, the test is usually going to be much harder just so that the test can evaluate differences in knowledge.
I remember showing my $IVY calculus final to a friend of mine who set the curve in what was supposed to be the same class at $STATEU, and his mind was blown. It took him a few minutes just to realize that the test covered the same topics, while I thought the test was merely "hard" pedestrian content. Once I talked him through the problem, he realized how cool it was, and then he realized one of the key differences between our schools -- the boundaries of my thinking on topics were challenged and stretched much, much more aggressively.
To be fair, some non-elite schools are equally or more rigorous than elite schools, but this is usually on a department level and is the exception rather than the rule.
As an MIT alum, I don't see a ton of value in competing over whose classes were the hardest. I've met super impressive people from everywhere from community colleges to Rhodes scholars and do not subscribe to the idea that MIT alums are uniquely good.
But having taken some physics and math courses at multiple universities MITs went much deeper in a shorter period of time. This isn't necessarily reflected in the syllabus because the topics may be the same but the devil is in the details.
MIT had absolutely fantastic problem sets that took me 10+ hours a week per class to finish and were rarely changed from year to year. This is because they've been tuned over so long that whether you get the answer correct is almost besides the point, the useful part for learning was the process of banging your head against them. This was true to an extent at other universities I've been at but usually the expected proficiency required to excel in a course was not quite so severe.
I ended up getting a PhD (in materials science), spent many hours working as hard as I could in lots of classes, and despite honestly knowing my stuff quite well I never got an A in an undergraduate physics course at MIT. Those were only gotten by the students who were obviously frighteningly talented, often with research experience in the course material already. Don't take that as sour grapes or anything, I am super proud of my B's in these courses. But MIT grades harshly, which may be part of why it's "harder".
Most MIT students stop caring about grades freshman year. Most MIT students interact with one another in class as fellow masochists struggling together against a common foe (learning the material) rather than competing against one another for grades. This is what I would personally call the weirdest and most advantageous aspect of MIT versus Ivy Leagues, but I actually think state schools are awesome at this too.
I'd have put that environment on the list of lessons way before any of the ones on there. Learning the value of close collaboration with people, regardless of whether you may think (probably wrongly anyway) that they're "better" or "worse" than you. Learning that when it comes to the real world, on a team you're all up against a way bigger opponent than each other, you're up against the laws of nature. And that success against that opponent is far more satisfying than any grade.
> The EU has done great work in this area by trying to standardize the university curriculum across the union. What that means is that a master's degree in computer science from the university of München is mostly comparable to one from Madrid, so name-dropping your university "does not work."
It matters very much whether you got your CS Masters from a place like Cambridge or ETH Zürich versus some small university in a small member state. In my experience (having studied and taught in multiple European universities, both before and after the standardization) Lesson 6 very much applies to the EU.
The main achievement of the EU standardization is that a Bachelor degree from any accredited university from any member state will technically qualify you to the Masters programs in all member states -- before the Bologna Process some countries didn't even have separate Bachelor and Masters degrees.
The Masters programs themselves are standardized at the level of nominal effort, but vary wildly in topics offered, actual effort required, and quality of the teaching. No standardization can change the fact that the top people will seek out the top universities, which then heavily skews the skill distribution between the universities.
The structure of the programs is standardized in the EU, not the quality of the programs.
As an MIT grad, what I particularly found challenging was the fast pace of work and the tough scoring on exams - not so much the subject matter. I wasn't impressed with this aspect of the education because I like taking my time with subject matter until I really understand it but I didn't feel like there was time to do so while there.
That method seems to encourage superficial understanding unless you're willing to devote a large chunk of your time to working. And by that I mean nearly all day. There is a strong culture of pushing those boundaries. For me, MIT helped me realize the importance and value of life/work balance more than anything. I do my best work when self-directed and moving at my own pace - not cramming for exams. But I am just one data point. I'm sure it worked well for others.
My experience is that the curriculum and what is taught is the same in many places but the assignments & exams are much more difficult at top schools. My bar for what "learning" something meant became much higher after constantly being beat down by insanely hard assignments/exams. Now I think testing is just as important as teaching in determining how much someone learns - hard tests expose sloppy learning very quickly and give you feedback on what you didn't learn as well as you thought.
Not to say that non-elite universities can't be as rigorous - some certainly are, and some students will be better than others. The brand is definitely a part of it too.
>What matters most is the ambiance in which the course is taught; a gifted student will thrive in the company of other gifted students.
As someone who went to both a very average university and a top ranked school, I fully agree. There were only two differences between the two:
1. The top university packed more material in a course (not a good thing, in my experience).
2. The top university had more peers which drive you to be better. This I really felt a lack of in the average university. All the motivation had to come from within, and although it was somewhat beneficial, it was also very aimless and inefficient. Synergy really is a thing.
(As an aside, the quality of instruction was not very different - perhaps slightly better in the average university. In my experience the role your peers play is much more impactful than the role your teachers play).
"One answer to this question would be following: One learns a lot more when taking calculus from someone who is doing research in mathematical analysis than from someone who has never published a word on the subject. [...] But this is not the answer; some teachers who have never done any research are much better at conveying the ideas of calculus than the most brilliant mathematicians.
"What matters most is the ambiance in which the course is taught; a gifted student will thrive in the company of other gifted students. An MIT undergraduate will be challenged by the level of proficiency that is expected of everyone at MIT, students and faculty. The expectation of high standards is unconsciously absorbed and adopted by the students, and they carry it with them for life."
I'm going to look funny at the claim of "expectation of high standards"; I suspect he's delusional.
But there is, in my experience, a considerable difference between "someone who is doing research" and "someone who has never published a word on the subject"; I've never met any "teachers who have never done any research [that] are much better at conveying the ideas." Further, the "ambiance" bit is right; being surrounded by people who are deeply interested in a topic beats the pants off people who are just there to get a grade.
I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education.
Just looking at the curriculum doesn't really tell you anything useful. How well the material is taught and to what depth matters much more. Something simple like "learn matrix multiplication and determinants" could either be covered in 45 minutes or take up several lectures going deeper and deeper into the subtleties of what those things actually mean on a fundamental mathematical level.
Then there is of course the personal additions a lecturer can add to each course beyond the curriculum, which in many cases can be more interesting and educational than anything on the curriculum itself. Basically you can have a dozen lecturers covering the same curriculum using the same textbook and get a dozen very different educational experiences. You can probably, to a lesser extent, even have the same lecturer lecture to a dozen different groups of students and get a dozen different outcomes.
That being said I have no idea if MIT is actually better in this regard
I enjoyed most of Professor Rota's comments, but couldn't disagree more with his Lesson 6 and think it is pretty destructive.
In my view, the ultimate proof as to whether you deeply understand something is when you can engage in rigorous synthesis using that thing, or correctly explain it to others without using terminology as a crutch.
Getting to that level of understanding is not merely a function of the recognized accomplishment level of your peers or your instructor. What imbues people with a deep understanding varies from person to person, and many really benefit from a deliberative, instruction and discussion/conversation-focused instructor. My casual observation of MIT is that the level of instruction can be far from the best I've seen, because the students are so bright or so fast that they don't need much from the instructor in order to immediately see the conceptual space.
Imagine however that you are no intellectual slouch, but maybe are a more contemplative and deliberate thinker. You may be penalized in an environment like this, which bears no representation on whether or not you can get to the same quality and depth of understanding as your peers. I once had an MIT-educated professor say, "I know how to grade these exams. My 'A' students will finish the exam in the time allotted, my 'B' students will finish most of the exam, the 'C' students less so." This infuriated me then, and infuriates me now. The counterpoint was a (well-known) UMich-educated professor, one of the best I had, that gave challenging exams with no practical timelimit. He inspired me to be very ambitious as the lead on a free-form semester group project, so much so that it was clear we wouldn't finish during the semester. He saw how ambitious it was, and gave us an incomplete until we could turn it in the next semester. We did, and it was a really nice body of work.
I've seen similar patterns in the rest of my education. I've always gotten the most not from the best-credentialed professors, but from those who themselves understand deeply and make the material and themselves open to the interested learner.
This is ultimately what teaching and learning should be about, and can easily take place at any good institution, not just the MITs of the world. In my field of engineering, there is no significant correlation between those who were educated at MIT or Stanford, and the impact of their contributions to what is in the field and has truly advanced the state-of-the-art.
> Because I looked at the DE course he taught (18.03) and I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. I'm sure many other HN readers have too. I wonder if there is some test you can take to see if you are just as good as an MIT graduate?
My experience at an okay school was that all upper level classes were graded and taught to scale with the student's intelligence. I and many other students passed through the curve. Many of us would not have passed comparable (by name and subject matter) courses at the top schools with a different curve and more in depth material.
In general the answer he gives sounds like bullshit to me. Really, "unconsciously absorbed" "ambiance" is what going to MIT is about?
>a gifted student will thrive in the company of other gifted students
This I put a little more stock in. It is competitive to get in. So all of the people in your calculus one class had calculus in high school, and they are all particularly gifted at math. This means they are able to cover more, and go deeper in to the subject because there is no time "wasted" educating an "average" student.
I looked at the OCW stuff when I took calculus at a community college. They cover the same material but a lot of the homework and exams are made of word problems which makes it (arguably unnecessarily) very hard. After that I only used OCW for lectures and book suggestions and never for worksheets/exam/practice problems because if I want to study calculus then I'm going to focus on that.
You can take it either way. It's hard, but not in a way that makes you better at the subject.
An insightful list, but one part bugs me: the approval of working so hard you can't stay awake. This is bad for learning, and apparently there are even experiments showing that it's bad -- which casts an ironic light on the part of this list about demonstrably knowing things vs. bullshitting.
Maybe there's a deeper reason it's good, but I'm skeptical.
MIT is a very good school, but shouldn't be fetishised. After several years of hiring people in the Boston area, I've seen just as many mediocre MIT grads as mediocre BU grads. In fact, the only person at my company to be fired for incompetence was an MIT graduate
> Lesson Ten: Mathematics is still the queen of the sciences.
> When an undergraduate asks me whether he or she should major in mathematics rather than in another field that I will simply call X, my answer is the following: "If you major in mathematics, you can switch to X anytime you want to, but not the other way around."
You can argue that with Physics as well. However, I have learned in my life, that there is a value in not having the option to "go back". Flexibility comes at a price.
> The world and your career are unpredictable, so you are better off learning subjects of permanent value.
I've been looking for a way to express this idea for years. Doing a core subject at University like Mathematics or Physics can be used in a million different careers.
In a similar way I'd recommend learning say Functional Programming over React or Scala.
Plus I guess learning Category Theory over functional programming too, although I'm not quite sure how true that is.
> Scientific biographies often fail to give a realistic description of personality, and thereby create a false idea of scientific work.
Any recommendations for biographies which give a realistic look into famous scientists' lives? I am reading the Einstein biography by Walter Isaacson and it's pretty good so far.
Completely off topic : how do you configure a LAN to have <domain>/~username urls (such as the linked post's url) exposed to the internet? I remember having such a directory in my school's linux network where I could place files in public or public_html (can't remember)and other users could access it by going to <internal school ip>/~myname, but it wasn't exposed to the internet.
I liked the part about the hidden curriculums. Any idea how one would balance it with the actual one when you have plans to go to grad school?
For me, the hidden curriculum is in machine learning and AI. I was recently given a chance (as an undergrad) to join such company. I think this is my best chance to learn about the field in a qualitative way and possibly get my name on a research paper before I graduate with a BSc. I'd work under the supervision of Ph.D.'s in the field.
That being said, for my grad school efforts, I would need to keep my GPA in check, which is currently 3.2, but which would suffer a blow. My question is that does anyone have an idea whether admission boards (in private US colleges) tend to tolerate lower GPAs for whatever hidden curriculum I've found, given it's still academic and aligned with the actual degree I'm applying to? I'd be applying as an international student.
> It is demoralizing to give a young person role models of Beethoven, Einstein, and Feynman, presented as saintly figures who moved from insight to insight without a misstep.
There isn't a single Beethoven scholar I can think of who seriously entertains the idea of Beethoven being a "self-generating" genius who never made mistakes.
Also, the Beethoven pieces that today's composers most admire-- the late string quartets-- were almost universally shunned by actual Romantic period commentators.
Perhaps the Romantic Age stereotype is demoralizing to students because professors with a narrow domain expertise don't actively seek out music history experts to revise their outdated views about the Romantic Age.
[Prof Rota was a bit of an institution already in the 80s, when I took his probability course 18.313. The course utterly kicked my butt, and I believe him when he writes that the homework would occasionally lead to publications.]
I thought that the point of a liberal arts education was 'knowing how' to live a good life, and then possibly knowing how to communicate effectively through speech and the written word.
One of the most cutting arguments I've heard from liberal arts education advocates is that STEM extremists want to turn college into a high-level trade school.
I quickly scanned for "You will be hired at places that others are not even considered for because you are largely paying out the nose for a brand name." Didn't find it. Lame.
[+] [-] dougmwne|8 years ago|reply
Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics.
I suggest that a society only interested in the workings of machines rather than the workings of people will soon treat people as mere machines. Let the nightmare begin.
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows you to write accounts explaining and putting in context historical events in a way that is pursuasive to other people. But they are not falsifiable.
I agree with holding the former in higher esteem. Being able to communicate with people is important, but it’s an impoverished basis for an education. It’s terrifying that many students manage to graduate without much exposure to the world of objective reality and truth that exists around them (and which makes their lifestyles possible).
[+] [-] jack_pp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
At the end of the day, these guys always work for somebody, who is usually some sort liberal arts or business major. It’s something to keep in perspective when somebody asserts that math and science run the world.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hudibras|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nothis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwanem|8 years ago|reply
I agree that the study of history is the best method yet found for recognizing the errors which produced those enormities, in order to avoid repeating them. But I'm not sure how effective undergrad history courses, or even history specializations, are likely to be in equipping their students with the tools for such study. Granted I've never taken such a course myself and so cannot speak with authority on even one example of the type - but I have found it not at all unusual for people who do have such education to be surprised in even so elementary and recent a matter as the American origin of the eugenic idea. Quite aside from being in my opinion a necessary antidote to the idea that the United States are somehow blessed with a permanent immunity to such enormities as we here discuss, such ignorance, on the part of so many supposedly educated in history and - if you're to be taken at your word - historical analysis, does not inspire enormous confidence in the value of such education.
[+] [-] kamaal|8 years ago|reply
Context matters. If you are studying history when you are about to be promoted to be the general of your army, or pursuing a career in diplomacy these things make sense in the context of your career.
For general folks the value of this information for all practical purposes is zero. Compared to say an education in STEM where many concepts can readily used applied across other disciplines, as its just Math at the end of they day.
For this very reason, some civil engineering graduate can pick CS way easily than say with a graduate degree in history.
[+] [-] indubitably|8 years ago|reply
Compared to what? Clearly he doesn’t know how to make a historical argument — perhaps he considers such arguments beneath him.
[+] [-] brians|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|8 years ago|reply
Indeed. I owe a significant amount of my professional and financial success to being able to communicate my/my teams' ideas and breakdown and communicate company strategy to my teams.
After a certain base level of excellence in engineering or another technical field, the distinguishing characteristic among levels of accomplishment seems to be communication, not a further 0.5% better at engineering. I see so many great technical people who are unable to communicate effectively and suffer badly from this.
[+] [-] brudgers|8 years ago|reply
These days I think that the creative element of programming is why software is eating the world at the pace it is. Undergrads can look at each other's code and say Wow! while one titration is fungible with every other.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|8 years ago|reply
So far the society that treats people as mere machines is constantly mouthing platitudes about the humanities to itself, chanting, "Think about people! Think about philosophy!" as though this will actually alter the balance of class power.
USAians already take more humanities courses in a STEM degree than almost anyone else in the world. It doesn't seem to accomplish much to turn everyone into fluent humanists.
[+] [-] harrisjt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mmirate|8 years ago|reply
We are machines. Squishy, carbon-based machines with certain unique computational capabilities, I'll grant - but still, machines.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bjourne|8 years ago|reply
Is there any truth to this? Because it seem like classical university jingoism to me. "My institution is better than yours." Anecdotes like "All MIT graduates I've met were dumb" or "All MIT graduates I've met were smart" does not count.
Because I looked at the DE course he taught (18.03) and I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. I'm sure many other HN readers have too. I wonder if there is some test you can take to see if you are just as good as an MIT graduate?
The EU has done great work in this area by trying to standardize the university curriculum across the union. What that means is that a master's degree in computer science from the university of München is mostly comparable to one from Madrid, so name-dropping your university "does not work." It also means that it is trivial for a Spanish student to study one year in Germany and then come home to Spain (see Erasmus). The US system, where some colleges are rated higher than others for irrational reasons, is strictly worse.
[+] [-] csa|8 years ago|reply
The content covered in the curriculum and the speed at which it is covered is one potentially challenging aspect of one school over another.
The more important aspect, imho, is your peers. Speaking for myself and what I have heard others experience, peers can push your thinking to more sophisticated levels -- this can be in terms of something like elegance in problem solving (which has valuable real-world applications), the ability to apply the knowledge in a wider range of contexts, etc.
This is also often reflected, rightly or wrongly, in the assessment stages. If you take a class with wicked smart peers, the test is usually going to be much harder just so that the test can evaluate differences in knowledge.
I remember showing my $IVY calculus final to a friend of mine who set the curve in what was supposed to be the same class at $STATEU, and his mind was blown. It took him a few minutes just to realize that the test covered the same topics, while I thought the test was merely "hard" pedestrian content. Once I talked him through the problem, he realized how cool it was, and then he realized one of the key differences between our schools -- the boundaries of my thinking on topics were challenged and stretched much, much more aggressively.
To be fair, some non-elite schools are equally or more rigorous than elite schools, but this is usually on a department level and is the exception rather than the rule.
[+] [-] neltnerb|8 years ago|reply
But having taken some physics and math courses at multiple universities MITs went much deeper in a shorter period of time. This isn't necessarily reflected in the syllabus because the topics may be the same but the devil is in the details.
MIT had absolutely fantastic problem sets that took me 10+ hours a week per class to finish and were rarely changed from year to year. This is because they've been tuned over so long that whether you get the answer correct is almost besides the point, the useful part for learning was the process of banging your head against them. This was true to an extent at other universities I've been at but usually the expected proficiency required to excel in a course was not quite so severe.
I ended up getting a PhD (in materials science), spent many hours working as hard as I could in lots of classes, and despite honestly knowing my stuff quite well I never got an A in an undergraduate physics course at MIT. Those were only gotten by the students who were obviously frighteningly talented, often with research experience in the course material already. Don't take that as sour grapes or anything, I am super proud of my B's in these courses. But MIT grades harshly, which may be part of why it's "harder".
Most MIT students stop caring about grades freshman year. Most MIT students interact with one another in class as fellow masochists struggling together against a common foe (learning the material) rather than competing against one another for grades. This is what I would personally call the weirdest and most advantageous aspect of MIT versus Ivy Leagues, but I actually think state schools are awesome at this too.
I'd have put that environment on the list of lessons way before any of the ones on there. Learning the value of close collaboration with people, regardless of whether you may think (probably wrongly anyway) that they're "better" or "worse" than you. Learning that when it comes to the real world, on a team you're all up against a way bigger opponent than each other, you're up against the laws of nature. And that success against that opponent is far more satisfying than any grade.
[+] [-] zmb_|8 years ago|reply
It matters very much whether you got your CS Masters from a place like Cambridge or ETH Zürich versus some small university in a small member state. In my experience (having studied and taught in multiple European universities, both before and after the standardization) Lesson 6 very much applies to the EU.
The main achievement of the EU standardization is that a Bachelor degree from any accredited university from any member state will technically qualify you to the Masters programs in all member states -- before the Bologna Process some countries didn't even have separate Bachelor and Masters degrees.
The Masters programs themselves are standardized at the level of nominal effort, but vary wildly in topics offered, actual effort required, and quality of the teaching. No standardization can change the fact that the top people will seek out the top universities, which then heavily skews the skill distribution between the universities.
The structure of the programs is standardized in the EU, not the quality of the programs.
[+] [-] taysic|8 years ago|reply
That method seems to encourage superficial understanding unless you're willing to devote a large chunk of your time to working. And by that I mean nearly all day. There is a strong culture of pushing those boundaries. For me, MIT helped me realize the importance and value of life/work balance more than anything. I do my best work when self-directed and moving at my own pace - not cramming for exams. But I am just one data point. I'm sure it worked well for others.
[+] [-] zaptheimpaler|8 years ago|reply
Not to say that non-elite universities can't be as rigorous - some certainly are, and some students will be better than others. The brand is definitely a part of it too.
[+] [-] BeetleB|8 years ago|reply
As someone who went to both a very average university and a top ranked school, I fully agree. There were only two differences between the two:
1. The top university packed more material in a course (not a good thing, in my experience).
2. The top university had more peers which drive you to be better. This I really felt a lack of in the average university. All the motivation had to come from within, and although it was somewhat beneficial, it was also very aimless and inefficient. Synergy really is a thing.
(As an aside, the quality of instruction was not very different - perhaps slightly better in the average university. In my experience the role your peers play is much more impactful than the role your teachers play).
[+] [-] mcguire|8 years ago|reply
"One answer to this question would be following: One learns a lot more when taking calculus from someone who is doing research in mathematical analysis than from someone who has never published a word on the subject. [...] But this is not the answer; some teachers who have never done any research are much better at conveying the ideas of calculus than the most brilliant mathematicians.
"What matters most is the ambiance in which the course is taught; a gifted student will thrive in the company of other gifted students. An MIT undergraduate will be challenged by the level of proficiency that is expected of everyone at MIT, students and faculty. The expectation of high standards is unconsciously absorbed and adopted by the students, and they carry it with them for life."
I'm going to look funny at the claim of "expectation of high standards"; I suspect he's delusional.
But there is, in my experience, a considerable difference between "someone who is doing research" and "someone who has never published a word on the subject"; I've never met any "teachers who have never done any research [that] are much better at conveying the ideas." Further, the "ambiance" bit is right; being surrounded by people who are deeply interested in a topic beats the pants off people who are just there to get a grade.
[+] [-] mathattack|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|8 years ago|reply
Just looking at the curriculum doesn't really tell you anything useful. How well the material is taught and to what depth matters much more. Something simple like "learn matrix multiplication and determinants" could either be covered in 45 minutes or take up several lectures going deeper and deeper into the subtleties of what those things actually mean on a fundamental mathematical level.
Then there is of course the personal additions a lecturer can add to each course beyond the curriculum, which in many cases can be more interesting and educational than anything on the curriculum itself. Basically you can have a dozen lecturers covering the same curriculum using the same textbook and get a dozen very different educational experiences. You can probably, to a lesser extent, even have the same lecturer lecture to a dozen different groups of students and get a dozen different outcomes.
That being said I have no idea if MIT is actually better in this regard
[+] [-] ThenAsNow|8 years ago|reply
In my view, the ultimate proof as to whether you deeply understand something is when you can engage in rigorous synthesis using that thing, or correctly explain it to others without using terminology as a crutch.
Getting to that level of understanding is not merely a function of the recognized accomplishment level of your peers or your instructor. What imbues people with a deep understanding varies from person to person, and many really benefit from a deliberative, instruction and discussion/conversation-focused instructor. My casual observation of MIT is that the level of instruction can be far from the best I've seen, because the students are so bright or so fast that they don't need much from the instructor in order to immediately see the conceptual space.
Imagine however that you are no intellectual slouch, but maybe are a more contemplative and deliberate thinker. You may be penalized in an environment like this, which bears no representation on whether or not you can get to the same quality and depth of understanding as your peers. I once had an MIT-educated professor say, "I know how to grade these exams. My 'A' students will finish the exam in the time allotted, my 'B' students will finish most of the exam, the 'C' students less so." This infuriated me then, and infuriates me now. The counterpoint was a (well-known) UMich-educated professor, one of the best I had, that gave challenging exams with no practical timelimit. He inspired me to be very ambitious as the lead on a free-form semester group project, so much so that it was clear we wouldn't finish during the semester. He saw how ambitious it was, and gave us an incomplete until we could turn it in the next semester. We did, and it was a really nice body of work.
I've seen similar patterns in the rest of my education. I've always gotten the most not from the best-credentialed professors, but from those who themselves understand deeply and make the material and themselves open to the interested learner.
This is ultimately what teaching and learning should be about, and can easily take place at any good institution, not just the MITs of the world. In my field of engineering, there is no significant correlation between those who were educated at MIT or Stanford, and the impact of their contributions to what is in the field and has truly advanced the state-of-the-art.
[+] [-] home_boi|8 years ago|reply
My experience at an okay school was that all upper level classes were graded and taught to scale with the student's intelligence. I and many other students passed through the curve. Many of us would not have passed comparable (by name and subject matter) courses at the top schools with a different curve and more in depth material.
[+] [-] stonemetal|8 years ago|reply
>a gifted student will thrive in the company of other gifted students
This I put a little more stock in. It is competitive to get in. So all of the people in your calculus one class had calculus in high school, and they are all particularly gifted at math. This means they are able to cover more, and go deeper in to the subject because there is no time "wasted" educating an "average" student.
[+] [-] swiley|8 years ago|reply
You can take it either way. It's hard, but not in a way that makes you better at the subject.
[+] [-] abecedarius|8 years ago|reply
Maybe there's a deeper reason it's good, but I'm skeptical.
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|8 years ago|reply
You can argue that with Physics as well. However, I have learned in my life, that there is a value in not having the option to "go back". Flexibility comes at a price.
[+] [-] icc97|8 years ago|reply
I've been looking for a way to express this idea for years. Doing a core subject at University like Mathematics or Physics can be used in a million different careers.
In a similar way I'd recommend learning say Functional Programming over React or Scala.
Plus I guess learning Category Theory over functional programming too, although I'm not quite sure how true that is.
[+] [-] senthil_rajasek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asciimo|8 years ago|reply
The horror! Maybe this was truly a terrible fate in 1997.
[+] [-] ploggingdev|8 years ago|reply
> Scientific biographies often fail to give a realistic description of personality, and thereby create a false idea of scientific work.
Any recommendations for biographies which give a realistic look into famous scientists' lives? I am reading the Einstein biography by Walter Isaacson and it's pretty good so far.
Completely off topic : how do you configure a LAN to have <domain>/~username urls (such as the linked post's url) exposed to the internet? I remember having such a directory in my school's linux network where I could place files in public or public_html (can't remember)and other users could access it by going to <internal school ip>/~myname, but it wasn't exposed to the internet.
[+] [-] ta_1509903111|8 years ago|reply
For me, the hidden curriculum is in machine learning and AI. I was recently given a chance (as an undergrad) to join such company. I think this is my best chance to learn about the field in a qualitative way and possibly get my name on a research paper before I graduate with a BSc. I'd work under the supervision of Ph.D.'s in the field.
That being said, for my grad school efforts, I would need to keep my GPA in check, which is currently 3.2, but which would suffer a blow. My question is that does anyone have an idea whether admission boards (in private US colleges) tend to tolerate lower GPAs for whatever hidden curriculum I've found, given it's still academic and aligned with the actual degree I'm applying to? I'd be applying as an international student.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
There isn't a single Beethoven scholar I can think of who seriously entertains the idea of Beethoven being a "self-generating" genius who never made mistakes.
Also, the Beethoven pieces that today's composers most admire-- the late string quartets-- were almost universally shunned by actual Romantic period commentators.
Perhaps the Romantic Age stereotype is demoralizing to students because professors with a narrow domain expertise don't actively seek out music history experts to revise their outdated views about the Romantic Age.
[+] [-] jpmattia|8 years ago|reply
[Prof Rota was a bit of an institution already in the 80s, when I took his probability course 18.313. The course utterly kicked my butt, and I believe him when he writes that the homework would occasionally lead to publications.]
[+] [-] internetman55|8 years ago|reply
One of the most cutting arguments I've heard from liberal arts education advocates is that STEM extremists want to turn college into a high-level trade school.
[+] [-] melling|8 years ago|reply
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/
[+] [-] patientplatypus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MilnerRoute|8 years ago|reply
It's interesting to wonder if, 20 years later, the author would change some of what he originally wrote.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pkrumins|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trisimix|8 years ago|reply