An observation on homework problems - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 01:50:51 am
content: Almost 40 years ago, I was told by an EE undergrad sitting next to me that I would never pass Physics II, EM, because I had a degree in English lit and "This is where they weed out the engineers."I had the highest score on the final, an 89. The class average was 45.This led to the following observation:Of the people I knew, the ones who made an A would beat on homework problems until they solved them and only sought help after 4 or more hours of failure. Those who made a B went for help after 3 hours. Those who made a C sought help after 2 hours. The D and F students sought help after only an hour or less of effort.The point of homework problems is to develop skills by exercising. It's just like building muscle. No exercise, no muscle. There are no shortcuts. You may get a sheet of paper, but without the exercise it has no value.

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 04:23:20 am
content: Hmm… were you exercising for 40 years to pass the exam? That would confirm their assessment! </JOKE>Of course there is no way to score good marks without exercises. It’s not only about acquiring knowledge. It is about speed. The time on an exam is limited and one is usually working under stress. Even if the student knows the subject perfectly, they will fail to recognize the path needed to solve a problem. Exercises make you automatically match partial solutions to typical situations in the blink of an eye.The years ofexercisesmade me sensitive to some of the fallancies related to statistics, like concluding causation from correlation. In this particular case the students, who got worse grades, might have asked for help earlier because of the common factor that caused both the low score and the need for help.

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 01:50:36 pm
content: Correlation does not imply causation. David Hume showed that. No statistics required. Just logic.I worked physics problems 3-4 hrs/day 3-4 days/wk all semester. I had the great advantage over my classmates that I was a grad student and only had to carry 12 hours. So I had the time. The extra 3-4 hours the engineering students had to take made it impossible for most to put in the same amount of time on physics. I was working on an MS in geology. By the end of the 6th week I had read all my geology textbooks cover to cover. So I was just attending class to review what I had learned and ask questions. I'd sit in class and sometimes eat an orange while everyone else was taking notes. This led one instructor to pepper me with questions for the first 3-4 weeks of class. I always knew the answers so eventually he moved on to the other students.I was failing Calculus I at the start, 17 out of 100 on the first quiz. I was advised to take Precalculus. I took that for my BA math requirement and was so bored I did not do any homework and got a C. I'd taught myself algebra in 6th grade and trig in the 8th. No way I was taking Precalculus a 2nd time.I did calculus problems 3-4 hrs/day 5-6 days/wk. I went from 2 out of 20 on the weekly quiz to 18 or 19 at the end of the semester. The person that triggered the inference was the class hotshot from my Cal I class. We were sitting waiting for the physics TA to show up. We had both spent 4+ hours on the same problem the day before.My comment is really an extension of the common phenomenum of people giving up without even trying.I was barely a B student overall. I never cared about grades. My focus was on learning. If I thought something was important, that got the bulk of my attention. If the instructor thought something else was more important and I missed that on an exam, I did not care.I have a close friend who had a 4.0 GPA for is PhD work at Austin. We took several courses together. There have been a number of instances where I had to explain to him some basic facet of what we had both studied some years after we finished the course. That never happened often, but I was always quite surprised. The real shocker was the nature of the Cristoffel symbol in tensor analysis. I had to drop the class because I simply could not spend enough time on it. But a year or two later I was explaining to him that it was the derivative of one coordinate system in relation to another. Very basic.The real world is not an exam. It requires solving problems for which there may not be clear answers. It is experience trying multiple techniques for attacking a problem that matters in real life.The reduction of university education into job training has littered the landscape with "professionals" who are utterly incompetent.What do you call a scientist who took remedial classes? An engineer.Most of engineering is a few courses in physics and a lot of mathematics. The rest is an ocean of details which one needs to know to work quickly, but which are not essential prior knowledge for solving a problem.

author: HighVoltage
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 02:04:20 pm
content: In the last few years I come more and more across students in the field of science and engineering that believe that homework is a ridicules invention of the past generation. These students want to pass tests without ever doing any serious training and just look at problem shortly. And with many new rules, that you can pass with 39% of correct answers, some of these students even pass their test and proof to me that I was wrong.

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 02:14:30 pm
content: Most exemplified by:"If I need to know that I'll look it up on the internet."I usually respond by saying I am not good at predicting the future. So I learn everything I can just in case I need the knowledge. In fact, we only understand things in the context of what we already know. The advantage of age and experience is we acquire an ever greater range of contextual knowledge. Or at least, some of us do.

author: HighVoltage
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 02:33:08 pm
content: Exactly!It can all be looked up within seconds.I have been looked at very strangely, when I use basics and develop a formula for something in physics.One very simple example would be the formula for the oscillating pendulum:t = 2 * PI * SQRT (l/g)It took me many hours as a student to do it myself and I was very much exited about it. These days, students get bored, when I try toshowthem the solution step by step.Of course, not all students are like this but the trend is definitely going in this direction.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 02:42:05 pm
content: Quote from: rhb on March 02, 2019, 02:14:30 pmThe problem is that in today's world you are likely not to have enough time to learn everything. The complexity is just too big. So instead it makes more sense to built from existing building blocks. Kind of like using software libraries.

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 04:56:45 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on March 02, 2019, 02:42:05 pmThere has *never* been a time when it was possible to learn everything. The complexity is *exactly* why a thorough grounding in the fundamentals is so important. Much of the complexity in today's world is the consequence of very bad decisions which ignore the impact of complexity.If you're young enough, you may get to see the consequences of the philosophy you espoused above. It will not be pleasant and you have less than a 10% chance of surviving the event. After that technology will slowly regress to neolithic levels over the course of a few hundred years. And at some point the human species will become extinct as have the majority of the species which have ever populated the earth.We have stripped the earth of all the resources which are accessible to small groups with limited technology. What is left requires tens of thousands of people working in an organized society to access. After the die off, neither the technology nor the level of organization required will exist. And most of the knowledge needed will be gone along with the means to power it. The technological regression is an inevitable consequence of the staggering waste of natural resources over the last 200 years.When that will happen and what the proximate cause will be no one knows. But I could list plausible causes for a week. None of which involve contemporaneous human actions. Just natural changes in the environment of the earth. A Yellowstone caldera collapse, or a Deccan Traps basalt flood. An no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation of the major extinction events which form the boundaries of geological time.My MS focus was minerals, so I developed an acute sense of the distribution of metals and other elements like rare earths. For lack of such work I went into the oil industry from which I developed an equal understanding of fossil fuels.Those who do not know history are shocked and amazed when the inevitable occurs.We all get what we deserve whether we want it or not, either as individuals or as members of a group. Sometimes this is as punishment and sometimes it's a blessing. Which is always ambiguous and depends entirely upon what we do next.

author: Buriedcode
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 05:35:33 pm
content: You're assuming that how "good" someone is at a subject is down to their effort. Often with mathematics some students don't "get it" at all when something is initially explained. It isn't some nice linear thing where they just keep chipping away at a problem - what if they don't even know how to approach it? That is why we have teachers to explain things in different ways, accommodating for different students. And of course, there are varying degree's of interest - some will put more effort in because they enjoy it, others will hate it, so will do the bare minimum.I'm not sure what this topic is about. Is it an observation that homework "these days" is easier? or there's less of it? or that younger generation is less knowledgeable? The internet has indeed changed things - but it is still more important to knowhow to find something outthan it is to memorize it. After all that is mostly what general education is about - teaching people how to learn, absorb information and ideas to make them useful. If people have become reliant on it, well, so be it. Before the internet there were books. In some ways I think it has gone too far, like spell-check for example - I know some who really can't spell at all because they just run spell-check rather than learning correct spelling. What's worse though are those who can't spell but don't even use spell check - there is no excuse for that.It's all well and good memorizing, or becoming knowledgeable in many fields, but ultimately, it's your time. I agree that engineers, and of course, scientists, should have a grasp of all the fundamentals - so one understands the underlying principles, but that doesn't meant to say all engineers should work from first principles all the time - thats just a waste of everyone's time.

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 05:45:11 pm
content: I'd like to return to the original topic, homework exercises.The purpose of these is to build proficiency in extending what you know beyond your current boundaries of knowledge. Good instructors and authors put a lot of effort into crafting exercises which are a small step from what you have been shown into things you have not been shown. It is impossible to show you everything and pointless as that would require a perfect memory. The purpose is to build the ability to go from what you do know into areas you do not know. The PhD is the culmination of that to the highest level. At least it is for those who "get it". There are far too many PhDs who only got their degree because their supervisor couldn't justify tossing them out.Those who seek assistance too soon defeat that purpose. They may get a certificate proclaiming their knowledge, but the certificate is just a piece of paper. It is not the skill to move from the known to the unlnown.

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 06:18:11 pm
content: You don't know what you don't know, so solving homework on subjects that have not been taught are making this generation just to google to find the answers, so it is pointless IMO. That is homework of previous generations where the answers could only be found in the library, or further on in the books.My observation of the new geberations of students is impatience. They want something, they want it now, not in hours of trial and error. It is the arduino generation and does it matter actually how they make it work in he end, as long as they make it work? Same with homework, I am glad if they do it instead if having to s of excuses to not have it.

author: IanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 06:27:46 pm
content: Quote from: Buriedcode on March 02, 2019, 05:35:33 pmI agree, I don't think you have quite understood what this topic is about.It is not about memorizing, or becoming knowledgeable(i.e. "knowing facts"). It is about exercising the brain muscle.In the real world of engineering there is a need to solve problems. Problem solving is a skill that has to be learned, it's about recognizing patterns and situations, about being able to "fill in the gaps" with appropriately learned intuition, and knowing what are the right things to do in what order to unlock the puzzle and find a solution.These are all skills that take practice and effort and dedication. They don't come from books and the internet. They can't be taught in class (but they might be coached by a tutor).There is an analogy here with sports and many other pursuits. To excel at any given sport you have to practice every day and work hard on your skills. Someone can't make you into a competitive tennis player just by telling you how to play each shot in a classroom. You can't make yourself into a competitive tennis player just by reading books or by watching other people play. To get better at tennis you have to put time in on the court, learning by doing. You have to work at it.(Edited for clarification)

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 08:36:20 pm
content: Quote from: Kjelt on March 02, 2019, 06:18:11 pmThe hallmark of a well trained PhD *is* knowing what they don't know. Knowing *very* precisely what you know and what you don't know, the exact location of the boundary, is essential to the process of discovery.Today we have a lot of PhDs who cannot separate facts from hypotheses. Some of them are Nobel laureates.A very common homework problem asks the student something they have been taught, but places it in a different context so they have to look for the relationship. The most common problem simply asks the student to apply the information they have been given to solving a problem.I was trained as a scientist, not an engineer. So I am more accustomed to reframing the question in terms of first principles. Good engineers do the same thing. Poor ones are helpless if they encounter something they've not memorized. Hence all the hand wringing about becoming obsolete 10 years after graduation. Good engineers become obsolete when they die, not before.The reframing is for the purpose of identifying the problem. Then I consider what I already know and whether I already know how to find the answer or if it is something new. I have had countless people come in my office at work asking that I write a program for them. Nearly always after I asked a few questions they said, "Oh, I know how to do that." and ran off.IanB got my point very precisely. I'd quibble with his usage of "knowledge", but that's a very minor point. I define "knowledge" as the ability to apply information to resolve a problem or question. A consequence of 5 years spent getting a liberal arts degree in English literature.Practice is required even if you have already mastered something. I was skilled at drywall and concrete work. I did a lot of that to pay for my MS. The trowel trades depend on your sense of touch. If you don't do it for a long time, you lose the feel and it will take at a minimum several days to get it back. Playing a musical instrument is the same way. If you don't play every day your skills diminish rapidly. There is a 3-4 minute guitar piece I wrote which I cannot play. And as I am musically illiterate, it takes a huge struggle over several days just to remember it. Even when I can remember it, it's quite difficult and took me a month to learn to play when I wrote it.If you still doubt the importance of actually *doing* things, pull out a calculus book and solve some integrals or differential equations.

author: IanMacdonald
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 09:08:55 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on March 02, 2019, 02:42:05 pmThe problem with this approach is that you become an 'appliance user' - Never understanding how anything you use works. That, and you end up using 0.001% of each of ten different 1GB software libraries to do a job that could be done with 1KB of proper code. This is basically why Windows 7 and 10 are so bloated compared to Windows XP.You see the same thing on the Web, where someone wants to start a website but has little knowledge of how to, so they start by installing WordPress or the like. Because, it seems like it will make the process 'automatic' -or something. The consequence is that to create anything original they now need to understand not just a simple and easily learned markup like HTML, but labyrinthine object-oriented PHP code with deeply nested functions, plus bespoke markup for theme definitions etc. Since they realise they are never going to understand this, they instead start searching for ready-written themes or plugins that will do what they want, find that most of them are junk, and of the few that aren't junk, some have nasty security vulns.If they added up the time spent on this process they'd probably be surprised to find that they could have learned the basics of HTML a lot more quickly than it's taken. Plus, learning HTML is an ongoing process, and as they learn more they can do more, whereas with the 'appliance-user' approach of searching for CMS plugins it's basically like rolling dice over and over again andhopingyou get a six this time. A skill which doesn't actually improve with time spent doing it.

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 09:44:30 pm
content: A very nice summary of where we are today and why. Thank you.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 10:03:02 pm
content: Quote from: rhb on March 02, 2019, 09:44:30 pmNo, it is old people 'everything used to be better' thinking. Re-inventing the wheel to understand how the wheel works isn't a good use of time. Just know what kind of wheel you need for a certain situation and order that wheel off-the-shelve is a much better use of time. Let a wheel specialist figure out how to design & make the wheel.

author: tpowell1830
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 10:18:17 pm
content: As nctnico observed, this does sound a bit like 'everything used to be better' thinking. However, as a person that did not get the level of education that RHB has, I have found that the key to all of my successful completion of all my projects was focus.Focus can be learned, and although working those problems for hours is an exercise, as RHB put it, the key was focus. As I have mentioned in the past, I am an old fart at 65, but my accumulated knowledge is a result of working the problem in a focused manner. Albeit I have good intuition for how things work, sometimes it is not obvious and that is where things grind down to a slower pace.I do agree that the problems that are already solved are there for the picking, but we should always look at things with a critical eye to be sure that what we see is optimized, and don't take the word of the original designer/engineer. Also, ask the hard questions whether it is best optimized for our solution in the project.Again, there is a lot of ageism out there where young people don't trust old people, but there are gems out here that can be utilized if needed. I never said that older people are always right, but, we do have a lot of experience that we can share for the right person and situation. We are what we are, no more, no less.my 2 cents...

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 10:30:16 pm
content: Quote from: tpowell1830 on March 02, 2019, 10:18:17 pmAgreed. I think it is more important to be able to analyse a problem and recognise a good solution rather than being able to master every detail of the solution. The latter can actually be counter productive because it is easy to loose sight of the big picture.

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 11:19:53 pm
content: Quote from: rhb on March 02, 2019, 08:36:20 pmActually IMO many math and physics highschool homework asignments are nowadays just comprehensive reading asignments where the student has to extract the parameters for the formulas from the "story".I already had a different topic about this so will not elaborate here.I agree with most part you wrote after that.QuoteI played piano for years, stopped a few years and picked it up now and then. The oldest pieces I played for a long time are still there, I believe they are somewhere embedded in my subconsciousness , if I rationaly try to think what key I need to play and when, it is gone, if I just do it, it is all still there. Strange how the human brain works. I must admit it takes time to regain the speed and precision but ut will probably never be gone.Just like swimming or riding a bicycle.I agree that practice makes the master, what was it 10000 hours to master any subject ofcourse if not limited by physical ability and/or brainpower.

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2019, 11:34:21 pm
content: FWIW I have 1 hour of WATFIV FORTRAN as my sole computer related credential.I've gone from a BA in English lit to an MS in hard rock geology to reflection seismology, which makes the DSP that most EEs do look like an afternoon nap.I fear complexity for the same reason Ken Thompson feared complexity. We are now dependent upon things that no single person is able to understand. I spent a lot of time fixing bugs in million line code bases. I share Thompson's discomfort with anything over 10-20 thousand lines. I just learned to swim through the mess.@kjelt the real world doesn't give you the formula. What you get is a bunch of information which is often incomplete and much of which is extraneous. Quickly determining if you have enough information is valuable. I'd loved to give examples from geology, but I'd get banned again if I did.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 04:07:33 pm
content: Quote from: HighVoltage on March 02, 2019, 02:04:20 pmI think part of the problem is that until university, a lot of the homework is genuinely useless. We know from studies that the amount of homework assigned to kids doesn't make a big difference in knowledge acquisition, so it's clear that at least in some subjects, the homework is actually a waste of time. I can't blame students for thinking homework is ridiculous when (as I often experienced it myself) it didn't actually help them learn.And on the other hand, I absolutely agree that practice is essential.Quote from: Kjelt on March 02, 2019, 11:19:53 pmWhile I find the "stories" to often be contrived, I think this approach does fundamentally make a lot of sense, because one of the huge disconnects between school and the workplace, IMHO, is that people have no idea when and how to apply the math they've learned in school. I mean, look at how many people learned algebra, yet can't even begin to apply it to real-world situations?

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 04:39:24 pm
content: A major reason why kids in high school struggle with algebra, geometry and trig is that their teachers have no clue how to apply the skills. The story problems would be much better if the authors and teachers had some real world experience of using them.With the exception of mechanical and electrical repair, they are essential to all the skilled trades. The high school math subjects are routinely used in carpentry, plumbing, machining, etc on a daily basis.Without a concrete explanation of what the tools are used for it is small wonder that the kids are not interested. I enrolled in Advanced Applied which was a quick summary of linear algebra and integral transforms when I was getting my MS in geology. I had not a clue how to use the material at the time, so I dropped the course because it was eating up so much time.My experience over the course of my career was that if I could get the problem into the appropriate mathematical form I could find a solution quite easily. The really hard part was figuring out what the appropriate form was. This is especially a problem for me with differential equations. I pretty much know how to solve the wave equation and that's it. For everything else I hunt through my books for a problem that matches mine.Of course, the kids are told that they should go deeply into debt for a completely useless piece of paper. The shameless exploitation of the students by the faculty and administration is appalling, but best left for another time.

author: Echo88
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 05:27:20 pm
content: "I'd loved to give examples from geology, but I'd get banned again if I did."Why?

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 06:37:47 pm
content: Is this another thread of old men yelling at clouds? Because it sounds an awful lot like it. The world has changed and information has become much more readily available. You'll still need to practice your skills, but ignoring this fundamental change means you're woefully inefficient compared to those that adapt. Research indicates that younger folks retain less information than they used to but are more efficient at filtering and finding what they need from large volume of information, which is just what this era of copious amounts of available information requires.

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 07:28:59 pm
content: Quote from: Mr. Scram on March 03, 2019, 06:37:47 pmNo it is not and most threads can not be put in pre-labeled boxes, if you do you are the one doing the filtering with a preconception which says more about you than the thread. Can we continue on content.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 07:31:46 pm
content: Quote from: Kjelt on March 03, 2019, 07:28:59 pmIrony is saying this in a thread more than one is using to confirm his own preconceived notions.

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 08:38:59 pm
content: Isn't that what a discussion is all about? Checking ones view on a subject and discuss it with others?There is no need or request to label the discussion only to participate.

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 08:43:37 pm
content: All of this is very far from my original point that the purpose of homework is to solidify the student's understanding of the subject by having them apply what they have been taught in the form of solving problems. And that the benefit of homework is in direct proportion to the amount of effort the student puts into solving the problem without outside assistance.I have this ridiculous expectation that an educated individual will understand logic at the subtlety of Plato, Locke, Hume, Kant and Camus, have mastery of applied mathematics such as differential equations and integral transforms and have a basic knowledge of chemistry, geology, biology and physics as taught in a 2-3 semester sequence in each making full use of mathematics where appropriate.Furthermore, have the ability to write clearly and grammatically with proper punctuation and spelling, and not be so deluded as to think that they are right and everyone who disagrees with them is automatically wrong without any discussion.That is the essence of a good liberal arts education. University has been degraded into an expensive vocational training program. It is still possible to get an education, but it now takes a lot more effort swimming against the current. How can anyone acquire the ability to make a critical analysis if opposing viewpoints are not permitted lest some poor soul be traumatized by exposure to a different viewpoint.Engineers in particular, are inclined to sneer at liberal arts graduates. Certainly, there are many who receive liberal arts degrees without learning anything. Tertiary education is now a scam to defraud young people with false promises and convince them to enslave themselves with debt.But:We all get what we deserve whether we want it or not, either as individuals or as members of a group. Sometimes this is as punishment and sometimes it's a blessing. Which is always ambiguous and depends entirely on what we do next.I rather suspect that a lot of university faculty and administrators will be quite dismayed when they discover that their pensions are dependent upon the financial well being of the students they have defrauded. As the saying goes, what goes around, comes around.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 09:04:20 pm
content: You have no idea how well you have learned a subject until you come to apply your knowledge. Applying might be a matter of working through some homework problems, working through some real world problems, or teaching the topic to other people. The smartest in the class acting as tutor to the middling students in the class usually benefits both groups - the smartest find the gaps in their understanding, and can fill them in. The middling students get a better basic understanding of the topic. This tutoring idea has its limits, though. If the smartest try mentoring the weakest students it can end up wasting both group's time (depending on how big the spread of ability and education on the course might be).I have found that homework generally works best when you don't spend an excessive amount of time trying to solve difficult problems on your own. It you find a problem that hard, you probably lack a piece of knowledge needed to solve it. Working in peer groups after a moderate amount of time on your own is a good step for efficient learning. Different people in the group typically have different gaps in their knowledge, and together they can get to a solution, benefiting all. Unless the peer group is really lacking in some area, going beyond the peer group for a solution should really be a last resort.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 10:48:26 pm
content: Quote from: rhb on March 03, 2019, 08:43:37 pmI agree with your idea that homework or exercises are supposed to solidify someone's understanding by having them apply it, but I don't think the notion that the benefits being proportional to the amount of effort the student puts in has been demonstrated or proven. It may very well be that students dwelling on subjects too long will miss out in other areas. As science advances, education has to provide knowledge about much more subjects and going all out with every single one isn't possible. Doing what worked 40 years ago isn't realistic or sensible. Instead the focus is more on giving students tools with which they can develop themselves into whatever is required.Research indicates that modern day students are better communicators than their older peers. It's one of the perks of living in the era of information. Don't let badly written Twitter and Facebook messages fool you.I don't agree with your fairly negative assessment of everything being worse than it used to be. The world has changed, and education has too. Students have much more information at their disposal, and need to develop different strategies to be successful in today's world. I don't see modern education producing students less prepared or able than it used to and thinking it is may be a sign one has fallen behind to the point of no longer understanding how things work. At that point it's best to move over and leave things to the next generation.

author: rhb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2019, 11:12:18 pm
content: @coppiceI think that is sound. In the case I cited at the beginning, the class hotshot from my Cal I class and I were not looking at the problem properly. We had gotten too good at applying certain methods and failed to step back and rexamine the problem. Once the TA pointed out how to approach it we were off and running.In that case, the 4 hours each of us had spent beating on the problem didn't teach us anything about solving that problem. It should have taught us that sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to step back, do something else and then take another try. We were a little too good at it for our own good and not yet mature enough to back off.Later in life I had many instances where I was trying to find an error in a program for several hours without success, looked up and saw it was close to time to go home. As I was a contractor I came and went when I pleased. So I did not sit around until 8 hours had passed.About 5 minutes from the office there was an overpass where US 59 connects to beltway 8. I came to refer to the crest of that overpass as "the point of epiphany" because of the number of times that when I reached that point I realized what the problem was. I'd go in the next morning and fix it in a few minutes.@Mr. ScramIt the current college students are better communicators I'd like to know on what basis that is. I don't see even basic command of English. We are living through a repeat of the Tower of Babel story.There is certainly a lot more material that must be mastered to be competent in today's world. I don't think a BS in EE today is anything but a technician's degree. Geology, even 80 years ago required an MS for professional status. In geology you had to look at a lot of geology. The problem today for engineering is you have to master about 30-35 semester hours of mathematics. I would not suggest anyone go into engineering today as a profession without getting an MS. I think that the students would be far better served by having time to actually learn the mathematics well rather than pressing through it as quickly as possible.The plain fact of the matter is that after you graduate from school, even with an MS or PhD, you really don't know very much. You've been exposed to a large range of ideas, hopefully have acquired some skills, but knowledge, the ability to use information to solve problems, really doesn't come until you have done it for several years on a daily basis.

author: tornados
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 08:24:47 am
content: Wow! Good job! I got 80, and I was very proud of myself

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 11:11:31 am
content: If I had to do my day job without being able to google stuff.... it would take 10-100 times longer to get anything done.What I learnt at Uni is still partly valid, but significantly out of date. On a day by day basis I have to deal with problems that weren't even defined a month ago using technology that didn't exist a year ago.The real painful ones are the ones so new, or so industry bespoke that you can't google them. Sometimes they don't even have proper documentation and your only course of action is to read the code.This is to say that you can't learn everything in advance, what you need to have is a good problem solving strategy and be expecting to learn new things each and every day.The really painful part in my trade is that resource managers take this a few steps too far. It's is extremely unpleasant to be assigned to a project as a consultant, the customer being charge $1000+ a day for your expertise when... in all reality, you didn't even know what technology existed until your manager told you what your next project would be.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 11:17:38 am
content: Oh and a small story.In the penultimate year of high school my attendance was around 15% and my presence in the "Technology" class was, literally 2 classes in that year. I showed up to the end of year exam and when marked it was 84%. The class went nuts and cried foul. How could I get 85% when I was never in school and had only attended 2 classes out about maybe 35? They demanded my paper be remarked. So... they remarked it, a different teacher gave me 86%. I didn't do a shred of homework or even a shred of class work. The material was just plainly obvious to me.It was around the time I kinda realised where my career should be pointed.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 12:06:01 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on August 13, 2020, 11:11:31 amYebbut, there is little real fundamental change; it is mostly variations on a theme with some semantic sugar and a colour change.Software language examples: C# is Java, Delphi is Pascal, Go's channels are from Hoare's CSP, Objective-C is Smalltalk.Hardware examples: the myriad different MCUs, all programmed in C.QuoteThose are the fun ones. There you have to think of the fundamentals, and apply techniques first used in other domains.Example: to reduce noise I needed a narrowband filter, so I used a technique described 20 years earlier to make a filter with a Q of 4000 using 10% components.Fast forward 30 years, and always wanted to revisit that N-path filter to do something new. I wasmostirked to find Tayloe had already got there with his mixerQuotePrecisely.QuoteNot so precisely. The customer is paying for your expertise in bringing previous experience to bear. Part of that experience is knowing how to rapidly become the local expert in the techandthe customer's problem domain. (Plus being able to spot the customer has asked for an inappropriate solution because they asked the wrong question.)Remember the old joke about the technician that repaired a car by hitting it with a hammer. The customer objected to the £10 invoice for one thwack. The technician agreed it was wrong, and changed it to "Thwack: £1. Knowing where and how hard to thwack: £9". I've done just that, to a starter motor

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 12:12:54 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on August 13, 2020, 11:17:38 amI passed an English Literature exam witha respectable grade after 1 hours revision. I wasn't interested in the subject, and that confirmed my opinion.Asimov's old story "Profession" significantly shaped my career choices. The points are as true today as they were in the 50s. Hence it is still worth speed-reading it athttps://www.abelard.org/asimov.php(Even though the page's style is stuck in the geocities era)I've just re-read it, and come to realise it anticipates modern consultancy practices, the decline of apprenticeships, and typical training courses.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 12:29:29 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 13, 2020, 12:06:01 pmNo offence but this sounds like an opinion from the perspective of a low level programmer. No that domain hasn't changed much I agree. No matter what paradigm or trendy language you use it all boils down to basic Jackson structured programming at the end of the day.The difficulties I am more referring to is the higher levels. Frameworks, platforms, AaaS, SaaS, PaaS, Cloud, Big Data, Clustering etc. Your education and experience allows you to read the documentation and be much faster at knowing what exactly to google and when, but each of these technologies introduces a lot of complexities and bespoke processes and nomenclature.For example, if you were an experienced coder in C or Java and I sat you down to a project and said it was in a Big Data cluster using Kubernetes and Docker, running on a Hadoop cluster utilising Spark. There is very little a basic set of core programming experience will help you with there. Nothing is quite as it seems anymore and there is a whole new glossary of terms... trying to use it like a normal local application node will lead to pain.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 12:52:29 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on August 13, 2020, 12:29:29 pmYou couldn't be more wrong, about meandabout JSP.I investigated JSP (and the other contemporary techniques) in the mid 80s, and rejected it as boring and not the way forward. My decisions and choices at that time have been proven correct.QuoteBeen there, done some of those, some in HPLabs, some in other companies.Alwaysat the bleeding edge where there were no available training courses.I got sick of seeing async protocols layered on top of sync protocols layered on top of async protocols layered on top of async protocols forat leastfive different layers.Andstillpeople don't understand the "fallicies of distributed computing". They think because the framework documentation omits to mention them, the problems have been solved. Ha.As for people understanding the limits defined by Lamport, or the Byzantine General's problems, or the split brain problem, they have no clue. They think FSMs are something to do with compilers.QuoteWell, I have archtected several high-availability soft real-time distributed systems, so I do have a clue about the "large scale" problems and how they can be ameliorated (not solved).

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 01:12:32 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 13, 2020, 12:52:29 pmJSP was just another cult. People came back from the JSP courses like religious converts, but later realised they'd got very little from it. The mid 80s was a little late to be looking at Jackson, Yourdon, etc. They had already passed peak BS by then.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 01:31:18 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on August 13, 2020, 01:12:32 pmSince I picked up JSP from a book comparing all the techniques, itwaslate.Once I figured out that JSP was a mechanical limited version of what I'd been doing naturally for several years, I was unimpressed.I never knew any practitioners of any of the techniques, so I can't comment on religious conversionI, and everybody I've worked with, have always picked apart techniques and technologies to find what is good and, um, less good.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 01:35:47 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on August 13, 2020, 01:12:32 pmEm. All CPUs still function purely on JSP.Sequence, selection, iteration.At least that's what I took from my exposure to JSP.Even a concept as ingrained as a C function has no real model in a CPU. The stack and branch operations required to deliver it in assembler are fabricated into sequence, selection and iteration operations.That is what I meant by it not mattering what paradigm or language you use, it all ends up at basic JSP anyway.Granted there is the rest of JSP stuff. It's been decades since I looked into it. Was it not just top down design? Modularise, divide and sub divide into smaller chunks to work with?

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 01:46:28 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 13, 2020, 12:52:29 pmI suppose it depends on what you want to achieve by using distributed computing.If you are simply in the "compute" space aiming for speed/throughput/latency it would be completely different to the scalability requirements and presenting dynamic platforms to allow basically architecture as a service. aka Kubernetes.Similarly, the Big Data concepts in distributed computing have allowed data mining and processing on a different level which simply was not achievable until recently.Maybe you mean the age old confusion that management might have that if 1 machine takes an hour to do a job that 2 machines will take half an hour. That's just management being fucking dumb. I don't think I have met a manager with a degree in anything related to management, so I normally treat them with caution ... tolerate them or use them to my advantage.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 02:20:34 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on August 13, 2020, 01:35:47 pmLooking athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_structured_programming#JSP_and_object-oriented_designit does look boring and trivial, and it looks like you are right.It seems as if I may have been thinking of JSDhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_system_developmentIt has been alongtime, and I've no regrets purging them from my memory

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 02:35:23 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on August 13, 2020, 01:46:28 pmItalwaysdependsI've never bothered to look at kubernetes, so I can't comment on that.However, one system I architected in 98/99 presumed globally distributed order fulfillment with rapidly evolving products and fulfillment mechanisms.Others were telecom systems, where latency, horizontal scalability and availability are key. And the telco system changes without notice - even the network operators know they don't know what's intheirsystem, let alone other companies' systemsYes, that did involve evaluating and implementing both clustered frameworks and platforms (J2EE, Spring, JAIN SLEE), and custom coded servers.QuoteIndeed, but there have been very few fundamental advances there.QuoteI've seen all sorts of dumbness, technical and managerial. I'm glad I'm out of all that!

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 02:55:58 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 13, 2020, 02:20:34 pmI think JSD was just something they cooked up when the business from JSP was tailing off. The essence of these things is to be profitable, not useful.

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 03:08:32 pm
content: Quote from: rhb on March 02, 2019, 01:50:51 amOr as physical trainers like to say: No pain, No gain.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 03:25:04 pm
content: my favorite gripe. PROVE THAT (A+B)^2 IS A^2 + B^2 + 2ABWHY ? This was proven thousands of years ago by some dude with a grey beard and a toga . It possible was also proven earlier by some dude from a place in the indus valley ( today's india) . All these years we have had millions of students posting the same proof.Ar you as a math teacher still unsure about it that you need to ask your students to prove it once again ? IF you are so desperate why don't you prove it ?That is not learning. That is solving crossword puzzles and sudoku's.Of course you need to know that formula. And it is nice to prove it while you are explaining it. But mindnumbingly asking the student to repeat that is parrot work. That equation can be looked up in a second. Teach them the applications !Exams should be done by giving the student a book with all formulas. There is no reason to memorise all that stuff. There are students with bad memory skills that have excellent reasoning skills. They fail cause they can remember if it was Bob or Pete that came up with something. That is just plain wrong. Reasoning skill is waaaaay more important that being able to recant the coursebook letter for letter.Feynman called that Cargocult Science. Go through the motions and you get the paper. But you are still the worlds biggest Moron.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 03:33:58 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on August 13, 2020, 03:25:04 pmYou really should read (or re-read) Asmov's "Profession" - he addresses that point and others. The key points are just as valid as when it was written.https://www.abelard.org/asimov.phpand try to ignore the geocities colour schemeQuoteAgreed.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 03:49:08 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on August 13, 2020, 03:25:04 pmA lot of this is a scam that lets low ability people get high marks in exams, by being drilled for hours in expensive private tuition, to turn a thinking task into a simple memory one. When these formulae are derived in class, and you work through where they come from, they are a genuine learning exercise. Reducing them to a memory exercise is a perversion of learning.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 03:52:01 pm
content: Tell me and I will forget.Show me and I will remember.Let me do it and I will understand.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 03:54:23 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on August 13, 2020, 03:52:01 pmA lot of people who struggle to understand even simple things are remarkably good at pure memory activities.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 04:10:51 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on August 13, 2020, 03:54:23 pmIt's funny. I take the completely opposite approach. I can't remember facts so I don't try. I only remember the logical reasoning steps to get from one bit of information to the other.... or I recall how I could find the information again when I actually need it.Random contrived example, the statement "Cats fall". There is no point remembering anything. Cats exist and so does gravity, so the statement is useless. I literally just drop everything that comes into that category. It can be derived from other information I already have with sane reasoning.The other category is. "Makes sense, I understand it, don't need it right now, so only going to remember it makes sense and that I can derive or find it later should I need it."It's like you don't need to remember the road map of England to cross it in a car. You can derive it fairly easily on the fly.Eventually of course the common nodes of this derivation tree become ingrained with use to become instant recall. Others sadly atrophy away with lack of use. The worst are when those weak atrophying paths get tangled with another and you get false recall or bullshit. Which I don't doubt will become worse as I get older and end up demented or stuck in a loop in my own bullshit tree. LOL

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 05:32:03 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on August 13, 2020, 04:10:51 pmThat's why I was never much good at languages where you have to remember arbitrary associations between two words.Ditto street names and road numbers. Some people navigate by following familiar street name. I navigate by knowing the direction I want to go in, and finding a road to fit.Ditto which button to push on an IDE or word processor etc.

author: jh15
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2020, 02:33:47 pm
content: Remember the old joke about the technician that repaired a car by hitting it with a hammer. The customer objected to the £10 invoice for one thwack. The technician agreed it was wrong, and changed it to "Thwack: £1. Knowing where and how hard to thwack: £9". I've done just that, to a starter motorThe perfect tool for that is the heel of your shoe.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2020, 01:49:45 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 13, 2020, 12:12:54 pmI just read it for the first time. He presents interesting ideas, in a framework reminiscent of Arthur C Clark's The City And The Stars, or Brave New World. I don't understand some of his plot choices, though. Why did he make the children learn to read as late as 8? Why did he make the number of creative people so small? Real creativity is not common, but its not as rare as that story implies. Is the implication that people have been purposefully dumbed down, so they now need to hunt for the few outliers?I seem to remember another story where the "House for the Feeble Minded" turns out to be the "Centre for Advanced Research". Did Asimov, or others, reuse that idea?

author: 0culus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2020, 03:32:47 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on August 13, 2020, 03:25:04 pmProving theorems that are already proved is an essential exercise that trains you how to think as a beginning math student learning how to reason through proofs. You can't very well assign all the Millennium Problems as homework and expect students new to mathematical thinking to get anywhere (unless one of them happens to be the next Terence Tao, or Grothendieck, or what have you).I do agree that you should never memorize what you can look up (eventually you will internalize the information that is important), and time pressure exams prove nothing except who is able to function in that environment. In fact, all of the advanced (some grad level) mathematics I took in my BS in Math used take home exams only. I ended up not doing math in grad school, but I learned a huge amount of very useful reasoning skills by suffering through that second undergrad degree (I also did computer science) with some great professors.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2020, 08:19:45 am
content: Quote from: coppice on August 16, 2020, 01:49:45 amI wouldn't over-analyse the plot choices an author uses to lead readers to the key points!I'd also apply that to Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.htmlOr, if you are channelling Harrison Bergeron, you can read the "Cliffs Notes" on the story

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 16, 2020, 10:25:57 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 16, 2020, 08:19:45 amHe could have talked about reading day being in early childhood, but instead specifically made it at 8 years of age. I assume there was a reason. Asimov normally has a reason for each of his plot points.Quote from: tggzzz on August 16, 2020, 08:19:45 amHarrison Bergeron is not to be taken too literally. It uses too much humour for that. In reality there would have to be a ruling elite of the most capable people running such a handicapping system, and Harrison would have been recruited into that. This is the route at least one movie inspired by Harrison Bergeron took -

author: pgo
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 09:52:04 am
content: As an educator I am often amazed and how much effort students will go through to remember things rather than understand them.Personally I have a poor memory so unconnected facts are hard to remember.Connected reasoning is much easier.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 09:58:09 am
content: Quote from: pgo on August 17, 2020, 09:52:04 amYou might be focussing on the students you can't relate to - the ones with a terrific memory, but poor critical thinking.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 10:18:45 am
content: Quote from: pgo on August 17, 2020, 09:52:04 amYes.It helps such students in the long term if (at the beginning of the course) they can be forced to realise that job interviewers look for that - and avoid such candidates.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 10:39:12 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 17, 2020, 10:18:45 amGood interviewers probe understanding, but most don't because they are part of strong memory/weak thinking cohort. Many interviewers are actually intimidated by someone who clearly has deep understanding, which they lack. Overall, life is richer when you understand, but people can progress surprisingly well understanding very little.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 03:24:42 pm
content: i wish i had this guy as a teacher !.

author: b_force
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 03:47:16 pm
content: Personally I think it highly depends what type of learner someone is.One person is very practical and really learns fast an quickly by doing stuff, others learn by (theoretical) repetition etcMost important is that there is no good or wrong in it, neither is one more smart or not.It's just nothing more than just having a preference.Unfortunately on schools/universities only one kind is being taught and (therefor) only being taken serious.The fast majority is only done with repetition, and even one of a very limited kind.This doesn't train peoples brains to understand the problem, but just repeat the solution.Result; after a month or two people totally forget what everything was about and move on.Or in other words, people are trained to remember things like (useless) facts, not to understand things and being trained in logical reasoning.Let alone understanding the meaning of it and seeing how that can be implemented on a wider/bigger scale or bigger picture.In fact, I have seen multiple people with a cum laude degree as well as a PhD but weren't able to understand not only some basics but also failed in very similar problems but with a different context.When I am coaching interns, I always let them focus on basically 4 things; statistics, error analyses, control theory andFermi problems.With these four plus a little bit of base knowledge and logical thinking you can tackle a lot of problems that or sometimes not even close to your working field.I really never bother about facts, nowadays there is Google as well as YouTube.Rather safe time, energy and effort (= hard-disk space in the brain) in understanding things.For an engineering/scientist tackling new unknown problems is far more important.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 04:28:47 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on August 17, 2020, 10:39:12 amHey, I'm trying to be optimistic here! That's eitherordepending on mood.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 04:37:02 pm
content: Quote from: b_force on August 17, 2020, 03:47:16 pmFeynman used to have a hack at medical students, who had to remember the names of all the bones etc. He wondered why they didn't just consult "a map of the body" when they needed to.Apart from that, many "simple facts" are very transient in nature, e.g. which button to press in FroobleApp v3.5 to cause the splodger to be faddled. You know, the kind of stuff that fills stackechange and similarly boring sites.

author: b_force
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 04:48:43 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 17, 2020, 04:37:02 pmhahaha, yes very typical.Mostly also with math for example, something like differential equations or similar.After doing 10 of them you get the point and what it's for and what it can (and can't) do, so why doing another 2000?Especially the weird ones that don't have ANY practical value, except for staying busy and being bothered about it.Second, raise an hand who does this by hand on a daily basis? (sound of crickets)You just fill those things into your math calculator of choice and let it ramble while you do actual serious work or get some coffee.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 05:22:55 pm
content: Quote from: b_force on August 17, 2020, 04:48:43 pmI do like to see candidates that know the correct answer to "what is 1+2*3?" I don't mind if they prompt me to say "using the normal laws of arithmetic". If they don't know "BEDMAS" or equivalent, then they need some other truly outstanding characteristics

author: ucanel
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 07:39:31 pm
content: I am an EE.First year of the collage at the C lessonsi think that the first thing that i will fail at my education life will be the programming,indeed that happened, i failed,at the summer school exams i memorised 10 pages of programs that likely to be asked,i passed the exams knowing nothing about programming.Now i am an embedded programmer,i love programming, i love problem solving.

author: b_force
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 08:13:56 pm
content: Quote from: ucanel on August 17, 2020, 07:39:31 pmAnd that, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect way to get ACTUALLY a degree without knowing anything.No offence towards you obviously, happy you found something you like

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 09:14:52 pm
content: Quote from: ucanel on August 17, 2020, 07:39:31 pmThat is possible for a technician, not an engineer.You should read "Profession" by Isaac Asimov, since it is directly relevant to that. I've previously posted a link to it.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 09:15:23 pm
content: Quote from: b_force on August 17, 2020, 08:13:56 pmAnd that, ladies and gentlemen, is why some institutions and degrees are more valued than others.

author: b_force
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 09:23:10 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 17, 2020, 09:15:23 pmMaybe in the UK, but I have never seen people bothering about it.As long as you have a Master of Bachelor of Engineering/Science people believe and assume you have some knowledge.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 09:30:01 pm
content: Quote from: b_force on August 17, 2020, 09:23:10 pmPeople have always wanted to know where you got your degree in some countries, like the US. There was a time when people in the UK didn't focus much on where you got your degree. They were mostly interested in whether you got a 1st, upper 2nd, etc. Now people do want to know where you studied in the UK. Anyone that didn't attend a Russell Group university (a group of about 40 old and trusted universities) is treated with great skepticism.

author: b_force
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 09:38:12 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on August 17, 2020, 09:30:01 pmInteresting, never came across these experiences, nor other people I knowPersonally when I look for candidates I don't even bother looking for a degree anymore.I just haven't seen any correlation between having a degree vs knowledge, work mentality and skills.Well obviously you're also not going to just take a random person, but what I am trying to say (also with my earlier posts), is that are other ways to gain knowledgeFor some people it's even more just a prestige thing than anything else.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 09:51:59 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on August 17, 2020, 09:30:01 pmYes, but the degree (ho ho) of skepticism should depend on the job.You need to match the candidate to the job; there's no point in employing a technician as an engineeror vice versa. Ditto practical skills / theory skills.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 09:58:50 pm
content: Quote from: b_force on August 17, 2020, 09:38:12 pmDepends on the job.For most of the places I've worked, having a solid grasp of the theory has been absolutely essential. That means a Russell group degree is almostnecessary, and a non-Russell group degree is a negative. It doesnotmean that a Russell group degree issufficient.A degree is an indicator, no more. You judge the candidate on what you discover in the interview.First you let them tell you what they have achieved in the past, and ask questions to verify their statements. Then you ask questions designed to show you how they think and approach problems that will be relevant to the job.

author: fourfathom
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2020, 10:19:03 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 17, 2020, 09:14:52 pmI read that Asimov story, and found it interesting that (in the story) it was claimed that only one person in 100,000 were suited to be the inventors, scientists, etc. I believe that in our world the number is much more generous than that.And I also think it is possible to self-educate and become an engineer. Life story:I dropped out of college after a couple of years and never got a degree of any sort. I had become interested in electronics before the age of ten, and (when I wasn't trying to be a bass guitar rock star) spent tens of thousands of hours reading books, magazines, and experimenting. I did take EE Technology courses in my early twenties, but never bothered to finish up and get my degree because I became bored -- I already knew that stuff. I worked as a technician for a few years and then advanced into an engineering role. At this point I already had better design chops than many of the "real" engineers I was working with. Yes, I had blind spots, but I was a good team player and we all worked to complement other's strengths.Time marches on, and I progress through a few companies -- established and start-ups -- never stopping my self-education. I took a couple of semesters of Calculus because I wanted to. I became an engineering manager (small teams), and director of engineering (the last start-up, a fiber-optics networking equipment manufacturer), while still keeping my design and architecture responsibilities. Our company was acquired in 1999 and I retired in 2001 with the title "Distinguished Engineer" and well over a dozen patents to my name. Now I'm back to playing with electronics in my garage.So am I an "Engineer"? I'm certainly not a scientist, mathematician, or physicist, but my employers and colleagues seem to think that I am a pretty good engineer. I found myself unable to maintain interest in an academic setting, but found my calling and passion in the hands-on world and became a jack-of-many-trades, master of some.So I think it's entirely possible to become an effective engineer without traditional formal training. I wouldn't recommend this path for everyone, but I think there is more than one way to reach your goals.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 01:07:05 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 17, 2020, 09:58:50 pmDegrees are only important when recruiting a fresh graduate, or someone with little experience. The importance of formal education gradually gives way to what they can convince you they have achieved in the real world.The UK used to have more nuanced qualifications for people of differing ability, suitable for different kinds of jobs. Now so many things are called a degree, you have to look behind that term to see what actual study occurred.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 08:23:20 am
content: Quote from: fourfathom on August 17, 2020, 10:19:03 pmI wouldn't take too much notice about a precise number in a work of fiction!It certainly is possible to become an effective engineer without formal training, but it takes a long time, is difficult and rare. I've knownoneindividual like that; he had stunning theoretical and practical expertise.Having said that, there are too many people that loudly make statements along the lines of "theory skills are useless, all that matters are practical skills", or "I knew a PhD that measured the impedance of the mains with an avometer, therefore...". Usually such people have no theoretical qualifications (and hence understanding), often because they failed at them.The very important point to me is that engineers are not better than technicians any more than technicians are better than engineers. You need a range of skills, and no one person will have them all. That is true of personality traits as well, and getting a well-balanced team where one person's weakenesses are covered by another person's strengths is very important to success.If you have all technicans and no engineers, then you may end up with something that fails for subtle reasons. Conversely, with all engineers you may end up with something that would work reliably if bits stopped falling off.Analogy: when diagnosing a serious condition, I wouldn't use a nurse. Similarly when inserting a needle, I wouldn't want a doctor. Horses for courses.I too chose to be a jack of all trades and master of none. I have seen many systems containing fundamental flaws which work unreliably. But if you want fast reliable soldering or a neat enclosure, don't come to me

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 08:32:13 am
content: Quote from: coppice on August 18, 2020, 01:07:05 amAs time goes on the "quality" of the degree becomes less important, but it can still be used as an indicator of what they ought to be capable of. Not everybody uses their degree in their current job, but might be able to in their next job.You give job candidates a chance to explain (and justify!) what they have achieved, and then probe what they might be able to do for you. That's both theory and practical skills,as appropriate.QuoteYes. In spadesOne size doesn'tand shouldn'tfit all.I really hate that the polytechs rebranded themselves as unis. Polys clearly signalled that they were offering different paths and different skills for different people - and that was very important to both the student and the employer. I think the rebranding was principally a case of academic inferiority complex, which annoys me intensely.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 10:43:07 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 18, 2020, 08:32:13 amSure. In the UK having gone to a prestige university will always say you are either very smart or your parents had the money to send you to public school.Quote from: tggzzz on August 18, 2020, 08:32:13 amGo back to the 1980s. Industrially Britain was falling apart, and Japan was doing well. British politicians tended to think the answer was to be more like Japan. Japan put 18% of its young through university, while Britain put a much lower percentage through university. The politician's answer was more universities. This ignored 2 key issues here. The first is that Japan called most tertiary education "university", while Britain had polys,technical colleges and other things offering HNCs, HNDs and other non-degree tertiary qualifications. If you took the total percentage of British youngsters who went through some kind of tertiary education it wasn't far from Japan's figures. The other point is that anyone who hasn't grown up in some kind of intellectual bubble knows that due to talent or inclination most of the people around them at school were either not prepared or not inclined to go through a traditional degree course.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 11:00:51 am
content: Quote from: coppice on August 18, 2020, 10:43:07 amThe current covid/brexit news management deflection fiasco apart, I'll note that public school does not mean university material.As Waugh put it in "Decline and Fall", "We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school." Guess where the hero went to teach!

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 11:22:49 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 18, 2020, 11:00:51 amWell, duh, whoda thought? The figures are clearly different now, but when I went to university in the early 70s about half of university students came from the 5% of the population at public schools, and half came from the 95% at state schools. Those people from public schools were of mixed ability, but had been well trained to get through the exams needed for university. Any numbskull you met with a degree from Oxford or Cambridge had clearly been to an excellent public school. Now the school exams have been massively dumbed down, so it must be far easier for anyone from a public school to get a place in a good university.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 11:45:58 am
content: Quote from: coppice on August 18, 2020, 11:22:49 amI don't know theactualpercentages, but the 60s really broke down the barrier that pretty much excluded the working class from university.I must be odd, because I chose to not accept a scholarship to a local public school, and go to the local Grammar School. Ditto Cambridge vs Southampton Uni.The major difference between the 70s and now is that in the 70s ~8% went to university whereas nowdays I believe it is 45%. If we make the grossly simplifying assumption of mapping that onto IQ (etc) bell curves, then mean value of competence is very noticably lower. Hence, even if the proportions of grades remains the same, the standard necessary to get a grade must necessarily be lower.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 01:59:52 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 18, 2020, 11:45:58 amThat was a period when the UK establishment realised the country was falling behind, and that anyone with talent needed that talent developed. That's why the universities expanded a lot in the late 60s and early 70s. Its also why the state starting paying everyone's college fees, and provided living expenses to anyone who's parents couldn't afford to pay. They didn't really want to admit how easy it was to get the government to pay, so we had to go through a shame of applying for discretionary grants, and not knowing that the outcome would be. If you knew someone involved in these grants - in my case a friend at the local council who could tell me the precise cost of my course, because he dealt with the payments - they could tell you that if a uni would accept you, you would get the relevant grants.Now the authorities have abandoned creating a well educated workforce, and we are back to the bad old days with working class youngsters getting a poor start in life. When I look at my father's generation, there were many bright people in dead end work, which they had never been able to rise out of. In my generation most of the capable people got a reasonable start in life.... at least in London, where I grew up. People of my age from some parts of the North of the UK tell a slightly less happy story. Not so many went to university, but large numbers of working class youngsters went to various kinds of poly or technical college and established a reasonable career for themselves.Quote from: tggzzz on August 18, 2020, 11:45:58 amNot at all. I never applied to Oxford or Cambridge, as I thought my life would be made miserable there. In later years, interacting with both very smart state school people and not always very smart public school people who went to Oxford or Cambridge I think I made the right choice. I went to the top tier that looked good to me - UCL. As an aside, my best friend at college is from Southhampton, and both his parents lectured at the uni. That made his first step to cross Southampton off any list of potent colleges to attend.Quote from: tggzzz on August 18, 2020, 11:45:58 amIn the early 70s it was a lot lower than 8%. It was more like 4%, consisting of most of the 5% who went to public school, and a modest number from the state schools.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 02:21:42 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on August 18, 2020, 01:59:52 pmI avoided looking at Surrey Uni and London colleges for similar reasons.Curiously, I went to work in Cambridge, from 81-87. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, partly because it was a very interesting time. The BBC's Micro Men andHermann Hauser's Oral Historycaptures it pretty well. I was involved in one of Hauser's anecdotes; I knew the beginning and am not surprised to have learned of the ending. Yes, it was a small world and peopledidwander into companies and the colleges via backdoorsThe main reason I left is there is too little ink (of any colour) on the OS1:50000 map, in particular contours and trees.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2020, 02:46:51 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 18, 2020, 02:21:42 pmIt certainly was a small world. Talk to anyone who worked at, say, Cambridge Consultants or the PAT Centre, and they tend to know everyone else you've ever known who worked around Cambridge. There always seems to be a Clive Sinclair anecdote in them, too.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 05:32:11 am
content: Quote from: pgo on August 17, 2020, 09:52:04 amOne problem I see is that the educational systems cram in too much material to actually go at a pace that permits all the students to actually truly understand. So the ones who need more time end up memorizing, because it’s that or failing.I had this exact problem with the “ballroom dance” class I took at university to fulfill a physical ed requirement: long before I had truly gotten the hang of one basic step, they added on another, and then another, until by the end of the thing I was hopelessly lost. And this is exactly what I saw happen with many students in various academic subjects.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 07:45:48 am
content: Quote from: coppice on August 18, 2020, 02:46:51 pmI started at CCL, before moving on. The staff turnover was, by the conventional standards of the time, fairly high - but that was because people were always moving on forgoodreasons. Usually that meant they were trying their luck at something new and exciting.There was a map at the back of "Cambridge Phenomenon: The Growth of High Technology Industry in a University Town" published in 1985, while I was there. The map showed CCL was pretty central to everything, and there have been many big spinouts since then.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 10:04:23 am
content: Quote from: tooki on August 25, 2020, 05:32:11 amI had courses where the lecturer wrote so fast that we spent the entire lecture trying to keep up with writing our own notes. and had no time to think about and properly absorb what was being said.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 10:28:34 am
content: Quote from: coppice on August 25, 2020, 10:04:23 amAll of my courses were like that.The solution is to scribble notes, and thenwithin a couple of hourswrite them out neatly. That has two major benefits:you end up with good revision notesas you are rewriting them, you arethinkingabout what you do and don't know, and can add in extra points where beneficial

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 10:34:37 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 25, 2020, 10:28:34 amThat's a coping strategy, not something desirable. In the early 70s, when I was at college, handing out materials was a lot more expensive than today. This was used as an excuse for not handing them out by a lot of people. However, anyone running a training course in industry at that time would have been kicked out for using such an inefficient strategy.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 11:09:46 am
content: Quote from: coppice on August 25, 2020, 10:34:37 amThere I will disagree.Very very few people grok complex stuff when it is first presented to them - and then only if they are partially familar with the subject matter. Most peoplethinkthey understand it, but frequently they are fooling themselves.There are a few good ways around that:repetiton and recapitulation - but there is insufficient time for that in a decent course. Solution: repeat/recapitulate yourselfexplain it, since you only know how little you know when you try to explain a subject. Solution: explain to yourselfrevision. Solution: revise while creating your own material for laterI always wanted handouts, at school and university. Now I realise they are anegative. People don't concentrate because "it is in the handouts", then just file the handouts on the principle that "it is all there and I'll come back to that later."Grokking takes hard work and concentration; there are no sugar-coated short cuts.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 11:51:05 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 25, 2020, 11:09:46 amNobody understands as much of something as they think they do after their first pass. Note taking helps somewhat, but its not that great. What REALLY sorts you out is application. Working through problems is one route. The smartest in the group can gain enormously by helping the weaker people in the group, if they have to take what they have learned and regurgitate it for the others. When I was at college we asked one of our tutors about a point in EM theory none of us had really understood. He told us he did great in his EM theory studies at college, and needed a lot of that knowledge to do his PhD. However, it wasn't until his first teaching job where he actually had to explain EM theory to others than he finally really got to grips with it. Note taking is a bit like explaining something to yourself, but to a fairly easy target.

author: mc172
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 12:41:02 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 25, 2020, 10:28:34 amIf that's what the lesson was like, then the "lesson" was a waste of time and was nothing more than going through a set of someone elses notes at too fast a pace. How can you think about what you're doing if you've just blindly copied down a load of notes and haven't been able to concentrate on anything the lecturer was trying to explain in between the frenzied note taking?I hated the lessons where you had to take notes really fast. I was constantly playing catch-up and concentrating not on what the lecturer said but what I was writing down, and focusing on doing it quickly before they disappeared off the board. The lecturer wouldn't always be coherent and would skip back and forth through what he was writing and the order of what he was trying to say, so my notes wouldn't be worth anything anyway. These kind of lessons would go through the same problem in slightly different ways, three or four times in one lesson, in an attempt to hammer it home, but anyone that didn't understand the first time round was left behind for the rest of the lesson.I suppose it's luck of the draw with what teacher/lecturer/professor you get but with this particular one I often came out with a cooked head. Those kinds of lessons with that lecturer did teach me something - switch off and stop thinking about anything including trying to understand the subject material, other than faithfully copying down the board so that you don't miss anything. What sort of retarded nonsense is that?The best lessons I had would be the ones where any notes required were given at the start and I could refer to them throughout the lesson (and of course after) but most importantly I could concentrate on what was being taught. I also had faith that the notes were correct after the fact when I referred to them during assignment problems or revision.

author: m98
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 11:07:26 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 25, 2020, 11:09:46 amDifferent people have different learning methods. I want to stay ahead of the lecturer, not be surprised. If I have to write everything down everything said and written, I have no time to think about the material and usually not even enough time to write everything down, making the notes close to worthless.Those lecturers, at least in my experience, are also the ones who have no literature recommendations besides like one monster reference work with quite disconcerting equation-to-text-ratios.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 11:34:59 pm
content: Quote from: mc172 on August 25, 2020, 12:41:02 pmIt wasn't like that; there were no "someone else's notes". The lecturers "created" their material during the lecture on the blackboard and OHP; we could write as fast as they could.People thought and and asked the lecturer questions during and after the lecture.QuoteThat luxury wasn't practical.I didn't need faith that notes were correct. After writing up my "scribbles" Iknewthey were right, andwhy. That was a very important advantage of how I did things, as I mentioned.

author: mc172
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2020, 11:51:34 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 25, 2020, 11:34:59 pmUnlikely that they just made it up on the spot. They'd at least have something they were working from, i.e. their own notes, which is what I was referring to as from your perspective, the student, you're going through someone elses notes way too quickly. I just don't see how it's conducive to learning to copy notes from a board.QuoteQuote from: tggzzz on August 25, 2020, 11:34:59 pmHow wasn't it practical?How did you know that they were correct and why? You didn't mention those specifically other than by relying on your recollection.In an earlier comment you mentioned how people can just file the handouts (which I was referring to when I said something along the lines of having the notes at the start of the lesson) to pretty much the bin, well yeah I agree completely but that's up to them. You shouldn't make the rest of the people that actually want to be there suffer a piss poor "learning" method from the 1850s by literally copying lines from a board.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 06:49:29 am
content: Quote from: mc172 on August 25, 2020, 11:51:34 pmThat doesn't change the validity of what I wrote, nor why. You have snipped the context (the "why") which makes that difficult to follow; this forum isn't stackexchange and subtle conversations are possible.QuoteThat's an entirely different point, and one that has been asked over the centuries.There's the veryveryold joke that a lecture is a mechanism for getting the notes from the lecturer's paper onto the students' paper without going through the mind of either.QuoteClearly you weren't alive in the 70s, and can't appreciate the scarcity and expense of duplication technology.I knew my rewritten notes were correct because Ithoughtandunderstoodwhen rewriting them. When I didn't understand something, I went and found out what I didn't understand and incorporated it in my notes.All that is a very good introduction to what happens in real life.I should note that I went on a decent course where they taught fundamentals that have been useful throughout my career. They didn't bother lecturing about ephemeral trivia that has a half-life measured in years.QuotePlease don't make strawman arguments.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 09:07:41 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 26, 2020, 06:49:29 amVery much so. Duplication of most things is so trivial these days that young people really have no grasp of what a )*(&^@#()*$&^(*&%^(*#%^( PITA getting a copy of most things used to be.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 09:48:18 am
content: Quote from: coppice on August 26, 2020, 09:07:41 amThe key skills have changed in the past 25 years.Before:locate possible source of information - go to library and look up the few books available in the catalogueobtain source - delay of aweek to a monthread source to gain informationrereadseveral times togleanall possible information in that sourceNow:on a whim, google and get hundreds of possible sourcesobtainallsources - delay ofsecondsglanceto see if each source might helpspeedreadthe better sourcesmove to next source and repeatThe TL;DR (incidentally a concept that didn't exist and couldn't have existed before):key skill was extracting information from any source you could get your hands onkey skill is deciding which sources to ignoreThen you were thirsty and a tap dripped. Now there's a firehose. Behaviour is different, unsurprisingly.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 10:03:51 am
content: Quote from: mc172 on August 25, 2020, 11:51:34 pmThis was the available technology:https://www.woorillacaught.com/roneo-machines/Read it and weep. I still have one example, but the purple ink has almost completely faded.For bonus points tell us why the standard editing operations are "cut" and "paste". That's how I produced my final year report.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 10:35:53 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 26, 2020, 10:03:51 amXerox machines were available technology, but they were rarely available for most people's use. They came with locks in those days, as using them quickly ran up a large bill.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 12:24:15 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on August 26, 2020, 10:35:53 amYes.Photocopiers weren't available in school, and using theonein the university library required payment in advance!

author: IanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 03:32:44 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on August 26, 2020, 06:49:29 amThis is something of a tangent, but you have just caused me to remember the word "Gestetner".[Edit: I see the thread has already gone off on this particular tangent]

author: Sal Ammoniac
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 04:34:57 pm
content: On some forums, EDABoard is a good example, 75% of the traffic in some of the subforums is students asking for someone to solve their homework problems. I don't find that surprising, but what I do find surprising is that many people on these forums, including old timers, take the bait and actually answer these people. Most of these homework question askers seem to come from a certain subcontinent.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 04:41:11 pm
content: Quote from: IanB on August 26, 2020, 03:32:44 pmIts depressing how many successful technology companies I used to walk past regularly as a kid which have long since gone, but I don't think I'll ever miss Gestetner.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 04:52:40 pm
content: Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on August 26, 2020, 04:34:57 pmThe objection I have to edaboard and stack exchange is that they deliberately limit subtle - and therefore interesting - conversations, by only allowing very limited context to be quoted.That condemns the conversations to be little more than "which button do I press to squaff the zirdle?". That is boring rote learning, best accessed via google - and then forgotten.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2020, 02:05:32 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on August 25, 2020, 10:04:23 amI did my degree with the Open University. Most of my friends at local "brick uni's" where complaining about having to take hand written notes and getting handed dodgy photocopies of course materials, which they had to clip into ring binders.My courses arrived by mail with full colour, full gloss, shiny, printed textbooks. Lecturers were presented on VHS (and then later DVD and in come cases Multimedia interactive things). All software provided. By the time I finished my degree in 4 years I had a pile of course textbooks 4 feet high.Some courses provided the actual 3rd party textbooks, but some required you go buy your own copy. Luckily these only cost me about £100 for the whole degree.There were "Tutorials" which was once a fortnight with the tutor face to face classes at a local school in the evenings. I went to 2 of them at the start and then never bothered.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2020, 02:36:30 pm
content: Quote from: IanB on August 26, 2020, 03:32:44 pmI just had a fun 10 minutes explaining the horrors of life in the days of the Gestetner machine to my son.Its not easy for a 20 year old today to related to what the bad old days of the 1970s was like.