[IkmoIkmo]

Yeah I feel there's a massive disconnect between class lectures, the book, the exam, and exam-specific student material.

Which is to be expected. Over time, students will optimise material for the exam. Whereas the lectures often discuss things that you ought to learn, but that isn't tested for mostly practical reasons (some knowledge is hard to test, or would make the exam too long).

I've recently sat in a uni statistics course, about 2 weeks in 80% of students stopped coming to class because the professor just had no ability to teach. 1 on 1 he's brilliant, in academic writing he's brilliant, but he's not a teacher. However, students set up a $60 2-day course, everyone who took it passed. At least that's formalised and open, sent to all students' email. But a lot of that nowadays happens through whatsapp. For example I just got a math guidebook, practise exams and some other helpful stuff sent to me on whatsapp from a maths study group I'm taking, all of which is 10x more helpful than the official book used in class or the lectures. But that's only because I got invited into the group by a friend.

I've also studied abroad multiple times and it's a world of difference without these connections. Mainly because exam difficulty has adjusted to students having 'prime' material allowing them to do well, meaning if you don't have it and just follow lectures or the prescribed materials, you're going to have a hard time even scoring above average when you put in tons of effort.

[douche]

One terrible way that bad professors try to enforce students attending their class periods is by sprinkling in "clicker" quizzes into their lectures. These are little four-button devices that you have to buy/rent at exorbitant rates from the school IT department. One class that I took, informally known as "Stars for Stoners" aka Astronomy 101, based something like 10% of the total grade on these clicker questions. Naturally, people found ways to circumvent this kind of bullshit[1], at least for a while...

[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/01/08/dartmouth/GN8oL...