[randoments]

Reading all these comments, I feel like US universities are a joke.

I had to do all the exams in person. 100% of the grade was decided at the exam. Millions of people graduated this way and they are fine. No students were harmed in the process.

[lionkor]

I agree fully. Not sure what they are on about, with "no labs??" in the replies.

You still do all the same things, and they are graded, but this doesn't affect your final grade. Instead, you need to pass a threshold to enter the exam, which is then graded.

The US isn't so amazing at this, it simply can be done better. Recognizing where you can improve and from whom you can learn is a great first step to ACTUAL improvement.

[meroes]

No projects, no labs, no teamwork, no papers?

What a narrow set of skills to send into your economy.

[bugufu8f83]

Just because those things don't contribute to your final grade doesn't mean you don't do them.

At Oxbridge, for CS we still had lab work. We still had problem sets assigned for CS and for math which were graded. We had one large CS group project in, I want to say, our second year. Humanities students were still assigned essays. It's just that none of this stuff contributed to your final degree classification which was based entirely on your exams (although if you didn't do your CS practicals you wouldn't be allowed to pass).

Obviously Oxbridge isn't exactly representative but certainly my experience showed me that the American style is not the only way of making education work.

[cafebabbe]

oh, that's why US has the only working economy in the world ! :)

joking, of course everyone does 'projects, labs, teamwork and papers'. It's just not the main focus of the grading process.

[ivankelly]

Given the way things are going, not knowing how to use AI will be like coming out not knowing about revision control

[maplethorpe]

Isn't the selling point of AI that it does it for you? What's to learn?

[lacy_tinpot]

If the AI does it for you, you need to still learn what to do.

What is the "it" that AI does for you?

This is assuming you know how to get good work out of AI in the first place. But even that is turning out to be a skill in and of itself.

[Levitz]

"It does X for you" is the point of many technologies. You still require knowledge to work around it.

Context helps immensely, for example. Think of what you can do that someone outside tech can't.

[strogonoff]

The “it does X for you” aspect of technology is not completely without its downsides, for various values of X.

For example, take “X” to be “walking”. Do we have the technology that allows us to pretty much never have to walk? Sure. As far as I am aware, though, we do not generally favour a lifestyle of being bound to a mobility aid by choice, and in fact we have found that not walking when able in the long run creates substantial well-being issues for a human. (Now, we have found ways to alleviate some of those issues for those who aren’t able, but clearly it is not sufficient because we still walk.)

The problem is exacerbated immensely as the value of X approaches something as fundamental to one’s humanity as “thinking”.

[maplethorpe]

> "It does X for you" is the point of many technologies. You still require knowledge to work around it.

When running water replaced the need to pump water out of the ground yourself, were people urged to "learn faucets"? You kind of just need to twist a knob and water comes out, right?

Maybe there was an intermediary stage where running water was slightly more complicated and there were more steps to learn, but devoting time to learning those steps would have been a waste of time, since the end goal of the system was for it to function without much input.

[ivankelly]

There’s a big difference between using AI well and using it badly. Judgement is what needs to be learnt

[lionkor]

Weaponized FOMO to drive everyone to use AI isn't really a great idea

[mekael]

I think you’re missing the /s.

[ivankelly]

Not at all. It’s a tool. It can be used well and it can be used badly, the difference often being others things thought in a CS curriculum. But a well trained engineer using the tool will be more productive than that engineer doing everything by hand, so leaving that tool out of the curriculum is doing a disservice to the students

[doug_durham]

So you didn't have to do any course work? No collaboration? No labs? I'm not aware of any University that doesn't have coursework outside of online diploma mills.

[theFco]

In my undergrad, coursework did not count towards the grade for the module. But you earned the right to sit for the final exam by passing the courswork.

[ilovecake1984]

We had a token portion for the grade from coursework. Eg 10%. Its enough to force you to do it, but not enough to influence the grade too much.

[make3]

for people with medium to high anxiety problems and/or with ADHD, exams are an absolute nightmare that is not representative at all of workplace performance or ability to do good work.

[tyrust]

Did you never have to write a research paper?

[raincole]

A million foreign students are studying in US universities. Millions applied. What a joke education system indeed!