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by StilesCrisis
5 days ago
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Do you think weed-out courses are a good thing? If these courses are so important, they should be taught in a way that students can understand. If they made it to college, and can program, they're clearly smart and motivated. |
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You clearly write from the perspective of the US-American university system.
In Germany, basically everybody can enroll into a computer science program at a university, assuming the person has a Abitur (Allgemeine Hochschulreife) certificate (these terms are difficult to translate into English) from the grammar school [1]. So, "have it made to college" is like "not having been a complete failure in school". [2]
So, making it to the university is no achievement in Germany, and also no sign of motivation either.
> If these courses are so important, they should be taught in a way that students can understand.
These courses are taught in a way that students can understand, but not in a way where you can afford to slack off.
It is basically a consensus in Germany that a university is clearly a wrong place for you if you are incapable of closing knowledge gaps on your own (for example by reading books from the library), and you don't have the self-motivation to sit over the lecture material for hours to finally understand it.
So yes, I would say that among the possible options, weed-out courses in mathematics are in my opinion likely the least bad one.
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[1] In years where there was an insane demand for places at the university to study computer science such as during the dot-com bubble, there were some restrictions (numerus clausus), but for computer science, this was always the exception to the rule.
[2] There exist good reasons for puns like "Abitur: nichts gerafft und doch geschafft" (Abitur: Didn't get a thing, yet still passed) or "A-bier-tur" (a portmenteau of "Abitur" and "beer", which suggests that even pupils who are more into drinking than learning typically get their Abitur certificate).