[Valseuss]

I disagree. In my experience, the lectures are one of the primary reasons for attending a university. For a lecture to be effective, the students will need to have read the material that the lecture is taking on. Then, during the lecture, they should see why they have read what they have and understand why it is important, what the general implications are and so on.

For me, at least, a good lecture always brings together the assigned reading material in a way that I cannot achieve alone. A good lecture makes things click. Solving a thousand problems may also make concepts click, but a good lecturer will reduce the time needed.

TL;DR: The point of a lecture is not to tell you everything, but to bring together the material that you have already consumed and provide a different perspective than the book you read.

[crpatino]

Yes, you are very right that it is what's supposed to be. The problem is that most students don't want to read ahead and expect the teacher to provide all material in class (and more recently, I am told, to provide class notes for those unable to pay attention for more than 150 seconds in a row).

Then, teachers will plan to pander to that majority, so any student who does what s?he is actually supposed to do will end up bored to tears with the so called "lecture".

As a single data point, I was well known in undergrad school to sleep through lectures, and be left alone because whenever woke up I ended up disrupting the class plan by asking questions (which I had read about the night before) that other students could hardly understand and care about even less. Then, I suffered a lot through graduate school to get rid of my bad habits once I was expected to attend to real lectures.