Professor draws ire for saying students will have to work hard

originally posted by: Indigent
a reply to: seeker1963

What a load of stupid incoherent ramblings are you capable of producing, good on ya!

So ya got nothin?

the future of murica is bleak

a reply to: Jiggly

This happened in the UK. But nice fly by #post.

a reply to: Metallicus

The audacity of this scum bag nazi professor claiming that students would actually have to work for anything in their lives!

Does this professor not understand what freedom means, in the land of the free??

You get whatever you want, work is irrelevant, who needs to struggle and find any kind of strength within themselves!?

Fire this professor immediately, for we do not want to see what kind of suffering he could inflict with his radical views of work ethic!!!

/sacr off

Lol, it is hard to imagine a world, where hard work is offensive!

a reply to: elementalgrove

I've met generational welfare families where hard work was considered very offensive, one guy I gave work to had to stop because he was worried about losing his welfare, then proceeded to tell me he didn't need to work because ......

originally posted by: seeker1963

originally posted by: Indigent
a reply to: seeker1963

The guy said even if you dedicate 100% to this it's most likely you will still be too dumb for it and fail, what does that have to do with sissies and crap?

Guess the military would DEFINATELY be a NO GO for you?

Sorry, but your mamby pamby way of bringing up our youth is the reason they are acting the way they are today! No better motivator than to prove to an "arsehole" they are wrong?

You make excuses, I find solutions for those who's minds have become corrupted by laziness and Cultural Marxism! Face it, the pendulum is swinging back! Don't blame ya for being scared!

So you consider yourself to be a John Wayne type of tough guy huh, you may not see it, but the days of the hard line tough guy are not necessary in this day and age. Once in the not too distant past yes it was needed, at some point though you need to let go of your bias and get with the times.

You may not be able to see it, don't feel bad, you wouldn't be the first and you're not alone.

I went to this exact same university, admittedly not the physical sciences class, but we got this exact same talk.

Nobody thought it was offensive 9 years ago.

I remember we had examinations at the end of our first term in December. We started with about 80 students on the course. When we came back in January only 30ish were left. Guess they didn't take the message too seriously.

We still had time for parties and went out to town (though I don't drink so I did that far less than anyone else)

I'd hate to go there now. It sounds horrible. It was always full of self-entitled privileged rich kids, but now those kinds of people are even more insufferable.

A lot of them looked down at people like me. I'm from poor northern family, I didn't get to go to a fancy private school and had to work hard to earn my place. Most of them apparently did not. There were two girls, twins, who came top of the class in every A-level subject they did and they had a really hard time there because they were northern and their father was a police officer.

Thankfully everyone in my accommodation and almost everyone on my course was more tolerant of northern uncultured proles like myself.

a reply to: Metallicus

Only he wasn't jut saying they needed to work hard. He was massively over stepping the bounds of what is acceptable from a lecturer by telling students that they should have no life outwith studying.

It was a stupid & inaccurate thing to say and he got called on it.

Students are not there to study exclusively and never have been. Developing social skills , becoming a more rounded human being and actually having fun are a key part of bring at university. It isn't even good advice for the students carers as one of the major advantages to going an Oxbridge college is the social networking.

originally posted by: ketsuko

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: Metallicus

...he suggested undergraduates will have to work hard and abstain from drinking to pass the course.

Oh, is this like an alcohol ban?

Legislating morality never works.

If he's implying they might need to spend more time studying than partying,

Implied nothing-- "Abstain to Pass".

that's not legislating morality,

Yes it is. Why he drew the "Ire". Students aren't stupid , they weren't "Ire-d" by being told to work hard. They were peeved he "suggested" they stop drinking too, to pass.

ab·stained, ab·stain·ing, ab·stains. 1. To keep oneself from doing, engaging in, or partaking of something; refrain: abstain from partisan political rhetoric; abstain from drinking alcohol. 2. To refrain from voting: Forty senators voted in favor of the bill, 45 voted against it, and 15 abstained.

Prohibition didn't' work either.

a reply to: Metallicus

I'm pretty ambivalent towards this. I've been in programs so intensive that they outright ban you from working for your first 3 years in the program, and tell you on the very first day of class to expect between 30 and 40 hours of homework per week per in major class.

Some subjects really do require that type of workload in order to even scratch gaining some level of competency in them.

originally posted by: amazing
They're in for a tough lesson in life. Life only gets harder the older you get and more work is required.

You can't be succesful without hard work. And as the Rock says. "Hard work always pays off, always!"

I don't know about that. I think that in many ways it gets easier. Ideally it should be level through your life, but in society we have a concept of paying your dues.

Jobs with a high barrier to entry to learn, tend to be pretty cushy once you finally break into the field, which puts those workers on easy street.

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
, which will require ALL of your attention and your FULL brain capacity (and for a large fraction of you, even that will not be quite enough),” Terentjev wrote to the students

You ever been in a class where the professor tells you at the very beginning of the class that if we all try hard and perform beyond our limits 1 in 5 of us will pass the class, otherwise it's 1 in 10? I have. That's just life for some professors and majors.

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
meaning the physical sciences are more labour intensive than other Cambridge courses. Pretty obvious in my eyes that some degrees are harder than the arts.

If you think arts are easy, you've never been in a professional art class. I like to tell horror stories all the time about some of the hell classes I've been through related to programming/game dev. They're literally nothing compared to what I went through for my art degree. They make 40 hours a week of homework on one class look easy.

I've had professors who demand 100 hours/week on art assignments. Professors who will only ok you into their class if you're taking just one of their classes and 9 or fewer credit hours in total, again who refuse to allow you to work while studying.

Properly taught art is quite difficult.

originally posted by: ketsuko
It has to do with the professor putting the fear of gawd into his class on day 1. He's a hard @ss, so what? I had one of those in a 100 level undergrad course -- Oceanography.

His speech was most appropo. The guy gave tests that made grad students sweat. One multiple choice question would have a full paragraph to it, and every answer option would have at least a full paragraph in response, and your job was to go through a pick out the one tiny detail that would disqualify one paragraph plus possible answer from another.

And then there were essay question where he expected no less than a full page response.

On the upside, the tests were only 10 questions.

In Computer Science there's this concept called parity, basically it's used for error checking or rebuilding data. There's a few variations on it but the simple explanation is that if two pieces of data are 0's or 1's it's a 0, the parity bit is a 0, if the data is 0's and 1's it's a 1. So
0101
0011
0110

In one of our midterms we were given 10 pages front and back of these 1's and 0's stretching clear across the page, and into a bunch of rows, in 6 point font. Somewhere in those pages was a single error, a 1 or a 0 where the other should have been. We were given two days to find the error. Not a single person found it, and as such we all failed our midterm which was one of three equally weighted grades for the entire class. Meaning that it was impossible for anyone to score above a 67% in the class.

In another class with this same professor we were given a single question with 10 subquestions. A single wrong answer anywhere would fail the entire test. In that class there were two grades, a midterm and a final. As such, a single wrong answer on this test, would fail the test, and mean that the most you could earn in the class was a 50% which naturally, is a failing grade.

I sympathize with the students, but I don't agree with them here. If you pick a hard major, or even just a hard professor or subject, don't be surprised when you have to work really hard... and still none of that compares to the art teacher I had. I remember one assignment where we had 7 days to draw a life sized self portrait... in ball point pen.

The thing about hard classes though, is you'll usually come out the other side with some well earned knowledge.

originally posted by: ScepticScot
He was massively over stepping the bounds of what is acceptable from a lecturer by telling students that they should have no life outwith studying.

The school I'm at now, specifically hires upperclassmen from my degree to be RA's for the dorms, just to keep the freshmen focused the appropriate amount on their studies. It's our schools premier program, and they have no problem making sure that the attendees either step up or step out.

a reply to: intrptr

So were you one of the self-entitled whiny kids in the class?

You sort of sound like it.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: intrptr

So were you one of the self-entitled whiny kids in the class?

You sort of sound like it.

No, Im the told you so, whenever control freak authorities try to instill their morality on people.

Like Prohibition, the War on Drugs, the War on guns, crime, poverty, education, "Terror".

Just shut up and teach already.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: ScepticScot
He was massively over stepping the bounds of what is acceptable from a lecturer by telling students that they should have no life outwith studying.

The school I'm at now, specifically hires upperclassmen from my degree to be RA's for the dorms, just to keep the freshmen focused the appropriate amount on their studies. It's our schools premier program, and they have no problem making sure that the attendees either step up or step out.

And are they telling students that they should have no life outwith studying?

originally posted by: ScepticScot
And are they telling students that they should have no life outwith studying?

Yes, actually. They don't enforce it, but they highly suggest it. And given the difficulty of the program they're absolutely correct in doing so.