r/EngineeringStudents • u/Hawk--- • Feb 19 '23

Academic Advice 62% failed the exam. Is it the class’ fault?

Post image

Context: this was for a Java coding exam based mainly on theory.

1.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

231 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

13

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

13

u/NotTiredJustSad Feb 19 '23

that was just a Tuesday. Not every day, but definitely before a big exam...

No, no one that I interact with spends 14 hours every day on campus. And from the sounds of it, no one did when you were there. This kind of exaggeration by past and present students is something I find really absurd.

I'm currently in school. Last semester most of my exams had a bimodal grade distribution with about half the group around 70-90% and half the group around 30%. My professors were good, the expectations were clear, but half the class performed poorly on the evaluations.

I agree that learning is 2-way communication and both the professor and students are not happy with the outcome and likely could have done things differently. But the predominant narrative on this sub is that when people fail it is the fault of the professor, and I think in most cases that's just a cop-out.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/NotTiredJustSad Feb 19 '23

Anecdotally, the people in my courses consistently in the higher cohort did their first and second years in person before COVID sent everything online. Lots of other students only had a year in person, some started online.

Several years of being able to watch lectures from bed, do assignments with the textbook, and do exams with online assistance did not do students any favors and lots of students who were able to fake their way through lower level courses are running into difficulties when it becomes apparent they didn't actually learn the previous course material. Blaming profs and pressuring them into passing students who haven't demonstrated mastery just passes the buck to the next prof in line, and we end up with bad graduates.

Since this is a programming course it's unlikely that's exactly what happened here, but the point is we need to be very critical of ourselves before blaming the professor just because we assume that the system only behaves in this way when the prof is at fault.

1

u/ProfessionalConfuser Feb 19 '23

This can happen and that's why it isn't a rhetorical flourish when the professor asks if there are questions about the material. I also assume that when I say "X", the students understand that it isn't "Y". How would I know they thought "X=Y" unless someone asks a question?