Anyone taken courses where there is a HUGE range in student abilities?

[ussfletcher]

I was the same way. Math has always been my weakness. I barely passed.

Ditto.

Electrical Engineering classes have got to be the most level classes I've taken, you don't learn that crap in advance and everyone is pretty equally clueless in the end.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

if you go to any beginning college spanish class this is very common. half the class is kids whose first language is spanish

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Had a computer stats class that was taught by someone who had zero knowledge of stats but was competent using the software. Classes consisted of the instructor writing literal key sequences on the board. I had already had quite a few comp sci classes and was struggling with stats. I hated the class because there was no discussion of why, how or, when to apply the software. The stats folk who had no knowledge of computers thought the class was a walk in the park. I shut up and stopped asking questions and just memorized key sequences.

 

[Babbles]

At times my MBA program feels like this. There are some students who are really good at talking, presenting, communicating, dealing with organization behavior situations and so forth but are crazy dumb when it comes to math situations such as statistics, supply chain, and finance. On the other hand there are some finance quant guys who are great math nerds, but have no idea how to deal with other people and manage group case studies. So it is interesting to deal with classmates in the program whose strengths wax and wane depending on the class they are in.

 

[TecHNooB]

I'm taking a chinese course right now. Crammed over 400 words in the week prior to the placement exam. Gonna get 15 credits once I pass it The grading is extremely lenient. I definitely overstudied, and continue to overstudy for classes I shouldnt be

 

[mfenn]

lol in most of my programming college classes I was like WAY over the top compared to others. I actually lost points in an assignment for making an html page too complicated (I used CSS) for what the teacher asked. I loled. We had to use stuff like <table bgcolor="red"> etc.. and<blink></blink> and stuff. Was brutal.

C++ was the same, we were not allowed to use loops till like year 3.

That's either an exaggeration, or I should've gone to college in Canada...

 

[Leros]

I'm taking an introduction to astronomy course right now. We spent the whole last lecture discussing how to do a simple algebra equation. Half the class was bored out of their minds and the other half was confused to death.

 

[Itchrelief]

In the Microbiology course I took, the first test had four students making an A, one making a D, and nine making a F.

LOL my micro class had a distribution not that dramatic, but the students had the previous years' tests to study from (if they had friends who took it), and some dude still managed to get like a 18&#37; (The vast majority of the 100+ question exam was multiple choice with 5 choices, so he didn't even break even statistically).

At first I was a bit miffed that I had to go in dry and other people had the previous exams to study for and thus could probably know the answers to maybe half the questions or so (a wild guess on my part as to how many he rotates in/out of the test bank every year), but after seeing that 18%, I lost all concern.

As to that Asian guy who never showed up to diffeq, that may have been me 10 years ago edit: I didn't get a good grade as you can guess; I'm not trying to show off by saying I could ace the thing without showing up!

 

[Toonces]

In my Russian class there were so few students that the prof. just graded us on personal improvement and tailored the curriculum to match. The Russian speaking natives expecting an easy A were assigned classical novels to analyze while we were still going through the basics of Cyrillic. Heh.

 

[Cheeseplug]

When I started learning Russian there were two sections, 20-25 people in each. There were about 6 who spoke it at home, a couple were in it for the easy A, and the rest hadn't formally learned how to read and write. By the end of the first semester, my section was down to about 15 people. Some failed a couple of tests and then dropped, a couple of people just stopped coming and took the F, and one guy quit after he realized there was a different alphabet. The next semester there were 2 sections, 11 in one and 13 in the other.

Now there is only one section and there are 8 people in it.

 

[wiredspider]

At times my MBA program feels like this. There are some students who are really good at talking, presenting, communicating, dealing with organization behavior situations and so forth but are crazy dumb when it comes to math situations such as statistics, supply chain, and finance. On the other hand there are some finance quant guys who are great math nerds, but have no idea how to deal with other people and manage group case studies. So it is interesting to deal with classmates in the program whose strengths wax and wane depending on the class they are in.

My Senior year project class was like that, we were all basically suppose to work together in our groups for the final project.

 

[Red Squirrel]

That's either an exaggeration, or I should've gone to college in Canada...

Nope not exaggerating. It was pretty bad. We actually got into OOP, but that was as far as we ever went. No file i/o, no network i/o no graphics, nothing functional.

One particular test there was a number where we had to write a program where the user inputs 3 values and it sorts them. So I put them in an array list and even allowed the user to select how many numbers to sort, and it was quite efficient and hardly no code. I failed that part since I used "illegal" code. We had not "learned" loops and arrays yet, only if statements, so he actually expected us to do this using if statements! You know how freaken dirty that is? The code he wanted was like 10x more lines then my version, and not scalable.

To me, loops, arrays, if statements, case statements etc are bare basics of any language and should be thought in the same week. Heck, given this was not the first programming course of the program, they should have been thought same day! I can understand taking longer the first time to go over the logic, but no need to repeat it every semester! If you understand how to do it in VB it's not very hard to pickup in say, C++.

Yeah, it was actually depressing tbh. I wanted to learn more programming, and learn stuff beyond what I already knew.