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

[Locut0s]

My father teaches 4 levels of beginner Chinese and while he would much rather teach those who have no knowledge of the language at all most of the time he finds that only a small number of those signing up have no prior knowledge. Therefore in any one class there are students there who range from knowing nothing to those who just want an easy grade and are almost fluent (though he tries to weed these ones out). Luckily since he is white most of the better students underestimate him and often make an ass of themselves. He's just about fluent. I've been in other language courses where this is also the case. Beginner level programming courses also come to mind, many people are self taught programmers and by the time they take a college level 101 programming course they some some pretty advanced stuff.

 

[Crono]

Pretty much anything with language, literature, history, etc. Basically liberal arts stuff, since they are usually filler classes for students of different backgrounds.

 

[Locut0s]

Pretty much anything with language, literature, history, etc. Basically liberal arts stuff, since they are usually filler classes for students of different backgrounds.

I'd say mostly Language. In beginner literature courses I'm sure you get lots of kids who have already read the entire curriculum and more but they probably haven't done a lot of literary analysis. Some with history.

 

[Cattlegod]

Beginning snowboarding when I was able to do 180s off of large jumps.

 

[Mungla]

It's like that in programming classes at the college level big time. From what I've seen, the majority of students could care less to actually learn something. They just want a grade high enough to pass and they could care less about the class past that. I'm always at odds in these classes with students since programming (especially VB.Net) is a huge part of my job.

 

[theknight571]

I've noticed the biggest range in the 100 level classes in college.

Some are there to fulfill a requirement, and some are in that program.

I took physics cause I had to... not because it was my major.

 

[Gibsons]

I've never had problems that dramatic, but as class sizes get bigger, you naturally get more outliers at both ends of ability.

It's tough, you want to reach the maximum number of students, but then you see some of the brighter students getting bored as you explain something the second time. They got it the first time, but there are some who won't get it even if it's explained five times, five different ways.

 

[TheKub]

There was a webserver admin class I had to take and that was pretty brutal. Half of the class consisted of networking majors the other half consisted of web DESIGN people. Spent the first 3 weeks learning about IPs, DNS, and a bunch of other crap all the network people knew already.

 

[Kirby]

I had a math class (some calculus) that this asian kid slept through the first two weeks. after that, he just showed up for tests.

i already knew everything that was taught in my first CS class.

 

[Fizzorin]

In my grad level classes I'm in my last semester. Went to class on Wednesday and was working on a group project when one of the teammates asked "What is outsourcing?". To make matters worse, the other member of the group chirped up with "I used to work for Wal-Mart and I can tell you that outsourcing is when a company sends your job overseas so they can blame foreigners if the product kills someone." I was speechless.

 

[BTA]

Was pretty common when I was in college.

As someone who usually already knew most of what was being taught, I just kept quiet and let the professor do his thing.

The only thing that bothered me was when someone with no experience with the topic, would sleep through the whole class and then wake up and start asking questions at the end of class when the rest of us are ready to go. If your dumb ass would have been awake all class long you wouldn't have to ask these questions. This is when I was taking a bunch of night classes so it'd be like once a week for 3 hours (or twice for 1.5 hours), so being able to get out early for the evening was a big deal.

 

[hanoverphist]

i had my first "web programming" class after i wrote a web page that controlled 3 levels of security, automatic updating/ downloading of MLS listings and had a custom picture upload feature. when the teacher asked for samples of our previous work (if any) i pulled up the website and showed him all 3 levels (public, agent and admin). he had me bumped up to the next level, which was java/ jscript. i used the same page to show them the picture uploader i wrote and got bumped up to the next level. all in all i ended up passing 2 courses and taking the 3rd, which was also easy. but, had i not already had a job writing those sites with a private ISP i wouldnt have been able to do that at all. there were people in all 3 classes that came to me for help with their assignments after seeing the page i wrote.

sad thing was, after i got the search engine working well and the page went public, the customer sued the guy i worked for and the page was taken down. it was live for 3 days. it was a realtor here in scotttsdale and he thought it was losing him money due to the extended time it took to build the site. turns out the owner was telling him it would be done sooner than we could actually write it. his own fault, but it really screwed me up. the customer never did get it online again, he didnt like my consulting fees so he tried to get others to work on it.

 

[blackdogdeek]

i took a scuba class several years ago. it was the first formal class i had taken of any kind since being in college. everyone else must not have gone to college or something because i swear i felt like a genius.

 

[Hacp]

Haha, in one of my current classes, someone messed up and forgot to put prereqs in. Course requires differential equations as well as a very good understanding of chemistry, I'd say up to Pchem 1(thermodynamics). There are 4 freshman in the course. Good luck to them

 

[Ramma2]

I took a 1 week CCNA class back in October. Abilities ranged from me, 10 years in networking, to the unemployeed accountant lady who was looking to make a career change.

Yeah that was a fun class.

 

[thomsbrain]

I took a psychology class that involved computer programming to model brain responses to stimuli. Of course, all but one student was a psychology major and had no idea what they had gotten themselves into. There was one comp sci guy and me, who had previous programming experience. The professor basically turned us into TAs and had us help teach the lessons.

 

[Jeff7]

Pretty much anything with language, literature, history, etc. Basically liberal arts stuff, since they are usually filler classes for students of different backgrounds.

Sounds about right.

Two filler classes for me:
- Ice Skating. I'd never seen an ice skate anywhere except TV. Two others in the class: One played ice hockey for several years, another regularly did some kind of local figure skating performances.
- Jazz History. I don't care for jazz, and I didn't want to take the class. But I needed more general arts credits, and it was one of the few things available in the summer (I wanted to get the damn requirement out of the way). Some other people in the class played music quite a bit, and already knew a lot of the material.

Most of my other classes were of course related to my major - mechanical engineering. If you didn't know what you were doing, you wouldn't be in the class for very long.

 

[eakers]

has anyone ever been on the other side of the fence? gotten yourself into a course where there was a broad range of abilities and been at the lower end of the spectrum?

As an elective I signed up for a nutrition course, not knowing that this course was aimed at Food Science majors and was basically there to weed out the ones who couldn't make it in the course. I ended up getting a pretty good grade but I had to work my ass off to just catch up to the basic knowledge that they all had from previous courses. It was all worth it for the screaming match the professor and another student had over whether or not milk is good for humans to consume.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Actually I think Chinese is a huge one. We have so many native speakers taking them here. They also compete against the ABCs who can speak Chinese but definitely suck compared to the FOBs. Then there's the people who genuinely don't know Chinese and are learning. I've had friends who went through 12 years of Chinese school with me and play dumb in college so they get thrown in the 1A class. Fortunately they split up native and non native speakers now, but to get thrown in a 1A class is still really dumb. You have to TRY to do that. I even question my friends in the 10A class because I believe they all could make upper div if they wanted to.

Then there was Beginner's Taiwanese. That was hilarious. There's the Taiwanese kids like me who have parents who speak but were never really formally taught. Nevertheless we know some phrases and can speak. Also a huge bonus if you speak Chinese. Then there's the Cantonese speakers. Much harder for them to learn, but it's still manageable. Then you have the white kids who join for whatever reason with zero Chinese background. It's a student taught class so it's not as rigorous as a language class, but for most of us we just sat back and did nothing because it moved so slowly for the non Chinese speakers =[. Probably should just learn at home. Much faster.

 

[Locut0s]

Actually I think Chinese is a huge one. We have so many native speakers taking them here. They also compete against the ABCs who can speak Chinese but definitely suck compared to the FOBs. Then there's the people who genuinely don't know Chinese and are learning. I've had friends who went through 12 years of Chinese school with me and play dumb in college so they get thrown in the 1A class. Fortunately they split up native and non native speakers now, but to get thrown in a 1A class is still really dumb. You have to TRY to do that. I even question my friends in the 10A class because I believe they all could make upper div if they wanted to.

Then there was Beginner's Taiwanese. That was hilarious. There's the Taiwanese kids like me who have parents who speak but were never really formally taught. Nevertheless we know some phrases and can speak. Also a huge bonus if you speak Chinese. Then there's the Cantonese speakers. Much harder for them to learn, but it's still manageable. Then you have the white kids who join for whatever reason with zero Chinese background. It's a student taught class so it's not as rigorous as a language class, but for most of us we just sat back and did nothing because it moved so slowly for the non Chinese speakers =[. Probably should just learn at home. Much faster.

Where is this? US or Europe? Not familiar with the 1A 10A etc... rating. My father teaches at a college (that's Canadian college not quite the same as a US college) and he basically just places his students based on a quick interview. If they seem really fluent then he either places them in his 4th level course or tries to convince them not to take it. He always ends up with a few fluent speakers though, lol. Most of these guys don't think that he's as fluent as he is, being white.

 

[hanoverphist]

has anyone ever been on the other side of the fence? gotten yourself into a course where there was a broad range of abilities and been at the lower end of the spectrum?

i felt like i was at the bottom of the spectrum in some of the higher math classes. i struggled to keep up, had to ask for help from peers many times.

 

[Red Squirrel]

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.

 

[Red Squirrel]

i felt like i was at the bottom of the spectrum in some of the higher math classes. i struggled to keep up, had to ask for help from peers many times.

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

 

[tokie]

Real Analysis is a good separator course. There are usually very little B's, and a lot of A's and C's.

 

[krcat1]

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