from Hacker News

Is the first year of a degree a waste of time?

by mayutana on 11/3/10, 8:55 PM with 31 comments

• by gaius on 11/3/10, 9:06 PM

  The first year of a degree teaches students what 6th forms used to in the old days. Fix the dumbing down in state schools first. A-levels have been devalued by politically driven grade inflation, so let's take it out of the hands of the politicians altogether and switch to the IB.

• by ig1 on 11/3/10, 9:29 PM

  Generally the first year is a bridging year. You have students with a wide variety of different backgrounds and they all need to be bought up to the same base. It's also the first time many students will have to learn for themselves as opposed to being spoonfed.

  So while you do learn less in the first year than the other two, it still has a lot of value, because you learn how to learn and many other personal skills which are critical for university and later life.

• by stoney on 11/3/10, 9:08 PM

  The quality of UK university courses varies tremendously. I studied engineering as did lots of my friends. The standard course length for an MEng is 4 years, I think that might even be a requirement to get the course accredited.

  But what happens in those four years can be very different - if you are at a less good university, you will probably be working less than 20 hours a week on your engineering degree. If you are at a top university, you will work at least full time if not more.

  So if this proposal was followed through you could end up with a slightly odd situation (or maybe a good situation?) where the less good universities offered shorter courses than the good ones. So the brightest students would be in uni for longer.

• by robchez on 11/3/10, 11:12 PM

  In AU, my first year in my mechanical engineering degree was a complete waste of time. They call it a "common first year" where you do little bits of every type of engineering. It was a complete waste of time and money.

  In theory it sounds great, and I was quite excited about doing some electrical engineering. But in fact it was just a 6 month long, highschool physics course on electricity, drawn out more than I thought possible. Spending an entire week on Ohm's law in University engineering is stupid.

• by robryan on 11/3/10, 11:42 PM

  I don't know, I feel that I got as much out of first year as the other years, sure you could say it wasn't as focused on the central theme of the course but I didn't go to uni just to focus on one thing and get it done asap.

  Some of the maths was repeated but really helped me get a better grasp on it. The physics class was the only physics I got exposed to in uni and was hard but rewarding, same with the circuits stuff for electronics. As opposed to some of my recent 4th year classes, which have actually been a waste of time.

• by hwolf on 11/4/10, 2:50 AM

  For me, it was my first time away from home, and I wasn't certain of my major. So it was useful as a self-discovery experience.

  But my friend, who is going to school in his town is finding the first (and even the second) year pretty useless. And it was sad that his freshman English class consisted of determining correct comma placement. I hope it's just the school and not the dumbing down of education across the board. So scary.

• by andrewingram on 11/3/10, 9:38 PM

  For my degree (Computer Science at Warwick), the first year did count towards my final results. Even without it counting, I feel it would have been fairly difficult to adequately teach Computer Science without the 'extra' year at the start.

• by dhume on 11/4/10, 2:08 AM

  Depends where you go, I guess. My university was willing to acknowledge advanced coursework I'd done in high school, so I didn't waste the entire year repeating material I'd already covered (calculus, introductory programming, etc.).

• by frou_dh on 11/3/10, 10:45 PM

  A few classmates of mine knew more about the subject in 1st year than I did when I graduated in the 4th year. I received the same First Class Honours classification that they did.

  That's one messed up ramp.

• by yread on 11/3/10, 10:31 PM

  The first year was the best year! And I went on for another 6 ones. I didn't know much programming at that time and just the feeling of working and being around really smart people was really good.

• by icegreentea on 11/3/10, 11:43 PM

  Currently attending engineering at u of waterloo in Canada. In my own experience, most of first year was a waste of time. Due to my luck in highschool as well as my own personal interests, I found 80% of first year to be review, or ridiculously slow. The most important part of first year for me was a relatively low stress environment to make friends with (particularly important in my program).

  But I saw with many (not all) of my classmates just how important that first year was. Unfortunately, the differences between people's high school educations were just so much (there were some people who were having problems with limits... I was breezing all the way up to multi variable calculus and linear algebra) that as useless as individual courses may be for individual students, taken as a whole (as a class), all those 'review' classes were definitely necessary to prevent massive massive 2nd year fail rates.

  Unfortunately this is not a problem that can only be solved by universities. They have their role to play, but so does our (by this I mean our province's) high school curriculum. In Toronto (where I grew up), we had integration (and almost derivatives) ripped out of standard grade 12 calculus (as well as a series of similar neuterings in other subjects). To get that stuff at all, your school had to offer honors, AP, or IB calculus or w/e. I lucked out with AP being available (which despite all the taunting I directed at the College Board did actually set me up for my first year university courses). But many bright smart kids just aren't lucky enough to attend to a school with such programs. Or even just average or slightly above average kids weren't pushed by the challenge, or dragged along by their smarter classmates.

  In the end, (at least in Canada), I cannot see first year becoming any harder (or useful) until universities know that enough of their enrollees will be knowledgeable enough. Because ultimately, they are run as businesses on some level, and have to keep a float. Which is the biggest shame.

• by sliverstorm on 11/3/10, 11:21 PM

  I like the move to summer classes. It hampers the classic 'work part-time during the school year, full time during the summer' for people bearing the full brunt of their educational bills, but otherwise I think it's a good idea. Summer, to me, is just a waste of time in which to forget what you learned.

  Coincidentally, I have not taken a summer break from classes for 3 years now.