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Originally Posted by Ikari  All of this succumbs to the logical fallacy that the original argument is based on. On an individual basis you can find individuals whom can do well without doing the homework, but that isn't true once you aggregate over the whole. Professors have to teach to the whole, and especially with the large undergrad classes this requires techniques that work over the aggregation of the whole. |
And all of
this assumes that "the whole" is the same at one institution as it is at another. While it might very well be true that for high school, across the whole, homework is necessary for people to do well, at some schools and in some programs, it's absolutely not.
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Nothing can dispute the fact that homework is used because it gets results from the class. Without homework, you do get higher failure rates and that is something which is to be avoided by University and high failure rates reflect poorly upon the professor, so they are always trying to find ways to make sure that as many of their students as possible are learning the material. With large classes, it's just not feasible to start doing some excused homework policy. You will fail out more students by doing this, it's just the way it works. While you yourself may be more than capable of getting through classes without doing homework, that isn't true of the whole. This plan has been tried from time to time with the same results, higher failure rates.
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This would be true except for the fact that as I explained, many schools
do eschew the use of homework in the way you're referring to it. The fact that many places do do this signifies that they don't think it's negatively affecting their graduation rate. I personally have been far more motivated to do outside work and learn in classes where the professor was engaged and interested in discussions as opposed to classes where the prof just assigned homework to be turned in and graded.
I can tell you that I don't know of a single law school that assigns homework - the law always has and always will be taught through the socratic method and suggested reading. None of the PhD Politics or History programs my friends are in have "homework." My girlfriend's med school doesn't have "homework."
If no homework = failure like you claim, I very much doubt that these programs would operate this way.