Quote:
Originally Posted by RightinNYC  I'm not familiar with these studies so I can't comment, but my main point remains:
If eschewing the traditional approach toward homework results in students failing to learn, how come so many schools continue to do so in their upper level classes? |
They don't. You won't come across a high level hard science or math class which doesn't have homework. Not in undergrad and not in graduate school; it doesn't happen that way. Perchance it's different than law since you just have to read case studies and past judgments and such past some base learning of the law. But in the sciences, math, and engineering that isn't going to work because we aren't taught specifics. We learn basics, the fundamental laws and problem solving techniques to allow us to solve problems we've never seen before. It takes time to master this and to fully understand this, and homework is essential to getting this down. I wouldn't want to take a graduate level course that didn't have homework because the tests (at least by some professors) aren't designed to be passable.
While there may be subjects that can allow you to get by without homework or by slacking off the majority of the time; it's not true for all subjects. The more rigorous subjects will normally require some amount of homework so that the professors and students get feedback about performance.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RightinNYC Interestingly enough, the vast vast majority of crappy lawyers come from the crappy law schools, where they take bottom of the barrel students and basically spend 3 years teaching them to pass the bar. Among those of us who don't spend all our time learning how to do multiple choice questions, there aren't so many crappy lawyers. |
I don't know of many great lawyers, but then again I don't (thankfully) deal with lawyers on a daily basis. I know of the crappy ones cause those damned ambulance chasers always have commercials running.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RightinNYC Different strokes for different folks. I wouldn't trade places with my girlfriend and she (a neurobiology major from Harvard) wouldn't trade with me. |
I only know of a couple people whom left gradschool in the hard science in favor of law school. They claim it to be pretty easy, but dealing with law to me seems rather mundane. You have to really like it to do good at it (though I suppose that's pretty much true of all subjects). I like research and laboratories and being able to us mills and lathes and understand the basics of electronics so I can make my own controllers and being able to program in a couple different languages and the thrill one gets when you combine all of that into a successful experiment. Plus the laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms in far off resonant dipole traps is dang cool....though I could have done without the nonlinear quantum optics.