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Originally Posted by RightinNYC  That's quite possible, my experiences with hard sciences are somewhat limited.
Again, my point isn't that you can slack off or not do the reading. The point is that in many subjects, I don't think that being forced to physically turn in homework is as worthwhile as being assigned reading to do on your own and then being engaged in discussion on the subject. I do my reading because I want to learn the subject and don't want to be confused when we discuss the material in class. All the feedback I need, I get from doing practice problems and discussing the material with classmates and professors.
This is incredibly true. 99% of the time you hear about a lawyer, its a personal injury lawyer just looking to make a buck.
Like I said, I don't find law to be particularly easy though I do find it incredibly interesting. I was great in science and math until 10th grade (I was actually planning on majoring in chemistry), but I started doing better in history/politics classes and worse in math/science classes so I made the shift. I look at the amount/type of work my gf does and have absolutely no desire to emulate that.  |
Well I suppose it can't be generalized over the whole of academia. There are some courses of study which can get away from homework, and there are those for which it is an integral part. I still find the removal of homework, especially from the lower undergrad courses, to be a silly idea. Mostly all those whom I have come across who complain about homework are people that either copy the homework or have no clue on how its done so they get pissed off and bitch instead of sitting down and learning the material. Maybe I tutored the undergrads for too long and it's made me bitter, but it pisses me off when people expect to cruise through University and start making unreasonable demands like "oh I did well on the test, I don't see why I should do homework" blah blah blah crap. If you did well on the tests, then the homework should be cake and you can do it in like 20-30 minutes...it just becomes free points at that point and I don't see why people would bitch about free points (other than being lazy and not wanting to do the work).
High School was a breeze, undergrad wasn't any more challenging (which is why I had 2 majors and 3 minors), grad school beat me upside the head and made me do ludicrous amounts of work. Let me tell you, solving mechanics questions from first principle is damned tough. I had homework sets which for me individually were easily 25+ pages of math and physics (with appropriate diagrams). My classical mechanics professor
loved homework, to a fault. We had weekly assignments which were several problems and each problem could easily take a few hours a piece to solve. We had daily homework sets which were only a couple problems, slightly easier than the weekly set (only took a couple hours a piece), and there was a list of questions which at the beginning of the class the professor would roll a dice and if your number came up you had to go to the front of the class and work one out (so you had to know how to do all of them). All of it was graded, and thank goodness because his tests were designed to fail. In that, there would be 5-6 questions and only enough time (3-4 hours) to solve 2...maybe 3, but if you got 3 you probably messed up one of the problems.
So until grad school, I don't see homework as any significant barrier to anything, it basically comes out to free points. So typically when I hear people bitch about it makes no sense cause it shouldn't be hard, it shouldn't be an incredible time sink, and you're padding your score which gives a buffer in case you do poorly unexpectedly on a test. I view homework only as win win...less you are the TA, then you have to give up a couple evenings a week to grade homework...and get pissed off at the retarded answers in which people obviously didn't try or copied which leaves you wondering as to why they even bothered turning something in in the first place.