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. 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. That's why it's a silly idea because it's counterproductive in reality.

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RightinNYC

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.

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.

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Ikari

These studies and panels are conducted cross University, so it takes in the data from many a University. There are tiers to this, like Ivy League pretty much the only retards you have in there are the bluebloods getting a ride on their daddy's name. But the vast majority of the students there are hard workers and thus don't have the same demographics of a state University. But the student bodies across the normal state Universities remains pretty uniform from one University to the next.

Is that why we have so many crappy lawyers? Damn...maybe I took the wrong route, sounds like what you're doing is a piece of cake compared to what I'm doing now. Well I guess them's the breaks of pursuing hard science.

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?

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.

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.

Ikari

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ikari

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.

Jake Blues

Alot of teachers do not include homework into the grade simply because it is unfair.Some students take the homework home and their parents do it or help them with it while others do not get any help and struggle then get a feeling of dejection that they couldnt finish it.

I would say not to waive homework but make it far more interesting than the traditional garbage most teachers give out.Like instead of calculating problems on paper I might say come up with your own problems with flow and allow the students to find the answer on their own.For example students could arrange a trip on their own to the local water treatment plant to calculate how much sewage flows into the plant every hour or over a dam,into your house for personal use etc.

I made it my policy no homework on the weekends when I taught.I wanted my students to enjoy their weekends.The most successful people in life live a balanced life.Play hard study hard.There is a good reason we have the expression "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy".
Peter Drucker the great management guru found that the best managers were people who were good at their field but also something else.For example they were creative designers but also were expert birdwatchers.Being an all around person is good and homework can take away time to critically think.Critical thinking is the top of the food chain in education.Checkout the book by William Cohen about the lessons he learned from Drucker it is a great read.

Obviously,you sound like an underchallenged student because you are showing critical thinking.Perhaps it is time for you to find a new school to attend!