The exam questions will all be based on questions from the textbook

Coming up with non retarded questions is pretty hard. They usually grab from other textbooks, but it's perfectly fine to grab problems even from the problem series.

Our aerodynamics professor does that.

But since in that class we are in charge of giving the class in the form of a presentation (every topic is divided on groups of 3 to 4 people) and he never says or gives a comment other than to complain about something he just makes the exams out of the book examples.

Since every presentation is some faggot reading it from the ppt and the occasional dude that actually studied the material and tried to give a (bad) explanation and the texbook material is covered from page 1 to the end in vector calculus (a class that its not given in our program for some reason) then all we have is the solved examples on the book.

Ironically, I am failing that course since I never attended to a single exam because I either didn't study or didn't feel like memorizing the problems.

I hate this so fucking much.

What losers actually do the problems in the book unless they're assigned?

>i don't like to study
>i'm too unique to learn this way
>change everything to accommodate me because working out my own way is too difficult, even though i consider myself to be really smart

I love studying.

But studying should be something you do in order to better understand the material, learn how to figure out how to solve problems, and find out how concepts can be applied. Then the test comes along and you do well because you practiced those skills. In the real world, those skills are important.

When you take questions from the textbook, all you do is make it so that people already know how to do that question, so it's easy for them. It doesn't matter if it took them 3 weeks to answer that question and they had to have someone else solve it for them in the end, they can do it in 15 minutes on the test. They get the same mark as the guy who figured it out in 2 seconds on the test without ever seeing it before. In real life, there are no homework questions. You can't "learn" how to do the question. You have to be able to intuit, and come up with solutions on your own.

Frankly, the modern 2-hour-test format is stupid too, but that's a limitation that we're having trouble removing, not a feature we're intentionally implementing. Teachers INTENTIONALLY make tests like the textbook. They say it's to encourage studying, but all it does is test for whether or not you studied, not whether or not you know the material.

It's not hard to present material you studied. Is your class retarded? Are you retarded? What the actual fuck is happening?!

I'm pretty sure he's saying that the teacher doesn't actually teach the class. He assigns a group to read up on the material and then present it to the class.

And nobody reads the material / prepares for their presentation, so the presentations are garbage, so the only way to learn is from the textbook.

Seriously, at that point what is the professor even getting paid for?

This is a perfect example of how take home tests and open book tests are doing poorly

essays and comprehension should be much more valuable than memorizing, nobody gives a shit if you can memorize when the ottoman empire fell, instead you should be able to explain in detail HOW it was important.

Is that common at big schools? I've heard it was common for professors to not actual teach class and have some kind of TA do it.

>And nobody reads the material / prepares for their presentation

They sound so uninspired or irresponsible of their learning.

>They sound so uninspired or irresponsible of their learning.
Why the fuck should a student have to do the teacher's job? It's not their fucking job to do lectures for him. They aren't qualified to do it. They don't know the material well enough to present on it.

That's WHY we have professors.

No need to get upset. Even though their professor is shitty, you should still read and study the material so you understand the material in any classroom setting whether you are giving a presentation on it or not.

That literally isn't the point though. Yeah, obviously you should try to make the best of a bad situation. You should always try your best.

But that's not an excuse for you to be put in that shitty situation to begin with. That's the point. That's the point of the entire thread. "Why is x shitty educational practice allowed?".

>That literally isn't the point though.

That is literally my point. I'm not responding to the OP, I'm inquiring on why a group of students aren't reading the material and why a responder is failing a course.

>Ironically, I am failing that course since I never attended to a single exam because I either didn't study or didn't feel like memorizing the problems.

This is what I'm responding to. My conversation was a tangent that you did not have to be a part of and could have just ignored.

It's a fucken disgrace here. Even in high level physics courses they give you simple tests so that mexicans can compete. In the USSR they used to call you up to the teacher and he would ask you questions and ask you to solve various problems and such. This was a much better method for testing knowledge.

Clearly you are the one that's retarded if you couldn't comprehend the message of that post.

The professor with the horrible exams in did this as well. In a school with motivated students and a course required for a specific major, I could see it working. It sure as hell did not work in my class.

What should the exams be based on if not the material from the readings, lectures and tutorials?
Doesn't mean it has to be identical, but I would have thought the point of taking an exam in a unit is to assess the information taught within that unit.

>Ironically, I am failing that course since I never attended to a single exam because I either didn't study or didn't feel like memorizing the problems.
>I didn't study

WHY AM I FAILING THIS CLASS REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>Since when did academia start rewarding rote memorization over actual comprehension?

Because girls do better when you base everything on rote learning.

>Since when did academia start rewarding rote memorization over actual comprehension?
If your comprehension is good, you should be able to solve it without recognizing it.

>>the exam questions will all be based on questions from the textbook
>Why is this allowed?

The way most everyone learns is either by experimenting or reading. We have labs, group work, and projects to teach you how to learn from experiences. We have textbooks and lectures to teach you how to collect, use and discern between differents types of information.

Going straight from highschool to reading peer-reviewed articles isnt always practical. So we create textbooks with very basic broad knowledge you need to have to understand scientific articles.

>Since when did academia start rewarding rote memorization
Also could be your class. While my tests were on material in the textbook i was provided with external articles as well. And more importantly the focus was on broad conceptual understanding rather than memorization.

Unless you're doing something like chem and bio at a low level, then it is basically stamp-collecting.

>WHY AM I FAILING THIS CLASS REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I never questioned why, nor I complained about it.

>holding up class each time a person is called upon to solve a problem
>a good method of teaching
Pick one.

>Cultural Anthro
>Book is various articles published by well known Anthropologists
>Every class is a discussion of one or more articles and what we can possibly take home about it
>Once in a while movie
>Exams are based on articles and class discussion material
>One paper due at end of semester
>Dude grades hard AF
Pretty dope

>>holding up class each time a person is called upon to solve a problem
>a good method of teaching

It is though.

Humans are naturally interested in their peers performance.

They pay more attention when their classmates are being publicly embarrassed

There is literally nothing wrong with this.

If you can't come up with an answer to a question that also appeared in the book, you're a brainlet.

On the other hand, if you don't bother to do any problems, you're also a brainlet.

this is literally all of undergrad math

math really is just rote memorization, especially engineer math like calc through PDEs.

>in calculus class
>teacher tells us exam will be based on the homework
>"ugh better do a few questions then"
>his advice is literally to make sure you understand the concepts and just do a few homework questions to make sure you understand how to apply them
>exam day comes
>there are a bunch of physics problems on the test
>we never did any in class
>they aren't on the curriculum
>i have no idea how to solve them because I'm not in science
>go up to him later and ask why it's fair to ask physics questions when this is a calculus class
>"well it was in the textbook lol"

Just because the problem was about some real world shit doesn't mean you need to know physics to solve it you faggot. God I hate this type of autistic mathematicians who can't model a spherical ball falling in a vacuum at constant speed.

>course doesn't have a textbook and professor writes all of the questions personally

based

It was force distribution. I don't know how force distribution works. I could guess, but I wouldn't be confident about the answer.

>In Methods in Numerical Anal Blast class.
>Learn stuff like Newton form and Lagrange form for first exam.
>Exam time comes along.
>Exam is on Cholesky factorizations, Aitken accelerations, and method of least squares.

Could you write the question?

t. engineering undergrad

It was one of those dead simple "box hanging from two wires" problems. I was given the weight of the box and the angles of the wires and asked to determine the force vectors acting on the box from each wire.

I know it was probably a fucking high school level problem and it should have been a gimme but I don't have any physics and I had no idea how to solve it. Best I could assume was that the vertical components on each vector would be equal and then do something with cosines to get the other portion, but I couldn't complete the question in a way that made sense to me.

You literally failed to solved the most basic problem engineering mechanics. You didn't even need to do calculus to solve it, just the most simple trigonometry.

Shame on you.

Yeah, I'm not fucking happy about it, but we didn't study them in class and I had no idea how to solve it. The point is that it was a physics problem in a calculus class that you were supposed to know how to do because it happened to be a homework question somewhere in the book.

>take first exam
>realize its from a test bank
>stop studying
>get high 90s while plebs fail.

> calculus
> involving physics

It's almost as if calculus was made to solve physics problems!

Pajeet, I am reporting this to administration. You have to go back now.

Its not my fault the professor is lazy af. Make your own questions or have grad slave do it.

>professor makes a test
>fucks up in the process
>have to correct the problems midtest

You're missing the point.

>tfw you have to correct three different questions

The only classes I've taken where is a thing have had the majority of class points invested in projects/homework. Even in community college we had design problems or "new rules for X subject from Y dimension to solve a problem".

>Since when did academia start rewarding rote memorization over actual comprehension?

When they didn't want you to comprehend anything...

obviously.