Hooray for Duke!
Duke University Cuts 8 A.m. Classes
DURHAM, N.C. – Duke University is eliminating 8 a.m. classes and trying to come up with other ways help its sleep-deprived students, who too often are struggling to survive on a mix of caffeine, adrenaline and ambition.
Unless there is some actual reason to get up (i.e. test or homework due) then there’s a nice sharp drop after the first couple days of class in attendance. Lewis Black says it best:
Why are you teaching this at such an ungodly hour!? Are you trying to keep this stuff a secret!?!?!
Bah, comes off better on DVD.
Categories: Silliness
This is why I think that there is a conspiracy in the CS department to always put the hard classes like 324 and 350 first thing in the morning. I haven’t yet passed an 8 or 9AM class other than Music Appreciation which was easy enough to skip and study out of class. Of course the poor choice of text books makes those classes a bitch too.. minimum spanning trees and shortest path algorithms really aren’t that difficult to grasp if the book isn’t written at a graduate/doctorate level with 40% Greek but the professor wanted a copy for himself for free or one of his buddies at another university wrote the book. Bastards…
Fuckin’ wooses, university is meant to groom you for what it’s like in the real world.
When I did engineering, my first class was at 8:00AM Monday morning, and my last finished at 10:00 P.M. Friday night. There were 35 hours of class contact time, and about 25 to 30 hours of assignments (12 subjects per semester, with 12 3 hour exams in a two week exam period).
Add a couple of trips home per semester (driving past midnight is crap).
All of this because the stupid Government refused to let them extend engineering to 5 years, insisting that it was always a 4 year course, and will remain as such….given that the foundations remain constant, and new technology only ever increases what you need to know.
Please give me your address.. the SKS in my trunk would like to meet you.