• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

There’s this class. Statistics. A midterm on Tuesday. Not terribly surprising, as it’s fourth week, and he, the professor who clearly cares for his students, warned us a month ago.

It is the most anonymous of classes – not so much in its size, but in its consequence. I won’t remember it, most likely. But impending graduation makes it necessary, and they say statistics is important, so I go.

Now, I’ve never studied the subject. I know it has some kind of significance, and I’m curious to find out what this might be. But so far, significance is elusive.

First week, we learn about how the media manipulates numbers. For three hours.

Second week, we learn how to read graphs. Another three hours.

Third week, we finally tackle the mean, median and mode.

Early last week, someone in the front of the room has a question about standard deviation. But wait – that’s jumping ahead of ourselves! Standard deviation is for Thursday, the professor says.

So three weeks in, we’ve reached middle-school level material. After class, I hear two students laughing about how they won’t need to study for this test on Tuesday because it’s so simple.

It’s true. And the prospect of not studying is enjoyable, at least for that one beautiful weekend. But the very fact that any class should be so effortless is just insulting.

It’s a rampant problem, at least on the north end of campus. I’ve been instructed how to write thesis statements at least 17 times in the past three years, though one would think thesis writing would be a prerequisite to attending this school in the first place.

My own standards have fallen, thanks to receiving too-high grades on papers that were the result of too little effort.

Has it really come down to improvement by means of self-motivation at a place where the intellectual challenge ought to be paramount?

With an average high school GPA that hovers around 4.25, it’s not as if UCLA students are exactly averse to learning, or that they wither in fear when faced with high standards.

That GPA seems to suggest we might actually be kind of good at it – or were, at one point. Yet for some reason, too many students here are saying high school was more difficult for them than college has been.

South Campus students, on the other hand, don’t share the same fate. They’re appalled when they hear we often get the questions to important tests ahead of time, or when their northern counterparts can get away with not even buying the books for a class.

It’s not that the glaring difference between “us” and “them” is a function of this one particular professor, or the subject in general. I’m quite aware that statistics has the potential to be a bit more difficult than finding the average of three numbers. History, as much as it is teased, has that potential too. There’s really no reason North Campus students should be getting away with what they do.

There just appears to be a distinctly different teaching philosophy that happens to be divided by Bruin Walk. There’s no question that this certain professor of mine wants his students to love his subject, and it’s no different with most of the instructors I’ve had.

Their theory is that by telling us not to take notes in their classes, by giving us the questions ahead of time, and by teaching us how to write an essay (for the 12th time), they’re actually challenging our capacity to think, rather than memorize.

But the consequence is that their expectations aren’t high enough. I’d venture to say that we can handle learning mean, median, mode and standard deviation all in one day (and in the first week, even). When I can get away with so much less than I’m capable of giving, I just can’t take these classes seriously.

E-mail cjenkins@media.ucla.edu if your thesis statements are 17 times better than they were when you started here.