a bunch of my uni courses were taught by TAs doing that same regurgitation.

I'm a flight instructor. We get prosecuted if we're that bad at our jobs.

27 here, back to university too for similar reasons and seeing the same thing.

I don't actually blame the lecturers or teachers. A huge part of higher education is self motivated learning with access to people who are incredibly knowledgeable, who also happen to be your teachers / lecturers.any lectures are there to guide the topics of independent learning.

Until a certain point, the purpose of most education was education itself. The matter half of the 20th century into today has seen a shift of the purpose of university being for employment on the other side. This is an enormous difference, it no longer appeals only to people who are passionate about the subject. If 70% of the lecture theatre is there not to learn but graduate, it changes the learning itself. People by nature want to optimise their tasks to get their goal; if the goal is to be as educated on the subject as possible, then you're motivated across the board. If the goal is to get a job and the degree is a checkbox in the process, or even if you're going because "that's what you do", then the motivation is to pass. There is no bare minimum to learning, there is to graduating.

The goalposts move on difficulty too. Universities are for-profit companies, who sell qualifications. Inevitably the difficulty of the qualification will creep downwards, as the expectation of difficulty from the learner does the same.

I think this has been happening for long enough that in all but the most prestigious or passionate corners of higher education, the staff and teachers also first entered higher education in establishments where everyone was motivated by either employment or profit.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe plenty of people in higher education are motivated by education for the sake of it, but it's no longer the default expectation.

Covid gave everyone who graduated in 2019 and earlier another layer of job security.

our education has been declining for as long as I've been alive. I think it still succeeds in it's systemic goal of creating drone slaves for the empire... anyhow dunning-kruger is a bitch. It's easy to mistake information available to you through your phone as knowledge you actually possess, If I was in charge of educating people I would challenge those notions by putting them in situations where they have to apply that knowledge and how it's dangerous to assume everyone with a platform is a credible source of information

I'mma try that if I ever try for a 3rd time. Though second time around I had zero problems understanding any of the material since I'd been working in the field for 4 years, my ex just had a problem with me spending every other weekend in university instead of catering to her every need. First time I was just a moron who didn't study at all and I had a pretty tough calculus course first semester and I failed it two semesters in a row lol

That's pretty in line with what I've read of cognitive science research around learning from lectures.

Though it's not actually necessary to teach yourself first, at least not fully. The important part is to sandwich things together. You can get a lot of the benefits with just half an hour before and after a lecture.

The short version of it is:

• Before the lecture, write down what you already know about the topic of the lecture, and what you don't understand. I can't remember as much about this part, though, to be honest.
• In the lecture, don't take notes, except perhaps extremely brief notes such as a reference that you want to look up later (i.e. if the lecturer references a particular paper verbally that isn't on the slides). Focus on engaged listening rather than taking notes (and if you're neurodivergent, "engaged listening" may involve doing something with your hands, such as crochet or fidget toys)
• The big one is that after the lecture, without looking at notes or your books, you should try to write down as much as you can remember from the lecture, as a free recall test. After you've done this, you can look up anything you couldn't remember.

Though I should note that there isn't a consensus on the best way to learn. There are some broad themes that research agrees on though. It does seem pretty close to consensus that splitting your learning up into multiple stages is best, and that free recall exercises like this are super powerful. A lot of the specifics are up for debate though

Once I understood this, school really started to click. Too bad it wasn't until I had baked in a shitty undergrad GPA.

i had multiple professors like that 1 was animal physio, the PROFESSORS was actually doing research/lab during the whole semester so he was barely in class, and had the TA who had her own MS degree research to do, when the final came about, everyone was like wtf he dint mention any of this in the whole course, like actually chemical/energy equations that he never discussed in class.

At least yours were taught by actual faculty?

A lot of my 100 and 200 level classes were taught by grad students who were interning as teachers in exchange for free/discounted tuition.

That was the most jarring thing for me transitioning from a community/junior college to a private university. Pretty much every teacher I had in CC was there because they loved to teach, but didn't want to teach children. In University it felt like everyone was teaching because they had bills to pay and had no concept of a world outside of school.

i had one in CC, in 09, where advanced alg teacher decided everyone should be doing matrices, adv calculus, and discrete math, which was wierdly in the textbook for adv algebra for some reason. half the class dropped out by the last withdraw date, only because i informed/ and noticed how the professor unilaterally dropped people from the couse without telling them. oh and the prof also called the students "terrible" paraphrased because they dont know math and said he it is the reason why people are graduating HS with such a low level.

the textbook in question was Pearson publishers how are people supposed to do math that is way above adv algebra, i also suspect he intentionally does this to make people drop the class so he doesnt have to teach.

I didn't like history, until I just sort of discovered it on my own. After that, I wondered why EVERY history teacher I ever had before or after, was so terrible at it. It's the most fascinating subject, just stories of interesting people doing interesting things, how can you fuck that up?

And yet somehow History has to be taught in the most mind-numbingly way possible.

I took my college level statistics class during one summer and the teacher threatened to just never show up again and cancel the class after giving us a test where the average grade was a 48.

Bro gave us 8 hours of homework per night and expected us to have z tables memorized.

lucky, we had a biochem that just read verbatim off the POWERPOINTS she made, which were taken from the book. she was the only biochem for life science majors, so no mechanism, in fact i dont think our region would replace professors suddenly, unless they became ILL , which was rare.

when they arnt doing thier on research projects, which is most of thier time to. i also notice they are forced by the univesity to be "Advisors" too, which is a big mistake, as some of them are pretty arrogant and protective of thier reputability, they dont want competition in the future for some reason, and alot of them give very bad advice. Hire an actual advisor, not someone that barely has time.