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| BS education is mostly spoon feeding. Most students ask their adviser what courses the have to take and take them. I was different, I told my adviser what courses I wanted to take. Undergraduate and graduate. Took me a little longer to graduate that way, but I learned more. And the more mature student in the undergraduate classes might find them frustrating from that spoon feeding. But he can ASK real world questions and soon find out if the teacher is just reading the book and spieling it or knows the topic. "Why is this?" is a good question for most lectures.
Most outsiders view graduate school as a time to learn all there is about an infinitesimal width topic that no one has done before. That's just the visible product. The real education is in learning to educate ones self without ANY spoon feeding. That takes digging the periodicals, books, and other published research, then to do the experiments on that infinitesimal project to learn what no one else has put into a can. At ISU in the 70s the Electrical Engineering Department figured a MS was practice at that technique, nothing great was expected from the thesis. Then the real research was only at PhD level applying the self learning techniques. It takes prodigious reading and careful sorting, just like on this forum there are posts and publications where the only value was that the author published, not that he added anything to the world's knowedge.
If one attacks the BS work with much curiosity, and works the library hard, one can learn how to do that self education bit earlier and save on the MS "practice" research period. At ISU there's a required library use course. Then the reference desk is the researcher's friend in finding material. That desk expects simple questions but is delighted when the question makes them work or even makes them fail the first time. That challenge they enjoy. The BS would be more valuable if the self education capabilities were learned or taught. Don't look to me to teach them, I don't know how to teach. which many faculty I had also didn't know but they didn't publicly admit it.
Gerald J. | |
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Looking to the Agronomists here...
