I believed that as an undergraduate. I believed that when I became a TA during my last semester as an undergraduate. I believed that throughout graduate school (where I TAed and taught several classes on my own). I believed that in my years as an Assistant Professor (before leaving for industry...long-ish story). And I most certainly believe it now.

Oh, sure, attendance is important. I always encouraged students to attend my courses. But college students are adults, and we should treat them as such. You know what? If you're hungover, or sick, or just walked away from a car crash, or exhausted, or in any other state where attending class isn't the best use of your time, then by all means, don't. You're an adult now. You can make choices and take the consequences of those choices.

And yes, I'll admit that I've had one or two students who skipped most of the lectures and did an excellent job on the quizzes, exams, and final (however, in my experience, students who could get away with that generally don't).

These issues aside, though, I didn't go to college for nine years to be a glorified hall monitor.

Also, this bit: "Grading will be _highly competitive_." Meaning: "I could have used powerful team collaboration tools in this classroom, but instead I've pitted these students against each other." Meaning: "I don't actually understand evaluation of performance, I just like bludgeoning people over whom I have power." Meaning: "I was hazed with this kind of crap as a student, I think it put a few hairs on my chest, and so I return the abuse unto you."

Listen up, instructor: Berkeley probably has some excellent instructor training resources. You've missed the past half-century, esp. the past fifteen-or-so years, of vast improvements in educational methods. Maybe your security chops are great, but your syllabus says something radically different about your teaching skills.

The consensus here at Berkeley is that this is simply a ploy to get students to drop the class because there isn't enough space for everybody.

"If you are disabled and require special arrangements for exams, you must contact the instructor with full documentation by 5PM, August 30. The alternate exam will be an oral exam, closed-book, closed-note, cumulative over all class material and will be scheduled at 9AM on Sunday, December 15."

Providing exams for disabled students is not degrading, if such accomodations are helpful. Other forms of accomodataion (eg, relaxing of standards or deadlines) may reasonably be subject to abuse, in the absence of direct oversight. Etc.

If there were some actual evidence this was an act of intimidation or "humiliation" it would be interesting to see such supported. In all likelihood, it would probably lead to a situation of legal jeapordy for the University.

Rinky-dink (non-Berzerkely) universities do this by setting configuration options in the registration software such that only a certain number of people can register each semester. If you get in a bit late and have a transcendentally good reason to need that course that semester, the professor is allowed to sign a small form which overrides the software and lets you in anyway.

In short, unless UC-Berkeley's software is stuck in 1968 just like its politics, the reason you gave is highly unlikely.

What happened in CS161's case was that the department had originally planned to have a certain number of students in the class, and was looking for TAs.

They weren't able to find these TAs, and that led to the cancellation of three out of seven sections.

Source: Current Berkeley student.

Just because they're "competitive" isn't always a bad thing. Struggling to learn is normal. Just because the prof makes it competitive might make you work harder, put in more hours and in the end, learn more through your struggles.

There is no

I really wish we had sufficient resources to teach the class properly.

Asking students to drop the class just ends up making those who choose to stay in the class feel guilty. And employing draconian measures to encourage people to drop out in order to meet administrative needs is passive aggression, plain and simple. Your beef is with admin, not with students, so don't take it out on them, don't involve them in it, and don't use them as pawns.

Worst case, sacrifice research and do all the TA work yourself. You can use this as a bargaining chip with admin next semester.

Good plumbers make a lot of money because it's a dirty and disgusting job that nobody wants to do.

It turns out that the university has a lot of rules about how TAs (and how much) TAs are paid, and further TAs are unionized (they are members of the United Auto Workers -- believe it or not!) and that we are bound by contract restrictions.

If you want to talk about this, and you're on the Berkeley campus, I sit in Soda Hall 739. Alternatively, I hike most evenings in Tilden Park for exercise -- if you'd like to join me sometime and talk about your ideas, I'd certainly welcome hearing them.

There's no reason to punish the undergraduate students for the failings of the department. Things like denying bathroom breaks don't do anything to help out your resource shortage, unless you're basically saying that the only way to have enough resources is to make the class so unpleasant that no one wants to take it. Still, this is completely unfair to those students that actually end up taking the class. If that is the case, I can at least understand it -- however, you should explicitly say so

If you've taken a particularly extreme approach to "wake the department up," you should just come out and say so, rather than claiming that this policy is the only way to deal with it.

A somewhat related thought:

I'm not sure what the reason for the lack of TAs is, but I do know that some of the security professors are spending their time on things other than Berkeley activities (i.e. startups, etc.). I have no idea if you're involved with this yourself, but perhaps you guys need to figure out how to get your faculty to be able to support more graduate students rather than spending your time coming up with an abusive policy.

I completely agree with you that the undergrad students are not at all at fault here. You pay a lot of tuition and deserve better.

Again, if you want to say that you need to make the class as terrible as possible so that people drop, then just say so.

I hate to make this request, but I need half to 2/3rds of the students to drop the course. I'm hoping that you will still be able to learn a lot from the class -- but I need to find a mechanism to make the class smaller. Being strict on attendance seemed like the "least bad" of several rather unattractive alternatives.

I'm hoping that someone has a better idea, and I'm completely open. Please come and see me in 739 Soda.

And I have to say that it is already a huge problem at Berkeley to simply get enrolled into a CS class. There are simply not enough resources to go around. That's why this class has a huge waitlist.

By the way, this problem is also occurring in other classes, but they are scheduled as Monday-Wednesday classes. My class is Tuesday-Thursday -- the first day of classes at Berkeley was 8/29. Monday is Labor Day holiday at Berkeley, so those other classes will have to deal with their situations on 9/4. (However, their TA deficits are not quite as large as those that we have in CS 161).

Our course has what Berkeley EECS calls "30 hours of TAs." I can assure you that they'll end up doing a lot more than 30 hours worth of work each week.

I'll also remind you that our teaching assistants are unionized, and we are bound by contract rules.

But even if I had the power to change that (and I do not), you can see that it would have to change for every single EECS class -- why would a TA want to teach 4 discussion sections for CS 161 when s/he could get the same pay credit teaching 2 discussions sections for another CS class?

Though, often times, most TA's I know put in far more than their required time.

You raise an excellent question about why no notification went out before. Indeed, for the last two months I've been asking the department to change its policies so we can get some more TAs in class. These efforts were still going on Wednesday evening -- the night before the first class (and indeed, they are still going on this morning!)

I also tried to stop the process of allowing so many students to register for the course when we didn't have TA support.

If you'd like to talk about this more, please come see me.

In case it is not 100% obvious, I'm quite unhappy with the situation (having a TA shortage, and having to run the class this way).

Having said all of this, happy to see a healthy discussion in Ycombinator. I'm a big supporter of free speech, and I think there are a lot of interesting comments here. So more power to you.

I'm afraid that it's a bit hard to answer your question in a public forum. If any Ycombinator readers are on the Berkeley campus and want to chat with me, I'm at 739 Soda Hall.

I think that at a certain point a professor's strictness just becomes an embarrassment to the department. This professor should be censured for this policy.

I was a disabled student. Now I teach. It's how I've seen it work everywhere.

That's the next paragraph in that section of the syllabus. So I guess he's covered.

Aside: Odd that hearing aids are emphasized here.

One might, under a broad definition, call them "assistive devices", but somehow I doubt this professor is going to recognize a common laptop or a tape recorder, among other things, as such, and he's going to embarrass, humiliate, and just generally make life difficult for any disabled student who attempts to argue with him.

Yes, I include graphing calculators like the TI-84 or, my personal favorite, the HP-48GX. They can be used to store a tiny amount of note material, but, again, if you're testing for rote memory at that level, your course is bullshit and a waste of upper-division credits.

> [...] you can expect to spend 20-25 hours each week on the class.

IMO you should be getting 20-25 credits then. Why even bother with assigning credits to classes, if it's not at all a realistic reflection of the actual effort required? It makes the credits seem 100% arbitrary.

Now in my experience, this was much more accurate for humanities than for math/science classes, where the amount of time the class took depended strongly on one's ability and preparation. I remember in particular one math professor whose problems were tricky: if you had the right insight, the proof was usually very simple, but if you didn't have that insight, you'd struggle and struggle. (And then there were the classes for which I was way under-prepared, and on which I spent way more than 25 hours.)

Add on to that the fact the time spent in lecture (on which the number of credits depends) doesn't necessarily track the difficulty of the material, and you have a recipe for wide variation in the amount of time one spends for a certain amount of credits. (Labs are notorious for taking way more time than the number of credits.)

And then you get into how some classes are more efficient than others in terms of how much learning you get for the amount of time you spend, and this doesn't match up with the number of credits either...

My point is that the hour/credit system is disingenuous to the point of being counter-productive, and is one of the areas of the educational system that I think we need to revisit if we're ever to progress passed the same old system that our parents (and for some, grandparents) used. It was a good start on objectifying quality and quantity of education, but it hasn't evolved really and we've learned a lot about learning in that time span.

I understand that classes are challenging, but they should be so on their own merits -- not because of laborious exercises. I'm not saying "no homework" or anything, but just don't require it. A lazy student will always find a way to fail, the gifted will pass, and the driven will do what's required (homework, attendance, etc.) to pass. At least that's my take on it.

These are young adults, treat them like such. If they are smart enough to pass the departmental practicums without coming to class once or doing a bit of your silly homework, then who cares?

Is a diploma meant to declare mastery in a subject(s), or is it to signify your willingness to jump through figurative arbitrary hoops while wearing a tutu? If it's the former, then attendance and busy-work like daily quizzes, homework, etc. really aren't going to further that objective.

I wonder if perhaps the professor is trying to scare people into dropping the class?

This seems likely.

It also appears that the professor is making somewhat of a political statement about the University, the (lack of) teaching assistants, and the shortage of funds available to him. I attended a University of California school several years ago, and there were a plethora of similar issues regarding class sizes, funding, etc.

It's sad, because actions like canceling four of seven planned sections¹ only hurt the students' education.

1: This originally stated that lectures were canceled, but I was mistaken. Thanks to codergirl for correcting me.

All the lectures are still there.

"There are currently about 170 students. However, given the current TA staffing, we can only support 75-90 students in the class. Because this class is so challenging, I expect that about 2/3rds of currently enrolled students will drop the course. Those who remain will need to commit to being on-time for every class and discussion section, and willing to devote substantial effort to reading and understanding highly technical material (and being examined on it during every single class section)."

They're teaching as many intro sections as they can without depriving majors of electives.

Fortunately they haven't gotten dickish about it but it's a tough spot to be in.

Problem is, the university was burned by that after the dotcom bubble crashed. They'd hired a bunch during the boom and then had far more than needed up until ~2010.

My freshman CS class in 2008 only had 3 students. The university doesn't want to repeat that.

Based on this I wouldn't be surprised if the TA who is assigned "bathroom escort duty" also would be instructed to check the toilet paper roll for crib notes prior to allowing the student to relieve themselves.

I didn't say it was required, but it's in the "choose-two" allotment of breadths.

When I graduated the only requirement was enough units and at least one lab class.

btw, what's the other class?

"If you miss a class or are late to a class or section (without prior approval from the instructor) you will be considered to have dropped the class and will receive a failing grade."

It's practically a lottery for bad GPAs.

You can't have both. Can you?

<ridiculous amount> of hours is required. If you don't put in these hours, don't expect to pass!

It's just a cop-out so the professor can assert it's your fault for not studying enough if you fail.

In reality, most of the kids who pass will probably study 5 ish hours per week for that class, if they are lucky and have time.

It's a damn diploma, which doesn't even guarantee you are getting a job, especially since those 7 hours left mean you don't get to network during that time. It's totally ridiculous anyone would expect you to sacrifice your health for that, and I did buy that con for far too long.

Ahh, well, such are things.

We never had anything this ridiculous when I went to University (EE at one of the better Uni's in Australia), but reading it sure didn't make me miss the ridiculous hoops you were expected to jump through in the name of 'education'.

Competitive grading is especially ridiculous and not a valid reflection of how industry actually works. Sounds like some of these professors need to be turfed out into the real world for a while.

G+ is a much better community for online and hybrid class than anything the Blackboard monopoly can muster up.

thanks! You'll hear some very good news on Tuesday morning.

here are the syllabi for two other similar classes at Cal: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/sp12/information.html http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee122/fa12/grading.html

here are syllabi for the the first two intro cs classes: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa13/about.html (this class has 1000 people in it) http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61b/fa13/handout0.pdf