chhotii

Technology marches on, Harvard has replaced paper course evaluation forms with an on-line form (to be done at the student's convenience, from home). Neat!

I've been reflecting on what to say about Molecular Biology from Hell. I'm sure the professor has heard the same complaints over and over again over the years. Why? Apparently, he doesn't agree with our criticisms.

Basically, there are 3 goals in designing a class like this:
1) To weed out the weaker students.
2) To motivate the stronger students (though fear of being weeded out) into figuring out how to seek out knowledge and solve problems on their own.
3) To teach.

Students-- especially Extension School students, who choose sacrifice their free time to be in school-- tend to think of goal 3 as the ONLY goal. They judge a professor on how well s/he imparts knowledge, perhaps with bonus points for being entertaining and grading generously.

Judged by this standard, this is not a very good class. Too much material is crammed into one semester. There is very little homework, so novel types of problems are sprung on us at exams, without any prior chance to practice solving similar kinds of problems. Rather than being provided with re-prints of the materials that best explain various concepts and techniques we are supposed to understand, we are frequently enjoined to "search the NCBI bookshelf!" for more information. The relationship between the so-called "starter kits" for our paper topics and the realm of actual paper topics is totally mysterious, a problem that had to be worked through before I could even start researching for my paper.

The professor is not a very good speaker. It's not his accent-- I had no problem with that once I had quickly figured out a couple of quirks of the French accent, such as the silent h and the unusual u (so "double helix" becomes "doooble elix", very cute!) A good speaker is one who successfully highlights what is the most significant point, and relates minor details to the major points, so the listener is not lost in a sea of detail. This professor isn't real good about that. I have several pages of handout showing diagrams of cyclin complexed with some kind of CDK getting phosphorylated and de-phosphorylated and ubiquinated-- What am I to make of these? He said "don't worry about the details, they change from species to species anyway", but what is here other than detail? Was there some major point that I missed? Other than that stuff happens with cyclin and CDK across the cell cycle. But did he need 4 busy pages of diagrams to say "stuff happens"? I think I'm going to have to research cyclin, CDK, and the cell cycle to study for the exam. (Rather, just to study for that 2% of the exam.) Of course, this is not in the textbook. The textbook goes into numbing detail about lots of topics, but usually not the same topics as what we are supposed to know for the class. I'm sure there's a review article out there that would explain what I need to know very well, but after paying $1,600 for this class, I have to find it for myself. AAAAARRRGGGGGHHHHH!

Well, the professor would say, the class is succeeding very well in meeting goal #2. See, Alex, when you're really working in the field, nobody is going to hand you the perfect review article on a silver platter; you have to go find it yourself. The point of school is not to make the teachers work for the student; the student pays for the privilege of having the teacher spend his valuable time looking at the student's lousy work because the student is just a maggot. Once you get a bunch of lightyears behind you, you can ride for real.

I'm sure the true priority of goals in designing this class are, primarily, goal #2 (to get students to figure out on their own what to do); goal #1 (weeding out) secondarily, and perhaps kind of incidentally; and goal #3 (teaching) lags a distant third. I mean, not that they set out to do anything to impede the teaching goal on purpose, but it's a low priority for the professor's time to actually think hard about how to teach better.

So is this a good thing? Well, NIH grant funding levels have been cut way, way back. (Gee, thanks, Iraq!) Perhaps Harvard should not be encouraging people to do science if there just aren't enough grants to support them. Medical school admissions-- I don't know, because I don't take any interest in the subject of medical school admissions. But I imagine they are probably still very, very competitive. Med schools just do not need more students applying, probably. By making their classes really tough, Harvard does a favor to those students who do well-- they have their pick of med schools, because the med schools know they survived a tough program.

On the other hand-- we have a situation where there just aren't enough primary care doctors to go around. Perhaps the bottleneck should be somewhere else? At the level of admission to a residency program that would prepare for a career in some specialty, perhaps? We have medical students and doctors coming from other countries to meet the needs for medical care in this country. Nothing against immigrants, and great for those people who get to come over, but isn't it of some value to have doctors who grew up in the same culture as their patients? And what about the brain drain on the third world countries? Don't they need great doctors in India too?

Turning away from the subject of all the freakin' pre-med hopefuls. Wouldn't it be a good thing if knowledge of science were a bit more widely distributed in the population? OK, so we can't all get NIH funding. But we live in a country where the vast majority of people don't understand the theory of evolution (judging by how many of them don't believe it); where people don't do the expected-value calculation regarding global warming; etc. etc. etc. How much of this is because science education is forbidding and inaccessible? So forbidding and inaccessible that my sanity is widely questioned for taking this class. And this is a class which listed only Bio 1a-b as its prerequisites, in other words, this could be a SOPHOMORE level class?!?!??!!

So what the heck am I going to say on this evaluation? What I've written so far (roping in everything from the war in Iraq to the brain-drain in India) ranges too far afield of what they are asking in the survey, I'm afraid.