The Poverty of Elective Courses
"The collapse of institutionalized higher education, of which the purposeless and directionless elective course is one example."
Table of Contents Expand Collapse
The collapse of institutionalized higher education—the elective course, aimless as to its why and wherefore, is a case in point.
Diminishing Marginal Utility of Credits
Only for students hoping to study abroad does a cumulative GPA truly matter. The drive to keep taking electives may be not only broad interest, but also a desire for an impressive transcript.
Why can an elective course examination be very difficult? For students who chose it, the same diminishing marginal utility of GPA versus time applies. Once the time invested exceeds a certain threshold, the cost of earning a higher GPA in this elective course exceeds the cost of earning a higher GPA in another course.
One can only hope that the result of this will be a universal lowering of elective course difficulty rather than a universal raising of compulsory and major course difficulty.
Electives, Major Courses, and Sitting In
Apparently JLU has a rule against taking electives offered by your own department. Yet I still see quite a few first-year students from the same major taking electives in their own field—they know nothing.
The teacher of Financial Derivatives Practicum spent the last session indirectly lambasting the economics freshmen, making clear that the course was designed for students from other schools who already have some financial background. In practice, the class was split evenly between economics freshmen and second- and third-year students from math, physics, chemistry, computer science, and law. The actual prerequisite is simply basic university-level learning ability—at least be able to understand what the teacher is saying. Without question, this is a linguistics problem.
If you genuinely want to pursue your own interests, you are better off sitting in on courses. The ancient Chinese taught by the Chinese Literature Department for the Archaeology Department is quite interesting.
What Can Be Learned?
The real paradox of elective courses is that they do not actually expect students to learn anything in class. If major courses at least have problem sessions to compensate, then other general courses, required courses, and electives are merely introducing students to the discourse system of the field, to assist them in teaching themselves.
As a college student, using Google and CNKI is not merely a need; it is an inevitability.