I agree and disagree. I agree in that pressure is good, I disagree that audits are bad because of no pressure. Audits mean that is low priority which means that it will fall off when your busy schedule of "actual" courses have deadlines. Which is not a refletion of your ability nor interest to learn but of your workload.
This is the main reason I hold resentment towards GE's. Not because I don't want to be a well rounded person, but because when 3-4 other major classes are already crushing you the last bit of "pressure" needed is some random music theory or history course quizzing you. I never really got the time to breathe in college, and taking my time woulda been a $20k+ decision on top of the $80k I already had in debt. I literally could not afford to learn properly.
Moreover, the hope is that GEs would mean more well rounded students, liberal thinkers. There is little proof of that outcome being achieved. I wouldn’t want to scrap them though, out of fear of what less well rounded graduates might act like.
> I wouldn’t want to scrap them though, out of fear of what less well rounded graduates might act like.
They would act like Europeans and the rest of the world where GE's aren't a thing. What that means depends on your biases, but it doesn't seem too bad to me. And since silicon valley is mostly foreign software engineers today it doesn't seem like a bad thing for their performance either.
You're right about that, I took an economics class which turned out to be a Marxist indoctrination course. I wasn't interested in wasting time on fairy tales. I then satisfied the GE requirement by taking classes like financial accounting, which I expected to be useful in my career.
External pressure can work in the short term, but it disincentivises taking risk (which is where life-long learning happens), it steps on internal motivation (which is where life-long learning happens), and once the external pressure is removed, the interest in learning drops to further below where it was before the pressure was introduced.
So yes, it works in the short term, but I believe it's a net negative overall.
Grades are great, but not for the pressure they apply on students -- they are a measure of how successful the teacher has been in reaching their students!
> Grades are great, but not for the pressure they apply on students -- they are a measure of how successful the teacher has been in reaching their students!
The students do have some responsibility to learn the material.
