You missed one type of value, which is peer group. Most of the more difficult courses I’ve taken have given me at least some value by granting better access to more smart, competent people. This has a number of benefits:
Better human capital. By watching how more competent people work and think, you can often pick up useful study habits and better techniques for the subject you’re studying. I’ve found this especially true in CS classes, where I’ve had this experience from both sides, e.g. teaching classmates how to use Git and picking up C coding style and tricks from better programmers.
Advice/planning help: both more advanced students and instructors can be very useful for the academic advice they provide later. Knowing talented students has given me info about several excellent courses, as well as summer opportunities, I wouldn’t otherwise have known about. A professor who can become a good mentor is also invaluable (although if you don’t plan to go into academia, you may have trouble finding a professor who can sympathize with your goals enough to give you good advice).
Better networking later: this is hopefully obvious, but knowing smart, competent people is useful for pretty much everything ever.
Friends/fun: people who think fast and have good background are less predictable/more interesting to talk to.
This suggests the following advice:
Seek out classes that signal difficulty or are known to be challenging. Many colleges have an accelerated introductory math sequence that will be good for this; in computer science, courses on operating systems and compilers are often known for their difficulty and attract the best/most interested students.
Avoid courses that are hard requirements for anything. These courses are the worst at filtering for good students because they’re required. Additionally, they’ll probably be taught at a low enough level that the good students will be disengaged and hard to spot.
Among sets of required alternatives, look for smaller courses. The largest course is probably the lowest common denominator. This is particularly important for general-education courses, in my experience.
Thanks, this is a great comment. A lot of these are points that I hadn’t considered in depth, though some are points that I deliberately decided against including. That’s because the focus of this post was about selecting between instructors who are offering different sections of what, on paper, is the same course. The questions of whether to take honors classes or what course level to do are questions I plan to explore in depth in future posts.
I did mention peer groups, but relegated that mention mostly to the PS of my post. That’s because, in the particular narrow context of my post, I don’t think there is a huge peer selection effect. What I mean is that different sections of what is nominally the same course will generally see fairly similar student populations, despite differences in the actual quality of the instructor or the instruction. There’s two broad reasons: (i) most students aren’t optimizing too much for instructor within sections at the same course level, but rather, are affected by scheduling considerations, and (ii) departments often impose space constraints on class sizes in such a manner as to make sure that each section has a similar size. Within these space limits, treatment tends to be first-come-first-serve. Thus, even if better peers want to take a class with a specific instructor, in the highly space-constrained and first-come-first-serve world, they’re unlikely to be able to reliably succeed at doing so.
The case where peer selection effects would be strongest in such a first-come-first-serve enrollment process would be where an instructor develops a good reputation with students at a certain quality level and a bad reputation with students at lower quality levels, so that those students are actually trying to avoid the instructor.
Oh, sorry. I think I interpreted “assuming that the major and course level are given” differently than you intended. My university is too small to offer different sections of the same course by different instructors.
Better networking later: this is hopefully obvious, but knowing smart, competent people is useful for pretty much everything ever.
I’d actually like to see this better explored/supported… I believe it’s true, and I’ve experienced it myself, but maybe if we could break down the specific ways in which networking can be useful, we could do it in a more optimized way (although if we optimize too hard, I assume we run the risk of coming across as phony?)
Avoid courses that are hard requirements for anything.
On the other hand, if you’re not sure what you want to major in, you might try taking lots of these sort of classes to learn what you liked, start on long chains of prerequisites early, and keep your options open.
I’d actually like to see this better explored/supported… I believe it’s true, and I’ve experienced it myself, but maybe if we could break down the specific ways in which networking can be useful, we could do it in a more optimized way (although if we optimize too hard, I assume we run the risk of coming across as phony?)
Collaboration: e.g., if I start a software company I’ll be very happy that I know so many good programmers personally.
Signalling: for instance, people assume I’m more of a hardcore math person than I am because many of my roommates did well in math competitions.
Halo: I’m reasonably well-networked in some communities and people there seem to give my opinions a surprising amount of weight. Not sure if this is causation but it seems probable.
Favors: This has been the most important for me so far. Knowing people (who want to do things for you) is an almost fully general substitute for having skills. I’m not very good at biology, but my roommate knows enough to explain anything I don’t understand. I’m bad at promoting my organization’s events, but I can ask my friends on the student newspaper to help.
With regard to coming off as phony, I think in some circles there may be an implicit understanding that “networking” relationships are based on mutual benefit. YMMV though.
You missed one type of value, which is peer group. Most of the more difficult courses I’ve taken have given me at least some value by granting better access to more smart, competent people. This has a number of benefits:
Better human capital. By watching how more competent people work and think, you can often pick up useful study habits and better techniques for the subject you’re studying. I’ve found this especially true in CS classes, where I’ve had this experience from both sides, e.g. teaching classmates how to use Git and picking up C coding style and tricks from better programmers.
Advice/planning help: both more advanced students and instructors can be very useful for the academic advice they provide later. Knowing talented students has given me info about several excellent courses, as well as summer opportunities, I wouldn’t otherwise have known about. A professor who can become a good mentor is also invaluable (although if you don’t plan to go into academia, you may have trouble finding a professor who can sympathize with your goals enough to give you good advice).
Better networking later: this is hopefully obvious, but knowing smart, competent people is useful for pretty much everything ever.
Friends/fun: people who think fast and have good background are less predictable/more interesting to talk to.
This suggests the following advice:
Seek out classes that signal difficulty or are known to be challenging. Many colleges have an accelerated introductory math sequence that will be good for this; in computer science, courses on operating systems and compilers are often known for their difficulty and attract the best/most interested students.
Avoid courses that are hard requirements for anything. These courses are the worst at filtering for good students because they’re required. Additionally, they’ll probably be taught at a low enough level that the good students will be disengaged and hard to spot.
Among sets of required alternatives, look for smaller courses. The largest course is probably the lowest common denominator. This is particularly important for general-education courses, in my experience.
Thanks, this is a great comment. A lot of these are points that I hadn’t considered in depth, though some are points that I deliberately decided against including. That’s because the focus of this post was about selecting between instructors who are offering different sections of what, on paper, is the same course. The questions of whether to take honors classes or what course level to do are questions I plan to explore in depth in future posts.
I did mention peer groups, but relegated that mention mostly to the PS of my post. That’s because, in the particular narrow context of my post, I don’t think there is a huge peer selection effect. What I mean is that different sections of what is nominally the same course will generally see fairly similar student populations, despite differences in the actual quality of the instructor or the instruction. There’s two broad reasons: (i) most students aren’t optimizing too much for instructor within sections at the same course level, but rather, are affected by scheduling considerations, and (ii) departments often impose space constraints on class sizes in such a manner as to make sure that each section has a similar size. Within these space limits, treatment tends to be first-come-first-serve. Thus, even if better peers want to take a class with a specific instructor, in the highly space-constrained and first-come-first-serve world, they’re unlikely to be able to reliably succeed at doing so.
The case where peer selection effects would be strongest in such a first-come-first-serve enrollment process would be where an instructor develops a good reputation with students at a certain quality level and a bad reputation with students at lower quality levels, so that those students are actually trying to avoid the instructor.
Oh, sorry. I think I interpreted “assuming that the major and course level are given” differently than you intended. My university is too small to offer different sections of the same course by different instructors.
I’d actually like to see this better explored/supported… I believe it’s true, and I’ve experienced it myself, but maybe if we could break down the specific ways in which networking can be useful, we could do it in a more optimized way (although if we optimize too hard, I assume we run the risk of coming across as phony?)
On the other hand, if you’re not sure what you want to major in, you might try taking lots of these sort of classes to learn what you liked, start on long chains of prerequisites early, and keep your options open.
Collaboration: e.g., if I start a software company I’ll be very happy that I know so many good programmers personally.
Signalling: for instance, people assume I’m more of a hardcore math person than I am because many of my roommates did well in math competitions.
Halo: I’m reasonably well-networked in some communities and people there seem to give my opinions a surprising amount of weight. Not sure if this is causation but it seems probable.
Favors: This has been the most important for me so far. Knowing people (who want to do things for you) is an almost fully general substitute for having skills. I’m not very good at biology, but my roommate knows enough to explain anything I don’t understand. I’m bad at promoting my organization’s events, but I can ask my friends on the student newspaper to help.
With regard to coming off as phony, I think in some circles there may be an implicit understanding that “networking” relationships are based on mutual benefit. YMMV though.