In retrospect, one of my worst mistakes in college was dropping an elective on nonlinear dynamics halfway through. Knowing the subject as I do now, I suspect it would have improved (and been useful to me!). Also, if I'd had that math elective on my scorecard, I wouldn't have tried to fill that requirement the following year with real analysis, which was more of a slog *and* a bad course to take in a term which was heavily overloaded anyway.
First term of my junior year was my worst. I took real analysis, Quantum II and the physics lab course, any one of which could easily expand to fill the available time. The predictable result: I did a mediocre job in all of them.
Junior Lab was (and I guess still is) intended to be brutally difficult --- a "separate the boys from the men" mentality. The problem was that the difficulty came in part from all the accessory skills that were required, on top of the core physics: data analysis, technical writing, formal presentations, etc. The way the undergrad curriculum was set up, this was most students' first encounter with any of those, which was just the wrong way to do it!
@bstacey "Weed out" classes are utter bullshit.
@And_Zoidberg @tobascodagama Yes, to some extent: I think hazing is partly about forming social bonds in a fucked-up way, which wasn't really a thing that the physics department had in mind. This wasn't quite a fraternity ritual; it was more like "teaching" a kid to swim by dropping them into the deep end of a pool.
@tobascodagama @And_Zoidberg Our "instruction" in fitting curves to data was pretty much, "Here's a MATLAB script, have at it!" Into the deep end, sploosh!
@And_Zoidberg @tobascodagama ... Which was irresponsible in multiple ways, from instilling a dependence on hyper-proprietary closed-source software, to perpetuating the idea that linear regression solves all curve-fitting problems.
@tobascodagama @bstacey Correct. An educator's job is to help ALL their students learn, not to cast some into the outer darkness.
@tobascodagama @bstacey Sounds pretty much like an academic version of hazing, with all the problems it entails