Class Participation and SMU

Hi Elaine, you have an amazing blog and interesting thoughts. I came to this page from a comment in a video link of this episode.

My 2 cents on this whole thing: Class participations sure do have lots of cons, but the pros outweigh them. Indeed, quality of learning in class gets a rung down sometimes, but I cant deny class part. makes class more interesting too, and i have indeed seen introverts becoming more vocal and daring.

Now, i put myself in the shoes of a employer. I do not want employees who too sit down in their claustrophobic cubicle space and keep to themselves and not voice out their intelligent considerations during meetings. I would rather a noisy, loud, sometimes ineffective but still churn out that 1 time stroke of genius suggestion or highlighting of a blind spot the whole boardroom misses. Communicate, Articulate and Invigorate. That is what SMU wants to bring to Singapore.

For now Singaporeans may still seem too new to all this; explaining for some silly participations. but once they get to year 4, everything falls into place. We will figure out whats useful to say, and whats better to dump. That will help definitely when entering the workforce.

continue on the great work!

Keith:

Thank you very much for the compliment.

My 2 cents on this whole thing: Class participations sure do have lots of cons, but the pros outweigh them. Indeed, quality of learning in class gets a rung down sometimes, but I cant deny class part. makes class more interesting too, and i have indeed seen introverts becoming more vocal and daring.

I don’t deny that class participation does make for lively discussion, but then again, debates are always another available medium. As I mentioned before, I don’t find anything wrong with being introverted, and being ‘vocal and daring’ are not characteristics which I find are useful (or positive, for that matter). Introverts being vocal doesn’t necessarily impact their entire personality – it just means that they talk more in class than they would like to. From my own experience, the ability to speak up can be easily shed once you’re done with it. Looking for personality changes simply because someone has been speaking up more is erroneous, in my opinion.

I’ve always been of the opinion that university is for learning, and well, talking about your opinions and all that can always be saved with your friends. If SMU generates poor quality learning, then I doubt it is a place I want to go to.

I do not want employees who too sit down in their claustrophobic cubicle space and keep to themselves and not voice out their intelligent considerations during meetings. I would rather a noisy, loud, sometimes ineffective but still churn out that 1 time stroke of genius suggestion or highlighting of a blind spot the whole boardroom misses.

It is an idealized (and simplified) situation to hope that your boss wants everyone to voice out their opinions and contribute to the company as a whole, but you and I would know that this isn’t the common case. I don’t know much about company structure itself, but I would suspect that efficiency and generating revenue are two things on the top of any company’s list. There are so many other factors that affect this ’stroke of genius’ – are you looking for some idea that is accepted by the entire boardroom? Does everyone actually think this idea is good? What about boardroom politics – do you have people there that will just criticize everything you say? This, also, seems to come with the assumption that verbal ability is correlated with your intelligence, something which is entirely not the case. It is not possible for SMU graduates to rise to the ranks to CEO immediately upon graduation and then completely turn around company structure. The idea of turning around company structure in itself will be difficult, with people resistant to change or having to layoff employees.

Additionally, compliance and obedience are aggressive forces in the whole boss-employee relationship. Groupthink is just one side of this idea of conformity, and this isn’t just limited to people with ‘traditional Asian values’. If the boss doesn’t like you, you’re never getting promoted, and if you’re employed by a boss who has been described as Machiavellian or authoritarian, then speaking up is not going to do you a bit of good at all.

C.:

Look…. profs may be right, but you can challenge them. Some subjects are debatable enough to do so. You don’t have to care about data etc., data isn’t always right either.

Permit me while I gawk at we ‘don’t have to care about data’. Yes, data is never completely right and it is never the ‘end-all’ to all debates, especially in the field of psychology, but we do enough to make it reliable and valid to the best of our ability. Some data is better than no data. That’s the whole idea of clinical trials; of experiments; of dissertations; of theses. If you had a hypothetical construct that said this pink pill could cure cancer without any data and wanted to administer this to human subjects, no one is going to take you seriously.

Yes, there is always an element of subjectivity surrounding any subject, but I’ve consistently repeated that the professor should know enough to impart to you the knowledge to form your own opinions. In the classroom that is all fine and dandy to beat around opinions around some abstract concept, but data is always necessary.

With your video game example, I can very well argue that video games do promote aggression without being backed up by any statistics in class.. sure the prof can refute me, but that isn’t the point. It would have been a very strong contribution. I can shut up for the rest of the class if I chose to, and the prof will still remember that one comment.

This sentence seems to say that you’re speaking up simply to make an impression on the professor. Secondly, you also seem to assume that your contribution will be loud and impactful enough to make the professor ‘remember’. I don’t think this is supposed to the case here – a university is meant for learning, not for pulling assumptions and making ‘contributions’ that factor little in the real world. The professor can refute your argument because he has the necessary data to do so, which is entirely the point of learning – to understand where you went wrong, and additionally, the professor should also impart to you the weaknesses in that data or study. I’ve already mentioned the whole idea of balance, and challenging the professor all the time is reflective on the capabilities of the professor.

Challenging the prof is part of the class. Its not high school were the teacher is always right.

A statement that challenging the professor is part of the class doesn’t bring any new information to me whatsoever, and this is an argument which I have addressed already in my article. You seem to subscribe to the idea which SMU blindly subscribes to as well – everything that was taught before university constituted no challenge, and the fact that challenging the professor in class seems to be representative of your own intelligence and enthusiasm. I’ve already mentioned (quite exhaustively) that this isn’t the case.

If a prof explains a theory or some case study… you can challenge it all you want…. its not a fact and its not fully proven.

Without going into the details how a case study is so incredibly, wildly different from theory, I understand what you’re trying to say. Abstract concepts are debatable; theories are debatable. This brings back my entire point of data – the need to prove your theory. But since you’ve established in your argument that one doesn’t have to care about data, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. It seems to me that you’re saying challenging theories (verbally) are everything, and nothing else matters.

Also it can be challenged without statistics since if the challenge is valid tests can be done afterwards. Also it doesn’t say anything about the prof, he is just teaching whatever is currently known. It doesn’t say anything about his own intellectual capacity or about his knowledge of his subject if you challenge the theories he explains.

You are contradicting yourself. If the challenge can be tested, that is the entire point of collecting data and experimenting, but you just said that data isn’t necessary. You seem to be subscribing to the view that there is always a black-and-white area in subjects, which I have already mentioned that isn’t the case. There will always be arguments that refute any given study, which the professor should have the relevant knowledge to impart to you, or at least understand that there are weaknesses in this theory – once again, the idea of balance. This is how theories are revised, or how experiments are conducted to challenge it – once again, data.

Your studying psych…. don’t you ever feel you want to challenge the theories and see what happens in the discussion? Sure the studies will prove something, but don’t you ever challenge the prof pointing out what they have missed or what could be wrong about it?

I do not know what your major is, but please don’t assume that theories in Psychology have never gone unchallenged. I have already mentioned in my article that I know there are different aspects in Psychology that can explain a certain behaviour, and I know that there are better explanations out there, and the professors do too. Studies about human behaviour have been experimented on, replicated, modified and refuted. Siegmund Freud’s psychoanalytic view was evolved through experiments and understanding that dreams weren’t all about repressed sexuality. Theories evolve through experiments, through data, and not through one’s verbal assumptions in the classroom. And hey, my professors taught me that.

Challenging things brings about change.

I would like to ask you to apply this mantra of ‘challenging brings about change’ in the political arena in Singapore before you do anything else.

If you go through life without challenging authority, you won’t really succeed big. Challenging a prof is part of this, and there are opportunities to do so…. asking him a relevant question so that the has to explore another field to which the theory should apply is already a challenge…. after uni, its about challenging your boss. If he is a good leader he will recognize constructive criticism.

Again, more assumptions, and I have already mentioned this in my article. Is there a correlation between speaking up in class and speaking up in ‘life’? Is there a correlation between speaking up and success? Is there a equivalence in viewing teachers as an authority figure and holding bosses up to the same measuring stick? Your ideas are theoretical, presumptive and generalized. I’m not saying that one has to sit down passively and absorb everything, but the fact that one needs to consistently challenge the professor is not an indication of learning at all.

I’ve already touched on this in my response to Keith above, and I will reiterate that this is an oversimplified view of the workplace. The idea is ‘if he is a good leader’ – does ‘good leader’ constitute allowing your employees to speak up in the workspace and make the entire process inefficient? What is the definition of a ‘good leader’, anyway? It’s like ‘intelligence’, whatever that still means. The idea that merit alone gets one somewhere in life is also simplified and generalized, especially in Singapore. There are so many other variables that gets one promoted – politics, racism, stereotyping – something that Singapore (quite obviously) never addresses.

why do people always complain…. its really not helping… I bet if class participation would be gone and the 10-20% of the grade assigned somewhere else, people would complain again.

I’d like to point out the irony in your defense in being open to ‘challenge’ and yet complain how people criticize the school system.

That is all.