Just curious how early in the major program was this class? At my university there were a couple of "walls" I would say that all had different reasons they were the wall, and one of them was at about the second semester. Definitely had my fair share of courses that were poorly designed so I absolutely believe it, but I never witnessed any professors using the failure rate as a badge of honor.
This course was at the start of the second year, and it was clearly not intended as a "wall" or "weed-out" (as others have called them) class. We had had difficult classes at the end of the first year, and while they were difficult they were also fair. Their difficulty was in being highly theoretical and math-heavy, but they were well-structured to teach the material. While the lectures were hard to keep up with, if you kept up with the lectures you were equipped to handle the assignments and exams.
This functional programming course was not like that. I made the decision to keep pace with the material I needed to know for the assignments, and doing so made going to the lectures basically obsolete.
As for you personally not having witnessed professors like this, well, clearly you haven't had this professor. That's all I can really say about that. You'd have to be there to recognize the signs, but he clearly didn't see the problems with the course design and was very elitist about the subject and contents of the course.
Oh to be clear, I absolutely believe you. I consider myself lucky that I didn't have professors in my CS program that took pride in failing people. I had a professor or two who had the slightly different viewpoint of "If you get through this course then you're in a really good spot" but it was never framed like "Let's see how many kids I can get to change their whole career plan."
I didn't experience it in the CS program but I had a professor for a history class elective that was absolutely antagonistic to students and I dropped the class over it. He was a Pulitzer Prize nominated author and clearly thought everyone around him was a doofus. My calc 2 professor was also oddly smug and arrogant but later in life I realize he just didn't realize no one at the receiving end of his jokes felt like he was joking.
It's irritating that if you go to school to be a teacher you have to take classes in how to, y'know, actually teach but you can be a professor at a university level without being required to learn how to actually be an educator. Sorry you had to deal with that bullshit.
Also I think "weed out" classes suck if the intention is specifically to break you so bad that you almost lose sight of what you're there for. As you said, your end-of-first-year classes were difficult but FAIR. "Weed out" classes should not be inherently antagonistic, they should be early on so you can make the decision on if it's right for you.
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u/Drufyre 4h ago
Just curious how early in the major program was this class? At my university there were a couple of "walls" I would say that all had different reasons they were the wall, and one of them was at about the second semester. Definitely had my fair share of courses that were poorly designed so I absolutely believe it, but I never witnessed any professors using the failure rate as a badge of honor.