Many of the classes at the University of
Florida (UF) have too much material forced into the curriculum. This is a
problem because it tends to cause difficulties for students registered for
those classes. The amount of material usually leads to them treating the class
in one of two distinct ways; either they memorise material for exams and
papers, forgetting it immediately afterwards, or they take time to attempt to
understand the material taught to them at their own pace which leads to lower
exam results than they deserve. One of the root causes of this problem is that
many of the overstuffed classes are so-called “weed-out” classes designed to
discourage weaker students from continuing in a specific field of study (e.g.
engineering or medicine). Another cause could be that, because course
requirements increase gradually, administration fails to notice the point where
the course load becomes too much for students. Those who are primarily affected
by this are students and instructors at UF. Instructors may have difficulty
maintaining a suitable pace to cover all of the material within class time, and
students struggle to keep up with the accelerated teaching pace. This is an
issue that has been noted mostly in the lower level and general education
undergraduate courses at UF, whether or not it occurs in higher level courses
or at other universities in Florida or the rest of the US is undetermined.
A direct effect of having classes with
overstuffed curricula is that instructors often end up rushing through lectures
or skipping important information so as to cover all of the required material
in the course. As a result, students struggle to keep up with the work assigned
to them and may fall behind on assignments or fail to understand key concepts
being taught to them because the topic is changed before they have a firm grasp
of it. This in turn causes students to feel more stress than they should and may
even cause them to dislike or hate a class that they might have truly enjoyed
had they been allowed to learn the material at a pace suited to them. By the
end of each semester, both instructors and students become exhausted (with many
students complaining that they have had enough weeks before the semester ends)
and often students receive lower grades than they are capable of attaining.
One of the primary reasons why this issue
needs to be resolved is so that UF does not produce graduates who merely
learned how to earn certain grades and pass classes, but rather students who have
learned how to absorb and effectively retain that which they have been taught
in their courses. Solving this problem might also help to increase the number
of students passing their classes and continuing their studies, which in turn
would increase the graduation rate of students at UF. Ideally, this problem
should be solved within several semesters, however, as it spans many colleges
within the university, the time taken to resolve the issue may be increased as
each college would likely work on their own schedule. One solution to this
situation would be a reworking of course curricula by the administration that
oversees them and perhaps the splitting of courses. For example, the material
from a series of two connected courses (such as General Chemistry One and Two)
could be reorganised and split over three courses.
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