"FWIW, I rarely found classes valuable when I was in school; they mostly consisted of the professor (or TA, usually) reading us the textbook. I only went to class so that I wouldn't miss surprise exams. A laptop was nice to have so I could do something useful during the class periods that weren't exams."
It's hard to gauge whether this says more about your ability to contrast and draw imaginative connections between the material and yourself or whether this indicates that you went to schools that aren't very good.
I don't like going to classes since either
a)I haven't prepared, in which case I don't get much out of it, or
b)I have prepared, and the class feels terribly slow - perhaps one point I had a question on will get addressed.
Classes where reading the book doesn't lower the information content to 0 are best.
I went to a top-tier cs university, and a third of any given class was useless to any given student. It wasn't that the teacher was bad, it was just that the third was different for every student. Classrooms aren't perfect.
I'd agree, for the most part. Especially with Gen-Eds, I would just hope for powerpoints or go to the local notetaking service and grab a copy of the notes and just cram for the exams. I'd try to pick Gen-Ed's that were interesting, but the exams and everything else just made learning a chore.
Classes I actually found useful:
- Technical writing (english)
- This SOC class where all the teacher did was talk about real life and the lessons he learned. Amazing stories, so much advice still sticks with me to this day.
- My Enterprise Integration class which had so much cutting edge info I knew more than my co-workers on some things when I started a job. I still wish I had saved all the notes.
Aside that, the most important stuff I learned in college were all real-life lessons.
It's hard to gauge whether this says more about your ability to contrast and draw imaginative connections between the material and yourself or whether this indicates that you went to schools that aren't very good.