Re: OT: US university course numbering (was Re: "to be" and not to be in the world's languages)

I'm spending all my posts today on US university stuff :)  Oh well, it's
not like Mli Vjacgu is making much progress.

On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 12:13:23AM +1100, Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:

> If you have a certain major, will you not ever do subjects that
> students of another major will do? Will the same subject have two
> different codes? (e.g. if a maths student and a computer science
> student both do first year discrete maths with the same lecturer* and
> in the same tutorials* and so forth, might the subject be MA 1391 for
> one and CS 1821 for another?)
More commonly, students in different degree programs might not take
the same math(s) class at all.  In a large American university (heck,
a medium-sized American university), such as the University of Maryland
which I attended, you could find the following spectrum of Physics courses:

(I don't remember the course numbers or the actual names, except in the
ones intended for Physics majors, so I'm making them up)

PHYS 107 - sound and light - a course for people who need to have some
science classes on their transcript but are afraid of science and/or
not very good at math.  This course actually had university students
sitting in the hallway in pairs sending compression waves down Slinky(tm)
toys, and writing up their observations.  Viewed as the Physics course
for musicians and artists.

PHYS 121/122 - a pair of basic Physics courses for students not afraid
of science, i.e. Math or non-Physics sciences (but not Engineering) majors.

PHYS 13X (i.e. 131, 132, and so on for I don't know how many semesters,
probably 3 or 4) - Physics for Engineers.  Required for an Engineering
degree.  Probably as rigorous as Physics for Majors, possibly more
difficult to pass*, but possibly not as heavy in Relativity and Quantum,
and generally having larger class sizes and taught by grad students or
less well-thought-of professors.

PHYS 170, 171, 270, 271, 440, 441, etc., plus labs 275, 375, 475 - The
course sequence for Physics majors.  Never more than 30 students in a
class, all taught by professors (though the labs were run by grad students
overseen by a professor who just gave the lab lectures), and very good
professors too.  It was a large and successful Physics department that
could afford to lavish lots of care on its students.

*The Engineering department, unlike the Physics department, had more
students enrolled than they cared to graduate, and so was very big on
weed-out courses - courses designed for a certain percentage of the students
to fail and hence transfer to some other lucrative major, such as Business.
However, the Physics major courses were probably harder to actually
master; the typical average grade on one of the several exams one would
take during the year in a 200 or 400-level Physics major course was about
60% correct answers, but it was curved heavily so that that score got
you a B.  (400-level courses at UMD were also open to graduate students,
who probably got more like 80% correct :)  There was a lot of room at the
top of the test for true geniuses to show their stuff, and we did
occasionally get some, including one undergraduate who looked like he
might be about 14 years old and wouldn't divulge his age, and got admitted
to grad school in Theoretical Relativity, which pretty much proves he was
brilliant.

Amanda