I’m tired of these college intuitions complain about cheating during COVID because people have scholarships, and tons of money lost on the line if they flunk a class.
Also because of COVID there are not much tutors available to help if you. Unless you spend more money for a third party tutor.
:angery:
That doesn't mean they're easy. I mean that there's a pretty well accepted baseline of things to cover in those courses. Less so with linear algebra, as some math purists throw tantrums about determinants and argue over how much of the course should be applied vs pure. But regardless of where you stand on that, there's a textbook or two out there that has been widely taught and vetted.
Higher level courses often require far more prep time because you don't have a bunch of existing syllabi and expectations you can draw from. There's no widely aggreed upon standard on what should be taught in a distributed systems course, for example, and it's not like you can just grab a textbook that everyone uses and pick chapters from it to cover. There will inevitably be some textbooks for it, but they're usually awful and out of date, and relying on them will make your students miserable.
A great example of an easier course that's not "basic" would be introduction to programming. There's really no standard for what to cover, and teaching it in a way that makes its topics valuable and interesting to the students requires a lot of thought and time. And of course these classes are often taught by overworked adjuncts, TAs, or profs doing 4/4 teaching load, so they just find a textbook and make students do rote exercises with completely inappropriate methods (having students mix loop practice with GUI development by having them incorporate them into boilerplate heavy Java/C# GUIs for example)
Basic as in there's a lot of lower year material for that stuff, not as in easy. Like stuff that have class sizes of hundreds because it's a lower year mandatory course, that are usually taught badly because it's mandatory for too many different degrees and isn't narrow enough to be interesting for most of the students.
The classes where it's like "this is all the math you need for your degree, cram it in all at once and then be sort of fucked if you didn't understand it fully and need it two years from now".
Basic is not the same as simple, and is not the same as easy.