One sentence: Quality VS Quantity.
I'm so shocked, I'm taking an upper-level (47...) class called Quantitative Economic Analysis, which sounds pretty hard and mathematical.
The thing is that, although our teacher is one of the best teachers ever (he is funny and his explanations are soooo clear), the contents of the course fall under what I learnt in High School.
I'll show you an example. In my first year of college I had two mandatory courses, called Math I and Math II, which included: matrices, derivatives, integrals, optimization, multivariate optimization, constraint optimization, Simplex method and series and sequences.
And they taught that in an fast way, like "hey, you already learnt derivatives in High School (it is mandatory to study for any kind of economics/business degree), so let's take only one hour to review some key concepts and then skip it".
And after those courses, whenever we had to use some of the concepts learnt at that time, our teachers said to us "I don't care if you don't remember that, you had those courses, so it is not my job to teach you again", which is hard to hear but makes sense.
Now, the problem of the US teaching system is that almost all your classes are non-mandatory, so there are people who after three years they got to Senior level and they don't know anything about Calculus.
I think it's a good idea to have more optional classes than the possibilities you have in Spain, but too much freedom will limit the quantity of contents you'll learn.
I'm so shocked, I'm taking an upper-level (47...) class called Quantitative Economic Analysis, which sounds pretty hard and mathematical.
The thing is that, although our teacher is one of the best teachers ever (he is funny and his explanations are soooo clear), the contents of the course fall under what I learnt in High School.
I'll show you an example. In my first year of college I had two mandatory courses, called Math I and Math II, which included: matrices, derivatives, integrals, optimization, multivariate optimization, constraint optimization, Simplex method and series and sequences.
And they taught that in an fast way, like "hey, you already learnt derivatives in High School (it is mandatory to study for any kind of economics/business degree), so let's take only one hour to review some key concepts and then skip it".
And after those courses, whenever we had to use some of the concepts learnt at that time, our teachers said to us "I don't care if you don't remember that, you had those courses, so it is not my job to teach you again", which is hard to hear but makes sense.
Now, the problem of the US teaching system is that almost all your classes are non-mandatory, so there are people who after three years they got to Senior level and they don't know anything about Calculus.
I think it's a good idea to have more optional classes than the possibilities you have in Spain, but too much freedom will limit the quantity of contents you'll learn.
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