Please post your questions and comments under the appropriate category.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Core Classes
Questions about curriculum, advising, resources. Please designate your program (MPA, MIA, PEPM, etc.)
23 comments:
Anonymous
said...
MIA: As there are not that many courses offered that could complete the Interstate Relations requirement, can students either: 1. Exempt this requirement given their undergraduate coursework or given their past work experiences? 2. Fulfill the requirement through independent study? 3. Search throughout CU courses that could have been included in the list, and propose those to OSA for consideration?
If SIPA is going to make academic advising required for all incoming first years, they should make it worthwhile. My session felt very perfunctory, just to check my name off. I was/am looking for a chance to discuss my interests, possible class choices, and concerns about classes. I know there are a lot of us, but do it right or don't do it at all.
Why was the student to TA ratio in the Microeconomics 8213 class so severely cut for a class which is bigger this year than last year? We are paying the same tuition as last year's class yet each student is getting less time per TA. Why has the SIPA administration watered-down the quality of a course that makes up the core of our curriculum?
Why does the MIA upper level Microeconomics class get practice tests with solutions a week ahead of time and the MPA class doesn't get the full practice test solutions until two days before the exam. Why does the SIPA administration allow such an unfair disparity in information provided between the two classes?
For a cost of $35k a year in tuition per student, why can't the SIPA administration guarantee the MPA microeconomics a classroom to hold a review session?
The MIA econ class (4600) has grown by 20% up from last year even though the physical classroom size hasn't changed and the number of TAs hasn't changed. The TAs are overworked students can't get one-on-one time.
It is UNACCEPTABLE that students should pay $35K to sit on the floor of an overcrowded classroom.
This should and can be addressed by next semester for U4601.
Why is it that students who have studied economics can test out of the econ core requirement, but students who have studied theory cannot test out of conceptual foundations? The Conceptual Foundations class is a review of basic international theory from a mostly Western perspective. Anyone who studied theory as an undergrad has covered most of this material.
We're required to learn way too much and too intensely of unecessary "concepts/quants" that limit us from expanding/growing as PROFESSIONALS. I'm not saying academics are not important, but we're not here to be economists or political theorists, so why are so breathing it to they point we're unable to tend to our professional growth/network..
I personally feel like we should do away with grades like the Columbia Business School and Yale Law School, just to name a few. We are here to learn, but there is immense pressure/competition to do well academically (GPA).
Columbia Business School has grades...! And certain students at SIPA who are interested in PhD need grades to show. SIPA is an ACADEMIC institution...plus it's relatively easy to get grades here anyway.
MIA: Conceptual Foundations is one of the most poorly planned/structured classes I have taken...I do not know why this is required. It is totally unhelpful to have a class so entirely focused on the US and the West while attending a school for INTERNATIONAL affairs. Continual threats of poor grades are also not helpful. I do not understand what the majority of students at SIPA will take from this class. It needs to be totally revamped or removed form the CORE requirements. Furthermore, every guest speaker should be given a crash course in public speaking. I am offended that they simply read from their papers. Eliminate the lecture and just send us your notes instead.
I know that for the career field I will be entering into I will not need to figure out complicated math equations. The organization would hire an economist for that, not me. I feel that I am spending all my time being forced to memorizes equations that I will never use once I graduate and in return I am not fully getting the concepts that ARE IMPORTANT in economics and how I would use them and apply them when in the field. Instead I know where to plug Q1 into Q2! Ridiculous!
Seriously, the procedure today to drop of CF Midterms was embarrassingly archaic!
Over 400 students lining up to get into Alschultz Auditorium to drop off papers into cardboard boxes? Could'nt we have simply uploaded them onto course works, or dropped them in our Professors mailbox.
Classes are simply too large. In all of my classes, there is competition for space, attention and help. I feel like everyone is overworked and frustrated.
I am a fan of core requirements in general, but I feel like they are too theoretical to the exclusion of historical facts. For those of us coming from different fields who might not know everything that ever happened in the world, some sort of events-based class would be useful to supplement or run parallel to the Conceptual Foundations material, whose flaws have already been mentioned.
I find that the devoting almost an entire year to core classes for EMPA students is unacceptable. We sit in the same classroom from 9 AM - 7 PM every Saturday (four hours of which is Statistics). We are all working professionals, and should have more of a say of what we study during 50% of our time at SIPA.
SIPA needs to reevaluate the MPA core curriculum. While most courses in the first-year core did help me to strengthen my quantitative skills and improve my understanding of public policy, there were some that I felt either need to be redesigned or taken out of the curriculum completely. The most glaring example in need of significant redesign is Professor Eimecke's Public Management Course. (Please note I am referring to the 2006 fall semester version of this course.)
We spent most of the class sessions walking through an inordinate number of slides and listening to anecdotes, many of which were focused on CompStat, the apparent wonder-policing program.
Our lab sessions were a significant waste of time, as our TAs did not have any constructive assignments or knowledge to impart. Instead of doing casework, building on class examples, most of the time we listened to a second version of the lecture. However, unlike in classes like stats and econ, where you need a simplified version, public management really doesn't require the demystification.
Finally, our group projects were teams of 8-10 people. There were no peer evaluations, and on most teams, 3-4 people wrote a paper while the rest of the team conveniently took home a good grade.
This course has the potential to be constructive, interesting and challenging, but as far as 2006 public management was concerned, it was a significant waste of time and SIPA $$...
MIA FINAL EXAMS CONFLICT!! There is a conflict between our Conceptual Foundations Final Paper being due the same day as our Economic Analysis (Professor Bubula) Final Exam!! Last year, the MIAs gathered together and got the administration to move one of these finals given both are core classes all of the students are required to take. Both exams being on the same day makes it incredibly difficult to devote a sufficient amount of time studying well for both as we will have to divide our time between them! I would like to request that the administration do the same thing as last year and move one of the final exam dates to avoid this conflict.
I was attracted to SIPA in large part for its big name faculty. Unfortunately, in my classes these big name faculty either lecture (or read notes) the entire time and don't involve the students at all, OR worse in my opinion, they do nothing BUT let students talk. While i believe that the students here have had valuable or interesting experiences, I didn't come to Columbia to hear what a group of 24 year olds think about IR -- I came to hear the experts. The emphasis that is put on class participation, to the point of grading it, seems to lead to several of my classes just consisting of several students making sure that they get their class participation grade for the day. It's really obnoxious and a waste of my time and money. Please stop grading class participation so heavily. In Conceptual Foundations, I have a really talented leader, yet she almost never lets us know her perspective. I do however, know exactly what several students think about EVERYTHING -- SO WHAT???? It's clear to me she's been instructed not to "influence" our thinking too much. She's the one getting a PhD, not me-- tell me what you think. Give me the credit to be able to assess for myself if I agree or not.
Let's start with the basics, things that at the instutional/class level should be like breathing and flushing after you pee: Conceptual Foundations must resolve their tech issues by the next lecture.
Anderson & her team would be burning the midnight oil to resolve the issue for good if it were a big name speaker. It'd mar the University's reputation to have these issues during an address by Bill Clinton. (I just went to a Sachs/Farmer lecture this evening - *their* tech, actually much more complicated than CF, worked just fine.)
But with us, it's laughed off as silly old SIPA. Not good enough, and not funny. The fact that they haven't burned the midnight oil to fix it, more than halfway through the semester, tells me that they simply don't care enough about the class and/or the students that make it up. That's disrespectful; "please just have patience" doesn't carry water. In a corporate setting, you'd be fired by now.
I am going to begin urging fellow students to walk out when tech issues arise until the professor & TAs learn that incompetence has ramifications. Let them explain to their guest why he or she just lost an audience to which to lecture.
I agree with many of the other comments here about the purpose/utility of the class. But SIPA's chosen this model for this year, and the future is up for debate; let's at least implement this year's plan correctly, fully.
I agree that the MPA core curriculum should be reevaluated. POP lectures, while entertaining, have little content. Same goes for Public Management.
POP in general feels poorly organized ... there isn't cohesion between the lectures, recitation, and memos. We finally received the go-ahead to propose legislation on LegSim and the semester is already half over.
Public Management should at least have as much content as a 1st year undergrad Business Admin 101 class but it doesn't even come close.
AGAINST the Student complaints of ECON/CONC Foundation Final - Not all of us agree!
Please do NOT change the dates and leave them the same. The Conceptual Foundations final is a *paper*. I want this due as late as possible, and want the econ exam as late as possible. This puts the onus on me to plan my time in a way that suits my strengths and weaknesses best. By grad school, people should not have a problem with figuring out how to plan their times around 2 coinciding deadlines.
ECON AND CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS CONFLICT: PLEASE CHANGE THE CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS PAPER'S DUE DATE
Please consider re-evaluating the conflict between the Econ and Conceptual Foundations finals. Perhaps the easiest solution would be to push the due-date of the Conceptual Foundations paper back several days. There is an entire finals week, yet all of my classes have schedule their finals for December 14th and 15th. This doesn't do anyone any favors. Those who wish to complete their Conceptual Foundations paper early may do so. For the rest of us, having a few extra days would allow us to write better papers. That's in everyone's best interest.
23 comments:
MIA: As there are not that many courses offered that could complete the Interstate Relations requirement, can students either:
1. Exempt this requirement given their undergraduate coursework or given their past work experiences?
2. Fulfill the requirement through independent study?
3. Search throughout CU courses that could have been included in the list, and propose those to OSA for consideration?
If SIPA is going to make academic advising required for all incoming first years, they should make it worthwhile. My session felt very perfunctory, just to check my name off. I was/am looking for a chance to discuss my interests, possible class choices, and concerns about classes. I know there are a lot of us, but do it right or don't do it at all.
Why was the student to TA ratio in the Microeconomics 8213 class so
severely cut for a class which is bigger this year than last year?
We are paying the same tuition as last year's class yet each student
is getting less time per TA. Why has the SIPA administration
watered-down the quality of a course that makes up the core of our curriculum?
Why does the MIA upper level Microeconomics class get practice tests with solutions a week ahead of time and the MPA class doesn't get the full practice test solutions until two days before the exam. Why does the SIPA administration allow such an unfair disparity in information provided between the two classes?
For a cost of $35k a year in tuition per student, why can't the SIPA administration guarantee the MPA microeconomics a classroom to hold a review session?
The MIA econ class (4600) has grown by 20% up from last year even though the physical classroom size hasn't changed and the number of TAs hasn't changed. The TAs are overworked students can't get one-on-one time.
It is UNACCEPTABLE that students should pay $35K to sit on the floor of an overcrowded classroom.
This should and can be addressed by next semester for U4601.
Why is it that students who have studied economics can test out of the econ core requirement, but students who have studied theory cannot test out of conceptual foundations? The Conceptual Foundations class is a review of basic international theory from a mostly Western perspective. Anyone who studied theory as an undergrad has covered most of this material.
We're required to learn way too much and too intensely of unecessary "concepts/quants" that limit us from expanding/growing as PROFESSIONALS. I'm not saying academics are not important, but we're not here to be economists or political theorists, so why are so breathing it to they point we're unable to tend to our professional growth/network..
I personally feel like we should do away with grades like the Columbia Business School and Yale Law School, just to name a few. We are here to learn, but there is immense pressure/competition to do well academically (GPA).
Columbia Business School has grades...! And certain students at SIPA who are interested in PhD need grades to show. SIPA is an ACADEMIC institution...plus it's relatively easy to get grades here anyway.
MIA: Conceptual Foundations is one of the most poorly planned/structured classes I have taken...I do not know why this is required. It is totally unhelpful to have a class so entirely focused on the US and the West while attending a school for INTERNATIONAL affairs. Continual threats of poor grades are also not helpful. I do not understand what the majority of students at SIPA will take from this class. It needs to be totally revamped or removed form the CORE requirements. Furthermore, every guest speaker should be given a crash course in public speaking. I am offended that they simply read from their papers. Eliminate the lecture and just send us your notes instead.
ECONOMICS:
I know that for the career field I will be entering into I will not need to figure out complicated math equations. The organization would hire an economist for that, not me. I feel that I am spending all my time being forced to memorizes equations that I will never use once I graduate and in return I am not fully getting the concepts that ARE IMPORTANT in economics and how I would use them and apply them when in the field. Instead I know where to plug Q1 into Q2! Ridiculous!
CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS:
Seriously, the procedure today to drop of CF Midterms was embarrassingly archaic!
Over 400 students lining up to get into Alschultz Auditorium to drop off papers into cardboard boxes?
Could'nt we have simply uploaded them onto course works, or dropped them in our Professors mailbox.
Classes are simply too large. In all of my classes, there is competition for space, attention and help. I feel like everyone is overworked and frustrated.
I am a fan of core requirements in general, but I feel like they are too theoretical to the exclusion of historical facts. For those of us coming from different fields who might not know everything that ever happened in the world, some sort of events-based class would be useful to supplement or run parallel to the Conceptual Foundations material, whose flaws have already been mentioned.
I find that the devoting almost an entire year to core classes for EMPA students is unacceptable. We sit in the same classroom from 9 AM - 7 PM every Saturday (four hours of which is Statistics). We are all working professionals, and should have more of a say of what we study during 50% of our time at SIPA.
MPA, 2nd year:
SIPA needs to reevaluate the MPA core curriculum. While most courses in the first-year core did help me to strengthen my quantitative skills and improve my understanding of public policy, there were some that I felt either need to be redesigned or taken out of the curriculum completely. The most glaring example in need of significant redesign is Professor Eimecke's Public Management Course. (Please note I am referring to the 2006 fall semester version of this course.)
We spent most of the class sessions walking through an inordinate number of slides and listening to anecdotes, many of which were focused on CompStat, the apparent wonder-policing program.
Our lab sessions were a significant waste of time, as our TAs did not have any constructive assignments or knowledge to impart. Instead of doing casework, building on class examples, most of the time we listened to a second version of the lecture. However, unlike in classes like stats and econ, where you need a simplified version, public management really doesn't require the demystification.
Finally, our group projects were teams of 8-10 people. There were no peer evaluations, and on most teams, 3-4 people wrote a paper while the rest of the team conveniently took home a good grade.
This course has the potential to be constructive, interesting and challenging, but as far as 2006 public management was concerned, it was a significant waste of time and SIPA $$...
MIA FINAL EXAMS CONFLICT!! There is a conflict between our Conceptual Foundations Final Paper being due the same day as our Economic Analysis (Professor Bubula) Final Exam!! Last year, the MIAs gathered together and got the administration to move one of these finals given both are core classes all of the students are required to take. Both exams being on the same day makes it incredibly difficult to devote a sufficient amount of time studying well for both as we will have to divide our time between them! I would like to request that the administration do the same thing as last year and move one of the final exam dates to avoid this conflict.
I was attracted to SIPA in large part for its big name faculty. Unfortunately, in my classes these big name faculty either lecture (or read notes) the entire time and don't involve the students at all, OR worse in my opinion, they do nothing BUT let students talk. While i believe that the students here have had valuable or interesting experiences, I didn't come to Columbia to hear what a group of 24 year olds think about IR -- I came to hear the experts. The emphasis that is put on class participation, to the point of grading it, seems to lead to several of my classes just consisting of several students making sure that they get their class participation grade for the day. It's really obnoxious and a waste of my time and money. Please stop grading class participation so heavily. In Conceptual Foundations, I have a really talented leader, yet she almost never lets us know her perspective. I do however, know exactly what several students think about EVERYTHING -- SO WHAT???? It's clear to me she's been instructed not to "influence" our thinking too much. She's the one getting a PhD, not me-- tell me what you think. Give me the credit to be able to assess for myself if I agree or not.
Let's start with the basics, things that at the instutional/class level should be like breathing and flushing after you pee: Conceptual Foundations must resolve their tech issues by the next lecture.
Anderson & her team would be burning the midnight oil to resolve the issue for good if it were a big name speaker. It'd mar the University's reputation to have these issues during an address by Bill Clinton. (I just went to a Sachs/Farmer lecture this evening - *their* tech, actually much more complicated than CF, worked just fine.)
But with us, it's laughed off as silly old SIPA. Not good enough, and not funny. The fact that they haven't burned the midnight oil to fix it, more than halfway through the semester, tells me that they simply don't care enough about the class and/or the students that make it up. That's disrespectful; "please just have patience" doesn't carry water. In a corporate setting, you'd be fired by now.
I am going to begin urging fellow students to walk out when tech issues arise until the professor & TAs learn that incompetence has ramifications. Let them explain to their guest why he or she just lost an audience to which to lecture.
I agree with many of the other comments here about the purpose/utility of the class. But SIPA's chosen this model for this year, and the future is up for debate; let's at least implement this year's plan correctly, fully.
I agree that the MPA core curriculum should be reevaluated. POP lectures, while entertaining, have little content. Same goes for Public Management.
POP in general feels poorly organized ... there isn't cohesion between the lectures, recitation, and memos. We finally received the go-ahead to propose legislation on LegSim and the semester is already half over.
Public Management should at least have as much content as a 1st year undergrad Business Admin 101 class but it doesn't even come close.
AGAINST the Student complaints of ECON/CONC Foundation Final - Not all of us agree!
Please do NOT change the dates and leave them the same. The Conceptual Foundations final is a *paper*. I want this due as late as possible, and want the econ exam as late as possible. This puts the onus on me to plan my time in a way that suits my strengths and weaknesses best. By grad school, people should not have a problem with figuring out how to plan their times around 2 coinciding deadlines.
Please leave it the way it is!!!!
ECON AND CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS CONFLICT: PLEASE CHANGE THE CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS PAPER'S DUE DATE
Please consider re-evaluating the conflict between the Econ and Conceptual Foundations finals. Perhaps the easiest solution would be to push the due-date of the Conceptual Foundations paper back several days. There is an entire finals week, yet all of my classes have schedule their finals for December 14th and 15th. This doesn't do anyone any favors. Those who wish to complete their Conceptual Foundations paper early may do so. For the rest of us, having a few extra days would allow us to write better papers. That's in everyone's best interest.
Post a Comment