Universities should always display concern for the learning experience of their students. However, not all attempts to help students with their education are created equally. The section meeting required in several lower division courses is one such enterprise that usually fails to be of any use to the serious student, and its failure is made all the worse by its mandatory nature.
A mandatory section is essentially an enforced waste of time. Even if it only spans 50 minutes, 10 percent of a course grade requires all the bother of attending a lecture — but with few rewards. Sections often fail at taking the reading or the material to a higher level, but actually dumb it down.
Their intended effect, of course, is different. Professor Tracy Strong of the political science department sees sections as “important because it is only in a dialogic context that … self-criticality can be achieved. A lecture will teach you things, but it cannot engage you in dialogue.” Indeed, if sections reflected such descriptions, their value would be increased considerably. But after enduring many long discussion sections, it becomes pretty clear to the average student that this is rarely the case.
The unfairness of a mandatory section is twofold: first, regardless of their intent, sections often cater solely to students adjusting to college or negligent in their studies. Yet, they are forced upon everyone. Second, too often they compel unwilling and unenthusiastic students to reiterate basic material.
Sections are especially needed in lower division courses because of class size and the typically younger students that are enrolled. Although having section available to the student adjusting from high school is considerate, it should not dominate the lives of older undergraduates. Section turns into a question-and-answer session for students who either haven’t adjusted to UCSD’s lack of one-on-one interaction, or missed lecture and haven’t done the reading. Yet some sections require attendance if you want to keep your eye on your grade, whether or not you need to hear everything over again. There is something to be said for weeding people out by not enforcing section — if some students can’t handle the responsibility of optional attendance, or don’t care enough about the material to want to discuss it, then that just means there are more spaces for people who do.
However, students of all years should be able to get along just fine without section as long as they invest a certain level of energy in their courses. Either attending the lectures or doing the reading is sufficient on its own to make section attendance pointless. Why spend 50 minutes rewriting notes you wrote the day before? Why listen to a teaching assistant reiterate an author’s point when the author stated it perfectly fine? Although section is useful when a student is confused or needs to play catch-up, it is cruel to subject others to monotonous repetition.
If discussion sections were more than just repetition — perhaps actual, engaging discussion — then the 10 percent of the course grade that depends on section attendance would be understandable. That 10 percent would represent the student’s seriousness and interest in actually thinking and engaging with the course material. According to Strong, “students are adults, make judgments for themselves, decide how to allocate their time. That is why [sections] count for a certain percentage of the grade.” If section did indeed represent a more intricate and thoughtful learning experience, such sentiments would be wholly justified. But the typical section experience falls far short of such qualities. The 10 percent of your grade that section controls means that the serious students who care about their grades — and actually do the reading and attend lectures — are punished by being forced to sit through mindless repetition. The student that likes to skate by can skip out on lectures and reading, but use section as his personal review session — turning section not into an engrossing, critical discussion, but a reiteration of class material.
The repetitive nature of section may even be bearable if the principle of student involvement didn’t bungle it even further. The glorified idea of getting students to actively engage in reciprocal learning or getting them to think about the material during class time almost always results in disaster. When a TA asks questions that are straightforward and simple, they are often met with a stony silence that fills the air with the reek of discomfort and embarrassment. It isn’t dense or uninformed students that usually cause this stifling environment, but a room full of shy, unenthusiastic and, most likely, bored students that don’t readily produce an answer. As for the few students who do dare to respond, it can become somewhat uncomfortable when they are the only ones responding. Usually, after a painful 30 seconds or so, someone raises their hand or the TA answers the question. The latter is a sigh of relief; the former makes matters worse. Students often give a roundabout answer that hits some of the points, but isn’t exactly what the TA was going for. However, by this point, the silence has put such a gall over the room that the TA is going to encourage anything, and writes all responses on the board, no matter their relevance. At the end of the day, it is not clear what the TA originally wanted to emphasize. In seeking to avoid embarrassing the lone responsive student, the TA has chosen encouraging participation over clearly elucidating the course material. This type of TA always means well, but in the end, even the limited usefulness of section is reduced by confusion to nearly zero.
The main crux of the problem is that sections attempt to be two things at once — a review session and an engrossing discussion. It usually fails to be the latter, but even if we must endure the former, it should be committed to wholly so at least it can be a review session of quality.
