Tuesday, September 20, 2005

The Skip Lecture Project (SLP)

Introduction

Have you ever waked up at 7 in the morning and felt like smashing your alarm clock? Have you ever wanted to zao lesson but did not dare to for the fear of missing something important? Have you ever wondered if attending lectures is futile? 

 

If you have, you are not alone. (If you haven't, well... subconsciously you have.)

 

Let us introduce you to SLP, the Skip Lecture Project!

 

Hypothesis

SLP has an hypothesis -

 

Attending lectures have absolutely no correlation with the grades you get. (Therefore, you might as well don't go lectures.)

 

Aim

The aim of the SLP is to prove that this hypothesis is true so that all students don't have to attend lectures anymore!!!

 

Background

As professional students after 12+ years of education, we have observed some very strange phenomenon. Students in lecture tends do things like chit chatting, eating, sleeping, drooling, doing homework, smsing, playing with handphone's games (personal favorite), staring at the wall behind the lecturer etc etc. Every single thing except... listening to the lecturer. This is absolutely waste of time and students can make better use of their time studying (or sleeping) at home or in hall.

 

Then on the efficiency of lectures. Most lecturers read off directly from their slides, which is usually exactly the same as our lecture notes. We might as well read it on our own time own target (OTOT).

 

Lastly on the efficiency of human beings absorbing the materials taught. Research shows that a normal person's attention span is around 30 minutes tops. Yet, the duration of lectures are more than 2 hours most of the time. In addition, many lectures are after lunch breaks, when our body is spending energy digesting food and therefore can afford less energy for listening, ie. our attention span becomes shorter. (Do you feel sleep sooner in lectures after lunch?) From these, we can clearly see that it is not very efficient for students to sit 2 plus hours in a Lecture Theatre listening to lectures.

 

Base on the above evidences, SLP strongly suspect that lectures are useless.

 

Test

To test the hypothesis, SLP recruits professional students to skip lectures for an entire semester. If the grades he or she gets at the end of the sem are as good as or better than the other sems when he or she attends lectures, it proves that attending lectures and grades are totally unrelated.

 

Progress Report 

Currently we have ONE volunteer in our project. He is in NTU EEE year 2 and he has been skipping lectures for 4 consecutive weeks. (Although he attended lectures for the first 3 weeks of this sem, it doesn't invalidate the experiment since he was playing with handphone games most of the time during lectures anyway.) We have been constantly monitoring his progress and... well, he's not doing so fine right now. However, we do NOT think this is the consequence of him not attending lectures. Anw, we will have a conclusion after his examination result is out.

 

 

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED!!!

 

We need a larger sample size to make our project more valid! Your effort (or lack of) will contribute to our grand and ultimate aim of abolishing lectures from every single country's education system! So don't hesitate, sign up today! PLEASE (join) SLP NOW!!!

 

 

Related Studies

Another project that is closely linked to our project is the Play Dota Project, PDP (also stands for Please DO Play). It investigates whether playing DOTA everyday will affect examination grades. Infomation on PDP will be out soon. Please return to this website regularly for further updates.

 

 

P.S. A senseless piece of crap written just the night before the most-feared and most-hated math common test. Haha!

 

 

1 comment:

  1. wakaka....i always miss the moring lectures....too lazy to go lar~~~~~~

    ReplyDelete