Skip Lecture Project Conclusion

Results The long awaited outcome of our Skip Lecture Project, launched on 20 Sep 2004 (details below), is out! From our one and only volunteer's exam results, we've reached the conclusion that lectures has ZERO CORRELATION with exams results!    Raw data: While his numbers of As decreased drastically by 2 (66% decrease) compared to his previous sem, he got no grades below B- in this sem. Though he may not be able to stay in ABP (Accelerated Bachelor Programme) any longer, but all in all, he is quite satisfied with his results. The slight drop in performance may be due to his heavy involvement in PDP (Play Dota Project).     There's some drop in grades compared to his previous sem, but this is NOT the results we should see from one who has been SLPing throughout the sem, if there is any correlation between lectures and grades. Therefore we conclude that attending lectures is...   U S E L E S S .

************* Skip Lecture Project  (launched on  20 Sep 2004)

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.