Three's a crowd

I've spent this semester teaching MATH1014, a course aimed largely at engineers and non-maths science students that combines linear algebra and calculus.  A class fitting that description was my bread and butter at Stanford, so I was looking forward to seeing how the ANU version compared.

As it turns out, the two classes aren't that similar, but the biggest difference in my experience here is the amount of contact I've had with my students.  My 1014 course has about 90 students (in contrast to Stanford's 50 - 60 students per section in Math 51), but I had vastly more contact with my students in the U.S.  I've usually enjoyed office hours as a chance to talk to students one on one (or at least one on ten) and in the past I've been somewhat proud of the crowds I drew.  I always provided chocolate, and I like to think that the math was useful, too.  While lecturers here hold office hours in some official sense, there seems to be little expectation that anyone will show up: I've seen a total of six of my students outside of class, and three of them were making up quizzes they missed.

As much as I like to think that my Stanford students just enjoyed my company, I suspect the difference stems from how assignments are structured here.  The 1014 students complete weekly Web Assign quizzes, but they don't have to turn in regular problem sets.  This is certainly more scalable than assignments that require eyeballs to pass over them, but something's lost, as well.  My life is certainly made easier by the fact that assignments are ready-made and waiting for me, but the medium shapes the kind of questions that can be posed.  Words like "show", "prove", and "why" are all off limits, whereas there have been several questions that ask students to round their answers to three decimal places.  I haven't done a computation involving three decimal places since such things were done on calculators instead of phones, so this seems very strange to me.  MATH1014 is aimed at engineers, and perhaps the assignments are calibrated to their needs; if your goal for your students is computational competency, then technology offers an efficient way to evaluate them.  However, I think that linear algebra is a great opportunity for students to wrestle with abstraction, and I wonder if the syllabus is shaped by what's easy to evaluate.