> When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not!
At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10.
Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
In Finland the universities (and I believe in many other European universities have/had this as well) there was "academic quarter" which meant that if something was scheduled for 10am it would actually start at 10:15am. IIRC if they used precise time (10:00) then it would actually start at that time.
I've heard it dates back to when people didn't have easy access to precise time. It would allow students to hear the hourly bells and walk to the class.
Same in Germany. Times are usually assumed to be ct (cum tempore) and start XY:15. When something starts sharp, it's specified as st (sine tempore).
It also allows you to have "1 hour" classes that are at 10am and 11am, and you aren't forced to leave early or arrive late. A 5m gap isn't enough for huge numbers of classes in many campuses.
How much can you actually do in 1 hour that’s 45 minutes long?
All my classes were 1.5 hours long. Yet professors still regularly chose to introduce new material on days with back-to-back classes, leaving standalone classes for practice or “less important” topics.
>How much can you actually do in 1 hour that’s 45 minutes long?
Almost exactly as much as one that's 55 (or 60) minutes long but many people are late to.
But yes, "1 hour" is fairly short for any deep topic progress. I vastly prefer classes that are 2 or 3, it gives time to have questions and not be in a blind rush.
We usually had 2 hour classes starting ct, some of them with another 10 minute break.
In Poland "academic quarter" has a sense that if the teacher didn't show up and it's 15 minues past, the students can leave. They still need to show up for the class at 00 every time and are scolded to varying degree if they showed up after the teacher started which they do right after they arrive.
At my university in New Zealand they didn't take attendance for lectures. You attended the lectures so you could learn stuff so you could pass the exams. It's surprising that isn't considered normal.
(There's some nuance to that statement as science courses tende to have labs - I don't remember why first-year physics was a requirement for software engineering, but it was - mathematics courses tended to have weekly assignments, and at least one software course had a very unusual style of putting us in a room one whole day per week for a semester to work on group projects.)
That's how it was for me in college in the USA.
As an aside, it's a little absurd that people wouldn't go to class given how much money they're paying.
Private colleges are around $39k USD per year. That's a lot of dough per class-hour.
I was lax about going to certain classes. Not always because of laziness (though, I'll admit it was occasionally a factor) but often because the format of one person, who lacked any particular talent for teaching, reading mostly from notes or scribbling incomprehensible symbology on a blackboard in a room filed with hundreds of people wasn't really a teaching format that did anything for me.
Hm, I had good teachers who were also researchers in their respective fields. Mostly. I wonder if this is another symptom of the USA's general hypernormalization - sounds like they're going through the motions, without the substance. They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply.
That's the thing though, in many places Europe people usually aren't paying much for university, and higher education is funded by the state. So the state has a keen financial interest on people not failing/doing over because they can't be bothered to go to lectures, a lot more than the students themselves.
The reality in my experience is that, whilst students are on paper adults (mostly) and responsible for their own successes and failures, a significant number benefits from being forced to attend. That's unfortunate for the ones that could "safely" skip the lectures and have to go, but on average it leads to better overall outcomes. So in that regard the attendance policies are sensible.
For NZ citizens to go to university it's only around $5k NZD per year and most degrees are only three years, except for a few which are four.
I only paid 50 bucks per month to study at university — there were many classes I never visited only wrote the exams
... so the old American high school "if the teacher is 15 minutes late, we're legally allowed to leave" meme has some roots in reality? Huh.
I guess it was the same in Poland and in America. It was never formally announced. Just sort of unwritten cultural norm.
Never heard of that in high school but my university's student handbook explicitly stated that if the professor did not show up within ten minutes of the scheduled start time, the class was officially cancelled for that day. I only remember that happening once, maybe twice, during my academic career. A few times they cancelled a class ahead of time but no-shows were extremely rare.
I confirm, we have it in Italian universities (it's called "quarto d'ora accademico" in Italian).
This thread is absolutely fascinating — American, never heard of this practice (esp ct/st), and desperately want it in my life now!
For the most part, American Universities were established after railroad time tables were a thing…and in the US Latin and the other liberal arts were never the primary curriculum at most US universities, so cum tempore might as well be Latin.
UC Berkeley had this as well, at least as of the class of 2010. I think it was called "berkeley time" or something along those lines.
Yep I even had one professor who locked the door at the start of class. You either had to pound on the door to get in or accept defeat. Most people just walked away unless it was an exam day
Same in Denmark. Actually often needed to get from one auditorium across campus to another auditorium
Same thing in Sweden in the 1980s
Still is, standard lecture is scheduled for example for 10-12. It starts at 10.15, pause 11.00-11.15, continues until 12.00. So it's neatly split in two 45 minute halves.
This has also been extended to evening events (dinners, balls, parties) in student towns. There “dk” stands for double quarter, so for example 18dk means that an event starts at 18:30, but you may show up from 18:00. And the time between 18:00-18:30 is used for mingling.
It’s a good convention.
so did things end at 11:15am as I imagine a lot of times there was something to be done in the next hour of 11AM?
Generally, a single-slot class was 45 minutes. So a slot at "10 AM" would have started at 10:15 AM and ended at 11:00 AM.
Most lectures were allocated double slots, though, for example from 10 to 12. In that case the actual official lecture time would have been either 10:15 to 11:00, followed by a quarter hour break, and another 45 minutes from 11:15 to 12:00. Alternatively -- and probably more commonly -- there was no break, and the lecture was 1.5 hours from 10:15 to 11:45.
At the universities I've been to classes were almost always 1½ hours, so until 11:45am.
Same in slovenia, in technical colleges at least.
For some lectures it was great, you really needed those 15 minutes to get coffee, go to the bathroom, etc., but for some late afternoon stuff, you just wanted to shorten the last three breaks to 5 minutes and leave half an hour early.
At Michigan State, I had a math prof (Wade Ramey) who would lock the door after class started. If you were late, you couldn't attend.
He also insisted students purchase a stapler and staple their homework. And he would give negative points on assignments. You could say "I don't know how to do X" for a step in a proof (0 pts), but if you put in something wrong, you would get negative points on that part.
He was a good prof, and I enjoyed his classes.
>And he would give negative points on assignments.
I remember reading (maybe from Nate Silver) of a professor who would use this technique to teach about uncertainty. You could weigh your overall grade with a proclamation about how certain you were about the answer. Right answers with high certainty could really amp up your grade, but conversely if you claimed 100% certainty on a question you got wrong, you’d fail the course!
There are a number of variations. You might actually be thinking of https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-favorite-liahtml or possibly https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/prediction/2022-gelman.pdf (if neither of those are it, it might be one of the others I collated in https://gwern.net/fake-journal-club#external-links ).
This is the best/most fun way to bet on the Oscars.
You pick the winner and then assign 1-25 (or whatever) points to it (using each number for only one category) and if you get it right you get that number of points.
It basically prevents ties. It lets you make risky picks without falling out of the running. The downside is a shocking number of people won't be able to follow the rule and end up with 22 used twice or whatever.
> shocking
I don't think it's surprising or notably bad that people will have trouble tracking everything when you ask them to order a big list while making other decisions that affect the order.
Make it a web app or hand out cards where the order is the certainty.
I have a medical condition (autoimmune hypothyroid, extreme edition) which I wasn't aware of, but was suffering from severely, during my University years. Waking up was extremely difficult for me and as a result I was often late. At the time I couldn't understand why I seemingly had a problem that nobody else did, and presumed I just lacked self control. Nope, I just needed (a lot) of medication.
Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
You seem to expect the professor to give you a reasonable accommodation for an affliction you didn’t even realize you had. If you want to hold him accountable for his (unfair?) rules, you need to first hold yourself accountable for getting the disease diagnosed.
The world we live in, with the people we live with, require accomodations every single day.
Not locking a door allows the students who were delayed on the road by a car accident, as much as the disabled student who took five minutes longer than expected after falling down some stairs.
Every single person makes mistakes at times. If those are not absorbed by flexibility, then they go on to affect everyone else connected to the punished.
If the professor is delayed due to a tire puncture, should they lose their tenure?
It also allows the people actually in the class a lesson uninterrupted by random people for variety of good/bad reasons.
Most 90% of students is not late on any given day. Should they all be penalized for the actions of a few?
The request is not to transfer the burden onto the 90%, but to design a system where the 10% are able to participate without impeding the 90%.
For example, if students enter from the rear of the room, then delayed students can join without disrupting the on-time students.
If we start the design process with the awareness that some students will be late, then we can design systems which support all students.
Here’s a process for that 10%: wake up 30 minutes earlier to create a buffer that allows for unexpected events like traffic and for expected events like “I just can’t seem to be on time, maybe I’m sick.”
I’ve been in the 90% at times and in the 10% at others. People should be entitled to grace, and we shouldn’t just assume anyone who isn’t absolutely punctual is a malingerer. Unless you live alone on a thousand acres you’re perpetually giving other people grace for their foibles and they’re giving you grace for yours.
So you're happy to punish 10% of students, for no fault of their own. You'll trade a moment's distraction, for a paid-for day's learning.
That, is a lack of empathy. Especially as for about the last hundred years universities have had a process that allows for the necessary flexibility.
To take this to the extreme... Should we simply fire everyone who is late to work, without reason? If someone else causes a car accident, should we simply revoke the licenses of everyone involved, regardless?
Come now, we can be more extreme than that! Late for class, your city gets nuked. Forget an assignment, bioweapon deployed. Bomb an exam, and you're on the first plane to the front lines in Ukraine.
See also: we can reduce the number of police and compensate by increasing the penalties for crime (late 20th century edition).
> Should we simply fire everyone who is late to work, without reason?
Not necessarily, but I think you’d see a much more consistent attendance rate. Which is of course the whole point of such a policy.
The student is the employer, though. They are paying the university for a service. They aren't the employee.
The student is the customer, not the employer, if you must phrase it in those terms.
And I think education benefits when you define the student as a student, before anything else.
Jonathan Haidt details quite a few reasons why treating a student as a customer creates bad incentives and poor outcomes (just agreeing with you on the student-first point)
Those educational benefits are being denied here, for reasons outside the customers hands.
>If the professor is delayed due to a tire puncture, should they lose their tenure?
This seems like a false equivalency. The student isn’t getting dropped from their degree program, they’re missing a class. If a professor is late, especially habitually late, I may not advocate for them losing tenure, but I’d certainly expect it to have a smaller impact like being brought up in a performance review.
They're missing a class, yes.
A class that they have paid to access.
A class that the professor would not be teaching, if they did not believe it essential to the degree program.
They are being denied access to something both important, and already paid for.
> You seem to expect the professor to give you a reasonable accommodation for an affliction you didn’t even realize you had.
No. How could he? Instead, I'm pointing out the value of empathy, tolerance and flexibility.
I’m all for empathy, tolerance, and flexibility (to a reasonable degree). I also don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a professor to act on an assumption of illness when the person actually experiencing the symptoms does not hold that assumption. Your perspective makes it seem like the prof is privy to information about your health that you don’t have.
I'd go a step further.. The prof was expressing empathy for the students that made the effort to be on time. They made it.
If you know you're late all the time, then make allowances. 8 hours not enough sleep, go to bed earlier. 1 hour not enough time to wake up, set your alarm to give you 2 hours.
This isn't related to knowing you're sick, just knowing you're late often.
It always makes me wonder when I hear "empathy, tolerance, flexibility" pointed at a group of 30 or more, who need to work around one persons inability to do the same.
I had a co-worker who was always late. I told her she was lying when she said she'd be there at 2. She got miffed. I replied. "You're late so often, do you expect you'll be on time. I know you'll try, but do you really believe you're not going to be late." She paused. "If you know you're very likely going to be late and tell me you will be somewhere at time X, then you are lying."
It really shows that you know nothing about sleep-related disabilities. I know someone suffering from idiopathic hypersomnia[1]. You can't just "choose" to go to bed earlier to wake up earlier in the morning. Sometimes it might work, most of the time it doesn't.
You think it's the disabled person's responsibility to never put a burden on others when others' expectations puts an unreasonable amount of burdens.
And we're talking about this specific kind of disability, but as someone else said in a sibling comment, it could be anything. Imagine you really have to go to the bathroom for some reason (pregnancy, diarrhea, ...). That can happen to a lot of people. Should all of them be prevented from being accepted into class ?
That's why we speak about "empathy, tolerance, flexibility". Empathy towards the weaker few, not empathy towards the "normal" many.
[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypersomnia/s...
FWIW I agree but I think it’s worth communicating a devils advocate position.
I don’t think anyone here is disagreeing that those with a disability should be protected. The distinction is that many don’t go so far as to assume someone has a disability when their behavior is maladaptive. In game theory, systems break down when they are too many people abusing the system. Giving everyone a break on all instances just in case they have a disability sets the table for creating an unstable system ripe for abuse.
You point out the specific case of sleep disorders. But the numbers of medical disorders is functionally infinite. If we apply the same rule across the board, we would be creating a world where nobody is held accountable because they might just have some obscure illness they aren’t aware of.
I think there are better approaches that don’t devolve like that. As another congener said, you can create a system where late-comers can quietly come in the back.
You are being purposely obtuse.
Illness is only one of the possible issues a student may have that may be impacting them. A little flexibility goes a long way.
I have no problem with the professor being flexible if he so chooses. I think the difference is I don’t levy an expectation that he is. I also don’t think he’s unreasonable for expecting people to be on time in a professional setting.
Maybe we should just be a little lenient to everyone, on principle?
What of the ADD student who gets distracted when someone comes in late? What should we tell them. "Suck it up"
What of the daycare that's expecting you to show up and pick up your kids on time. Should we tell the workers to wait, because the guy replacing you at work was late. Then of course we tell the cleaners of the daycare to start their shift 30 mins later because they have to wait for the last kid to leave. Oh and the cleaners will have to stay 30 min extra to clean, so now we tell the people relying on them to wait. Or.. Or we tell the cleaners to work a bit harder so they don't take an extra 30 minutes..
So the 30min you're late messes up the day of not just the person expecting you, but all the people expecting them.
How about on principle anticipate that you're going to be late, and make an effort to arrive early. If you know you're late all the time, start giving yourself more time.
It is baffling that you are claiming “can’t show up on time” is something professors need to work around as a reasonable accommodation.
In cases where a student shows up 10+ minutes late to a course and disrupts the lecture, what percentage of the time do you estimate the reason for tardiness is a diagnosed or undiagnosed illness or hardship.
Then maybe the easy solution is to make sure anyone showing up late doesn't disrupt anything? That accommodates everyone, is flexible, and does not unfairly punish anyone.
_THAT_ is flexibility.
Isn't it reasonable that we try to disrupt each other as much as possible as a default? It seems odd to force that responsibility onto another party. (ie it's weird to assume the professor is responsible for making sure another adult isn't disruptive)
> Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
On the contrary, your anecdote is evidence of how this seemingly arbitrary behaviour can actually uncover real issues and prompt people to question and investigate.
Why not. I mean if you're expected to come and relieve a co-worker at 5pm, because he has to go get his kids from daycare, and you show up at 5:30 so now the police are at the daycare collecting his kids (because he's waiting for you all the time)
It always baffles me. Make accommodations for your conditions.. So the 30 plus students are meant to have their time interrupted by a late arrival. I have ADD, so when in a class if someone comes in late, I get distracted and can't pay attention. Which person should this prof accomodate? Me with ADD or you.
The "make accommodations" is always argued by the few, against the needs of the many. It's self centred. If waking up is hard, go to be earlier, get a better alarm clock, pick classes later in the day. Make accommodations for your own disability.
My ADD has me working from home, with noise cancelling headphones. I accommodated my own-self.
You seem to think that if everyone were more empathetic, it would be possible to arrange our society so that people with serious un-diagnosed medical conditions never have to miss out on anything important.
Maybe people had ADHD and having students disrupt the class once it began made it hard to stay focused. The professor was making a reasonable accommodation for them and should be celebrated.
As someone who is _often_ late, your inability to be there in time is not someone else's problem. Unfairly punished...gimme a break.
That's a common point of view, but when your disability is never someone else's problem, it becomes waaaaaay harder to manage. You should display more empathy to people that don't follow the norm.
Except in this case, there is no information to the other party that someone has a disability. So the default that we assume someone has a disability is what most people take umbrage with.
I try to be generous as much as is reasonable. I generally assume the person who cuts me off in traffic may have an urgent need, but vaulting every misdeed to an assumption that it's due to some unknown disability crosses into unreasonable territory, if for nothing else than it's probabilistically a bad assumption. Taken to the extreme, it becomes enabling for everyone who does not have a disability but gets away with bad behavior.
Its so strange to me that when it comes to college no one has any empathy whatsoever for students. Its so absurd.
Some people don't have empathy for students regarding this particular subject.
Fifteen minutes late used to be the academic standard in Germany (and other countries): it was noted by “c.t.” in the timetable, meaning “cum tempore”.
When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
> it had already been mostly abolished
c.t. is still standard at many German universities (and at all Bavarian universities I know). However, I know at least one university of applied sciences where lectures start at full hours.
Those are strange annotations; it looks like at least one word is missing. They mean "with time" and "without time".
Tempore is in ablative case, and in english there isn't a good substitute. This means it isn't a static set time event, it has some leeway so to speak. German has the ablative case, so I think it works out for them.
I don’t see why the grammatical cases of Latin and German matter in the interpretation of these abbreviations.
The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.
So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).
"mit" is followed by dative in German. In Latin, ablative and dative are very close and which is very close, a lot of forms are indistinguishable.
That doesn't change anything else you said, though :)
While it's true that many Latin nouns have identical dative and ablative forms, tempus isn't one of those nouns. (In the singular. I think dative and ablative are identical in the plural for every noun.)
And of course, as everyone has already mentioned, spookie's comment is complete nonsense because the case is required, and fully explained, by the prepositions.
It seems to make sense if you interpret it as:
10am c.t. = 10am with extra time
10am s.t. = 10am without extra time
Cum can be translated as 'with', but due to cultural use, it can also be translated as 'in addition'.
Some younger Latin recipes use 'cum sal' as a one-liner at the end, to tell the chef to season to their taste, for example.
> Some younger Latin recipes use 'cum sal' as a one-liner at the end
I have some questions:
1. What cultural use? Are you saying that German culture involves writing recipes in recreational Latin?
2. Why is sal in the nominative case? That can't possibly work.
3. Shouldn't there be a verb? For example, Apicius always ends recipes with a direction like "serve" / "bring in" / "enjoy".
(Technically, those verbs are all in the future indicative, so I guess I shouldn't call them 'directions'. But it's hard to think of them as something other than directions.)
By cultural use, I meant a phrase whose direct translation makes no sense. An idiom ("cultural phrase").
Nominative case - Its how its used. Can't say I've studied the evolution of that particular idiom, but breaking expected rules is not unusual.
There might have been a verb, once. But as with all slang, what gets dropped tends to confuse the foreigner, but be understood to the local.
They sound like appropriate abbreviations to me. Something like: "With time to get to the location" and "Without time to get to the location"
That’s called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing.... (It usually is 15 minutes.)
This is also fast becoming the norm in many big tech companies. The internal calendar tools will pretty much always start meetings 5minutes after the hour/half hour by default and end exactly on the hour/half hour by default (you can override if needed).
It's pretty obvious, you can't travel to a meeting instantly and 100% appreciated when you work in such a place. For those senior enough for all day back to back meetings you get toilet breaks!
If you work in a company that doesn't do this take note and if you're senior in a company you should start pushing for this to be implemented. A lot of calendar tools have options for meeting buffers by default and enabling it is all you need to do.
At my schools and workplaces, meetings or classes would begin when they began, and then several people who mattered would be chronically late, and so whatever we did in the first 5-10 minutes was an utter waste and went down the drain, because the leaders would rewind and repeat it all "for the benefit of those who just joined us."
This was the worst part of being a person who is prompt and on-time for all meetings and events. If you're going to always accommodate people who are chronically late, then you don't respect my time or effort. You just slapped me in the face for being prompt when you rewound your lecture or repeated your introduction. You wasted ten minutes of my time to cater to other people who are [habitually] wasting ten minutes of everyone else's time.
It was horrible and reprehensible, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it or mitigate it. What was I going to do, be late on my own?
I learned about 25 years ago never to be late to anything, particularly an appointment or a job/volunteer role where I'm indispensable. I was fired as a volunteer from a very important role because I was late only once. It was a role which was strictly dependent on timing and promptness. I learned at that very moment, never to be late again, and riding public transit as I did, I always built-in at least 30 minutes of lead time so that I was super-early rather than on-time, or God forbid, late.
At St Andrews University we have the concept of an “Academic hour” where every class and lecture begins at 5 past and ends at 5 to the hour. So your 10:00-11:00 lecture is actually 10:05-10:55. I believe this is mainly to give people time to get between their classes across town and to standardise how much time one has to set up between lectures.
UC Berkeley does this too. Nobody told us freshman, and in my very first class we were all dutifully early, wondering where the professor was, and at 8 minutes after the hour the whole lecture hall was wondering if we needed to bail. Then the lecturer came in and asked what we were all doing there, didn't we know classes don't start until 10 minutes after the listed time?
Our team did the same during the pandemic. They declared that the first 5 minutes of every meeting were for bio breaks.
Now meetings actually start at :05 or :07. The prior meeting will often drag until that time, but you don't feel bad knocking at :00 or :02 and asking for the room to clear.
I'm sure that's where Larry Page got the idea.
Unfortunately UMich ended "Michigan time" back in 2018. I always thought it was a great solution to the problem.
> The 10-minute transition time will move before the hour instead of after the hour. Previously a one-hour class with an official start time of 9:00 a.m. would begin at 9:10 a.m. Under the new policy, class will begin at the official start time but end at 9:50 a.m.
https://www.michiganpublic.org/education/2018-02-20/universi... / https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
Sad.
A rare case of institutional design that respects how people actually behave, not just how they're "supposed" to.