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taelor comments on Calibrate your self-assessments - Less Wrong
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The only (unfortunate) major difference between the English[0] and Irish university systems is that most English degrees take three years Ireland has been steadily moving towards four for decades. We have the same grading system for degrees, the same (old) academic calendar with some universities having adopted the American one. I am not under the impression that the manner of teaching is wildly different in the US from the rest of the world (except for the abombination that is the Socratic method, in that other abombination, the postgraduate law school). They do seem to be much more fond of multiple choice tests than in those parts of the world with more dialects of English.
[0] I could probably have said British, but the Scottish system is different in some ways I'm too lazy to look up.
On the Socratic method; I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about that or could write an article on the benefits and consequences of it. From what I see is that the above average students get frustrated when the jump to conclusions faster than the teachers guide the class to them, and the below average students who consistently aren't understanding the questions, with the Socratic method really only working for the average students (this scale though can be re-calibrated, for example if the teacher caters the to the below average students, now the average students are also frustrated, and vice versa.)
The main problem with using the Socratic Method as a didactic tool is that it really wasn't intended for that purpose; Socrates was a man who claimed to know nothing, and the "Socratic method" is simply a collection of techniques he developed to demonstrate that other people didn't know anything either. 90% of his so-called Method (as demonstrated in the early dialogues like Euthyphro or Charmides -- which have the highest probability of actually being representative of things he actually said, and not just mouthpiecing from Plato) consists of Socrates demanding that people define their terms, refusing to continue the argument until they did so, and then pointing out that the definitions they supply are either self-contradictory or inconsistent with what they're actually arguing. When used correctly, the Socratic method is great at exposing logical inconsistency and self- contradiction, but extremely inefficient when it comes to guiding people to truth -- its purpose is to destroy; it does not create.
That's really interesting; maybe we need a new name for the (convoluted) modern Socratic method?