Friday, September 21, 2007

Some Thoughts About Recaps

So today's course on Probabilistic Modelling started, not surprisingly, with a recap of basic probability theory. I'm not objecting to that, and there were clearly people in the class who have not done probability before. However, I had the same recap last year for a Modelling and Simulation course, and the year before that for an Artificial Intelligence course.

The repetitiveness of it got me thinking: Why waste time on all these separate recaps? Wouldn't a much more elegant solution be to organise one class of one or two hours a year which recaps probability theory, and everybody who needs it could go there?

Sure, there might be scheduling problems, but it still seems better than to subject everyone to the same recap, and force three different lecturers to teach the same material at roughly the same time. And I'm sure probability theory is not the only subject that recurs frequently in recaps.

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