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Comment by buildbot | Hacker News Reader

Every professor has their own style, most of the ones I had were very open that office hours were a pretty great way to get help/more targeted hints on what to study. This isn’t in my opinion, a problem. Their goal is to educate you as best as possible in theory, via classes, homework, and office hours. Students who take the time and effort to attend office hours clearly want to at least pretend to be putting in extra effort, so why wouldn’t they out more effort into helping them learn? I doubt that they are directly giving away test answers.

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In an astrophysics class I had in college , the professor called on a student to solve a problem, he got it wrong, and the professor said "if you would come to my office hours you would know how to solve this" - the students response was something along the lines of "sorry, my parents are crackheads so I need to work two jobs to pay for school"

Plot twist - the student's dad was the professor.

I think once they start having homework in kindergarten "doing all the class work during class" is a goal that won't be reached.

With all empathy that sucks and is not fair - but should office hours be removed because one student could not attend?

Many of the professors I have worked with that I respect have different methods for helping these students- for example sending them an email after class, offering explicit direct help & advice. Or connecting them with a better job, or a research position.

No, office hours shouldn't be removed. Perhaps professors should just not reward people who come to office hours beyond the extra instruction that is given. Eg no special knowledge communicated solely in office hours("this question is going to be on the test next week"), and no special treatment ("this student got the wrong answer but I know from office hours they're trying really hard so I'll give them some extra points")

Fully agree, a hint should be at most about which subjects to focus on - and ideally that’s something they said in class too.

The problem with targeted exam hints on what to study is that it can create situations where a student who understood the material better overall and put in more effort studying all the material equally, scores lower than someone who simply happened to get hints from the professor. If your actual goal is to educate, you shouldn't give exam hints, and especially not one-on-one.

For sure - I think my definition of an exam hint is more like, study these subjects or “yes, data structures of some kind will be tested, but don’t worry about sorting algorithms.”

Not specific hints or answers, that’s obvious favoritism

For many profs the goal is to spend as little as possible time with students, so that they can spend more time with their research career, than lectures for students or hours after the lectures. For that they employ students, who have passed the exams. Teaching is merely a necessary annoyance to them.

IMO the really good ones want to do both, teach undergrads and get them enthusiastic about their research, win win. This what happened to me, with FPGAs & the LHC of all things, and is hugely responsible for where I ended up in my career!

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