Quote:
Originally posted by Count Iblis II:
I just looked in the preface of the book ''Topics In Advanced Quantum Mechanics'', by Barry R. Hollstein. It says that he wrote it from his lecture notes of a course he taught to graduate students. But this book is is used for third year undergraduate students.

Graduate students here usually don't follow any classes. They start with their Ph.D. research right away. They do have to learn things, but they do that themselves from the literature.
Yes, and J.D. Jackson in the standard senior text for E&M at CalTech (or was 20 years ago). I found that my education in Quantum was sufficient to give me a big edge in grad school, but in other subjects (e.g. mechanics) I had to work as hard as the rest.

And this proves that one can call showing videos and telling stories is passable as teaching how?

Yes, the American secondary education is not as advanced as elsewhere. I had to go to community college starting in my 3rd year in high school in order to do math. Current trends in the US are trying to correct this by allowing H.S. students to take calculus and other advanced courses.

My first year class was largely chinese, taiwanese, US and European students. On the qualifying exam (taken at the start of the 2nd year), the Chinese scored the best, the Taiwanese the second best and the US and European students were pretty much tied. My advisor used to brag that his first group of 3 students "did as best as the worst Chinese". That said, I didn't see that the European students were that much better prepared than their US counterparts.

Also, my experience (and maybe this has changed since I was a grad student) was that UK students were often under a lot of pressure to finish in 3 years, before state support ran out. I find that this put them at a severe disadvantage in doing a complete research project. Basically, given the long time for a US Ph.D., a good U.S. Ph.D. is often (but not always) comparable to a UK Post-doc.

I have not found the same to be the case with students from France, Germany or Holland. However, I have much less experience with them.