You can probably change before your academic fourth year (end of second or third). If you've already taken all the credits to be promoted to fourth year it might not make a lot of sense to change your degree in fourth year and have to worry about taking more courses and hitting credit limits (I would study the academic calendar and maybe talk to an advisor). Of course this depends on what major you're going to be in, especially if it doesn't have a lot of requirements. If it has a lot of requirements it might be a better idea to aim for a combined major between your favoured specialization and your current one, or to do a minor instead.
yjk
joined 1 year ago
From Educational_North384: Changing specilization in 4th year? Unfortunately, I got rejected by all three specializations I applied to in my second year of science. Currently, I have 54 credits. I really want to get into the math/stats major, but the only option available to me now is the Combined Major (3096): Science. Is there any chance for me to change my specialization in my fourth year? Thanks for any suggestions.
It definitely feels bad but I think it's not the fault of the system, there's just not enough resources to make everyone happy. I would argue making you choose your program when you enter from high school just shifts the time frame and furthermore is a worse predictor of success in university. Of course the ideal solution is to just increase resources in popular faculties, but that's not part of the system.
Also, I don't see the argument for why rejects shouldn't have priority over people who want to do that degree. On the practical side of things, that will just lead to people who want to do CS just try to estimate the admission average and apply to math as their first choice if they don't like their chances. It also really diminishes the point of ranking your specialisations if you know your application is going to get discounted for your second and third choices.
It would be interesting, however, to compare where the marks come from for cs rejects vs people who want to do math as a major. Maybe there's a large population of people who only want CS, and take easy courses to boost their grade. Curbing the effectiveness of that strategy would be a good way to equalize things.
I think it's a fucked up situation that doesn't really have a solution. Would love to hear any ideas y'all have.
From atom9408:
this is insane. ubc has gotta do something with this.
it must have been the spillover of people who didn't get into cs choosing math and stats as their backup and taking the seats from people who actually went to uni to do math or stats. this is actually ridiculous. another reason why this whole general first year thing is bullshit and harms students.
like i genuinely feel so terrible to have to take part in this system to take seats from other students. first year is a rough adjustment. i don’t know why they make it to be the most important year for science students.
Great work, but honestly this should just be a feature in lemmy itself (detect third party cookie from home community and auto-redirect). I think there are a few open issues on the topic.
From Illustrious-Mix948:
I am taking MATH302, MATH215, STAT 200 and BIOL 111 together in term 1. Can anyone know what will be the difficulty level and workload? I want to add another STAT/MATH/ECON course, should I? Please help!
I am taking MATH210, ECON 102, STAT 305 and STAT 306 together in term 2. Can anyone know what will be the difficulty level and workload? I want to add another STAT/MATH/ECON course, should I? Please help!
I've taken CPSC 121, not MATH 341, so I'm basing my answer off the syllabus at https://personal.math.ubc.ca/~solymosi/341/341.html. I have also worked through part of generatingfunctionology, which is mentioned in the syllabus.
Based on the course outline there doesn't seem to be much material you need to know that you didn't learn in 121. The other courses also have little to no focus on the topics in the class, so I think the point of the pre-reqs is the ability to think mathematically and prove things (as 223 and 226 are both honours courses, and 220 is a proof course). It might help to read a mathematical proof book (I hear How to Prove It by Velleman is a good starting point).
From georgebush0000: Hello, has anyone ever taken CPSC 121 and MATH 341 (introduction to discrete math)? If so, did you find that CPSC 121 alone gave you adequate preparation for the course? Because I was kind of surprised to see that MATH 341's pre-reqs are just "one of MATH 220, 223, 226 or CPSC 121". I've only taken math up to MATH 12 or precalculus 12 but did quite alright in CPSC 121 and found the course content super interesting. I appreciate any advice!
What about mirroring certain discussion posts/comments (by hand, just crossposting them) from reddit to here, and answering them here?
Subbed to sfu and upvoted posts. Lemmy probably will need all the support it can get. Interesting to see the cs bias on here.
CNPS 363 is repeated.
tbh I never understood the point of taking electives or gpa boosters (unless you're first year or premed). Courses that are in my specialization or adjacent to it seem much more interesting.
though some of these topics intrigue me I'd prefer to learn about them on my own time (though I guess it's hard to do so for Counselling/Leadership/Negotiation courses), without any pressure, and having more autonomy on what I learn about.
Top comment from u/threads_of_measure:
tl;dr: both the UBC prof mentioned in OP’s article (Dr. Mohammad Arjmand) AND the author of OP’s article (Dr. Leonid Schneider) seem a bit sketchy. The author of OP’s article has been sued multiple times for libel and in at least one case a German court has ruled against him for the German equivalent of libel. To be clear there is a lot of stuff in OP’s article that ranges from concerning to scandalous, but it's presented in a completely scattershot and rather unsubstantiated way that is a giant red flag for me. That being said, personally if I were a prospective student I would wait on publishing/working with Dr. Arjmand until I had first talked to other people in the material engineering field who aren’t his coauthors or have significant personal interest in his reputation about the stuff raised in OP’s article. Research misconduct is surprisingly hard to prove but UBC does investigate this stuff on their own and has kicked multiple faculty out for doing research misconduct before.
I'm not going to comment one way or the other on whether or not Dr Arjmand is guilty of research misconduct because engineering is no where close to my area of STEM and it's a rather weighty accusation to throw around. However, there's a lot of things about the blog post OP linked to that made the allegations as well as that blog in general that seem more than a bit off and just rubbed me the wrong way which I'd like to talk about.
If you want to publicly accuse someone of research misconduct it's usually a good idea to get someone in their field to look over your evidence first instead of just publishing it in your own (obviously not peer reviewed) blog. After talking with people in that field you are more sure that research misconduct has occurred, there are multiple avenues to try and address this such as filing a report with the funding agency (who usually have a dedicated process/team to review research misconduct), the journal the published in if they published in a credible journal, or if they didn’t publish in a legit journal you can write up your findings and get that published in a legit peer reviewed journal.
I would like to compare OPs article to another article alleging research misconduct (fraudulent data) that I think is a good example of what this looks like when it is done right. That example is the following paper, where the authors allege a case of research misconduct around fabricated data where a team of researchers published a paper using fabricated bird genomes: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305197821000417
First things to notice is that in the owl paper the authors have the relevant expertise to judge whether fraud occurred (it is their sub field) and their article is published in a peer reviewed journal where the reviewers would also have the necessary expertise. That is not true for OP’s article. While Dr. Schneider does have a formal academic background and had a research career, he’s a cell biologist not an engineer and describes himself as an “independent scientist” with no current institutional affiliation. The lack of current institutional affiliation is a red flag, but by itself not immediately discrediting, in that you can get away with things as an "independent scientist" that you can't get away with when you are accountable to an institution.
Second thing to note is that in the fake bird genomes paper it is abundantly clear who they are accusing and what they are specifically accusing them of doing – even going out of their way to bring in what research misconduct is understood to be and how their accusation meets that fields definition. With the forbetterscience article we don’t get this focus and clarity, instead the author puts Dr. Arjmand at the center of some sort of research misconduct sh*tshow but the author also brings in other names left and right, sometimes trying to use past allegations of misconduct as evidence against Dr. Arjmand and other times the connection is alluded to but isn’t that clear. At sometimes he’s accusing Arjmand, at other times his coworkers, sometimes he’s railing against the field general, “science” as a whole, various references to “chinese papermills” or “iranian papermills” (Schneider really goes out of his way to mention if someone/something is from a non-western country, particularly China), and so on. There is a similar issue with the “what” aspect of Dr Schneiders accusations are in that he dumps a slurry of things that if true would be a huge deal (making up data/graphs altogether) mixed in with things that are bad but not super bad (messing up the scale bars on graphs) and don’t meet the “deliberate intention to deceive” standard that has be met for something to be actual research misconduct of the fraud variety. To top it off everything is written in this scandalized tone where everything is the most serious, egregious, how could anyone do this tone.
This scattershot approach of guilt-by-association and mixing together of accusations is what got Dr. Schneider in trouble with the German legal system where he was successfully sued by two coworkers of someone who was absolutely guilty of research misconduct, however, those two coworkers weren’t the guilty parties and Schneider accused them of research misconduct anyways without having the evidence to back it up.
Article here: http://blogs.mediapart.fr/seraya-maouche/blog/060117/entretien-avec-leonid-schneider-l-integrite-scientifique-et-la-justice-allemande Google translation here: http://blogs-mediapart-fr.translate.goog/seraya-maouche/blog/060117/entretien-avec-leonid-schneider-l-integrite-scientifique-et-la-justice-allemande?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en
Third set of things to note is the specific length that the authors of the fake bird genomes paper go to show evidence for each of their specifically enumerated accusations. They restate the specific accusation, they show their evidence for making that accusation, and then they discuss why that specific misdeed is bad and what the impacts are for the field. They got everything in the correct form so it is very easy for someone with knowledge of the field to evaluate their specific conclusions. The evaluating the substance part is trickier and I really think unless you have experience with a specific field it can be easy to get things wrong which is why I’m comfortable looking at the bird genomes paper and saying “oh yeah, those are some fake ass genomes” and am not comfortable saying whether or not Dr Arjmand is guilty of research misconduct.
Second to last thing to note is just the overall tone and worldview of the writing. The tone of the forbetterscience.com author comes across as unserious, self-absorbed, bitter towards the profession as a whole, frivolous and rather callous towards all of the people he is talking about which is a huge problem given the heavy weight of the accusations he is leveling. If you are doing something that could end/derail someones career you should take that seriously enough to write clearly and professionally. From reading the machine translated article on the German defamation case, Dr. Schneider also has a bit of a victim complex going on where he is constantly saying things like “it is obvious that Germany views blogging and whistle blowing as such a despicable activity that someone like me is guilty in default”. Because it’s a machine translation I don’t want to put too much weight on how he comes off but the tone seems consistent with the tone on his blog, which is that he is the lone truth teller against a hopelessly corrupt institution and the world is out to get him.
And finally to make a point about his unserious writing when making accusations:
The real problem here is UBC. Ethics for them is something to wipe their bottoms with while they count the money they make with bad science.
As far as bad scientific methods go, there is this thing called cherry picking your data where you sift through all the data and pull out the data points that support your argument and discard (without mentioning or accounting for) all of the data that don't support your argument. Dr. Schneider is cherry picking anecdotes of research misconduct, some well established and others less so, to argue that UBC “wipes it’s bottom” with research ethics. If you want to say that UBC as an entire university is the problem here you need to show me what the standard for research universities is for handling research misconduct and then show me how UBC is not meeting that standard by either not doing what they are supposed to do or going out of their way to cover up for bad actors. This is necessary because the unfortunate reality is that at a sufficiently large institution you will have bad actors that will attempt some kind of misconduct, of the HR type or research ethics variety, and the measure of the institution isn’t that the presence/absence of cases but how the cases are handled. Schneider can’t be bothered to do that, but he doesn’t let that stop him from trashing an entire university.