"As each semester progressed, attendance in [the professor's] introductory physics courses fell to 50 percent, as it did, he said, for nearly all of his colleagues...'I had poor attendance, and was failing 10 to 15 percent'"
So, 50 percent of the students aren't coming to class, and they're only failing 10-15 percent? It sounds like the tests are too easy. If the tests were more demanding, more students would come to class--which might (paradoxically) lower the fail rate.
"Unlike in the lectures, attendance counts toward the final grade...[the professor] gauged the level of understanding in the room by throwing out a series of multiple-choice questions. The students “voted” with their wireless “personal response clickers”"
I'm currently a sophomore in Computer Engineering, and I have had several 150+ student lectures that used these clickers to take attendance. It's a simple way to make sure students come to class. This is a major benefit that has nothing to do with smaller class sizes.
You might be right that much or most of the higher pass rate is due to higher attendance, but it's also possible that students were learning plenty from section, the book, and working on problem sets. When I taught the analogous course (Physics 1) at Caltech, many of the students skipped lecture entirely. The failure rate was typically under 5%, and I guarantee it wasn't because the tests were easy.
One student I remember took it all the way: he skipped everything, including homework (which counted for 20% of the grade), but he got perfect scores on all four quizzes and on the final exam. According to the numbers he had an A- because of the 0 on homework, but everyone in the grading room agreed that was absurd, and so we gave him a flat A instead.
First year physics is mostly review for a lot of incoming freshmen, especially if they did one or more AP classes in high school. I'm not suprised that some would do great even skipping the lectures.
When did they put freshmen on grades? When I was at Caltech years ago, first year was pass/fail.
Back then, Goodstein taught phys 1a. Fine lectures, unless you had read the chapter in advance. Then you noticed that his lecture was almost identical to the text, which made it hard to stay awake. Oh, and the retch session were taught by full profs, not grad students, so a lot of learning happened outside of lecture.
Highly qualified students have the option to test out of the different terms of Physics 1. (I know because I graded the placement tests for five years.) I suppose some of them take the course anyway to get an easy A, but this guy I'm talking about aced Physics 1c analytical track, an E&M course that uses Purcell, and very few high schools cover material that advanced. (It's well beyond even AP Physics C material.)
Regarding grades, here's how it shakes out nowadays:
Shadow grades don't appear on your report card, and they don't count towards your GPA, but they are used for internal scholarship awards and recommendations.
Recitation section TAs in physics have been a mix of professors and grad students for as long as anyone can remember. Virtually without exception the best TAs were grad students (as measured by student reviews, section sizes, and exam results), though some of the professors weren't bad either. This jibed with my undergrad experience at Harvard: almost all my physics professors sucked, and by far my best instructor was the 22-year-old grad student who taught my freshman physics section.
Basically all classes at Caltech are curved. It actually makes a lot of sense, because it means you can make the tests really hard and leave plenty of room at the top, which among other things helps reduce the variance due to careless errors. (If you make a couple minor minus sign mistakes, but nail a hard problem most people miss, you still come out ahead.) In Physics 1, typically 90%+ was A+, ~82-89% was A.
I pulled this trick in my entry-level calculus class in college. They were so generous with extra credit that my marks should have meant that I got an A. But I didn't do any of the homework and the TA decided to punish me with an A-. I suppose I should have fought, but I'm epically lazy.
Lesson: if you're going to do something like this, don't assume that the people on the other end will hold up their end of the implied bargain. Either fight or do some token tribute.
or even their end of the /explicit/ bargain.
I had a prof fail me, after announcing that the final grade would be the class grade.
I never went to class, so he felt justified in ignoring my A-/B+... took me awhile to get over that slight.
While I can see where you're coming from, a few other factors need to be taken into consideration.
One of MIT's greatest strengths (and arguably weaknesses) is the sheer "atmosphere" of working on your classes. The line between directly school-related stuff and other stuff is very blurred. While of course it's true that homework and tests impact the lives of students at any and every school, I think it's fair to say MIT takes it to another level. And not just with direct things like giving lots of homework and tests - I often felt like it was easier to find an Athena cluster (what MIT computer labs are called) than a drinking fountain or a snack machine. Because of this atmosphere, the emphasis on necessarily attending lecture is lessened, as there is more of a "continuous" feel to each class, which might include going to lecture, recitation (which is often much more valuable than lecture but doesn't get included in the "50 percent" quote from the article), study groups, office hours, and more. Now, does this devolve into problem set copying for some students? Definitely. But overall the atmosphere was definitely there. Because of this, it's misleading to focus on a number like "50% of students aren't coming to class", as attending lecture is just one part of the equation.
I should add as a disclaimer that I never took a TEAL class at MIT, or even a physics class (something I regret). So, while I have perspective on the school as a whole, my perspective is still that of an outsider when it comes to the physics department.
As a side note, personally, I kind of hated the atmosphere because people often adopted a "woe is me" attitude as semesters went on. You'd be amazed how hard it is to get an MIT student to commit to spending an hour or two attending a potentially worthwhile event, in spite of the fact that they'll easily burn that much time complaining about their workload in just about any given week. At the same time, I liked the overall philosophy which really seemed to encourage pushing yourself to the limit. The Institute allows things a lot of other schools don't, such as for a student to take 6 or more classes in a term without special petition or paying extra, as well as for students to take classes that conflict (it's pretty hard to fit 7 or 8 classes into a schedule otherwise)....
I got an A+ in one of my courses without attending a single lecture (it was in an inconvenient time slot... which is why I didn't even go to the first lecture), and I enjoyed the course a lot more than most of my friends who did go to the lectures.
Don't overestimate the value of lectures. Sometimes a bad professor can do more harm than good to the learning process, especially for something you actually find interesting.
So, 50 percent of the students aren't coming to class, and they're only failing 10-15 percent? It sounds like the tests are too easy. If the tests were more demanding, more students would come to class--which might (paradoxically) lower the fail rate.
"Unlike in the lectures, attendance counts toward the final grade...[the professor] gauged the level of understanding in the room by throwing out a series of multiple-choice questions. The students “voted” with their wireless “personal response clickers”"
I'm currently a sophomore in Computer Engineering, and I have had several 150+ student lectures that used these clickers to take attendance. It's a simple way to make sure students come to class. This is a major benefit that has nothing to do with smaller class sizes.