As we settled into the MIT routine, Shantanu and I began independently to arrive at the same subversive but increasingly obvious conclusion: The giant lecture classes were a monumental waste of time. Three hundred students crammed into a stifling lecture hall; one professor droning through a talk he knew by heart and had delivered a hundred times before. The sixty-minute talks were bad enough; the ninety-minute talks were torture. What was the point? Was this education or an endurance contest?
This last sentence reminds me of Bryan Caplan's book regarding the theory of signaling. It states that part of the value of undergrad is to demonstrate a level of endurance.
