John Hopecroft. Photo provided by the interviewee

"I'm primarily a teacher."

As the winner of the Turing Award, the highest award in the computer field, John Hopcroft, a professor at Cornell University in the United States, pays more attention to his role as an educator. As a postgraduate supervisor, most of his doctoral students graduated within 3 years, and 3 students who worked closely with him also won the Turing Award. But he preferred to devote himself to teaching undergraduates, and he has been teaching undergraduates since 1964.

A large number of Chinese students have also been taught by him. From December 2011, he began to teach students from Shanghai Jiaotong University, Peking University and other domestic universities. He has mentioned on many occasions that freshmen from top Chinese universities are of higher quality than freshmen from top American universities, but after three or four years, the latter tend to surpass their Chinese counterparts in terms of knowledge and ability student.

Another thing surprised him—he had spared no effort to help Chinese universities recruit teachers, but after two years, these new teachers all left. The reason, he got the answer is that the school's general environment only pays attention to research funding and the number of papers published, but does not care about the quality of teaching.

From this, John Hopcroft concluded that there is a problem with the quality of education in Chinese universities. He often said that the mission of a university is to cultivate the next generation of talents, not to engage in research; if a university president wants to enhance the reputation and influence of the school, he needs to focus on improving the quality of teaching.

Based on the above considerations, as a visiting chair professor of Peking University, he and Gao Wen, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor of Peking University, jointly launched the "Excellent Teacher Award Program for Computer Majors in Colleges and Universities" in 2018, aiming to promote colleges and universities to pay more attention to undergraduate classroom teaching .

Moreover, the 2016 recipient of the Chinese government's "Friendship Award" wanted to do more.

On November 18, 2021, when meeting with Minister of Education Huai Jinpeng, he proposed plans and ideas to further promote teaching reform in the field of computer science. This spawned a new plan. Soon, at the end of the year, the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education decided to implement a pilot work plan for undergraduate education and teaching reform in the computer field (hereinafter referred to as "101 Plan") in some colleges and universities.

The plan proposes to take the lead in building a number of first-class core courses in the computer field, develop a number of first-class core teaching materials, establish a high-level core teacher team, build a number of core practice projects, and explore a new model for cultivating high-quality talents in the computer field.

In addition to being a professor at Cornell University, John Hopcroft is also the director of the Frontier Computing Research Center of Peking University, the director of the John Hopcroft Computer Science Center of Shanghai Jiaotong University, and the Hopcroft of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Director of the Ford Computational Science Research Center. Now, he and his wife first work in China for 3 months, and then return to the United States for 3 months, taking turns in this rhythm.

In mid-July, as soon as the 83-year-old man arrived in Beijing, he accepted an exclusive interview with "China Science Daily" and talked freely about the story behind the "101 Project" and his own educational philosophy. There is a hexagonal reception table in front of his desk, every visitor can sit and communicate with him on an equal footing.

"If you really understand relativity, you can explain it to high school students"

"China Science Daily": You have worked in China for many years, what is the most important thing in your work? Is it the "101 Program" or the "Excellent Teacher Award Program for Computer Science in Colleges and Universities"?

John Hopcroft: Both projects are important and both will have a big impact. One such influence is teaching evaluation. We are doing the teaching evaluation of computer science in the top 40 universities in China. After the annual evaluation, I will write to the principals of these schools and tell them whether their school is ranked in the top 1/3, the middle 1/3 or the bottom 1/3. . They should have realized that the evaluation of universities is no longer based on research funding, number of papers and international rankings, but on teaching quality (Editor's Note: In the implementation, the evaluation is carried out in the form of the "Excellent Teacher Award Program for Computer Science in Colleges and Universities" of).

The quality of teaching in these 40 universities started to improve and attracted attention. Currently, the Ministry of Education is discussing with me how to expand the program. Because the vast majority of students do not have the chance to enter the top 40 universities, the Ministry of Education wants to extend the program to more disciplines at 1,500 Chinese universities. In this way, the quality of education in Chinese universities will be greatly improved.

"China Science Daily": What is the background of the "101 Project"?

John Hopcroft: "Project 101" has two main components, one is classroom teaching and the other is lesson plans.

The first is teaching. In order to assess the quality of teaching, I sat in on a large number of courses. I told the Minister of Education of China such a thing: There was a class taught by a first-class teacher. At the beginning, every student was very involved, listening to the class carefully and taking notes; but in the middle of the class, she wrote down a mathematical theorem on the blackboard and spent 20 minutes to prove it. At this time, half of the students stopped focusing on listening to the lecture, but took out their mobile phones.

Every teacher has his own style and we should not force change. So I just told the teacher my observation above, and asked her, "What do you think should be done?" She said, "The students may not understand that mathematical theorem, and I should give the students an intuitive version that is easier to understand." I continued to ask her: "Six months from now, what do you want students to remember from your course?" She thought for a while and said, maybe it's not the theorem she spent 20 minutes proving, but the need to understand key idea.

Therefore, the current practice of the "101 Project" is that the teacher will observe a few classes, but will not tell the teacher what to do, but discuss the situation observed in the classroom, and let the teacher decide whether to adjust the teaching method .

The other part is the lesson plan. I had only cooperated with some of the top 40 universities in China before, and the vice mayor in charge of education in Shanghai asked me if I would like to visit other universities. When I visited these schools, I realized that they are very different from the key universities - the teachers of the key universities are fluent in English, and they can observe for themselves what the current international universities are teaching and obtain the most advanced teaching materials; but University teachers at the bottom of the rankings are not fluent in English, and you need to "feed" them the Chinese version of the teaching content.

Therefore, "Project 101" invited the best teachers in China to write Chinese teaching plans, and the teaching plans they compiled were all very good.

However, there are also some problems.

Taking mathematics as an example, all I have observed so far are teaching plans for advanced courses such as topology. If you want to be a mathematician, if you work in one of the top universities in China, then such a teaching plan is very good. However, the vast majority of students who come to the class are not math majors and require general-level courses such as linear algebra.

Therefore, we need to send the written materials to more universities so that more people can see if they are suitable. If it doesn't fit, we should take the original version as an honors course while writing a regular course version. We can ask some high-quality teachers in ordinary universities to try out these teaching plans to see if they are suitable for ordinary students, because they know what level of content is suitable for ordinary students and can make appropriate adjustments to the corresponding content as needed.

"China Science Daily": What skills or experience do you have in effectively explaining complex and obscure issues?

John Hopcroft: For teachers, the most important thing is to really understand complex content and reduce it to language that anyone can understand. Don't use advanced jargon, if you really understand relativity, you can explain it to high school students. Therefore, the most important thing for a good teacher is to know how to explain complex problems in a simple way.

Top Universities PK: China wins in freshmen, America wins in graduates

"China Science Daily": You have educational work experience in many countries. Can these experiences be applied to China?

John Hopcroft: Some countries' experiences have not been successful. In countries like Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, India, etc., the government doesn't see education as a priority, so there's very little I can do. I try to improve education in these countries, although I can help some teachers and students by teaching lessons or talking, etc., but I cannot help these countries improve the quality of education systematically.

However, when I came to China, I found that there is a lot of emphasis on education. China believes that the competitiveness of a country in the future is talent, and those countries that improve their education systems will become world powers. When I tell the Chinese government something they can do to improve education, they do it on a small scale. After about a year, they'll evaluate it, and if it's really working, they'll expand it. They are open to any idea that might work, see if it works; if it works, they take it.

"China Science Daily": You mentioned the comparison between freshmen and graduates of top universities in China and the United States. Can you talk about more details?

John Hopcroft: Talent is evenly distributed in terms of quantity, so China has four times as many talents as the United States. But in the United States, no matter which university you go to, you can get a good education. As a result, America's talent is widely distributed across more than 200 universities. But in China, everyone wants to go to a top 10 university, so the quality of freshmen at top Chinese universities is indeed world-class, much higher than the quality of freshmen at top US universities. However, the quality of graduates from top U.S. universities is higher, and I think this is due to the higher quality of education in U.S. universities.

In fact, when I first came to China, I found that some teachers did not teach at all, they just showed the slides to the students. Things are different now, if teachers don't teach, they get bad grades.

Another difference between China and the United States is that the United States has produced enough scientists and engineers to meet the needs of the country. If governments need to solve a problem, they only need to hire people from national labs; if companies need to solve a problem, they only need to hire employees. Therefore, cultivating the next generation of talents is the sole mission of American universities.

In contrast, there are not enough scientists and engineers in China, so Chinese universities have two missions: one is to train the next generation of talents, and the other is to help the government and enterprises carry out applied research, and the second mission may interfere with the first. a mission.

China Science Daily: Do you think we should have some professors focus on research and others on teaching?

John Hopcroft: I can tell you how America does it. For example, Stanford University in the United States has a dedicated applied research institution, and its positions are separated from teaching positions. Applied researchers will move out of the campus with the institution, they are not teaching staff, and their salaries do not use the school's teaching funds, but are paid by their employers. The research institute has no relationship with Stanford except in name, nor is its director appointed by Stanford.

So, we have to separate these two tasks and keep them independent. But this first needs to train enough scientists and engineers in China, so that there are enough people to do research work.

'I'm primarily a teacher'

"China Science Daily": Can you talk about the artificial intelligence model? What impact will ChatGPT have on education?

John Hopcroft: I don't think it will have much impact on education. The bottom line is that a good education is not about how smart the teacher is, or what he can explain, but about whether he cares about the success of his students.

ChatGPT may help in automating existing tasks. We should realize that we are going through a revolution in which the number of jobs will decrease and only a small number of people will be needed to provide us with all the goods and services we need. How will we restructure society when the vast majority of people have no jobs? We have to get people interested in travel, music, shows, sports or whatever.

This may sound like a big change, but if you look back at history, 95% of the population in the United States worked in agriculture before the industrial revolution, but only 5% today; new jobs have emerged in manufacturing. And today, when jobs in manufacturing are disappearing and being automated, you don’t know what new jobs you’re going to have in the future, and they might be nothing like what you expected.

"China Science Daily": China's education authorities are encouraging the teaching of history of science at the undergraduate level. What do you think of this?

John Hopcroft: I think that's a good thing. If you don't understand the past, you're likely to repeat it; knowing the history gives you a better perspective on the future. The purpose of college education is to help a student live a happy life, not to help him find a high-paying job. Get rid of too narrow a focus and expose students to all things in life.

"China Science Daily": Stanford University and Cornell University are both excellent universities with high international rankings. What do you think is the reason?

John Hopcroft: The reason why American universities rank high is that they recruit many high-quality doctoral students from China. We should teach doctoral students how to do research, but some teachers ask doctoral students to help them do research, which is not appropriate.

The purpose of doctoral students coming to university is to receive education, not to become "workers". Most of my PhD students graduate within 3 years because instead of making them do research, I teach them how to do research. Three of the students I worked closely with won the Turing Award, and a fourth won the physics prize second only to the Nobel Prize. I think the reason they do so well is that I let them do things that interest them. If I let them follow my work, they probably wouldn't be as successful.

"Chinese Journal of Science": What kind of students do you like?

John Hopcroft: I like anyone who wants to learn because I like to help the curious. If someone is knowledgeable, thinks they know it all, and always gets bonus points, I'm not that interested in him. But if someone really wants to learn, and puts in the effort, I'd be fine giving my time to help.

"China Science Daily": In your life, is the main role a scientist or a teacher?

John Hopcroft: I am primarily a teacher. I just use science as a way for me to solve problems, some of which is figuring out what to teach. Turns out, something I developed that was supposed to be taught turned into world-class science.

It is fortunate that the times of change and opportunity are everywhere. I was one of the first computer scientists in the world. When I was in my 40s, the President of the United States appointed me to the National Science and Technology Council. Generally speaking, people usually don't get such a job until their 60s.

(Original title "China's Higher Education in the Eyes of a Turing Award Winner - Why China's Top Students Win Enrollment, but Lose at Graduation")