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The amount of effort I've seen others apply towards getting straight As has led me to believe that they have been misled on priorities. They essentially asked a

The amount of effort I've seen others apply towards getting straight As has led me to believe that they have been misled on priorities. They essentially asked as children "what does it take to be successful", received "straight As" as the response, and then ran with it. Although it ended up working out for those I knew who went into medicine, for those who went into other fields I can't help but think that they would have been better off spending time actually learning something else, whatever it may have been, as opposed to trying to please their teachers without really learning anything. Being a hard worker is a great virtue, but effort needs direction otherwise it might be wasted, or worse, destructive.

WalterBright 8y ago
> trying to please their teachers without really learning anything. If they got an A without learning anything, they took courses taught by incompetents. That's not an indictment of schooling in general.
- waterhouse 8y ago
  The way grades work these days (most recent source: a friend who graduated public high school in Palo Alto in 2014), a large fraction of the grade is doing homework. Lots of homework. Enough that the friend I'm thinking of was often awake into the a.m. doing it. It's not that he had to spend that much time to learn the subject for the test; he probably could have dropped half or more of his homework and still done fine on the tests. The trouble is, if he did that, even if he got perfect scores on the tests, he would have gotten Cs or worse in the overall grade, because of the portion that is homework. This friend decided he wanted to play the game and max out his grades because he wanted official recognition (he did get into Harvard later). Another friend, probably equally intelligent, did drop a bunch of homework, did get Cs, and had a rough time with college admissions (through a string of luck and outside intervention involving setting up a meeting with a Fields Medalist professor at Berkeley who then advocated for him, he managed to get into Berkeley). Both friends are now doing math PhDs. I, myself, also dropped a bunch of homework, also got Cs, and left high school after 10th grade, and never went to college. I subsequently studied programming on my own, and have been employed doing that for nearly four years.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    Caltech also had an institute policy that if you aced the final, you got an A, even if you never did any of the homework. There were students who did that (google Hal Finney), but alas I did not have that kind of wattage upstairs. I could not do well on the finals unless I mastered every last homework problem, which often involved getting help from my ever-indulgent roommate (thank you, Mark!).
    - waterhouse 8y ago
      That would be an improvement. I think, more generally, students should be able to choose to make their grade depend entirely on their test scores. (Knowing all the material on a test is much different from acing it; you have to be thoroughly checking your work multiple times to reliably achieve perfect scores. I've taken a decent number of math contents where the winners were basically determined by "who makes the fewest careless mistakes?". It is good for a person to be able to do that, but by that point it's measuring a different skill. Having a higher ceiling is much better—but teachers like to have the grade be "number correct / number of problems".) If you didn't answer the 10 homework problems designed to make you practice the law of cosines, but you correctly applied the law of cosines on a quiz and a later test, how is it justifiable to take points away? It seems to me that a student's grade should be the best available estimate of their ability in, knowledge of, and perhaps interest in, a subject. If a teacher knowingly gives a C to a student in the above type of situation, that seems to me like lying. And if the tests aren't enough, in total, to make a decent stab at measuring all relevant aspects of the subject matter being taught, then that seems to be a deficiency in the tests. Maybe some subjects need take-home projects because a timed test simply isn't a good format to demonstrate some skills, but grading down for the lack of regular drill-type homework seems indefensible to me. (I wouldn't make all the students switch over to being graded solely on tests, because some probably do like the current system, and because there are reasonable arguments that a high-pressure timed test is especially bad for some students and isn't a good reflection of how well they'd do real work. Similar arguments may be made about coding interviews.) Another, possibly more important, reason to oppose required grading of drill-type homework: It basically forces everyone to follow the same study program. (Well, they can study more on top of it, but they can't follow any study program that doesn't include doing all of those problems.) Given the range of human variation, this single study program is going to be suboptimal for lots of people. That's a problem in itself, but moreover, it gives students no incentive to try out different studying approaches and learn what is best for them. Then, when they go to a more unsupervised environment, where the problems are hard and studying really is important, they may be totally unprepared. Some may rapidly seize upon decent studying methods, others may just fail miserably. (I've heard this is a classic failure mode of smart kids who go to college.)

WalterBright 8y ago

> trying to please their teachers without really learning anything. If they got an A without learning anything, they took courses taught by incompetents. That's not an indictment of schooling in general.

waterhouse 8y ago
The way grades work these days (most recent source: a friend who graduated public high school in Palo Alto in 2014), a large fraction of the grade is doing homework. Lots of homework. Enough that the friend I'm thinking of was often awake into the a.m. doing it. It's not that he had to spend that much time to learn the subject for the test; he probably could have dropped half or more of his homework and still done fine on the tests. The trouble is, if he did that, even if he got perfect scores on the tests, he would have gotten Cs or worse in the overall grade, because of the portion that is homework. This friend decided he wanted to play the game and max out his grades because he wanted official recognition (he did get into Harvard later). Another friend, probably equally intelligent, did drop a bunch of homework, did get Cs, and had a rough time with college admissions (through a string of luck and outside intervention involving setting up a meeting with a Fields Medalist professor at Berkeley who then advocated for him, he managed to get into Berkeley). Both friends are now doing math PhDs. I, myself, also dropped a bunch of homework, also got Cs, and left high school after 10th grade, and never went to college. I subsequently studied programming on my own, and have been employed doing that for nearly four years.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  Caltech also had an institute policy that if you aced the final, you got an A, even if you never did any of the homework. There were students who did that (google Hal Finney), but alas I did not have that kind of wattage upstairs. I could not do well on the finals unless I mastered every last homework problem, which often involved getting help from my ever-indulgent roommate (thank you, Mark!).
  - waterhouse 8y ago
    That would be an improvement. I think, more generally, students should be able to choose to make their grade depend entirely on their test scores. (Knowing all the material on a test is much different from acing it; you have to be thoroughly checking your work multiple times to reliably achieve perfect scores. I've taken a decent number of math contents where the winners were basically determined by "who makes the fewest careless mistakes?". It is good for a person to be able to do that, but by that point it's measuring a different skill. Having a higher ceiling is much better—but teachers like to have the grade be "number correct / number of problems".) If you didn't answer the 10 homework problems designed to make you practice the law of cosines, but you correctly applied the law of cosines on a quiz and a later test, how is it justifiable to take points away? It seems to me that a student's grade should be the best available estimate of their ability in, knowledge of, and perhaps interest in, a subject. If a teacher knowingly gives a C to a student in the above type of situation, that seems to me like lying. And if the tests aren't enough, in total, to make a decent stab at measuring all relevant aspects of the subject matter being taught, then that seems to be a deficiency in the tests. Maybe some subjects need take-home projects because a timed test simply isn't a good format to demonstrate some skills, but grading down for the lack of regular drill-type homework seems indefensible to me. (I wouldn't make all the students switch over to being graded solely on tests, because some probably do like the current system, and because there are reasonable arguments that a high-pressure timed test is especially bad for some students and isn't a good reflection of how well they'd do real work. Similar arguments may be made about coding interviews.) Another, possibly more important, reason to oppose required grading of drill-type homework: It basically forces everyone to follow the same study program. (Well, they can study more on top of it, but they can't follow any study program that doesn't include doing all of those problems.) Given the range of human variation, this single study program is going to be suboptimal for lots of people. That's a problem in itself, but moreover, it gives students no incentive to try out different studying approaches and learn what is best for them. Then, when they go to a more unsupervised environment, where the problems are hard and studying really is important, they may be totally unprepared. Some may rapidly seize upon decent studying methods, others may just fail miserably. (I've heard this is a classic failure mode of smart kids who go to college.)