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> You haven't really learned the material if you keep making careless mistakes. In case it's not clear what "careless mistakes" means, this would be something

> You haven't really learned the material if you keep making careless mistakes. In case it's not clear what "careless mistakes" means, this would be something like taking a physics problem where two rigid balls of a given mass and given initial velocity and momentum collide, and correctly carrying out the steps to determine their final velocities, except you forgot to carry a 1 or flipped a sign somewhere along the process. Given that the student showed his work for each step of the process, I think this can be clearly distinguished from, say, a student who didn't know how to apply the laws of conservation of momentum and energy. I'd agree that it makes sense to take a point off, because there is a correlation between mastery and a lower error rate, but I don't think it makes sense to say "well, you're not perfect, therefore we'll take 20% off your grade for not doing homework". If you took a bunch of physics university professors and gave them a quiz with 10 problems of roughly that level, how many of them do you think would get perfect scores? Er, I assumed that the phrase "aced the final" meant "got a perfect score". Was I wrong? If it's more like "got 90+%", then forget everything I said about it. > How can you divine that a person has mastered the material when they fail every test you can concoct? Er... you decide that they probably haven't mastered the material? I haven't talked about anyone who fails tests, just those who make a few math mistakes and don't do most of the homework. > I wouldn't want to hire a person who was so unreliable. I think there's a lot of time in between high school and becoming a pilot or a surgeon. Once you're pretty close to knowing your career path, it certainly makes sense to practice a lot and lower your error rate a great deal—and if, for some reason, you can't do that, then it would make sense for people to refuse to employ you in that field. However, when students are taking classes in 4 completely separate subjects, and there is no way any career would cover more than 2 of them, then intense practicing is very premature—most of the work would be wasted. Also, by the way, pilots and surgeons are two examples of professions where your work is direct and has immediate effect, and mistakes can be catastrophic and hard to fix. In fact, it's hard to think of professions that are more extreme in that regard (drivers and other operators of heavy machinery—but airplanes are some of the biggest and most dangerous machinery out there). There are plenty of professions where all your work can be looked over by a peer before it goes into production / otherwise has a real effect. That is a cost, but if you're good enough in other ways, you may more than compensate for it (and I think it is common for sufficiently large tech companies to require peer review for all changes before they go into the master branch, let alone production).[1] So I would say it is inappropriate to apply the standards of pilots and surgeons to all students of all subjects. [1] Come to think of it, I know two programmers who have some form of dyslexia; one is my coworker and his pull requests are full of typos, the other is a friend and keeps mixing up words. Both of them also spent lots of time studying CS on their own—one focusing on data structures, the other on programming languages—and are quite valuable engineers. They're also fans of programming languages that do advanced compile-time type-checking.

WalterBright 8y ago
Making mistakes in programming can get very expensive, as in millions of dollars. It's not a profession for the careless. Making mistakes in accounting can get you an audit, or even charged with a crime. You won't last long in carpentry if you persist in cutting boards too short. Having to hire an additional person just to clean up after their mistakes is expensive. And flipping a sign? One thing to be learned in solving problems with math is, once you have the solution, working the problem from solution back to the initial conditions is a check. Another thing to be learned is to recognize when your solution is "unreasonable", like momentum not being conserved. Not doing these checks means you've got more learning to do, or are lazy. Neither is acceptable. And partial credit doesn't mean jack when you've got angry customers. > If you took a bunch of physics university professors and gave them a quiz with 10 problems of roughly that level, how many of them do you think would get perfect scores? I expect them to not make excuses for getting the wrong answers. > dyslexia When I began programming, I discovered I was prone to making certain kinds of errors. I learned to use techniques that minimized the risk of those errors, and learned to specially check for them. I.e. don't make excuses, find ways to compensate. Your example of using a programming language to help compensate is along those lines. > it is inappropriate to apply the standards of pilots and surgeons to all students of all subjects. You might change your mind next time you pay someone for a service, and they carelessly botch it up and present you with the bill anyway.
- waterhouse 8y ago
  > I expect them to not make excuses for getting the wrong answers. Ok. Do you think it would be good to fire all the professors who made more than zero mistakes on the quiz? I agree that mistakes are bad. I don't think all policies of the form "inflict punishments on people who make mistakes" are a good idea. It's easier to fix stupid mistakes on homework, when you have plenty of time and can consult the textbook and such. Therefore, if, as I advocate, students are permitted to base their grade solely on test scores, then, to the extent that they do this, this will actually increase the degree to which students are punished for stupid mistakes. So if you hate mistakes that much, you should support such a policy and encourage students to make that choice. I submit that, at least for seriously-sized tests (like a final, usually at least an hour long), for a student to become practiced enough to expect to get a perfect score, with enough confidence to make it worth jeopardizing their grade if they did make a single mistake, is a difficult enough task that almost no one would do it. Therefore, the "perfect score on test => homework doesn't matter" would do very little to incentivize students to take the "tests-only, harsh punishment for mistakes" option. Therefore, my proposed "anyone can choose tests-only" option is better. You didn't clarify whether "ace a test" meant "perfect" or just "really good score". I'm now guessing it's the latter. That is much more achievable, and certainly would have covered most of the scenarios I'm thinking of.

WalterBright 8y ago

Making mistakes in programming can get very expensive, as in millions of dollars. It's not a profession for the careless. Making mistakes in accounting can get you an audit, or even charged with a crime. You won't last long in carpentry if you persist in cutting boards too short. Having to hire an additional person just to clean up after their mistakes is expensive. And flipping a sign? One thing to be learned in solving problems with math is, once you have the solution, working the problem from solution back to the initial conditions is a check. Another thing to be learned is to recognize when your solution is "unreasonable", like momentum not being conserved. Not doing these checks means you've got more learning to do, or are lazy. Neither is acceptable. And partial credit doesn't mean jack when you've got angry customers. > If you took a bunch of physics university professors and gave them a quiz with 10 problems of roughly that level, how many of them do you think would get perfect scores? I expect them to not make excuses for getting the wrong answers. > dyslexia When I began programming, I discovered I was prone to making certain kinds of errors. I learned to use techniques that minimized the risk of those errors, and learned to specially check for them. I.e. don't make excuses, find ways to compensate. Your example of using a programming language to help compensate is along those lines. > it is inappropriate to apply the standards of pilots and surgeons to all students of all subjects. You might change your mind next time you pay someone for a service, and they carelessly botch it up and present you with the bill anyway.

waterhouse 8y ago
> I expect them to not make excuses for getting the wrong answers. Ok. Do you think it would be good to fire all the professors who made more than zero mistakes on the quiz? I agree that mistakes are bad. I don't think all policies of the form "inflict punishments on people who make mistakes" are a good idea. It's easier to fix stupid mistakes on homework, when you have plenty of time and can consult the textbook and such. Therefore, if, as I advocate, students are permitted to base their grade solely on test scores, then, to the extent that they do this, this will actually increase the degree to which students are punished for stupid mistakes. So if you hate mistakes that much, you should support such a policy and encourage students to make that choice. I submit that, at least for seriously-sized tests (like a final, usually at least an hour long), for a student to become practiced enough to expect to get a perfect score, with enough confidence to make it worth jeopardizing their grade if they did make a single mistake, is a difficult enough task that almost no one would do it. Therefore, the "perfect score on test => homework doesn't matter" would do very little to incentivize students to take the "tests-only, harsh punishment for mistakes" option. Therefore, my proposed "anyone can choose tests-only" option is better. You didn't clarify whether "ace a test" meant "perfect" or just "really good score". I'm now guessing it's the latter. That is much more achievable, and certainly would have covered most of the scenarios I'm thinking of.