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Sure. Have at most ten to twenty students per teacher. Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. Unfortunately, in

by ht_th 6y ago

Sure. Have at most ten to twenty students per teacher. Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. Unfortunately, in education quantity seems to be prioritized over quality. When you have over 50 students, let alone over 200 hundred, good luck grading authentic open-ended projects or papers in just two weeks. As a result, most tests consists of multiple-choice questions and standard-format open questions. It is unclear to what extent they test students' understanding, and students do become quite proficient test takers, but at least theses tests can be executed given the current constraints of available staff, acceptable rigor, and student expectations. Unfortunately, you cannot move these type of test to an online setting and expect students not to cheat at all. It is too easy to talk to classmates, look at the study materials, or even on the Internet for some hints to answers or even the actual answers. The only option many institutions saw was to move to a draconian proctoring solution because they just lack the means to roll-out anything else given the constraints they have to work with. Ideally, they would re-evaluate their choices regarding quality versus quantity, but because they need the large number of students to stay afloat, nothing meaningful will happen.

ghaff 6y ago
> Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. Take home tests aren't perfect but I had plenty of them in school. And even when I didn't I don't think I had just about any engineering class that didn't assign problem sets that counted for a decent portion of your grade. If you can do take-home problem sets, you can do a take-home exam.
- ht_th 6y ago
  Taking home exams or assignments are great, but they need to be assessed as well. Here too, the number of students is a limiting factor. With too many students, the best a teacher can do is summative assessment and generate a reasonable grade for the student. Personally, I think formative assessment is far superior to summative assessment, but formative assessment takes a lot of effort from the teacher. Often more than is allotted to her for assessement (or the whole course!). I was thinking more about a larger project or paper with quite a lot of freedom for the students that would take the teacher hours to get familiar with and give constructive formative feedback on. As part of that, an oral section to discuss the project and paper with the student would be great as well. In assessment, I would like the teacher and student to be partners rather than opponents. If a student understands the material, together they should be able to have a conversation where the student can reflect on her understanding and learning to the extent where the teacher can determine that the student has passed the course. Of course, if there is an intense interaction between the student and teacher throughout the course, the whole idea of a final assessment becomes pretty meaningless. I know, my ideas are a bit far-fetched and there are a lot of practicalities that are difficult to work out. But one can dream!
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  > That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. One major difference is that unlike a whiteboarding interview there are presumably clear expectations as to what one is expected to have learned in the class and therefore what topics the discussion will cover, and at what depth. Another issue with whiteboarding interviews, specific to computer-related subjects, is being asked to write code on the whiteboard, which is a severely unnatural act in all sorts of ways compared to the way one normally writes code. But an in-person assessment in a proofs-based math class, for example, would not have that problem. Similar for a CS (as opposed to software engineering) class. And in a software engineering class, the concept of "test" is pretty odd, for the same reasons that whiteboarding interviews are; I'd expect longer-term projects to be closer to the right evaluation tool.
  - seg_lol 6y ago
    I could see notebooks being a useful way to both handout homework and projects as well as automatically check for correctness. A merge/code review tool could be used to annotate individual problems. Have you seen this done?
    - Jugurtha 6y ago
      We have collaborative notebooks on iko.ai[0] which makes it easy either to pair program/troubleshoot on the same notebook, or for a teacher or instructor to review work. We haven't added autograding yet as it is specific, but nbgrader[1][2] comes to mind. - [0]: https://iko.ai/docs/notebook/#collaboration https://iko.ai/docs/notebook/#collaboration - [1]: https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io - [2]: https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/command_line_tools/nbgrader-autograde.html https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/command_line_tools...
b0rsuk 6y ago
And that would somehow be bad? Maybe the sooner current system explodes, the better? After Thatcher, practical schools were closed and there has been pressure to make as many people earn a university degree as possible. Universities are lowering standards and churning out people that have no business studying at a university. Most people go to a university because that's what society, and employers, expect. How many students do you think Plato, Aristotle, Jesus etc. had? Teach the brightest and the ones with genuine interest in the subject (I don't use the word "passion" because after adoption by corporations it no longer seems to mean anything). The rest will be fine with a high school/secondary school education. Most people retain only a fraction of that knowledge anyway. Maybe it's time to stop treating (higher) education like an assembly line?

by ht_th 6y ago

ghaff 6y ago

> Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. Take home tests aren't perfect but I had plenty of them in school. And even when I didn't I don't think I had just about any engineering class that didn't assign problem sets that counted for a decent portion of your grade. If you can do take-home problem sets, you can do a take-home exam.

ht_th 6y ago
Taking home exams or assignments are great, but they need to be assessed as well. Here too, the number of students is a limiting factor. With too many students, the best a teacher can do is summative assessment and generate a reasonable grade for the student. Personally, I think formative assessment is far superior to summative assessment, but formative assessment takes a lot of effort from the teacher. Often more than is allotted to her for assessement (or the whole course!). I was thinking more about a larger project or paper with quite a lot of freedom for the students that would take the teacher hours to get familiar with and give constructive formative feedback on. As part of that, an oral section to discuss the project and paper with the student would be great as well. In assessment, I would like the teacher and student to be partners rather than opponents. If a student understands the material, together they should be able to have a conversation where the student can reflect on her understanding and learning to the extent where the teacher can determine that the student has passed the course. Of course, if there is an intense interaction between the student and teacher throughout the course, the whole idea of a final assessment becomes pretty meaningless. I know, my ideas are a bit far-fetched and there are a lot of practicalities that are difficult to work out. But one can dream!
bzbarsky 6y ago
> That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. One major difference is that unlike a whiteboarding interview there are presumably clear expectations as to what one is expected to have learned in the class and therefore what topics the discussion will cover, and at what depth. Another issue with whiteboarding interviews, specific to computer-related subjects, is being asked to write code on the whiteboard, which is a severely unnatural act in all sorts of ways compared to the way one normally writes code. But an in-person assessment in a proofs-based math class, for example, would not have that problem. Similar for a CS (as opposed to software engineering) class. And in a software engineering class, the concept of "test" is pretty odd, for the same reasons that whiteboarding interviews are; I'd expect longer-term projects to be closer to the right evaluation tool.
- seg_lol 6y ago
  I could see notebooks being a useful way to both handout homework and projects as well as automatically check for correctness. A merge/code review tool could be used to annotate individual problems. Have you seen this done?
  - Jugurtha 6y ago
    We have collaborative notebooks on iko.ai[0] which makes it easy either to pair program/troubleshoot on the same notebook, or for a teacher or instructor to review work. We haven't added autograding yet as it is specific, but nbgrader[1][2] comes to mind. - [0]: https://iko.ai/docs/notebook/#collaboration https://iko.ai/docs/notebook/#collaboration - [1]: https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io - [2]: https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/command_line_tools/nbgrader-autograde.html https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/command_line_tools...

b0rsuk 6y ago

And that would somehow be bad? Maybe the sooner current system explodes, the better? After Thatcher, practical schools were closed and there has been pressure to make as many people earn a university degree as possible. Universities are lowering standards and churning out people that have no business studying at a university. Most people go to a university because that's what society, and employers, expect. How many students do you think Plato, Aristotle, Jesus etc. had? Teach the brightest and the ones with genuine interest in the subject (I don't use the word "passion" because after adoption by corporations it no longer seems to mean anything). The rest will be fine with a high school/secondary school education. Most people retain only a fraction of that knowledge anyway. Maybe it's time to stop treating (higher) education like an assembly line?