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Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

• bernulli 5y ago
  Yep, this is it. Ever wondered why syllabi and problem statements are so long, convoluted, and oddly specific? It all boils down to "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, it's going in the syllabus." [0] Edit: I did not come up with [0], but I also don't remember where I saw it.
• hbarka 5y ago
  A complementary proposition would be Teaching is a slow process of becoming something you love.
• leetrout 5y ago
  This is TERRIFYINGLY accurate. """ Here’s what will happen: Like most other humans, your students will be lazy and fallible. So many of them will procrastinate and not do the homework. So they won’t learn anything. So they will get a terrible grade on the final. And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework """ This is almost exactly how adjunct teaching went for me. It was not the experience I had hoped it would be in almost any way.
  • beebmam 5y ago
    Good! Students should be failing out of they're unwilling to work hard
    • jjj123 5y ago
      You could call it unwilling to work hard. Or it could be difficulty prioritizing work, or ADHD, or disorganization. Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?
      • Lascaille 5y ago
        The testing is for a combination of knowledge of the subject and ability to apply it in practice.
      • matthewdgreen 5y ago
        As an advisor of PhD students I've learned that both things are important in different amounts. Much of what our education system measures right now is "willingness to work really hard from a young age." When I meet students from top-tier institutions I see a lot of this: it's really impressive. I also see a good deal of of selection for what I'd consider raw problem-solving ability. I see a smaller degree of selection for raw creativity. The most creative students I've met have been the ones that didn't accumulate credentials, and often suffered because of (possibly undiagnosed) ADHD. They did well when they found their passion, either because they found it later in life or because they really, really cared about it. Our system doesn't do as well with these people, but they can usually make their way through. Unfortunately there's a downside to this: all the creativity in the world isn't going to help you if you can't execute. A brilliant idea only takes you so far. And gaining sufficient background to have brilliant ideas is often an even more demanding task, which passion alone doesn't suffice for. I don't exactly know what to do about all this. What I do know is that a system that bases future success on how well individuals do at age 16 is fundamentally, profoundly stupid... And I wish I had a better one.
      • r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
        I know this is harsh but if you have ADHD, difficulty prioritizing work or are disorganised to the extent that you can't perform academically at the required level to complete a degree then you shouldn't be wasting your money and time going to university and should instead look for something that better suits your talents.
        • caddemon 5y ago
          I see where you are coming from in that there is only so much burden on the teacher that would be reasonable accommodation. However I think it comes across as harsh because many of these students could successfully complete a degree if they received adequate treatment from a healthcare provider.
    • savanaly 5y ago
      >And you know what? When the students blame you, maybe they are right. The teacher is supposed to use their experience to help students learn. Shouldn’t you help the actual imperfect humans in front of them, rather than imagining a bunch of perfectly rational Platonic objects?
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • avs733 5y ago
      they are perfectly willing to work hard...the problem is their heuristics of what it means to work hard have been poorly developed.
  • gonehome 5y ago
    I really liked homework suggestions that (critically) included the answer key and walkthrough of solution! Doing problem sets in university without this made it way less valuable because you need the immediate feedback loop to learn and waiting until office hours or recitation takes too long and you forget. Good classes (from grade clarity perspective) were ones where it was clear what would be tested and how to prepare. Then you could leverage the optional homework to focus on areas you didn’t understand yet. There were classes I enjoyed that did this poorly by either forcing homework grading without answer keys (feedback loop too slow, often can’t focus on what you don’t know) - or made it very hard to know what the test format would be like to prepare for. I like learning and enjoyed my CS classes - I also kept a high gpa at a university known to be hard (was also preparing for medschool where gpa is critical in the US), but the stress around grades was miserable. Getting good grades is a skill that’s related to learning, but also its own thing. Sometimes to optimize grades you have to do things that hurt learning (rather than focus on how a compiler works and digging into interesting details here, you must focus your attention on the specific types of puzzles that will be tested). I get why this is done, but I still wish there was a better way to handle this. I think ISAs and job market validation of skills is an improvement (like lambda school) but those students still blame everyone else for their own failures even in that case so it’s a hard problem.
    • legobmw99 5y ago
      In CS courses, I always appreciated when we were given access to the grading scripts/unit tests used by course staff. It made that feedback loop immediate, and unless you were intentionally doing something weird you usually knew exactly what grade you were getting for your submission. As a TA, it was funny to see the ways a few students would overfit those tests. In one extreme case I literally saw a student replace a complicated function definition with a if-else chain that just determined which of the 4 test cases it was being run on…
      • bsder 5y ago
        As an CS instructor, my solution for that was to have a skeleton level of unit tests but to switch in a full suite once the deadline passed. Your grade was based on passing the full tests. Practically everyone who "played fair" got the same grade for both. Occasionally, I would add a test that tripped everybody up and I'd have to go see what happened. Anybody who overfitted, however, got crushed. My favorite assignment was always the next to last project (before end of semester deadlines start getting crushing). I created only a single unit test to verify the test suite runner was functional, and the students had to submit the rest of the pre-deadline unit tests. And I would switch in my full suite at the deadline. I told people that anybody who passed that suite would get bonus points that everybody was always bugging me for. It was always absolute chaos. I only ever had one student pass the switched in suite (he got some nice bonus points out of that--didn't need them, of course). I would then reopen the project for a week (I planned for it) to let everybody else clean up their work and resubmit. You could see and feel the difference in the students after that assignment. The fact that testing was an integral part of programming and that testing was, in and of itself, a difficult problem was a revelation--and not a particularly welcome one.
  • zwkrt 5y ago
    There is a breed of very narcissistic person in our culture that will always find a way to blame their inadequacies and their mistakes on those around them. In high school, if you are a teacher you have quite a lot of authority in the classroom and so even if your student is oriented in this way, they will just 'not like that teacher'. Helicopter and apologist parents are increasingly an issue but they aren't directly in the classroom. In college however, students are grappling with their own burgeoning adulthood. They realize a TA is just another student with a few years on them. While the professor might be a bit out of reach, for a narcissistic person, it is easy to justify to themselves that they are actually above the TA in status/rank/morality/righteousness/sociability. Subsequently they can beat down the TA in the way that you mentioned. "All my problems are the result of your failures to address them". "I would have done better but the TA didn't like me." "Oh I hated that class the TA was a total nerd." "No one ever told me I had to do the assignments, I didn't realize I would be tested on this." It doesn't help that people who choose to become a TA are often a 'helpful' kind of person, the exact kind of person that tends to be a little bit susceptible to these kinds of criticisms, even if they are untrue. The only way to move forward as a TA (and as a person) in this environment is to harden yourself in the ways that the article and many other commenters mention. That's my 2c anyhow.
    • civilized 5y ago
      I'm sure it's theoretically possible to do poorly in a class because the teacher didn't like you, but statistically, it's got to be one of the most powerful red flags on a human. Steer clear.
      • webmobdev 5y ago
        I didn't get you; steer clear of who - the teacher or the student?
        • titanomachy 5y ago
          probably steer clear of the student who claims they failed because the teacher didn't like them
  • vwoolf 5y ago
    This is also how teaching went for me. I found out why teachers have attendance policies, quizzes, and all the other things that, as a student, seemed inane, if not counterproductive, to me. While those things sometimes are, and can be overly punitive or poorly applied (like anything, much of the apparatus around teaching can be done better or done worse), I now get why instructors do those things.
    • caddemon 5y ago
      I also think there's always going to be a question of which students you are optimizing for. I had a professor that didn't have an attendance policy, but at the start of every year he would show a scatter plot of class attendance versus final grade with a fit line showing decent correlation. Of course if you looked closer, the effect was mostly that very good attendance led to A's. Low attendance was a crapshoot on the plot, with every letter grade represented including many of the A+'s. The students that attended didn't need an attendance policy because they were inclined to attend anyway. The question is how much forced attendance would have improved the scores of the bad performance/low attendance group versus how much it would have hurt the good performance/low attendance group (including missed opportunities at the same time slot). I don't see a policy that realistically helps all of the struggling students without hurting any of the top students, so a tradeoff has to be made. Perhaps offering attendance as extra credit without making it a penalty could be a good middle ground, but I don't think it would help all of the low attendance/poor performance students. By the time they realize they need extra credit they would already be behind, and they may not care about an extra credit offer at the start of the semester.
• zabzonk 5y ago
  The whole thrust behind this article is that grading and testing is a bunch of crap. And that's entirely correct, IMHO. We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who they study with they can freely choose. But it is not going to happen, and we will stay with the whole grading and testing bullshit.
  • jdrc 5y ago
    That's putting the cart before the horse, people need teaching to learn how to spend, trial and error is the slowest learning strategy and should only be used when there are no alternatives
    • zabzonk 5y ago
      > trial and error is the slowest learning strategy But that's what they do now! I can't see any alternative to that, but people could be given an increased range of learning possibilities.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    That is not at all what I got out of the article. The main thrust is that policies that are apparently dumb to non-teachers are not actually dumb. They are well-justified responses to the ways students will attempt to defeat the purpose of the system.
    • zabzonk 5y ago
      > students will attempt to defeat the purpose of the system. Given any system, why would people not attempt to defeat it? And if they can defeat it, perhaps the system is wrong?
      • asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
• memming 5y ago
  Yup. If i taught as if a younger version of myself would have liked, it would be a terrible course for most students.
• jasoneckert 5y ago
  Evaluation has always been the biggest challenge for teachers in the tech industry, because education is largely driven by assessment (I've been teaching IT for 23 years now). But things are changing, and the pandemic is speeding that process. A decade ago James Paul Gee outlined where we want to go, and I think it will largely come to fruition before the end of this decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNfPdaKYOPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNfPdaKYOPI
• finexplained 5y ago
  This perfectly describes my experience as a TA in graduate school. At first I didn't understand why my advisor insisted on being so precise in assignment instructions. Then when TAing with him I saw how students could creatively misinterpret instructions, even when I could not imagine how to make them more precise. An exception for the new case would be added to the next iteration of the assignments. I only understood why we went to such lengths to prevent cheating because in my first year I watched my advisor spend two weeks of his time sitting down individually with each student and present evidence that they had cheated. Only about 10% of the students had cheated, but in a class of 1400, that's 140 students! I can't even imagine how much work that must of been on the head TA.
  • beebmam 5y ago
    When I was a TA, I convinced my professor to stop giving graded assignments. it was obvious on tests who had done the assignments and who hadn't.
    • marcosdumay 5y ago
      Professors grade the assignments to make sure that students do them. There are many other options for evaluating the students, but not many to force them to learn something.
    • yodsanklai 5y ago
      Graded assignments are useful to give feedback to students. And more importantly they force students to work regularly and not wait for the last minute to study.
      • moltke 5y ago
        Personally I always preferred quizzes for that. I've always been a very strong autodidact though, there are probably people who prefer getting dragged through things by homework.
      • lupire 5y ago
        Thus we see the problem that universities are admitting students who aren't ready for tertiary education.
• endisneigh 5y ago
  This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. Interviewing, school, job performance, etc. etc. If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly from its own organization. It would find all of the top performers outside of the organization, perfecting arbitrating wage vs. value benefits. Profits from this would be divested back into the organization forming an infinite virtuous cycle. Later it would supersede whatever nation it's in, conquering it by finding the best military leaders and soldiers using the same "perfect evaluation" ability. It would get the best diplomats and business leaders. Later it would turn an eye to other nations, then the world. Eventually the galaxy and the entire universe.
  • thrill 5y ago
    We could call it the Paperclip Maximizer.
  • akvadrako 5y ago
    There is such a system in the long run, it's called the free market. If you can consistently outperform your peers while both parties have complete information, it's a sign of having some advantage. Free markets are never perfect locally, but on a galactic scale they are pretty close, so the superior groups and will dominate.
    • brabel 5y ago
      > so the superior groups and will dominate. That may be true by definition, if your definition is that superior groups eventually dominate, but that's of course just tautology. However, depending on how you define "superior", for example "more intelligent and honest", or "more compassionate and fairer", could be what most people have in mind, then that may not be true at all. In human societies, throughout history, it's likely that who dominates is actually the most brutal and reckless, up to a point where people actually become accountable for their actions.
    • 5y ago
• warner25 5y ago
  I've often thought the same thing about becoming an adult, especially a parent, in general. There are so many choices that I harshly judged older people for making (how to allocate their time and money, where to live, what to allow or not allow the kids to do, how to behave at work, etc.) that I now find myself making as a married guy in my mid-30s with four kids. It makes me sad, but on each point I'm like, "Oh, now I get it." I fear that this pattern could continue until I become my father in my 50s and 60s. I try not to judge people so much anymore. Anyway, I appreciate the article as someone who will soon try my hand at teaching. I will have a lot to learn.
  • germinalphrase 5y ago
    I may not make the same problems I judge my parents for, but I will certainly make new mistakes my children will judge me for. Just trying to be better.
    • bckr 5y ago
      That might be true, but I think there is a threshold called "good enough" that every parent can reach with some effort.
  • sturgill 5y ago
    I frequently say that 16 y/o Chris would be very disappointed in 40 y/o Chris. But 16 y/o Chris was an idiot. As you touched on, the fun twist is when you abstract the learning so it’s not just “I was wrong about X” but “I should be much more accepting of contrarian views.”
    • swayvil 5y ago
      Larry Niven. Protector. Human eats mutagenic yam. Among various changes, it greatly augments intelligence. The first thought of a Protector, just awakened from his mutative trance, is, "Wow, I have been really really dumb".
    • VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
      Don’t judge your former self too harshly either. It’s easy to forget why you were an idiot at 16.
• jdrc 5y ago
  In the light of remote teaching, remote work, gamification, AI etc, we should rethink teaching as a whole It feels there is very little experimentation in the space, mostly trying to mimic a classroom in digital
• cushychicken 5y ago
  Reminds me of a quote I read long ago - I think it was from Sartre - that I'll try paraphrase: "Teaching in public schools suffers from the same problems as cooking in public cafeterias - and generally produces similarly mediocre results." I don't buy into the sentiment that public education is a mistake, or even that it's outputs are generally mediocre. I do, however, think that the insight that public education is more akin to an industrial process than an interpersonal relationship holds some water.
• Daneel_ 5y ago
  For the most part I actually had wonderful teachers during my school career. What I bitterly disagreed with was a lot of the curriculum, and I knew they didn’t have a say in that. So my question to educators here would be: Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students?
  • germinalphrase 5y ago
    I teach high school English, so I have a greater degree of freedom in my curriculum development (there is no textbook. I create everything). That is actually not my issue. My problems are mostly reality/logistical constraints. There is always more I could do, more I could give, more I could help every single student, but I would have to learn to freeze time or never sleep. It’s unhealthy and irrational, but I feel shame for not giving more when I know what a kid needs but I circumstantially lack the capacity to give it to them.
  • yodsanklai 5y ago
    > Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students? Normally, professors teach things they have some expertise in, and they're biased to think that this is useful to students. Besides, it's often very debatable whether something is useful or not. For instance, I used to teach things such as theory of computation, automata theory, and similar so-called theoretical classes. You could debate ad nauseam whether this benefits students or not. Some would argue it's useless and students should do more javascript labs, other think that these are the foundations of our field, unlike the latest JS framework which will be obsolete in 2 years. Some of my colleagues go to great length to convince students that the class they teach is useful, but I'm not convinced this is necessary. I've noticed that students are happy as long as they think they learn something from the class, and that the class is neither too hard or too easy. They don't question the utility of the class if the teacher manages to make the topic fun. For instance, labs, exercices, exams, should be of gradual difficulty, so each student feels they can make progress. This is challenging to achieve when the class audience is heterogenous. So rather then the choice of topic, what had happened to me was that I disagreed with the way the topic was taught. In my university, sometimes we would work in team with little saying on the class syllabus, labs, exams... This can be frustrating and I'd just leave the team.
• oconnor663 5y ago
  My teaching experience is limited, but for teaching compsci I've had good results with programmatically graded assignments, where the students get unlimited submissions but also machine-enforced deadlines. (I liked this when I was a student, and I've liked structuring my own class this way too.) One of the big benefits is that you can be maximally clear about what the problem set is asking the students to do, because you give them an example input and an example correct output, and for each submission you tell them what their output should have been. But each grading run uses a randomized input, so they can't just hardcode the answers. Compsci is perfect for this, because students can fix their bug quickly and resubmit their whole assignment. For math, I guess you'd want to avoid having them repeat problems they already got correct. But for other subjects that don't really have a place for "random input", I guess this doesn't work?
  • mr_cyborg 5y ago
    As a student I’ve taken computer science classes with and without some kind of autograder. I’ll say that depending on how it’s set up it can be complete nightmare fuel. In one class I recall that 3/4 of my time was formatting comments correctly to not trip the chest detection that came from not “properly attributing” the code I wrote. Also the assignments were written to the autograder. So instead of saying “write a method that does X” it would say “write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format”. After having taken so many open-ended assignment classes that really hurt my brain.
    • oconnor663 5y ago
      Ugh automating the cheat detector sounds awful. The tool we used had a nice similarity detection feature for me to look at, and I used it by hand a few times, but of course it had false positives. > write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format Yeah I hate that too. Personally I went with "your program should read JSON from stdin and write JSON to stdout". For students who had never seen JSON before, that was definitely some extra friction. But the upside is that it's something they're going to see a lot of in the real world.
    • 5y ago
• cpach 5y ago
  TBH reading this article really didn’t give much, IMHO. I guess the context here is mainly a university? Or is it senior high? Anyway, I spent around three years in college and the value-add for me wasn’t the grades I got. The value I got out of it was the foundation that I laid and the inspiration I got. I got in touch with materials/domains that I might never have encountered otherwise. And to me that’s truly a gift that keeps on giving.
• neap24 5y ago
  As a teacher (CS and Math) for over a decade, I agree with much of this. I will only add that, as far as grading is concerned, I think the long-term incentive for the teacher is actually to put almost no effort in at all. There is no pay or status increase for teachers who are tough, consistent graders. In fact, some of the most revered teachers I’ve known essentially hand hold their students to a guaranteed A in the class. At first, principled teachers may stick to tough grading, but as the years go by and they watch their friends easily make 3x more in industry, the incentive to just put a check mark on every paper is about the best you can do to close that benefit gap.
  • analog31 5y ago
    When I was an adjunct (EE and Math), it was widely known amongst all of the teachers, that the student evaluation scores were primarily a measure of what grades the students expected. And I had to ask myself: If I were a student again, why would I adopt any other strategy?
    • lazyant 5y ago
      I don't remember if it was a formal study but somebody has asked students at the beginning of the course what grade they _think_ they'll get and at the end it fit very well. Basically all students try to make a particular grade with the least effort, since that's what they are incentivized to do.
      • analog31 5y ago
        Indeed, since the evaluations are handed out before the final grades are tabulated, they can only be based on expected grades. But expected grades are still a better performance metric than a coin toss.
• MyHypatia 5y ago
  I wish I had read this essay before the start of every year in high school and college. It would have saved me a lot of frustration, and helped me understand why things are this way.
• LaserToy 5y ago
  Ha, the same happens to managers. Unless you have a power to remove cheaters, you will have to throw rules at them. At expense of everyone else. I still hold the line, but do suffer sometimes.
  • dominotw 5y ago
    what makes you happy being a manager. i mean how does it provide you satisfaction. I've been trying to see if its a good idea to go into managmement but dealing with people isn't my strong suite.
    • LaserToy 5y ago
      Honestly, ability to build more. Can’t say I’m a big fan of people issues.
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  Grading is not dissimilar to setting up arbitrary metrics on a business or an engineering team. People will find ways to optimise for the metric. If you give bonuses based on number of commits created or number of tickets closed you'll end up with a lot of useless commits and tickets. If the only thing that matters in order to pass a course is to do an exam, people will optimise for that. If someone doesn't like the subject or doesn't like the teacher or doesn't like being taught (especially disagreeable boys), they will happily skip the subject and just try to get a passing score. In university I was already working as a professional developer and I attended only a few classes I cared about and hacked my way out of exams with a mix of cheating and cramming the night before. I enjoyed all the project work instead and I excelled at that. But that was worth just 1-2 points out of 30. Why was I forced to memorise bullshit I didn't need and that I would have not remembered 3 seconds after the exams in order to get a piece of paper saying I graduated? Isn't being able to do the projects more important than that? When I hired people with degrees from "good schools" I was always surprised to realise how little were they able to get done on their own. I quickly stopped even checking their qualifications as they're completely worthless for anything related to work. If I had to reform education I would make it totally based on projects. There would be no grades or titles when you get a job, just an increasingly longer list of projects you worked on. When I was in school I had to take a Latin class. I didn't want to take it but I picked the best course according to my interest - and unfortunately it had Latin. I spent those lessons secretly working on my own projects, then I downloaded a bunch of famous texts with their translation and I just wrote a J2ME application to look things up and used it for 5 years (Mobile internet was very expensive back then and searching on the internet would have been way harder). After I finished my written finals in all the subjects, luckily my score was already high enough not too pass, even if I got zero at the oral exam and I kind of bullshitted my way through that last exam. Was there any point in trying to force me to learn something? Why do we put people in this situation?
  • shikoba 5y ago
    > There would be no grades or titles when you get a job, just an increasingly longer list of projects you worked on. And you'll obtain the good obeying sheeps. You would miss all the competent rebels, those who think outside the scope.
• kaycebasques 5y ago
  Tangential: The article mentions Chesterton's Fence. I clicked the link to learn what that means and didn't find it (it's just a link to the guy's Wikipedia page). But check out the beautiful signature of this Chesterton fellow! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#/media/File%3AGK_Chesterson_signature.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#/media/File...
  • phalangion 5y ago
    Chesterton's fence refers to a principle that before changing something, you should first understand why it is the way it is. > Chesterton’s Fence is a heuristic inspired by a quote from the writer and polymath G. K. Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing. It’s best known as being one of John F. Kennedy’s favored sayings, as well as a principle Wikipedia encourages its editors to follow. In the book, Chesterton describes the classic case of the reformer who notices something, such as a fence, and fails to see the reason for its existence. However, before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. In its most concise version, Chesterton’s Fence states the following: Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place. [0] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
• viceroyalbean 5y ago
  >In a recent post, Parrhesia suggested that course grades should be 100% determined by performance on a final exam—an exam that could be taken repeatedly, with the last attempt being the course grade >[...]I suspect this proposal hasn’t seen much contact with people who’ve actually taught classes This is how a fair number of classes at my university are graded. Particularly math classes are structured so that you could literally ignore the class for 3 months and then just show up and take the exam and that decides 100% of the grade. Some homework is available for bonus points, but it only contributes to going from a failing grade to passing. While retaking the exam to get a higher grade isn't technically part of the system they will let you do it if there is space.
  • icegreentea2 5y ago
    They let you retake the exam? Like... the same exam? Or re-do at a later term?
    • viceroyalbean 5y ago
      Re-do the exam when it is next offered. The most common math exams (e.g calculus, linear algebra) run 4 times a year so there are quite a lot of opportunities.
• scarecrowbob 5y ago
  I spent my 20ss trying to become a professor and teaching undergrads. The article resonates loudly with me. One of the best thing about nope-ing out of that lifestyle has been this: I still teach people. I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly validating. I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly validating and they find this useful. I teach new things to musicians I play with. I mentor my coworkers when they are working with new things. I help my friends and partners learn new things. The best is that I know how to research ideas and commit to learning them myself. Much of formal education has systematic problems that make it struggle to achieve its stated goals. But "teaching" as a form of human interaction is a wonderful thing.
  • sizeofchar 5y ago
    It’s totally a systemic problem, that’s it. Same thing with me. I love teaching, I just can’t stand the faculty anymore.
• tyjen 5y ago
  I'm currently on a goal and motivation research reading interest, so I think I can add value to this. School pedagogical approaches are weird and appears broadly to be testing a student's ability to endure forcing themselves to learn material they may not find interesting. Obviously, this divides the student population and people with better executive functioning, or stricter parents, float to the top. It's what we've done for so long, we're anchored around the concept. From a motivational standpoint, for many students this can kill curiosity and desire for learning. Goal attainment research consensus clearly demonstrates specific and sufficiently difficult tasks lead to better performance. It's even more ideal when the individual sets the goal or at the very least is involved in developing the organizational goal. This goes against the grain in schools. Sometimes teachers are incredibly vague, others specific. And, unless the student is in a highly individualized learning environment, like working on a capstone project, they do not play a role in course goal setting. You start to see the potential problems when research demonstrates, the highest individual performance occurs when individuals are provided a specific and sufficiently difficult goal with a learning oriented approach and decreased emphasis on performance (tests and grades). On the other hand, when an individual already possesses skills and knowledge for assigned goals, then a performance approach, not a learning approach, yields an overall higher performance rating. Also, by far, the worst goal orientation, among the aforementioned, is performance avoidance, that is performing to avoid negative consequences. Students are in school, they're in the process of obtaining skills and knowledge for a career they may not even have solidified yet. Students are largely falling into the performance avoidance category, then the performance approach category, and, finally, for the luckier few, the learning approach category. Add in the teacher quality variable, whether they assign specific or vague and easy or sufficiently difficult assignments, and you start to see how this creates problems for students and for society. I speak from experience. I failed miserably during school, even dropping out of high school, for a variety of reasons outside of my control and am extremely fortunate to be where I am today.
• staticassertion 5y ago
  > But some are an assault on reason, with every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted. It was never stated which temperature circuit to build or how to prove it works or what level of explanation was necessary. And who’s to say what “build” means? OK? So your students tried to do something and failed creatively. Sounds good. Reward them for their efforts, ask them to try again if you feel that they still need to get something out of the assignment. > But some don’t, and they keep complaining and asking for regrades, and if those aren’t accepted they (or their parents) contact the principal/chair/dean/ombudsperson, who are required to have an investigation. OK. > hat gets misinterpreted too, so more details are added, and by the time the teacher retires you have a monstrosity that’s universally despised but almost impossible to complain about. So your bad solution is good because it started off bad and ended worse. OK. > Well, enjoy re-grading every single assignment from every student near a boundary, Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the 90. Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and want regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross out the old grade and add the new one. How onerous... > As far as I can tell, most follow the incentives and make little effort to stop cheating. Cool. Most of the time cheating entails something like access to notes on a test that is artificially made more difficult by requiring memorization. That's why open note tests are far better. > But some teachers are principled Bummer. They don't sound principled so much as they sound unimaginative. > Say you suspect students are copying from each other on an exam. You can silently prepare multiple versions of the exam with “micro differences” in questions. Sounds dumb, I don't like the idea of trying to "trap" kids. I cheated exactly once on a test and got away with it - why? Because I was unhappy in school and I went home and spent my time distracting myself rather than preparing for it. Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my life, you trapping me and once again teaching me that education goes hand in hand with punishment would have done years of damage. > They realized that they could skip learning the material, and instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm with my father’s grading as a reward function. Creative. Without knowing more about the assignment it's hard to judge, but I'm wary of any assignment that you can just brute force like that. > your students will be lazy and fallible. I had to undo years of being told I was "smart but lazy". Teachers need to erase that word from their vocabulary. > So they won’t learn anything. That's OK, most people don't learn much from school. > And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework. a) OK b) I mean, maybe the parents would? I frankly don't believe that any student will blame a teacher for not forcing them to do homework. > Surely what matters is if a student understands things, not if they ask questions in class? Good question. What exactly is the point? To me, education serves a few functions. 1. Babysitting kids so that parents can work 2. Providing young people with a safe place for them to explore their emerging identities, interests, and view of the world 3. Stoking an interest in learning and providing the tools and resources to build a baseline knowledge for future education So, is understanding really the goal? I don't see understanding as being particularly critical to the education system. > Participation credit helps to internalize positive externalities. 100% agreed. My transcript is an odd mix of grades - even within a single class, within a single semester I could go from an A or B to a D or F, or coast by on a C. What I value most is that during that time I dated, made lifelong friends, read books on physics and philosophy, discovered New York City while I skipped classes, played video games, learned to bike, etc. All of the stuff you're talking about, it's the stuff that got in the way of everything that has produced value in my life. Anyway, those are my thoughts. I think school is pretty stupid, as is, but I find that I pretty much exclusively disagree with teachers about why. I sometimes read /r/teachers and the self indulgent pity party, and the "I wanted to be good but I just hate kids now!" theme, is sickening. I also find it sad that so many people become what they hate. I think people seem to have an incredibly hard time empathizing with their former selves, which I find so weird. But I've had adults trivialize teenagers' problems, as if just because now they have "adult problems" that somehow means that when they were a kid they were just dramatic. Maybe try to regain some insight into why your younger self would be disappointed, and what they might suggest.
• IgorPartola 5y ago
  My college classes gave a 5% weight to homework, 45% to the midterm and 50% to the final. Since I was a good test taker I could skip almost all the homework and still get an A or an A- if I didn’t do as well on one of the exams. It also didn’t help that the professors gave extremely hard exams to small classes: I distinctly remember getting a B+ on an exam where I got 1 out of 6 questions right because everyone else got half a question right. I still don’t really know quantum mechanics basics but my grades say otherwise.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• motohagiography 5y ago
  That relationship of a teacher being an obstacle to a grade that signals institutional approval, it is totally broken. This is gamefied "education," where the course material and even the instructors recognition doesn't persuasively have intrinsic value. I'm dealing with something now outside academia, where there is absurd bureaucracy, and I'm sidestepping and shortcutting it because I see the mission outcome as separate from the prescribed process, and the trickling and breadcrumbing of details is an abuse of my time, so I sympathize with the student perspective - but in an educational setting, the prescribed process is essentially a sacrificial cost that enables you to "become," a person who has mastered it, as it makes the skill the effect of a skill, and not just the affect of the outcome. Education is necessarily transformative, otherwise it's just rote training. Example would be, I take music lessons, I'm difficult to teach because I really like Bach and Chopin and I can play some simple preludes by ear, but my sight reading is maybe at a gr. 2 level, which is just enough to get the pieces under my fingers with a hill climbing struggle, but makes me useless as an actual musician, and probably very irritating to musicians whose performances are the effect of their years of real skills, and not the affect of hackery or savantism that an unskilled observer can't easily distinguish. Even if we played the same piece, comparing them to me would be insulting and debasing to them because it's like saying a recording of something is the same as a performance of it, so it's very diminishing. In the case of the temperature monitoring circuit in the article, the process is designed to facilitate a mental transformation of exercising elementary skills, and being educated means being able to commit to that process of being molded by the experience. The details are to force commitment to the process and filter out those who aren't. Unfortuately, credentialism incentivises this affect of skills and drives enrollment, so if you are doing a job oriented degree, you're basically trained and not really educated through a process of becoming. It would almost make sense to offer students a deal, where they can choose a training track that leads to a 52% / C- grade and do the minimum, which takes them out of the way of the TAs, they don't participate in discussions, and they can coast and draft others, maybe date each other and say they went there, but they can't impose costs, where others can elect to aim higher and choose the education track with an understanding of what that means.
• kazinator 5y ago
  > But some are an assault on reason, with every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted. It was never stated which temperature circuit to build or how to prove it works or what level of explanation was necessary. And who’s to say what “build” means? You have to think like a software engineer. Test first: write the requirements fro the perspective of a test which fails if the requirements are not met. Rather than dictating irrelevant details of the apparatus that is to be made during the assignment, describe a procedure by which it can be verified to meet the requirements. "Build a temperature monitor circuit.": what is it monitoring: the temperature of what? Where is that taken? What is the output? Decimal temperature in Celsius to the tenth of a degree? In what range? Or else is there just a control output: is there a hysteresis to turn something on and off like a thermostat? Etc. "Test it to prove it works." That's a poor way of giving requirements. You need specific test cases. You may have to have specialized equipment on hand that the students can use, like a controlled source of reference temperature.
  • buo 5y ago
    Absolutely. In my experience teaching in college, this is the correct approach. A very useful thing to have, both for teachers and students, is a "rubric": a succinct description of how the work will be evaluated, and the importance (weight) of each feature.
    • castillar76 5y ago
      Yes! And then the rubric should actually define the pieces of the assignment you care about them getting right. I have this debate a lot when we’re designing assignments for an intro to Python class (which, sadly, we have to do very regularly because of sites like Chegg…). Figure out what it is you want the student to get out of the assignment (e.g., manipulating dictionaries or sorting values) and evaluate their results based on whether they did that thing. If they did the thing but missed some nitinoid details they don’t get a perfect grade, but they should get a solid, passing grade for it.
  • ksml 5y ago
    It's a silly exaggerated example. Point still stands, at least from my experience. Even with a rubric, people still (intentionally or unintentionally) find ways to do things that circumvent the learning goals/outcomes of the assignment
• kizer 5y ago
  Every year I age I respect good teachers more and more. I think it’s one of the hardest jobs. And at the risk of getting some blowback I think much stems from our broken and outdated public education system. There has to be choice and freedom, both for the students and the teachers. I know I’m speaking vaguely but that’s because I myself can’t articulate a solution. But I know there’s a better way.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  Interesting. I grew up in an “exams count only” system that used a 2 decimal point score precision. So if you scored 89.75 at the end, you completed the course with 89.75. It wasn’t bucketed into grades. There were 4 exams: two quarterlies, a half, and the final. I don’t think it ever struck any of us that if we failed to study for an exam that it was anyone’s fault but our own. I actually really like articles like this because they have so many unnecessary assumptions: “Things are this way because students will complain if they suck at things” The unstated assumptions are that students in this schooling system mostly have external loci of control. The second thing is that courses are designed in an adding-epicycles manner based on the least reasonable member of the previous class. That is, it is a cost function that aims to minimize the failure of the greatest idiot which implicitly leads to it adding cost for the smart guy. So you have built a schooling system optimized for the greatest idiot who believes someone else is responsible for all of his failures. This actually explains why so many college students here are like they are.
  • plandis 5y ago
    > I don’t think it ever struck any of us that if we failed to study for an exam that it was anyone’s fault but our own. This is interesting to me. If you’re noting working through problems how do you get the feedback to even know if you really understand the material? Generally assigned homework was nice because a professor will know the key ideas and can efficiently assign work covering those parts. Right now I’m self studying real analysis and I wish I had someone to pick problems for me because otherwise I’m just trying to do them all to ensure that if I don’t know something critical it will come out when I can solve some particular problem. On the other side of the same coin. How does a teacher know if their teaching is effective without frequency feedback until he form of students grades? I feel like waiting several weeks to determine if you need to change course is doing a great disservice to the students.
    • renewiltord 5y ago
      Oh we worked through problems all the time. But if you didn’t then the next class would be impossible to understand and you’d just sit there like a fool. So the incentives were already aligned there. And you get feedback from your peers as you work through stuff and also from the lecturer at the end of the next class. It just wasn’t graded.
• Vaslo 5y ago
  Easy solution to the regrade. Never do one off regrades. Always say that a regrade of one question will require the entire exam be regraded. This will be done by someone else or the prof who may grade it worse than a rushing grad student who is just saying “yeah, yeah, fine, ok”. Most students fear this, especially when it’s the professor doing it. Almost never had to do regrades with this policy.
  • adminprof 5y ago
    This doesn't work when I've tried it. How many students or times have you implemented this policy? First, it doesn't make sense when the regrade is most objective (like points were calculated wrong, or the grader didn't see something that the student wrote). And if you say that it doesn't apply for straightforward grading mistakes, then you get emails asking you whether something is a grading mistake or has the chance of lowering a grade. And I've tried this policy before, and got students who wrote in my course evals something like "the professor intentionally tries to scare students from asking for regrades by threatening to lower their grade even more." And then what about when you are still asked for a regrade (which in my experience was not zero, but maybe about a third or half as much as without this policy). In those cases, you end up doing way way more, so the level of effort actually increases.
• avnigo 5y ago
  > I had some teachers who tried to avoid the issue by setting the A boundary at 89.5%. I outwitted them by earning 89.483% 89.483% rounds to 89.5%, but not 89.50%; it's just a matter of significant figures. I see significant figures often being misunderstood. You can only ever compare values of the same number of significant figures, it's just that most of the time that's done implicitly, so it's not acknowledged.
• rrss 5y ago
  removed
  • cdjk 5y ago
    I would be curious to know the name of that school.
• szundi 5y ago
  When I give my course to the students, I kind of feighten them on the first homework grading that has low weight in the final grade. Some of them even quit as I seem to be a crazy strict guy. Then they stay and I ease up, they study as needed, end of semester: “best course” / “best teacher” / “this course made most sense this year” etc.
• Cerium 5y ago
  In high school I had a chemistry teacher who offererd that the grade submitted at the end of the year would be the greater of your grade with and without homework. He also warned that only occasionally the latter is a benefit rather than a harm. This intrigued me so much that I did the homework and didn't submit it in order to get a bad homework grade and overall top marks in the class. Anonymous grade info was posted on the wall periodically, everyone wanted to know who had the zero in homework.
• derbOac 5y ago
  So I've taught a lot at the university level, and reading this and the original blog post they were responding to I realized that I gradually shifted in how I saw exams. The traditional model, the one implicitly adopted in the posts, is one where the instructor presents material, maybe with some discussion or engagement with the material in the form of activities or assignments, and then evaluates understanding on an exam of some sort. In this model, the exam is a measurement. It makes sense from this standpoint that all you really need is some megaexam that measures your comprehension of the material, and if you pass it, you pass. There is something to be said for this in all sorts of areas of life. There's another model, though, where the teacher is a sort of coach. In this paradigm, your role as instructor isn't just to present material and then measure it, but to provide incentives along the way for the student to engage with the material and process it. In this model, the exam is activity. You present a series of quizzes or exams for the student to problem solve, and you incentivize this by giving credit or not giving credit. It's the equivalent of training drills in sport. All those assignments and midterm exams are incentives for staying engaged with the material along the way, to practice. I suppose you could say something like "well taking the final exam repeatedly could serve that role, and you can't literally give the same exam over and over again due to cheating and learning to the test, so what you'd really be doing is giving multiple exams, which is kinda like assignments" but then at that point you've redefined things so much it's a moot point. There's also little point in assigning material the student doesn't understand yet, so what you end up with is what usually is done, which is units, with assignments or interim exams that are graded along the way. Ideally you'd have tailored material, activities, and exams that are tailored to specific students and their specific progress, but in practice at universities there's just not enough resources to do that. It's too expensive, if you include social components as part of the learning process. There are also general trends that are too hard to ignore (most students whereever you are will be in some peak of a bell curve of some sort), and so you end up with what usually happens (which is sort of the point of the author).
  • jvvw 5y ago
    At Oxford, my degree depended entirely on 8 three-hour exams at the end of the final year, which were mostly set by different people from the people teaching you. There are issues with this (not least that if you are slightly ill say during the two weeks of exams, it affects your whole degree) but one thing that was really nice compared with the other universities where I have taught is that the relationship with the people teaching you feels fair less adversarial and more cooperative. Also by not having exams in the second year (there were exams in the first year you had to pass but which didn't count towards your degree), there was more emphasis on really understanding the subject rather just jumping through hoops. But I think this only worked because of the teaching system there - as a general rule you had two tutorials a week which were usually one-to-two (or sometimes one-to-one or one-to-three) and it was very hard to slack too much or not do the work for them. Such a system requires a significant amount of funding so probably isn't scalable. Colleges did sometimes set their own internal exams too during the course which didn't count towards your degree (but for which you could get monetary prizes if you did well in them!) but which you could fail which would set a process in motion in which you could be kicked out of the university.
• hajile 5y ago
  Unfortunately, even graduating students usually still have the life experience of a child and can't see the real purpose in education. Most are better off without a degree. Most who get a degree would be better off with an apprenticeship tailored to their field. Most of the rest would benefit from getting a few years of real life experience first. The reduction in attendance would lower costs and reduce degree inflation in the job market. More productive years would be available and people could replace their college debt with a mortgage and have something of tangible value when they were done.
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    Sounds like you don't have the life experience to see that there is more point to getting a degree than learning. Maybe you don't like that, but it is true.
    • hajile 5y ago
      What things are supposed to be learned alongside said degree? I graduated years ago and I still have yet to see what these other points are.
      • IshKebab 5y ago
        The other benefits of a degree beside learning are: * Makes it way easier to get a job * Great social experience
        • hajile 5y ago
          You can gain social experience lots of other places while making money rather than spending tons of money. Degree inflation means that getting a job with one is about as hard as getting a job without one a couple decades ago. In any case, who you know is usually more important than what you know when starting out. If you wind up self-employed, then I started out my professional programming career before I had a degree (and started learning programming around 9-10 years old). In my many, many interviews, I've never been asked about my degree. Likewise, I've never asked a programmer about their college education in an interview and I don't see a reason to start asking that question. I care about if you can do the job and that's all any company really cares about too.
• iancmceachern 5y ago
  So is management in a large company.
• anon946 5y ago
  As a professor, this completely resonates with me. For example, I take attendance and make it 5% of the grade. Then I give 5 free days and am generous with absences due to whatever. Why? Because it's a nudge for many students to get them to come to class, which makes them stay engaged, and ultimately get a better grade. (The other reason I take attendance is so that I can recognize at least most of them by mid-semester, so can call on them by name when they raise their hand.) And I'm often torn with taking points off for submitting work late. On one hand, why should it matter exactly when they submitted the work, if it's good work? On the other hand, I know that if I just said that there's no late penalty, some significant fraction of the students would wait till the end of the semester, then realize that they haven't been keeping up, then create headaches for everyone involved, including themselves.
  • leetrout 5y ago
    I ran my class like a job (senior level interactive media). We had assignments with deadlines and I did PR reviews. Deadlines are deadlines. Cut scope, features, etc but absolutely no late work. You can guess how it went.
    • professoretc 5y ago
      > I ran my class like a job... Deadlines are deadlines. We were having a conversation at my college about deadlines at some training thing and someone pointed out that almost no job is like that. That movie scenario where the guy has a big presentation, but it's also his daughter's dressage recital or whatever, and if he misses the presentation he'll lose his job? That doesn't happen. In the real world, you just say "I can't do it that day, let's reschedule for next week." and that's fine. Most real world deadlines are soft.
      • titanomachy 5y ago
        As a software engineer, I generally agree. My partner is a corporate lawyer, though, and deadlines are a _big deal_ for them.
      • 5y ago
• djoldman 5y ago
  Theres much to talk about here. A lot of this is sensitive to context. Students in high school, college, and grad school have different levels of maturity. There are also different incentives for each setting. I would say that high school and college students are more similar than grad students though. Perhaps more important is the fact that the power the teachers have in each setting is different as well: high school teachers have little power whereas college professors have much more leeway in designing and grading their courses.
  • caddemon 5y ago
    I feel like a lot of development happens between 14 and 18, so I don't understand why freshmen and senior years of high school are so similar from an academic philosophy perspective. Even in a private school where the teachers have a bit more freedom. I think a lot of kids get thrown into college with no idea how to manage themselves because they never had to before. There ought to be a better way to ease into that. I agree it is very context dependent though. Not just academic year but also class content. Some courses need to lay a strong foundation, others would be most useful as a survey, still others are about synthesizing knowledge from across prior courses. Some classes contain students mostly forced to be there and others contain mostly students that are excited about that particular material. Different fields lend themselves to different assignment styles. And so on.
  • golemiprague 5y ago
• bmacho 5y ago
  (On homework) > And you know what? When the students blame you, maybe they are right. The teacher is supposed to use their experience to help students learn. Shouldn’t you help the actual imperfect humans in front of them, rather than imagining a bunch of perfectly rational Platonic objects? This is an extremely mean accusation. As a former student, I've never ever blamed any of my professors for not giving me enough homework. I am sure I passed the final exam classes with much better grades and knowledge than the homework classes (which I usually failed and dropped very early). And if I've not, I've still felt extremely annoyed and mad about the system, and how nonsense and unfair it is. I can accept a statistics about homework and no homework classes (which the article fails to provide), that the majority of students perform better, or the average is better, or the lower range is better, or anything. But this kind of arguing is simply worthless (less than worthless).
• nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Much of the article and comments here can be explained the death of good faith. People no longer believe in competent, benevolent power, and a process of maturation that challenges power in acceptable ways. Instead we build "systems". We pretend these systems are equitable. They merely hide power and force it to become malevolent, incompetent and terrified of challenge. We call this stagnation "progress"
• nostrademons 5y ago
  This phenomena has plenty of analogues in the corporate & government worlds as well. A formal performance review system is instituted to keep people from spending all their time sucking up to their boss, and then is progressively refined to deter all the ways that it has been gamed, until it is very well adapted to preventing the historical forms of gaming the system but bears no relation at all to incentivizing good business results. A codebase gets a series of bugfixes, until it ends up slow and impossible to maintain, and then is thrown away when a competitor adapts to market conditions faster. A new government bureaucracy is formed to identify and prevent all the ways that terrorists could bring down airliners, and only serves to violate flyers' privacy and add millions of hours to accumulated travel time. The root cause, I think, is that humans are really bad at considering both the specific and the general in their decision-making. A new procedure might perfectly solve the problem you're having right now, but the cumulative effect of all these new procedures is to make the overall system useless. Long-lasting systems provide for ways to throw away whole parts of the system and replace them with something simpler, without throwing away the system itself. Whole industries get outcompeted by a nimble startup. Codebases get refactored, and gnarly subsystems deprecated and replaced with clean interfaces. Elected officials get thrown out of office. Perhaps the right way to look at this is to embrace change, and position yourself as the destroyer and replacer of systems that have become overcomplicated and bloated. That's why the tech and finance industries have been so highly compensated over the last 20 years: together, they're throwing away whole parts of the 1980/90s institutions that had become bloated through 40-50 years of progressive micro-optimization.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  Any visionary attempting to restructure traditional learning should read this, and I say that with no ounce of malice or sarcasm - its a nice hazard map, and it at least one constructive change that should be enacted: 1. Grades should be a continuum (percentage), not bins (A, B, C,..). "When you are forced to discretize into a small number of bins, injustice is inevitable." Report cards have no rational reason for not being an aggregate of numbers rather than low resolution numbers (letters). The crux of the justification given for enacting these policies students hate is that students need motivation; their human nature, even given a clear end goal, is not enough for most of them to learn at the required pace without intermediate and forced goals. Of course this leads into the problem of carefully interpreting assignments to do as little work as possible, and lowering the quality of all student's experience to make assignments painfully clear. All this leads so naturally back into the temptation to loosen standards of the class. If students are going to lazily and disingenuously complete assignments, they will not learn, and it should reflect on their exam grades - but making every student perform the same problems every time will waste half the students time if your assignments are catered to the slowest learners - the fastest learners will feel completely patronized and waste the most time. Don't punish your best students. The real solution is breaking up classes. One class as a monolithic, multi-month, atomic unit causes problems. Each intermediate exam should serve to split the class into many smaller classes, which can be failed and retaken modularily. In fact, students should decide when they want to take that modular class's exam, and can stay in or attempt to test out at their discretion. Now all of the sudden the relationship between doing assignments and performing on these intermediary tests is tangible, and need not be forced through forced assignments and over-specified instructions. Students can still be required complete a final exam encapsulating all material from each modular class (longer re-test periods could be applied if need be), and if they performed poorly students would have the option to retake those modular sections to build up a more robust understanding. This has other benefits as well: pre-requisites can be much smaller, and more specific pursuits of knowledge can have constructed an express course of just the strictly necessary modular courses from each full course. Students wanting complete understandings can always go back and pick up where they left off.
  • smogcutter 5y ago
    > Any visionary attempting to restructure traditional learning should read this, and I say that with no ounce of malice or sarcasm... On the contrary. Part of TFA’s point is that, like many other fields, outsiders usually have a much poorer idea than they think of the hows and whys of teaching. Until you’re actually in front of a classroom it’s not obvious why seemingly sensible ideas are often ineffective or unworkable (see also: any HN thread about k-12). Reading a blog post, rubbing some brain cells on it, and then making pronouncements is exactly the kind of thing TFA warns against. Any visionary attempting to restructure learning should teach.
• penteract 5y ago
  The grading method this article argues is infeasible is widely used in the UK (although retakes aren't always unlimited or free). This does have downsides, but many of the other problems described in the article vanish. Very importantly, students aren't incentivized to hide the fact that they don't understand something in homework.
• pacman128 5y ago
  I taught college CS for 10 years before moving to industry. Cheating wasn't a huge problem, but I did run have some issues. Gave a makeup exam to one student with an altered programming problem than the original exam. The student answered the original problem, not the one on the exam they was given. That made it very clearcut. I also had a written requirement that students must be able to explain their homework programs to me. Had a few that couldn't explain what parts of "their" own program was doing.
  • manquer 5y ago
    Most professionals don’t know parts of their SO copy pasta code does either
• a-dub 5y ago
  i always personally preferred project work. i was never great at exams (although i did get a whole hell of a lot better at them). project work always better suited my obsessive personality and desire to really polish things. projects feel creative, homeworks and exam prep... don't. (although learning how to take exams meant learning how to make good cheat sheets and memorizing them well, so in a way it became creative) that said for most lower division material projects are unsuitable, for that stuff the system i saw i liked the most i first saw online for an undergrad intro ai course at mit. it was pretty simple, the course had a handful of carefully designed uncurved but not tricky half exams units that were given throughout the term. the final was two half exam spaces for any units you wanted to try again, if you did well all semester, you didn't have to show up for the final, if you messed up, it's your chance to retake the specific units you wish to improve. goal: demonstrate you learned all the techniques in the course, that's it. sometimes it felt like putting more weight on homeworks was for student comfort and to reduce stress on exams for everyone, sadly sometimes i think it had the opposite effect of producing lazier exam design and more reliance on curves. i once took a course which had no official notes, fairly weak lectures and the claim "i teach at a level above the assigned textbook." no, he didn't, he wasted everyone's time. i once went to see a professor after the fact to go over the final, i told him explicitly i just wanted to understand the things i got wrong but he kept returning points even after multiple statements that i didn't care. this made me very sad to think that he probably sat for hours with people arguing over points rather than discussing material. overall it felt like some professors (or maybe their students) spent hundreds of hours designing amazing courses and some spent less than ten. those in the former camp were often prickly in terms of their specific asks, but obviously in those cases it didn't matter as the care and craftsmanship that went into the course design justified any particularity. it was the waste of time courses that were the worst (even if they did sometimes come with generous mea culpa grading).
• Zak 5y ago
  One of my favorite teachers in high school had the following policies: * There will be a short quiz every week covering recent material. * Homework is optional for any student who got an A on the last quiz (due to the length of the quizzes, that essentially meant 100%). * Anyone with an A average in the class so far and an A on the last quiz is permitted to sleep in class. It worked great. Nobody's time was being wasted on busy work, nor were people recklessly left behind.
• slaymaker1907 5y ago
  As a student for many years, I completely agree I would not prepare as well without some stakes in the homework. However, using those super precise instructions can be harmful to students. It's very difficult for me as someone with ADHD to follow these instructions and not miss something.
• sdenton4 5y ago
  The example about the ever-increasing list of assignment requirements appears in many other domains than teaching. Think of the AirBNB with a fifty-page guide whose 'rules' are all thinly-disguised anecdotes about something that went horribly wrong. And I'm sure we've all seen business processes like this... This ends up (somewhat) preventing asshole behavior at the expense of making life worse for all of the non-assholes. But in reality, assholes will find new and imaginative ways to be assholes, no matter how many specific rules are in place. One hopes that better solutions are possible. In the teaching example, we could imagine keeping the rules broad and simple, and including a reward for any student who doesn't require 'special treatment' through regrade requests, etc. (I have seen systems where regrades include a grade reduction if no errors are found.) In AirBNB, deposits and waive-able cleaning fees serve a similar purpose.
  • camgunz 5y ago
    It's regulations in general. Whenever someone complains about regs and red tape stifling innovation, it's generally that someone tried to game the system. "This is why we can't have nice things", etc
• jzer0cool 5y ago
  Examples of "You understand when you're older ...". Any examples of when you thought you understood then, but only, truly understood when older?
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted OTOH when I took operating systems I got an assignment that said “implement a job scheduler, using FIFO, LIFO or round-robin job scheduling”. So I picked FIFO, got it working and I had time left over so I thought, “what the hell? I’ll do LIFO too”. So I did, and I still had time so I took a crack at round-robin, but I didn’t have time so I turned it what I had, proud of myself for going above and beyond. I got back a 66 on the assignment. I asked why and he said, “you didn’t even attempt round robin”. I pulled up the assignment where it VERY CLEARLY said “or” and he said, “well, it should have been obvious I meant ‘and’”.
  • portpecos 5y ago
    That’s pretty sad. As a CS Professor, he should understand the distinction between a conjunction and disjunction.
    • dan-robertson 5y ago
      I think It’s a question of scope not of the logical operator. One way to interpret the question is: 1. You choose X or Y or Z 2. You provide a scheduler that does the thing you chose Another is: 1. You provide a scheduler where I choose X or Y or Z and the scheduler does the thing I chose. The question is whether the disjunction applies to the input configuration of the scheduler or the output of the assignment. That is, whether the output of the assignment has type (X_scheduler | Y_scheduler | Z_scheduler) or type (X | Y | Z) -> scheduler.
      • kelnos 5y ago
        I agree with you, but not as the assignment is worded: > “implement a job scheduler, using FIFO, LIFO or round-robin job scheduling” To me, "using" modifies "implement"; that is, the teacher is telling me to implement something, and then telling me what to use. (That is, "using" does not modify "job scheduler".) If the teacher wanted the second interpretation, they should have said: "Implement a job scheduler that can use FIFO, LIFO, or round-robin scheduling." In this case, "that can use" is clearly referring to the job scheduler, not to me. To be fair, though, I think some students might still (reasonably!) believe this means they only have to implement one algorithm. I would probably use this second wording, but also change the "or" to "and". Even better, though more wordy: "Implement a job scheduler where the user can select between FIFO, LIFO, and round-robin scheduling." Let's also remember that boolean logic and English usage are not the same thing. I don't think my two suggested wordings would be considered "over-specifying" in the same way that OP is talking about. They're just a better use of language. The teacher here should just have re-read the problem instructions, shown understanding and empathy toward the student, and either a) just changed the grade right then and there, or b) offered to let the student complete the rest of the assignment and turn it in again. And then made the wording of the problem more clear for the next batch of students.
• apstats 5y ago
  High school AP stats teacher here in their first year of teaching. While I think this article holds some water much of it is a hyperbole. In reality a good teacher will learn they can’t make everyone happy and learn to deal with students who complain.
• superposeur 5y ago
  As an instructor, agree about everything but will add that I try to keep a positive framing. That people procrastinate and need incentives is human nature — no more use bemoaning this than bemoaning politics. The job of instructor is precisely to enforce a system of rules and incentives while not being too dogmatic about them that the class turns into a grind while promoting enthusiasm for learning while creating inspired course content, while balancing all this with the instructor’s own scholarship priorities. It’s a tall order and very few people do it well. That mastery is difficult and subtle does not distinguish pedagogy from other professions, but what is different is that every shmo off the street remembers being a student, so thinks they know the secret formula for pedagogy.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• punnerud 5y ago
  I feel the same with Wikipedia, the Norwegian articles are often better than the English ones because they often are shorter and to the point. I don’t want to read 2000 words for something that could be explained in under 100. Have been thinking of a 200word limit per article version of Wikipedia.
  • Ardon 5y ago
    I'm not sure that's really in the spirit of an encyclopedia, unless you really could get all the information you had in those 200 words. I think this would be a valid imposition on the summary sections of most pages though, they can be a little unfocused I find.
    • punnerud 5y ago
      You get to put all the information there, but have to place it in a sub-article. That way you force the writer to have a more faster introduction.
  • Hendrikto 5y ago
    > Have been thinking of a 200word limit per article version of Wikipedia. Hard limits are not a good solution either. They may still be better than the status quo though.
• zenlf 5y ago
  The title could also be why communism is fundamentally incompatible with human society. The realization of human nature really disappoints.
• jccalhoun 5y ago
  I always say "Never underestimate a student's ability to misinterpret an assignment."
• ameister14 5y ago
  This writer seems more concerned with not being blamed than improving students' success rates. Why have homework grades? Well, if you don't, "they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework." Why have deadlines? If you don't, they "blame you for not imposing deadlines on them." I get why someone would want to avoid blame or conflict, but it shouldn't influence what you're grading people on. His reasoning for participation grades is bogus. 1. Classes are not better if everyone is talking and asking questions. Often, this actually causes class to move more slowly and cover less ground and questions would be better after class one on one. 2. He doesn't want kids to act up and is punishing the kids that do by removing their future opportunities, which is not great because the kids most likely to act up are the ones most likely to have learning difficulties or hard home lives. So this makes things worse for kids that need the most help. 3. Participation grades are arbitrary and a tool for control. The initial arguments for other grades about how they can't be arbitrary and you need to be rigid are thrown out the window with participation grades. 4. You don't really have a major freeloader problem in classes, in part because it's not a commons. It's managed and controlled by one person or an administration. It is my opinion that it is unnecessary to punish what freeloading exists, which is what participation grades do. 5. Participation grades are not really an incentive, they are a penalty. If you make participation worth something you are forcing people to participate if they want the same grade they would have previously gotten without participation. You are penalizing non-participation by lowering their grade. For it to be a pure incentive, they would need to get extra points or something for participation, but they don't.
  • plandis 5y ago
    > 1. Classes are not better if everyone is talking and asking questions. Often, this actually causes class to move more slowly and cover less ground and questions would be better after class one on one. Covering more material isn’t necessarily a good thing if students are not really understanding the material that’s already been presented. I personally and benefitted greatly from others asking questions. Sometimes the questions asked were not even things I considered. In my college classes that were purely lecture based where the prof didn’t allow interruptions, I certainly got more value out of studying with others because of the questions.
• jackblemming 5y ago
  Sounds like ruining the system for everyone because a minority of abusive, lazy, or incompetent students. That doesn't seem reasonable at all, and it sounds like the root cause needs to be addressed. That minority is not going to be spoon fed when they enter the real world.
• chubot 5y ago
  And most of the students are amazingly gracious and drop the issue. But some don’t, and they keep complaining and asking for regrades, and if those aren’t accepted they (or their parents) contact the principal/chair/dean/ombudsperson, who are required to have an investigation. Reminds me of The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict... But it's the other side of the coin The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
• justinlloyd 5y ago
  I have taught at college and university in STEM subjects, and also professional corporate training courses on software development to senior and lead engineers for about a dozen <companies you have heard of and use their products every day>. And I will say that universally, every single class runs the exact same way. There are those that want to learn, and there are those that are killing time and will argue with you until they are blue in the face that they deserve a different grade, and they have come up with more excuses and reasons why something wasn't done than I could think up in a decade. When I used to teach at college and university I would think "there's no way you are ever getting a job in this field" and then when I did professional corporate training I would think "I have no idea how you keep your job, but I do know that if I showed up for an interview, you wouldn't give me the time of day." You can argue with "well maybe you're a lousy teacher" and whether that is true or not, it doesn't account for the flat out denial and debating, and dare I say it, outright lying, about why the assignment wasn't done.
• EntropyIsAHoax 5y ago
  My "senior seminar" for my undergraduate degree had the most ingenious grading system I've ever encountered, called the "cookie system". While working on your paper throughout the semester you had to meet certain milestones. Each milestone was due at 6pm and there were the following grading rules: - if you reach the milestone before 6pm you gain one "cookie" - if you reach it after 6pm but before midnight, no cookie - you lose 1 cookie for each day it's late, starting at midnight the day after it was due - if you at any point during the semester reach a negative amount of cookies, you instantly fail the class - the final paper is graded pass/fail This has the advantage that it keeps students on track, but the final grade is just a result of their actual knowledge and the final paper. The first few milestones were trivial to meet so you get a little buffer if you're late for some reason. In my year not a single person failed due to lack of cookies either
  • pgcj_poster 5y ago
    So if you hand in the first assignment a day late, you fail the class?
    • EntropyIsAHoax 5y ago
      Yes, but the first assignment was something silly so everyone could do it. I could also see giving everyone 3 cookies to start with as an initial buffer
• danjc 5y ago
  Are people less reasonable than they used to be? I mean, was it necessary to use these kind of nudge/incentive techniques 30 years ago, 60 years ago?
• dan-robertson 5y ago
  Firstly, I sympathise that teaching seems to be awful. I think a lot of the problems are misaligned incentives (universities are judged by their research output; it is hard to have a career as an excellent teacher rather than an excellent researcher) But I worry that the argument has strayed too far from one based on Chesterton’s fence to one with a lot of status quo bias and rationalisation. I say this because my university (outside the United States) followed a system much like the one the author is arguing against. - Almost all of the degree was determined by a final exam. In fact there wasn’t even a final grade for the degree but one for each year and the convention was to take your final-year grade so in some sense only the final exam mattered (you might be expelled or advised to transfer to another course/university if you did particularly poorly in earlier exams). However, there were no resits. - There was homework but it was not graded (at least for my subject. Your individual questions would be marked as right/wrong and problems would be pointed out) - Attendance to lectures was not required however one had to spend a certain reasonable number of nights at the university (for a particular definition of ‘at’ and ‘university’) in order to graduate. - Attendance to lectures was strongly encouraged (because you would struggle to get notes/homework without attendance as ~everything was handwritten or on physical paper) - Attempting homework was strongly encouraged because you would go to small (one on one or one on two) group teaching sessions to discuss it, so there was social pressure to not be (extremely conspicuously) absent and to have something to discuss Let me now briefly discuss how this alternative system addressed some of the author’s points. - Preparing for exams by doing homework (and also a ‘homework’ set of example exam questions) was incentivised by the social pressure of it being very obvious if you didn’t do the work - The homework system also addressed the problems of asking questions being scary in a big group and the (not discussed) system where lots of students in the US don’t realise that they are meant to seek out help in office hours (and worse, I understand this is a particular problem for poorer students who are less likely to know that unlike high school you aren’t meant to touch it out alone) - Because homework wasn’t graded, some questions would be very difficult (because attempts and discussion could be interesting) or chosen for the pedagogical value. Looking at homework offered good opportunities for feedback - Converting examinations to grades was complicated (you would get regular partial credit marks plus two different kinds of bonus mark for different levels of significant progress on a question which got outsize rewards to encourage doing fewer questions well over having a crack at more questions; there was a vector which you could dot with your vector of the three marks to get an ‘overall mark’) and borderline candidates would have their submitted answers carefully reviewed by the examination committee to allow for more fair subjective grading - The university didn’t really offer many opportunities to appeal which reduced the pressure on teachers but has its own problems. There were some rare allowances for extenuating circumstances but in general it was encouraged to not start exams if there were serious complications (eg some health problem) and to wait a year, which was also a problematic system. - But they did try to be particularly fair to students, e.g. they would collect the rubbish paper after the exams and if some student claimed that they had answered a question for which no answer had been submitted, the bins would be searched - Cheating was relatively difficult as there was only one big opportunity for it: the final exams of which there were four (to allow for more time and averaging out a several days) which contained questions from all courses. More could be invested in invigilation for these few exams. That doesn’t mean the system was without complaints. The big complaints were (1) pressure, which was slightly mitigated by the selection procedures of the university somewhat selecting students who were able to handle big exams; (2) unfairness with regards to poor performance during the exam week for random reasons (e.g. injury/personal circumstances/mild illness like a bad cold); (3) different standards for different courses, particularly a divide between pure and applied and harder courses tending to have easier questions; (4) The university is selective and many students felt that they could have gotten a higher grade by going to a less selective university, and many students felt their future would depend on the grade and not the institution next to it (many companies claimed to have ‘institution blind’ hiring for example) and therefore the university was unfairly damaging students’ career prospects with their desire to grade students based on how much they might be allowed to continue education/research at the university.
• quijoteuniv 5y ago
  If you have lived all your life in a basement you tend to think the flourecent light is the sun. Could not make sense of the article… my take on teaching is… you teach because you are the most capable on the subject in the community, is a responsability and you do your best. As with most professions when you do it for the money, you become cinic.
  • derangedHorse 5y ago
    Teaching should definitely not be done by the "most capable on the subject", it should be done by those who are the best educators (with "best" being based on some metrics relating to student outcomes). Both roles are not the same. Just because someone is knowledgable about a subject doesn't mean they know how to convey that subject for consumption. Conversely I think that those who don't know as much about an entire subject but understand the material of a particular course very well could be better suited for the task of teaching than the "most capable".
    • quijoteuniv 5y ago
      Tomeitos, move to a smaller isolated community and see how you become the right person for the job.
• jrm4 5y ago
  Soooo..I teach IT for a living and am thankfully thankfully free of being on the research side of things. I am incredibly lucky to be able to generally do things how I like. I let them know mostly early on: I do grades because I have to, not because I enjoy them. I've settled on the following: I try to make the biggest assignment an ongoing project-thing that they "turn in" more than once, and try to coach them into primarily learning and doing -- and turning in something that I can reasonably slap a good grade on. I do one or two small quiz type deals on top of that. Very hard multiple choice, but take-home, and you're on your honor to not to consult live humans. Also, I do the nice type of "curve," so if your fellow students' grades are average low, that helps you. Honestly, this is much more to maintain classic ideas about grading, though I suppose it helps keep the younger ones on their toes. Also, I find the psychological effect of "QUIZ" to be sufficient to get people to prepare, even when they don't check the syllabus and see that these aren't all that much of their final grade. This seems to be a pretty good way to do IT type classes.
• MengerSponge 5y ago
  To first order, you can solve the regrade and homework issue with policy: gate regrades on completion of homework assignments, and limit the number of regrades that may be submitted per week. You need a rate limiter to prevent students from just spamming regrades until the evaluation returns "A", and you want to incentivize the desired behavior--homework is intended to help students develop skills. If you want to learn more, some useful keywords and phrases to find cutting edge thought: "ungrading", "Standards Based Grading", "learning objectives-based assessment" There is literature on this, but don't let that stop you! It's much more fun to speculate about pedagogical practices based solely on what you remember from high school and college.
  • derangedHorse 5y ago
    That's exactly my problem with this post, the author makes it seem like a lot of thought was put into their teaching when it seems like most of their "progressive" ideas were half-baked. When talking about the abundance of regrades, instead of re-iterating on the idea, they gave up on it and deemed it impractical. > "We could change from the current “mandatory Odysseus” regime to an “optional Odysseus” regime: On the first day of class, offer students an irrevocable choice: They can have homework and deadlines imposed on them, or not. Perhaps the students who need deadlines would learn to opt for them and others could live freely." I don't see why there can't be more happy-mediums like having deadline schedule where if you miss one assignment, you can turn it in within the next 2 assignments. There's a lot more options in the space of possibilities that aren't being explored. And maybe this is not exactly a criticism in the author's eyes depending on what their priorities are. I'd have to find out how the author ranks the priorities of being a teacher. Is the main priority to have the students leave with an understanding of the course material, to just do the job well enough to not get reprimanded by the school (by doing the minimum to reduce student complaints and have a "healthy" pass/fail ratio), or to aid the student in their education however far they are able to go with points given for effort (which could vary depending on what the student will actually pursue). This also isn't even touching on the topic on the quality of teaching being done and whether as much thought has been put into that as grading policies.
    • 5y ago
• bricemo 5y ago
  This opinion seems uninformed about a great body of research that has been done around standards-based grading. Stanford has led a lot of this and a family member of mine has collaborated with them on successful field studies in school districts. The result has been increased comprehension, better test scores, and especially improved performance for disadvantaged groups. By removing grades on homework, and making it so that what is being evaluated is not collection of points, but rather ability to demonstrate the skill against a rubric while retesting, it allows learning closer to the actual target skill. It also more closely mirrors an actual career: if you are running a project at a company and do not hit your quarterly goal, then you don’t just say “Oh well, guess I got a F” and move on to phase 2 of the plan. You revise and try phase 1 again until you reach the objective. It should be noted that switching from normal grading styles to standards-based grading is not trivial. In school districts there are in fact entire training programs and coaches like my family member that help teachers, administrators, and parents understand the concept and put it into practice. There are not only practical obstacles, but also paradigm shifts that have to slowly happen. But the results are worth it, it is overwhelmingly more effective.
  • pmyteh 5y ago
    This is interesting. Do you have a link to further reading?
    • tgv 5y ago
      That's a really necessary question, and I'll be blunt. I've had a fairly long research career in psychology. We all know the research standards in psychology are low, but those in educational sciences are much lower. It's a personally held belief that at least some of the misery in the current state of education comes from their research.
• nobody9999 5y ago
  "If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson Source: http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/117566_if-the-colleges-were-better-if-they-really-had-it-you-would-need-to-get-the-police-at-the-gates-to-keep-order-in-the-inrushing-multitude.html http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/1175...
  • bo1024 5y ago
    I believe college used to be much more about being close to the cutting edge of knowledge and research (thus why instructors have historically been research professors), whereas now it is more like an extension of high school.
• pkdpic 5y ago
  Kind of agree but thats why I stopped teaching and went to a dev bootcamp. Even though I taught for about 7 years my theory was that 3 years was a good amount of time to put in to teaching before starting to burn out. Sort of treating it like the public service it feels like. Not that everyone has the option of leaving. But financially speaking I observed that even fewer people had the option / privilege of teaching indefinitely without the financial support of a spouse or roommate living situations into middle-age. Thinking mainly about the growing percentage of non-fulltime teaching roles.
  • cehrlich 5y ago
    I had the same experience. In addition to many jobs being less than full-time, it's also not a very secure job, in the sense that depending on your specialty there might only be a handful of universities that could ever potentially hire you in any given country. I'm currently transitioning from teaching to dev, and this insecurity is what caused me by far the biggest anxiety, much worse than not having a lot of money. Regarding the article: I agree entirely. I also came into teaching with the goal of being different than the teachers I'd had, but every good intent got beaten out of me by someone who used it as an opportunity to skirt the rules. Combine this with strict admin stuff (you know you're BSing and I know you're BSing, but I can't give you a bad grade because you technically didn't break any explicit rules) and you end up with the current situation of having to preemptively mention every loophole and edge case.
• gverrilla 5y ago
  teaching is broken
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jdougan 5y ago
  Another fine example of "Our systems are the scar tissue of past mistakes."
• jacobsenscott 5y ago
  You can replace "teacher" with "engineering manager" and it continues to be spot on. None of this changes after engineers graduate, and even after they have years of experience.
• nojs 5y ago
  One of the most effective exam techniques I have seen, which is uncommon in my country but maybe common elsewhere, is oral exams. I TA’d for a German professor who did them for his stat/ML course, and so got to sit in on all of them (I also took the course myself in an earlier year so had the experience as a student as well). The process was: 1. Give students a list of about 100 questions in advance, more than you could memorise. Some were simple like “write down the formula for X”, some were more complex like “derive the backprop update algorithm”. 2. Pick the first question difficulty based on the student’s assignment grades 3. If they go to it right, pick a harder question, otherwise an easier one. If you aren’t sure whether they really understand, interrogate them about the answer, ask follow up questions etc. 4. Choose a grade based on which questions they got right. Firstly this was highly effective at making students actually learn the material because most were worried enough about embarrassing themselves in front of the professor that they prepared well. But also, it was extremely fair because it’s essentially impossible to cheat and fake what you know. I suspect many professors would avoid this because it’s harder to justify the grades at the end to a third party. But if you record the exams, and the student is clearly failing to answer simple questions, it’s quite hard for them to argue they were treated unfairly. Of all the written exams I’ve seen and taken, I’ve never seen a process as fair or effective as these oral exams.
  • l_s 5y ago
    To back this up - I went through the oral exam experience on both sides (student and TA) with two different German professors and it worked incredibly well. We offered oral exams as a remedy for a few situations: - suspected/known cheaters - students who missed exams due to illness - times in the course where we needed to get a good grip on whether our students understood the coursework the way we'd taught it It was scary for a lot of students, especially the ones without great English, but it was always, in my view, incredibly fair. edit: based on your comment history you're also in Australia - I have a feeling we might be talking about the same place :)
    • nojs 5y ago
      Haha small world! It was at the ANU, intro to statistical machine learning several years ago.
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  Maybe there's room for a top tier education and/or certification environment. Some place where the assignment instructions are the simple version and the people who try to play the unreasonable "but what about this?" game just get failed out. It would be a feature of the credential in question. And right along with that, small enough class environments that the grade for the course is pass or fail, and the exam is oral. You either know the material or you don't. Maybe we could do this in software and try to cut back on the need for leetcode interviews. Ha!
• nonbirithm 5y ago
  > Shouldn’t you help the actual imperfect humans in front of them, rather than imagining a bunch of perfectly rational Platonic objects? As a functional, working class adult, I carry a conviction that specific aspects of my life would improve if I was forced to give up a portion of my autonomy by an external party for what some people may term "my own good." And I don't mean this in the sense of finding enjoyable hobbies, but in doing the things that need to be done for the maintenance grounded in hard physics and biology, such as exercise and diet - two things I have little interest in, and for which I have no luxury of external deadlines for. There are limits to certain other strategies. Amphetamines don't exactly help with falling to sleep on time, for example. For some reason, I believe this in spite of the issues my upbrining caused me, and it gives me conflicting feelings. As other commentators have pointed out, there can be numerous lifelong problems stemming from how one was raised by their parents. In my case, I suffered numerous traumas that I believe I have yet to fully move on from. Criticizing those methods, or the lack of them in the present, makes me feel like I'm shifting the blame to the world around me instead of taking responsibility for myself, as "an adult". Yet, at the same time, I feel as if I can't be trusted to just expect myself to do the right thing because I've gained financial autonomy and the "adult" label. There are times when the perfect solution makes its appearance ("just" exercise daily), and yet the drive to pursue it fades before my eyes. There are disorders of the mind that are known to interfere with the very capability of someone to take responsibility, such as ADHD. I sometimes imagine what it would be like to have access to a set of data on the exact dates and times of how people exercise each day, or how they plan their meals (knowing full well that those insights might not necessarily work for me), and the resulting health statistics/ages lived for those people. In some racing games, there is a "ghost" feature that shows you the runs of the players with the best times, to use as a guide for your own strategies. With the current Internet, at times it feels like there's only a massive pile of conflicting information and no sense of direction, which ignores what actual people ultimately do with their lives.
• bluenose69 5y ago
  Once, I tried a grading scheme in which the grade is either a weighted average of assignments and exam grades, or the exam grade, whichever is higher. My reasoning was the same as in the article -- I thought this scheme would measure what matters most. However, I found that quite a few students skipped assignments and also did poorly in the exam. Of course, the strong students sailed through either path. But the weaker ones also matter. And, after all, the point of grading is not just to assess. It is also to motivate students, and to signal to them which things are important. Unless the class is quite strong, it makes sense to balance assignments and examinations. And, as in the article, it is helpful to pick a scheme and stick to it.
• WaitWaitWha 5y ago
  > [...] course grades should be 100% determined by performance on a final exam—an exam that could be taken repeatedly, with the last attempt being the course grade. [...] Lets take this at face value. There is no reason pay academia for the entire class. If I can pass the final (and pay for that part) which demonstrate my knowledge, there is no reason for me to spend the entire semester/quarter/period in class or pay for it. Prove me wrong. This is how it works with real-world licensing and certifications.
• matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > The problem is that student performance is continuous. When you are forced to discretize into a small number of bins, injustice is inevitable. Yeah, so why insist on doing that? Because that's what's easy for the schools and the teachers of this rather inhumane mass education system. How else are they to evaluate the performance of hundreds of students? They can't know each student individually. They must create artificial tests which they can apply at scale. They must create a grade economy. They must reduce humans to statistics. Why even have grade boundaries? The difference between 89.95% and 90% is no doubt statistically insignificant. Why cause pain by creating rigid A-F boundaries? > But some teachers are principled and are determined to police cheating anyway. The problem is much of what is considered "cheating" by these people is actually perfectly normal real world behavior. Research and team work are absolutely normal and expected in the real world but in the artificially difficult dream world of academia they are frowned upon. Why? Because allowing these things would force them to use less efficient evaluation methods. Much easier to ask a ton of questions in timed high pressure exams that will single-handledly decide the student's future.
  • adminprof 5y ago
    Simply, because using absolute points would lead to debate over every single decimal of a point. A student with 89.95% would be determined to fight to get 90.05% and then continue to fight to get 90.15% so it only makes the problem worse.
    • matheusmoreira 5y ago
      That's not my experience. There were no A-F grade boundaries in any of the schools I've ever attended. Students only ever cared about the one boundary that still remained: minimum passing grade. I saw exactly one student trying to get a teacher to round up a 99% grade to 100% just so he could say he had a perfect grade, nobody else cared about decimals unless they were in danger of failing a class. Boundaries are the problem. Standardized testing for post-graduate positions in my country would give students bonus points based on their overall academic performance. Full bonus points for grades > 90%, half points for grades > 80%... Of course students wanted to optimize that number as much as possible and I don't really blame them.
• Gimpei 5y ago
  A lot of the issues here seem to be a product of the US education system that defers excessively to the students (probably because they’re paying big bucks). But it could be worse. I did my grad studies in a European University where there was only one examination at the end of the year with no option to contest or even get feedback. The year before mine a Nobel prize winning professor made a mistake on one of his test questions, causing the half of the class that chose that question to fail. Even though it was his fault, there was no recourse. One half of the class had to repeat the entire year-long course!
• tempestn 5y ago
  This passage is terrible and beautiful: Here’s a story from my father. He was teaching a course for working professionals that had a large project component. He—being naive and idealistic—decided that as long as the students eventually finished the project, they had learned the material, so they should get full credit. Thus, his policy was that students could submit the project, get it graded, and then repeat this process as many times as they wanted. He knew this would mean extra work for him, but thought it would be worth it for the students. The result, of course, was catastrophe. To call the strategy many students took “abuse” gives no measure of their ingenuity. They realized that they could skip learning the material, and instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm with my father’s grading as a reward function. Edit: I will say though, I would give this grading scheme a poor grade too. The teacher recognizes it's more work for them, but doesn't seem to recognize it's also far more work for the students. Particularly those who care about their grades and are actually trying to abide by the spirit of the thing and not game the system.
  • matheusmoreira 5y ago
    It's funny, because this evolutionary algorithm is actually just peer review. Submit some work, it gets sent back with comments and corrections, authors change their work to reflect feedback and repeat until the result is published. This is what happens when people try to publish a paper in a journal, when people try to get their pull request accepted. Maybe these students didn't learn the material but I'm sure they learned this process.
  • avs733 5y ago
    >Particularly those who care about their grades and are actually trying to abide by the spirit of the thing and not game the system. A grading system that is more work for students focused on the grade over learning is something I would see as a feature not a bug.
    • tempestn 5y ago
      It's not more work if you're focused on the grade over learning; it's more work if you care about the grade at all, assuming the material is at all challenging. Unless you get a perfect grade on the first attempt (or at least a high enough grade to guarantee yourself a top mark in the course overall), you're going to feel compelled to keep re-trying. (And if other coursework forces you to leave it be, then to feel like you're missing out.) Better to be able to just put in your best effort the first time, and then you're done. I can only speak for myself, but I would have hated this system when I was in school.
• avs733 5y ago
  this article hits so close to home with my experience teaching this semester I feel personally attacked. It makes me sad. I'm really enjoying reading the discussion others are having so I will contribute to anecdotes that I think are telling of just what the author is getting at. 1) About a year ago I was teaching a class that included working with a user group from a country in Africa. 2/3rd of the way through the semester, after submitting an extensive (and well done) research paper on the country's culture, norms, people, and public health needs a student asked me flat out "Is Chad a real country or did you invent it for this project". School is so internalized as a game that they don't even know that they are approaching school as a game. 2) I recently gave a test and received a number of regrade requests. One student had written two paragraphs to answer a question needing one sentence. His regrade request (after seeing the key) was to include the first five words of the first sentence, and ellipses, and the last four words of his last sentence and ask for credit "because the answer was in there". Another asked for a partial credit because 'I understood it even if my answer wasn't right'
• smichel17 5y ago
  Someone I know went to a college where the final exam was 100% of the grade, in most courses. You could retake it as many times as you want, but only if you scored below 70% (presumably to limit the amount of retakes). The result was that if people weren't feeling confident on the test day, they would recycle their test (not hand it in), thereby receiving a zero and guaranteeing the ability to retake. Designing systems of incentives is hard. That said, several of the mentioned problems seem like they have solutioms. - Excessive detail: keep both or several sets of instructions. The detailed version is authoritative in the case of a dispute by the student, but as long as they don't dispute, it's fine if they follow the spirit of the instructions. - Deadlines: Give X "extension tokens" per semester, which allow students to submit one day late, no questions asked. Max 2 tokens per assignment (48h extension). My undergrad CS department did this and it was great. I would guess the latter would work well for regrades as well. A generous but bounded number of regrade tokens. You could even do something like make unused tokens worth 1 bonus % on the final exam, if you want to further disincentive abuse.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    > The detailed version is authoritative in the case of a dispute I think this means everyone will always refer the detailed version. Especially if this is stated up front. Nobody wants to be fucked if the _do_ legitimately need to dispute.
• strken 5y ago
  This is what happens when you take a class where some students don't want to learn, put them in a classroom with teachers who don't want to teach those students, and expect the teachers to act as inspectors in addition to actually teaching them. If you're trying to learn, and if other people are involved, the process goes something like this: 1. you find a mentor, a peer group, or a teacher 2. you read or watch the resources they give you, and do some exercises 3. you ask them to critique your work, possibly in exchange for money[0] 4. they give you actionable feedback, you thank them, and go back to step 2 This is because you want to learn, they want to teach you, and they're not the same person who's going to be testing you later. [0] A good example of when you'd pay money is Drawabox's official critiques
  • matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Completely agree. People are forced to learn because basic education is compulsory and higher education is necessary for success. Not everyone wants this but they're forced to go through it. Since everyone has to be taught, schools turn into mass education centers designed to teach hundreds if not thousands of people at once. It's impossible to mentor individuals at this scale, so teaching becomes these one-to-many broadcasts called lectures and evaluation becomes mass testing. There are inherent limitations to these practices. Not every student is engaged by lectures and there is no room for individualization, people who don't adapt often get diagnosed with "attention deficit" and medicated with amphetamines to improve fitness. Tests are so trivial they have to impose ridiculous constraints on them to artificially increase the difficulty, punishing perfectly reasonable behaviors in the real world such as research and team work. And it goes on and on, it just keeps getting worse until even the average student can smell the phoniness of this system from a mile away.
• dhosek 5y ago
  I remember an obvious case of cheating when I was teaching college students (a boyfriend and girlfriend who sat next to each other turned in identical test papers). I remember telling them that it was obvious that one of them copied off the other and that they couldn't sit next to each other and when I started to complain I told them that filing a formal cheating complaint was a lot of work and I'd really prefer not to do that but if they'd prefer that instead of sitting apart on test days, I could do that too. They sat apart on the next test day. I forget which one of them was the one who failed the next test, but both stopped coming to class after that (I'm assuming the one who was providing the answers was only in the class to provide the answers to the cheater).
• jaitaiwan 5y ago
  This is probably counter, but why do a participation merit system when you could do a participation demerit system. Your grade can go no higher than a D without participation
• k__ 5y ago
  I had the impression that the assingments for math are often like the first (dismissed) example with the breadboard. Draw the rest of the fudging owl.
• paulorlando 5y ago
  Made me sad reading this. I've avoided this by making sure everyone knows you never increase grades, unless there's a grading error. Also, in spite of putting more nicely worded instructions than the ones in the article, I always have around 2% of students completely miss them. More instructions have not decreased that for me. So why do more of them? At one point I said to a student - "You should really work as hard at learning as you do trying to negotiate a higher grade!" I assume they rated me low, but I stopped reading those things years ago.
• Heyso 5y ago
  Well, the issue here, is confusing evaluation and exercice. The first one is used for pilots, to make sure they won't crash the plane. And the second one is used for learning (making mistake and correcting them). There is no point in cheating on exercice, but there is on evaluation.
• naveen99 5y ago
  Teaching can be fun when you get to pick your students.
• cycomanic 5y ago
  I think one of the major problems with university teaching at the moment is the strong emphasis on student evaluations. I don't believe students are necessarily the best judges of learning outcomes. In face I have learned that students tend to be the most conservative entities at university. Try to make any change in a course and they will hammer you on the evaluations. The detailed instruction example is a perfect example of this. In my experience it is not so much that students find creative ways to misinterpret loose instructions, instead I had students literally complain they had to think for labs or homework. I find this attitude very weird, as if when they start working they will always be given the detailed step by step instructions.