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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. H
by 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 agoIt'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 agoIt'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 agoThis may help: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Beck_Hall_1991_The_Relations_of_Learning.pdf https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Beck_Hall_1991_The_Relation...