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I don’t know, a multiple choice quiz shouldn’t be used for grading students at all? My university asks the students to make projects in groups which are differe

I don’t know, a multiple choice quiz shouldn’t be used for grading students at all? My university asks the students to make projects in groups which are different from one another. One team gets to write a tictactoe game in c with ncurses library, one team gets to write connect four with another library and has to implement a given Interface, etc pp. Honestly, these kind of multiple choice tests just suck, and OP shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take this stuff serious.

nso95 4y ago
But then 1 person ends up doing most of the work on the team
- vkou 4y ago
  That person gets a valuable life lesson. Some of us work, so that others prosper.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  My college Software Design & Testing did this well. One big group project that takes the whole semester, but you have to write and submit a simple plan that outlines each team member's responsibility, then you have periodic milestones. Part of the milestones are reporting on what each team member actually did. This works because it's closer to a real work environment, where you'll have a manager who's at least somewhat aware (or should be) of how much each person is accomplishing. The whole, "just let the group figure it out" process that is so common in schools doesn't work, because there's no one with manager-level awareness and authority.
deleted 4y ago
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cgriswald 4y ago
No. Group work is terrible and students are—at least perceptually, when not in fact—in competition with each other both for grades and for time. Even in the best case scenario students are incentivized to do the parts of the work they already do best which seems antithetical to education. Multiple choice quizzes are also useful to the student because they provide a snapshot of fact memorization and maybe some application but there is no point in counting the grades, IMO. If we must evaluate students, then we should be treating evaluation as important as imparting knowledge and experience and spend the time on it that it deserves. Students deserve and need timely and thoughtful individual feedback in order to improve anyway. That means thoughtful projects and a lot of time spent grading. How you incentivize this amongst educators who often don’t even want to be teaching is beyond my pay grade. (Additionally, a grade should reflect level of mastery at the end of the course regardless of progression but that’s not how grades are generally calculated.)
- eloisius 4y ago
  Group work is terrible, but project-based ability assessment is much better than multiple-choice tests. I quit school before graduating, so maybe I’m not the best example, but I had one instructor that noticed a few of us were bored out of our minds in an intro to OO class and told us we could skip all assignments and the final if we turned in a working clone of Asteroids that met certain criteria, using a vector drawing library called Processing, by the end of the semester. Instead of making class Dog extend class Animal for the whole semester, I found myself learning how to do polygon collision detection, optimize it with a rectangle intersection pre-test, modeling thrust and inertia, etc. I started adding level-ups like extra lives, missiles, procedurally generating increasing difficult levels. Still some of the most fun I remember having with a computer.
  - dleslie 4y ago
    > making class Dog extend class Animal for the whole semester I expect this is hyperbole, but the sense that degrees have softened their content density is palpable. Even when I was attending, decades ago, the administration at my university was conjuring plans to greatly diminish the breadth and depth of content in their courses in order to graduate more students.
    - TulliusCicero 4y ago
      They're talking about an intro class, so doing beginner level OO stuff isn't exactly surprising.
      - dleslie 4y ago
        My intro courses had me building an HC11 out of logic gates. The next semester we wrote code to run on it.
        TulliusCicero 4y ago
        And what exactly does that have to to with an intro OO class? Is this a "if it's lower level it must be harder" kind of thing?

nso95 4y ago

But then 1 person ends up doing most of the work on the team

vkou 4y ago
That person gets a valuable life lesson. Some of us work, so that others prosper.
TulliusCicero 4y ago
My college Software Design & Testing did this well. One big group project that takes the whole semester, but you have to write and submit a simple plan that outlines each team member's responsibility, then you have periodic milestones. Part of the milestones are reporting on what each team member actually did. This works because it's closer to a real work environment, where you'll have a manager who's at least somewhat aware (or should be) of how much each person is accomplishing. The whole, "just let the group figure it out" process that is so common in schools doesn't work, because there's no one with manager-level awareness and authority.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cgriswald 4y ago

No. Group work is terrible and students are—at least perceptually, when not in fact—in competition with each other both for grades and for time. Even in the best case scenario students are incentivized to do the parts of the work they already do best which seems antithetical to education. Multiple choice quizzes are also useful to the student because they provide a snapshot of fact memorization and maybe some application but there is no point in counting the grades, IMO. If we must evaluate students, then we should be treating evaluation as important as imparting knowledge and experience and spend the time on it that it deserves. Students deserve and need timely and thoughtful individual feedback in order to improve anyway. That means thoughtful projects and a lot of time spent grading. How you incentivize this amongst educators who often don’t even want to be teaching is beyond my pay grade. (Additionally, a grade should reflect level of mastery at the end of the course regardless of progression but that’s not how grades are generally calculated.)

eloisius 4y ago
Group work is terrible, but project-based ability assessment is much better than multiple-choice tests. I quit school before graduating, so maybe I’m not the best example, but I had one instructor that noticed a few of us were bored out of our minds in an intro to OO class and told us we could skip all assignments and the final if we turned in a working clone of Asteroids that met certain criteria, using a vector drawing library called Processing, by the end of the semester. Instead of making class Dog extend class Animal for the whole semester, I found myself learning how to do polygon collision detection, optimize it with a rectangle intersection pre-test, modeling thrust and inertia, etc. I started adding level-ups like extra lives, missiles, procedurally generating increasing difficult levels. Still some of the most fun I remember having with a computer.
- dleslie 4y ago
  > making class Dog extend class Animal for the whole semester I expect this is hyperbole, but the sense that degrees have softened their content density is palpable. Even when I was attending, decades ago, the administration at my university was conjuring plans to greatly diminish the breadth and depth of content in their courses in order to graduate more students.
  - TulliusCicero 4y ago
    They're talking about an intro class, so doing beginner level OO stuff isn't exactly surprising.
    - dleslie 4y ago
      My intro courses had me building an HC11 out of logic gates. The next semester we wrote code to run on it.
      - TulliusCicero 4y ago
        And what exactly does that have to to with an intro OO class? Is this a "if it's lower level it must be harder" kind of thing?