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Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases l

• codefreeordie 4y ago
  It is perhaps unreasonable for the purveyor of a critical service to demand that they be the only one who is allowed to understand or validate the quality of the service on offer, and to insist that the customer is too naive to be permitted a viewpoint.
• paskozdilar 4y ago
  I don't think the problem is that complicated - you just can't measure knowledge with a process (or a machine). Only a human can approximate another human's level of understanding. Trying to create a knowledge factory seems to me a pipe dream. All cheating comes from trying to force learning into a rigid mechanical box. Solution? My opinion - remove colleges, bring back guilds. Of course, this is an oversimplification, but the moment you remove the need to print out diplomas, everything does become simpler. The "measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is the hardest problem.
  • hnarn 4y ago
    Again, it’s so easy to criticize, point out the “problem” and then offer no solution. The “knowledge factory” exists for a reason. The way our society is constructed, we need structured specialization (pick a course), verification (you’re OK) and rating (you’re the top 5%) — because our entire society expects these things to work and be available. It sounds like the only difference in your example is that these things exist but are not centrally verified to be identical, because apparently diplomas themselves are the problem. People need to be able to improve, be excluded when incompetent and rewarded when excellent, because that is how our society works in all other aspects, and the one thing that will always be true about an educational system is that it will mirror society: and if it doesn’t currently it will in a few decades. You cannot suggest fundamental changes to an educational system without more or less advocating a revolution in society. No wonder most complaints stop at the problem and never continue to proposed solutions.
    • paskozdilar 4y ago
      > It sounds like the only difference in your example is that these things exist but are not centrally verified to be identical, because apparently diplomas themselves are the problem. Yes, exactly. You are using a diploma as an indicator of knowledge, and you have a diploma-giving machine (university) that gives the diploma to anyone that can pass a test. People cheat the test in order to get the diploma. It will always happen, no matter how intricate you make your tests, because you cannot automate knowledge verification. It isn't a "problem" - it's an "impossibility". And it's one impossibility software companies have gradually started dealing with - most don't care about diplomas anymore, because the correlation between knowledge and having a diploma gets lesser and lesser the more diplomas are printed artificially. So, that is a pretty good solution, too. Remove diplomas altogether, and let employers measure knowledge in a way they seem fit. They will have responsibility for the mistakes of an employee, so it makes sense that they make the criteria. That way, educational institutions will have to make their education useful in the real world, or their reputation will crumble.
• passivate 4y ago
  >These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more. I don't agree that the system is broken (broken to me is something that is completely unusable, and we must stop using immediately). The progress we've made as a global civilization is to be credited to the way human knowledge is captured, distributed and taught by us as a species. And certainly formal schooling is a big part of that. And so, I'd rather view the situation as us being on a path of continuous improvement - where everything, including education can be improved.
  • hnarn 4y ago
    My opinion is that the educational system in most industrialized countries today rewards the wrong things and that the quality of education suffers to allow an easier time of mass-grading and classifying. Whether this means it’s “broken” or not is of course completely subjective because it depends on what you think the educational system should be doing in the first place.
    • passivate 4y ago
      >completely subjective because it depends on what you think the educational system should be doing in the first place. Yup, you nailed it. That is the crux of the argument. I think it also leads into the meta discussion of what it means to be a "productive member of society" and how education fits into that philosophy. Why should one be forced by society at-large to be educated, or productive, or anything at all? :)
• bruce511 4y ago
  >> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? This is what makes the problem intractable. Measuring knowledge takes time, lots of time, by a skilled person. That does not scale. Since we need (want) scale we necessarily have to use (ever weaker) proxies for measurement. And if there's one thing we do know, you get exactly what you measure for. Hence, the system is not broken - it's working exactly as intended. It's not "fixable" because there's nothing to fix (at this scale.) Real learning happens either because a) the student is soaking up everything they possibly can using every resource offered or B) they've left college and are fortunate enough to be in a workplace where there are more knows than know-nots, and they take every opportunity to soak it in like a sponge. College does not prepare people for the working world (and never will). It is operating exactly as it is designed to do.
  • hnarn 4y ago
    So, the Leibniz argument? Our current system for educating citizens of all ages is already the best it can be, and any change or even reflection upon it is a waste of time.
    • bruce511 4y ago
      You can't educate someone who is not ready to be educated. Those that get the most out of college are those that put the most in. This was true 1000 years ago, and is true now. Yes, this system is the best [1] because access is open to all (which it wasn't). So those that want to go, can, and those who want to learn, can. What probably needs to change is the understanding of what college is for. It's not to give you an education, it is to give you the opportunity for you to take an education for yourself. [1] for some definition of best. Not all schools are created equal, nor all subjects, scale is in play here as well.
      • zelphirkalt 4y ago
        I somewhat agree about it being a chance for students to take education for them, but there is also the issue of an institution offering a limited view on a subject like computer science. For example some time ago I estimate that mainstream OOP was taught everywhere, while there was almost no place teaching FP (This is changing slowly now). Even if you took every opportunity you had, you might not have even a teacher or lecturer, who is familiar with it. You could only learn on your own, which you would not need that institution for. Teaching quality is not the same in all places. Teachers and lecturers are not the same everywhere.
• hooande 4y ago
  This comment is saying "No one else here knows as much about this as I do", and little else. Your only concrete solution, produced by your years of study, seems to be "shut up and listen to educators". Well what are they saying?? How do we fix the problem of cheating and the other issues associated with measuring learning through testing? If you have so much specialized knowledge about the problem, what does it tell you about how to fix it?
  • hnarn 4y ago
    I said no such thing. I never even claimed to be a teacher (which I am not). What I said was that we should listen to people who are active in the field for proposed solutions to problems we face. I also never said I was active in the field, in fact I said quite the opposite. I really don’t understand why your comment is so confrontational. I never claimed to have the answers to all problems in all educational systems across the globe, I only suggested that if you want to resolve them you probably shouldn’t do it by having an open discussion involving only programmers (or any other non-pedagogical group of people for that matter).
  • Rastonbury 4y ago
    Is this what you really got from that comment? The implicit point is that the better you want to assess knowledge the less scalable it is, eg. giving oral/one-to-one interview style assessments to university students is not feasible even if it is a better knowledge assessment. Therefore, saying "fix the system" isn't helpful, everyone knows some fixing needs to be done but not how or even if they do, don't have the power to. Look at problems like poverty, housing supply, climate change, I can look at all these and say the system is broken
  • wildmanx 4y ago
    > This comment is saying "No one else here knows as much about this as I do", and little else. No, it's not. Not at all. But your comment is saying "How dare you suggest that we listen to experts? We all should have a say!". And that's the problem the gp post is pointing out. Do you argue like that with your doctor before surgery? With your lawyer before they defend you in court? With a chef before they cook a meal you ordered in a restaurant? No? Then why is education any different and suddenly everybody claims to know how it should work..
• learner1234 4y ago
  why do we need to "measure knowledge"? school should be to teach knowlege. Measuring is not our problem. It is the problem of the employers. Test the teachers not the students. We only need to make sure the teachers are of good quality, not the students.
  • hnarn 4y ago
    > why do we need to "measure knowledge"? Because knowledge is currency. It opens doors to privilege and status in society. It also ensures incompetent people are not put into positions where they can do harm.
    • imtringued 4y ago
      You mean measured knowledge acquired through a every specific way is currency. Someone who acquired the same knowledge on his own will be cast aside until he gets his certificate.
      • hnarn 4y ago
        That's because the certificate is the value, not the knowledge itself. The knowledge is assumed. Without a certificate, the onus of verifying the required knowledge is now on the consumer or employer, and unsurprisingly neither of them want that, so of course knowledge combined with a respected certificate is worth more than just the knowledge itself.
      • hhmc 4y ago
        Would you let an uncredentialled surgeon operate on you?
        • bezier-curve 4y ago
          That's not possible because of regulation. For occupations that don't relate to other people's life or death situations, or security in general, it's reasonable to assume if someone has a skill, they should be able to use it professionally regardless of how they achieved it.
• nabla9 4y ago
  > Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics. Finland topped Pisa rankings many years, because we 1) listen teachers and have good academic pedagogical research, and 2) teachers are highly educated and reasonably well paid, meaning that the job is attractive to competent people. Then politicians started to think big and read all the hype papers from think tanks about digitization and how the young are digital natives. Let's give them computers and they learn by themselves and ... we started slipping. Still OK, but slipping. It turns out that computers are not magic. Having all the information accessible is not a pedagogical solution. ps. Chinese studied Finnish school system and imported some of the best policies in Shanghai and it worked. Some lessons work across widely different cultures.
  • trashtester 4y ago
    As a Norwegian who lived in Finland for a year, it struck me that the parents I met actually CARED what the kids learn in school, instead of just treating school as daycare for older kids. This, combined with the possiblity for good teachers to gain respect in their communities, is what makes Finnish schools more effective learning environment than Norwegian schools, I think. Not salaries, some specific methodology, etc.
• radu_floricica 4y ago
  > So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics. Well, yes, but at some point we look at the system, see human beings spend over a decade of very precious years doing just that, and not really getting over a decade's worth of benefits. If we just want to incrementally improve things then definitely we should let specialists have the most weight. But listening to educators will absolutely never lead to major reforms or (god forbid!) reducing the years spent in the system.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  I never gave a fuck about grades. For some courses I had below average marks, for others I was the best. I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea. And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me, programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them. Which can be fine, lower level work is ok and highly needed. But wouldn't make me as good as someone who knows his stuff from a to z. I hate it when I hear someone considering himself a programmer after he modified a WordPress theme or did a 3 weeks boot camp. Why should this field be hold to much lower standards than medicine, physics, math, chemistry? I never heard someone bragging that he is a doctor after watching YouTube videos, which happens often with writing and architecting software.
  • franciscop 4y ago
    In retrospective now I know that I unconsciously sabotaged myself, I knew the best way to pass subjects was to have a basic understanding of the theory and then practice a lot of exam question examples, but I just couldn't get myself to do that until I had in fact understood the theory in depth. That led to my grades ending up exactly average, but also at one point I challenged myself and got the highest marks in the most difficult course in my degree. Everyone, specially those who were normally top of the class, were like "WTF did you do??" lol
    • culopatin 4y ago
      Ha, this led me to fail school the first time I tried it. Now 10 years later I’m back in school with a 4.0 because I’ve learned to navigate the system and I know what the school wants. I still balance diving deep into what I’m interested in, but I don’t let it get in the way of the grind.
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    Well it's probably down to the harm done if the standards are lowered vs. the gain. Incompetent doctor? People die. Incompetent chemist? People die, or at least there's substantial material damage. When it comes to mathematicians and physicists they only ever have any real impact when they roll up their sleeves, open matlab or R and turn their theoretical work into something practical. Does that make them programmers? Probably I guess. Anyway as for us programmers there are very few jobs where a poorly written program will cause anyone any harm especially since it can be reviewed, tested, and corrected before being used for real, unlike a doctor who must use their skills on the fly and get it right first time, every time. So the bar for entry is obviously much lower and lowering standards doesn't do much to increase harm.
• ahzhou 4y ago
  Scaling solutions invariably rely on parents. Ignoring parents seem like a great way to design broken systems.
  • Hendrikto 4y ago
    Now you increased the burden by a factor of 3…
• advael 4y ago
  My position on this has been pretty controversial when I've shared it before, but I still think it's correct: Measuring knowledge at scale is futile, harmful, and pointless. The fact that a lot of society has been arranged around the fiction that this is a feasible endeavor does not mean it has borne out in practice, and prioritizing assessment in this way has been gradually hollowing out most forms of pedagogy of their value while building an ever-expanding series of increasingly meaningless hoops for people to jump through to get what they actually need. We have deemed it necessary to create assessments to prop up the idea that education can be easily measured and should gate meaningful life outcomes for most people. Most if not all "cheating" behavior is either just a rational, strategic response to this situation, or a disconnect between how people actually solve problems (e.g. often collaborative and laser-focused on the part of the problem that drives the outcome, in this case the assessment) and some weird cultist notion of what it means for an individual to do it "correctly". Effective pedagogy will never scale unless we get some really AGI-like technologies (I loved The Diamond Age as a kid, but A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is from the perspective of extant tech a total pie-in-the-sky fantasy, illustrative of how meaningful teaching requires individualized approaches), and we see time and time again that teacher-to-student ratios as well as particularly good specific teachers are overwhelmingly the drivers of even the stupid metrics we are optimizing for In short, this whole system is broken because its fundamental premise is flawed
  • jules 4y ago
    What you are saying is not at all controversial, but it is incomplete, which is probably why you have received pushback in the past. Criticising the existing system is easy. Giving an alternative is harder. Implementing that alternative and showing that it's actually better on some metric is MUCH harder than that. But you have not even given an alternative!
    • barnabee 4y ago
      The alternative is to treat higher learning like any other experience in life or on your CV/resume: you do it, you tell people you did it, then you either convince them that doing it imparted something useful on you or you don’t. As someone who’s hired plenty of people, exams and grades do not help one bit with the process and you shouldn’t pay any attention to them. The only good use of exams I see see is as a potential entry gate, administered by the place you’re trying to impress, to get onto a course, be considered for a job, or be given a license to do something. As exit gates they’re just noise.
• bradleyjg 4y ago
  and then listen to the teachers and academics Should we also always listen to the car mechanics, used car salesmen, and cops because after all they are the experts?
• concordDance 4y ago
  > Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics. No, we should listen to the people when deciding what the purpose of school should be, THEN refer to the experts on those purposes. Is it teaching random factoids? Making people "cultured"? Separating out people who follow instructions and learn well from those who don't? Introducing habits useful in a workplace? Good habits of thought? Teaching the knowledge required to vote sensibly? To provide some foundational knowledge for later vocational training? To navigate and function in the modern world? Is it just day care for kids? First decide on the purpose(s) (and their weightings if many) and only then can we have a plan. I think there hasn't been anywhere near enough thought given by most people about what the purpose(s) of schooling is(are).
• peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > HOW do you measure knowledge? This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue. You DON'T measure knowledge. You should measure the satisfaction of the students. Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning. > maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics. pity that academics and teachers often disagree and, most of all, that schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say. Teachers are not doctors, doctors practice medicine, teachers do no operate in such a stressful environment, they "educate" young people and is is often the case that it means they impose or suggest their opinions (because they can, nothing prevents them) and families see that kind of "education" unfit for their kids. And they have all the rights in the World to be listened too, even if they are technically wrong or I disagree with them (I completely disagree on catholic schools for example). The experts are there to find a solution to their problems, not to build hypothetical perfect solutions in a void. Also: teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead. In my country (and practically all other countries in Europe) they are like bus drivers, they are fulfilling an obligation required by State laws under the State government but also offering a service the people paid for to the State. Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland. CONTROVERSIAL On a last note, there's a topic I believe it's the most important, that will quite certainly cause uproar. If your youngest students die in school shot by someone just a bit older than them, the society you live in have failed in every possible way. The fact that the system is broken is a joke compared to that.
  • Glawen 4y ago
    >This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue. >You DON'T measure knowledge. >You should measure the satisfaction of the students. >Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning. What is satisfaction going to get you? As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have great marks while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties.
• bambax 4y ago
  > HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? When I was in school, many moons ago (in France) there were no quizzes. Zero. "Tests" were either dissertations (for topics such as literature, history, etc.) or problems. Everything was done in class, in longhand. There were no good or bad answers, even in math class, because what was evaluated was the ability to describe the problem, the approach, and the solution, and you got points for that even if the ultimate result was wrong. "Cheating" was very difficult; copying what another student was writing was hard and not very effective, because unless you could reproduce their whole argument, just taking a sentence or two would not make sense. This system didn't "scale" very well; in fact it didn't scale at all. If you build a system that let one person "teach" classes of hundred of students and generate quizzes that can be instantly rated by a machine, then some (most?) students are going to try to game that system. This is inevitable, and I'm not even sure it's a bad thing.
  • scotty79 4y ago
    > "Cheating" was very difficult; copying what another student was writing was hard and not very effective, because unless you could reproduce their whole argument, just taking a sentence or two would not make sense. In high school we often were given two (or more) sets of problems so we can't copy off each other because people sitting one sit away from each other have different sets. I remember at least one test where I wrote down problems from both sets (they were verbally dictated by the teacher at the beginning of the test). Then I just solved both and passed the solution to his problems to the classmate sitting behind me (I was asked for this ahead of time by him). In Poland cheating is frowned upon by teachers and they tried to catch the cheaters but there were no formal systems in place to report or excessively punished cheating (like in USA).
  • elondaits 4y ago
    Yes, although many of the students in the story weren’t interested enough in learning, had “low morals”, “no honor” and some apparently were scumbags, as a group they were somewhat efficiently solving the problem of passing the class… that’s not nothing! In the real world the solutions to your problems can’t be found online, or if they can it’s valid to search them there (and lawyers will charge you a lot to do that). Collectively searching and distributing a solution is something young people are quite adept at (e.g. gaming wikis).
• Quindecillion 4y ago
  > Cynically, this will never happen because reforms to battle educational issues in any democratic society usually takes more than 5 election cycles to show obvious results (and when the bad results start stacking up current leaders will take the flak regardless). Well obviously we need to fix the system of the system!
• YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  I TA'd for a Prolog course at my university (Imperial College London) during the four years of my PhD there. As part of that work I helped correct students' papers. It was pretty clear to me that the students were sharing their code and only changing variable names etc. to make it look different. It didn't work, because you could see the same, let's say, idiosyncracies, in their code. For example, there might be three or four different ways to solve a coding exercise and about 60-75% of the papers would solve it using the same way, which was not necessarily the best, or even the most obvious, way (what is the most obvious way to solve a Prolog exercise might not be common sense, but that's why you are given a lecture, first, and then the exercise). What's most interesting is that I saw the same patterns repeated over the three years I TA'd for one of the Prolog courses. I guess they shared the answers between years, or somebody had put them online (I searched but couldn't find them). Or they just copied solutions to similar exercises they found online. I didn't report the cheating because I felt there was no benefit in doing so. In particular with Prolog, because it's not a language commonly used in the industry, and it's taught at Imperial mainly for historical reasons (there are many of us logicists studying, or teaching, there) I reckoned that most students found it a useless chore and did not understand why they needed to learn it, and why they needed to "waste" time solving those coding problems. So they copied from each other in order to get the job done quickly and then have more time to spend on the things they felt were more useful to them (like learning Python or "ML" I suppose). I personally thought, and still think, that learning to program in Prolog is useful, just to disentangle a programmer's mind from the particularities of the coding paradigms, and the programming languages, she's most familiar with. At CS schools today, programming is introduced with Python and I guess it's easy to get into a mindframe that all programming languages must necessarily work like Python. Studying languages from different paradigms, like Prolog or Haskell, can shake you off that mentality (it sure did me, back when I did my CS degree). The problems is that you can't really force this appreciation of the need to learn different things on students, who are often in a terrible hurry and under terrible pressure to do good on their course, so they can get on with life. The Prolog course I TA'd was mandatory and so it must have really felt like someone was trying to force the knowledge down the studnets' throats. I don't think that's a good idea. You can't teach people that way. They'll just see your obvious effort to force them to learn what you want, and they'll simply take the obvious route around it. And that ends up teaching them a lesson that you really weren't expecting to teach: the world is full of idiots who think they can teach you things, but you know better than they do and you'll show them who's boss. That's what students do with tests, also. They can see they're a useless waste of time and they can see the obvious way around them is to cheat, and that it's to their benefit to cheat. And so they cheat. I don't have solutions to this. The students shouldn't have to fight the school, and the school shouldn't have to fight the students. The school is there for the students' benefit after all.
• mordae 4y ago
  > do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues. Because it conflates two things with conflicting incentives. This could and should resolve nicely. 1. Spreading knowledge 2. Certifying competence To get e.g. a RHCE you may or may not attend the course. You may get the materials elsewhere and study from them, you might get tutoring from someone else who attended the course, you may have enough experience from your day job. This is knowledge acquisition. Then you attend the certification exam and either succeeded or fail. If you fail, you get back to knowdge acquisition. Decide to pay for the course this time. Get tutoring. Read the materials again. Maybe retry right away because you were just stressed and disoriented. Then you succeed. Compare this with college. Fail a couple of examinations? Too bad, you are booted. Want to try again? Repeat up to two years! This is absolutely insane! No surprise people are cheating their way through! Decouple knowledge acquisition from competence certification. Managed to reach end of the math track but failed physics? No problem! Certify math competence and let them study physics some more! Got enough certifications to warrant a title? Cool, give them the title! Make it possible for people to step away for a couple of years and then come back to earn some more certifications and even the title when they actually need and want to learn those skills. Make it possible to study 1/3 of your time for 15 years. Maybe people would stay in the learning mode longer. Unlike many doctors who are hopelessly behind the times. Make it possible to study with kids or sick parents to take care of. Make it a part of the adult culture. Not something people had to suffer through in their youth to earn their place in the world.
  • bnralt 4y ago
    This is it. To expand on further on why it's so crazy to couple education and credentialing - already know all the material in a class? Too bad, you have to pay for it and spend time taking it anyway. Is it a class that's completely unconnected to your field? Too bad, the university is making you take it, so you take it. Is the class taught poorly, so that you need to teach yourself outside of it? Too bad, you still have to pay for it and put time into it, in addition to actually teaching yourself the subject. The education is the major chunk of time and cost, but the credentialing is what most people are trying to get. By forcing people to buy them together, you can make people pay a lot (in terms of both time and money) for an education they find little worth in just because it's the only way to get the credentials.
• 21723 4y ago
  The other problem with the "we need to fix the system" arguments is that they often ignore the much greater problems in our society. Our schools, in the aggregate, aren't that bad. We have a broad spectrum and inequality is severe, but even in the worst-off areas, it's not the schools so much as broader social conditions that are producing lousy academic performance. If kids are getting evicted, they're not going to be able to turn homework in on time. If they're doing nothing all summer, they're going to backslide. I also question the social value of "fun" projects like dioramas in grade school: the result seems to be that middle-class kids' parents do all the work, producing adult-quality work, while the less well-off students turn in projects that looks like they were made by kids. We have ridiculous rates of cheating because we're in a society run by people who cheated and everyone knows it. Corporates cheat; you can't become (or stay) an executive if you don't lie and backstab your way to the top. The fish is rotting from the head, and young people are extremely alienated. This doesn't justify their actions, at an individual level, but it does explain the upsettingly high rate of dishonesty we're seeing. People also underestimate the power of peer framing and moral drift. Generally, people don't wake up one day and decide that they want to cheat their way through college like some future insurance executive. It happens over time. They start with minor offenses like lifting a sentence without attribution, or looking up one answer on a phone... but, over time, they're plagiarizing whole papers and have stopped doing the actual work... and this is when they usually get caught. Dishonesty also goes both ways. Grading might be broken, but a world without it would be worse--removing the SAT enhances the preexisting advantages of the rich. Once people become teenagers and realize that advancement in society isn't only based on merit but also requires playing social/nonacademic games (in high school, to be popular and appear "well-rounded" to admissions committes; in college, to get laid but also to get introduced to the best companies; in the work world, to ingratiate oneself to the right people and thus climb the ranks over more deserving but less likeable peers) at which everyone cheats, because everyone has to do so... because global corporate capitalism is itself a cheating system in which most of us are predestined to lose... it becomes harder to make a moral argument to them that cheating is categorically unacceptable.
• scotty79 4y ago
  > do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues I think the reason for feeling of competence that prompts so many people to share their opinions on the matter is that nearly all of us went through this broken system at some point in our lives and our future lives literally depended not so much of what was taught but what was written down as the result of the teaching.
• nicolas_t 4y ago
  > HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge. The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questions to guide the student along the path to solving it. We had either 3 or 4 hours to solve those problems. Those tests worked very well. I'd come out from one of those tests having often learned something new. I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory. While I did feel that some of the education in the US was valuable and interesting, I hated those tests, they didn't correlate as much with comprehension of the subject matter and more with learning facts that are more or less tangentially related to the subject matter. I still remember in a computer graphics tests being shocked by being asked when Opengl was first released, which companies were involved and other completely useless knowledge. What's interesting to me is that there's much less opportunities to cheat with the former tests while the later tests are pretty much made for cheating. So, imho cheating is a symptom of bad tests.
  • codefreeordie 4y ago
    Why is it a foregone assumption that the important attribute of education is "measuring knowledge"?
    • oblio 4y ago
      Because we have a limited number of everything and we have to compare people.
      • vintermann 4y ago
        The more we can split up "Teaching people useful things" and "Rationing access to status objects" the better off we are.
        • 4y ago
• golergka 4y ago
  > HOW do you measure knowledge? This question has no meaning unless you specify what the goal of the measurement is. There are two main options. 1. Measurement as part of education process — for the sake of both teacher and the student. 2. Measurement as part of external qualifications — for the people who would later use the credentials achieved in measurement to accept you to higher education and to extend job offers. Most of the problems with different measurement strategies happens because people conflate the two.
• bnralt 4y ago
  > ...input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more. If people within the education system are getting upset that the people who are supposed to benefit from the education and who are paying an enormous sum of money in order to obtain the education dare to have an opinion about the education, I'd say that's a pretty good indication of the problems with the system. I can't think of any other area where there's anger at customers voicing their opinion. Institutions with that kind of attitude probably wouldn't last long if the education system was opened up and students were actually given some choice (say, by separating education and credentialing).
• rscho 4y ago
  Listening to teachers, yes please! Listening to pedagogy academics, no thanks!
• swasheck 4y ago
  i like this thread and wish to tug at it a bit. i’m not so sure we _can_ fix it or even _should_ fix it. in my opinion, fixing implies a standard of perfection. it’s an imperfect system, formulated by imperfect people - the types we’re going to meet and interact with for the rest of our lives. there are always going to be imperfect ways of measuring the “goal”, be it content domain knowledge, or project completion kpi, or something else. the positives of an imperfect system that i can think of off the top of my head are that they give teachers the ability and motivation to find creative ways to impart information and knowledge, and it can implicitly educate pupils in how to navigate complex, broken systems. teachers who come up with novel educational methods are generally heralded for their innovations, but there’s not much else to incentivize them to remain or continue to innovate. not to mention the fact that those innovations may be expressions of their personalities and not an actual template for how every teacher should teach. the same seems true for students. they find adaptations for navigating those broken systems. some will fall into the stream of the system, play the game, and get high marks. what have they learned? i’d say they have learned a fair amount. some will discover a need to collaborate survive and they have learned about themselves. some will complain and resist, but pass based on raw willpower or charm or something else. some will fail but will see gaping holes in the system to explore, exploit, or fill. they’ve also learned. these are just a few of the dimensions i can think of off the top of my head. i believe that the primary way that we should seek to reform or improve educational systems is through how we treat the educational infrastructure (teachers, staff, materials, services) and the students who are failing to engage the experience due to factors beyond their control (mental health, SES, etc.)
• throwaway787544 4y ago
  FWIW the teachers lack perspective. I've dated several teachers and listened to their side about why they teach the way they do. I would propose simple solutions, like a continuous improvement cycle, and educational experiments conducted at random by regular teachers, then reproduced and cross referenced to build new models. They had never considered these ideas before. When you live your life in a rigorously controlled institution, you only consider what the institution echos. Outside the box thinking is possible, but it's the exception. You need outsider ideas and collaboration. Politics will never solve these problems. It has to be grassroots and volunteer driven.
  • Planktonne 4y ago
    > I would propose simple solutions, like a continuous improvement cycle, and educational experiments conducted at random by regular teachers, then reproduced and cross referenced to build new models. They had never considered these ideas before. I've never met a teacher who didn't do those things; I have met many who wouldn't phrase it like that. Just because they're not using the same terminology as you doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's very easy to look at a system from the outside and think that they're missing the obvious [1]; things become more complex the more you understand them. [1] https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
• nuclearnice1 4y ago
  > probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much This is the story of hacker news. And of most other online forums. And of most meetings. Let’s bikeshed. Hi, I’m on the Internet and I read the whole post title. Let me share my thoughts. People are stupid, lazy, and uninformed in the general case. People writing in an 8 line comment fields on mobile aren’t going to be the exception. There is no need to be frustrated. Unless you enjoy that feeling. Then by all means embrace it. Try this? Dip into the comments with right expectation. These are off the cuff uniformed thoughts of the masses. Maybe they make you laugh or cry or maybe something inspires you. Maybe there’s a gem buried here somewhere. Don’t expect HN commenters to know anything deep. If you are in the mood for a deeper thought, go to the library.
• mobjack 4y ago
  Computer science is one of the harder subjects to assess knowledge through tests. In other industries, passing an accreditation exam gives you value in the market. In software engineering, certificates are seen as useless. This can explain the cynical attitude programmers have against testing.
  • analog31 4y ago
    I have degrees in math and physics. Those degrees gave me close to zero value in the market. Spending X years in school, then having to prove to an employer that you can do barely more than squat is a familiar experience in a lot of fields. There are tests you can take in those subjects, such as the Graduate Record Exam. Those tests work to some extent because the subject matter is relatively mature, and consistent from one college to another. And yet there are entire fields of math and physics that I've never been exposed to. Their main purpose is to see if you're conversant in a body of knowledge that would prepare you for typical graduate study, not for a job. Software engineering is a comparatively young field, with less standardization. There are even debates on HN as to whether software engineering is a real thing. There are places where every programmer has the title "engineer" regardless of their background. I'm only employable because most people hate math and physics so much that they're relieved if anybody offers to do those things for them. That, and I'm pretty good at programming and electronics.
• slibhb 4y ago
  > So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics. Oh please. Teachers advocate for themselves. Academics are currently waging a war against standardized testing for ideological reasons. Instead of a polemic against people giving their opinions please just tell us what you think. For my money, the problem with education is that we decided it's not about knowlege but rather increasing the socioeconomic position of participants. From this it follows that everyone needs a 4 year degree. Education will only function when it's a small number of weirdos who want to be there. Solve the problem by attacking credentialism, reforming student loans, and bolstering alternative post-secondary education (trade schools, bootcamps).
• j45 4y ago
  A minor critique and support for what you are saying. The experts of pedagogy (academics and teachers) are rarely digitally literate (they can’t use technology in any competent, engaging or engaging enough way) enough compared to their students. This line was crossed about 15 years ago with most institutions still digitally functioning like they are in 2005. Some neat studies out there about this. Profs are smart and know what they don’t know. Academic leadership often doesn’t have the will to modernize. We saw how many colleges resisted modernizing during the pandemic lockdowns and when they came back lamented how poor online was after designing a solution in 2 weeks. Bureaucracies serve ultimately for their own self preservation. Pedagogy is a red flag word. People who use it incorrectly often discount themselves pretty quickly. Pedagogy is about how children learn, it has less relevance in higher education, which is more about learning how to learn. Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to see how often that word is used. It’s pretty telling when educational conferences how pedagogy is used every 3 words when… How adults learn (andragogy) including young adults is quite different than children. When I hear the word pedagogy referring beyond high school it’s tell take sign of people using buzzwords, and a sign they might not really know the difference. If experts really wanted to get into digital learning taxonomies based on old ones that don’t seem to bridge the divide, maybe that would be a start. Instead academics have insisted on sharding the digital learning experience among dozens of digital tools for students ( how many different things do students have to log into), perhaps so it will not challenge their job security. Ironically most institutions have streamlined enrolment systems that are pretty complex but can take your money smoothly. I think part of this is because too many academics are poor listeners though to openly entertaining ideas and positions that are not their own. There are amazing academics who get all of this and more (including the solutions) but they are often buried in the toxic cultures present at most post secondaries. In Academia, afoption of ideas is gradual and slow, and too slow for the rapid changes taking place the past 2-3 years in society. Another observation is that most universities only teach how to teach children, and churn out teachers. Maybe it’s why the word pedagogy is so present in academic circles. Do universities have a 4 year degree to teach university students like they do for K-12? In this post - just reading about how WhatsApp and Google docs is used to learn together, for better and worse .. was created by students, not experts. Good on the prof for finding more ways to engage with the material. It’s a big problem. Institutions have not kept up the skills of their staff. It’s decades behind. Probably another 10 years before the folks at the top wanting to keep things familiar enough start to retire and digitally native geriatric millennials can start getting into those roles and help change. You have a good point about election cycles but it can go both ways to hurt education and curriculum too if that’s what politicians want. Looking at students, Covid forced 10-15 years of change to happen in 2, while we have students who have missed a big chunk of education. There’s a need for our leaders, experts and institutions to recognize and do something about this, but bureaucracies ultimately serve their own self preservation at all costs. One choice is expend all this effort fix the old institutions, or put the same effort into building new institutions for the future. Education is no longer measured by hours of butts in seats. Education is no longer math not changing for 500 years so curriculum can take a few years to do minor tweaks. It’s interesting to see how much more society has opened up to taking courses from anyone to learn the beginnings of any topic. If you ask me the clock is ticking on academic brands if they can’t create and revise curriculum faster than the 1-3 years it can take to approve and change a single sentence in a course. If it’s relevant, I’ve built platforms to deliver online K-12, post-secondary education and industry training certification for a unusually long time. It feels like a weird world sometimes with the lens still stuck creating ad delivering education like it’s designed to be stored on encyclopedia CDs. Meanwhile, Industry is often having to fill its own gaps to build the skills and competencies they need in people because education isn’t turning out people that are needed. The advances they put in place to keep their people safe shouldn’t be discounted. Edit: Grammar, clarifications.
• jonathanstrange 4y ago
  I can't see how this addresses the main problem mentioned in the article. My take is that if a student cheats, they should be expelled from university. If you're very lenient, introduce three strikes. The first two strikes will nullify your course as if it hadn't been taken, the third will get you expelled from university. I personally think that would be too lenient, though, and believe that nobody who cheats in any way should have a place in academia. This question has nothing to do with the quality of teaching or problems with tests, etc. It's a matter of intellectual integrity. When I first heard that students often cheat in higher education not too long ago, I was shocked. When I studied during the 90s at two good German universities, I had not ever heard of anyone who cheated in any course. A cheating student would have been a huge scandal. To be fair, I studied philosophy and general linguistics. I guess people in more practical disciplines cheated even then, e.g. economics -- more specifically, "BWL" in Germany -- always had a bad reputation. However, even in these disciplines cheating was rare. Its incomprehensible to me why lecturers and universities nowadays appear to be so lenient about it.
• Deritiod 4y ago
  I assumed you would say that the programmers should start working for the school system but your final description.of problems is not difficult to solve. The teachers are the problem. After all I was also sitting in school for 13 years
• analog31 4y ago
  >>> HOW do you measure knowledge? The teachers I've known don't really care about measuring knowledge. They're looking for a reasonable way to motivate engagement with the class, that's not too disruptive of the overall flow of the course. One professor told me, "A student who has made an effort to work through the homework problems a couple times should be able to easily get a B on the exam. Testing also acknowledges that you're competing for your students' attention, and if you give no assessments, your students will rationally focus all of their effort on the courses that do. Preparation for the test becomes a reasonable measure, not of your knowledge, but of how much effort you need to apply to a course. Since students have been taking exams for years, each student knows how to calibrate their own level of effort. As a student, after some trial and error, I developed a pretty good routine for getting A's in the two kinds of classes I was taking: Those that were dominated by solving problems and proofs, such as math and physics, and those that were based primarily on written assignments, such as art history.
  • cycomanic 4y ago
    I can tell you that almost every teacher who is not burnt out, does care about how we measure knowledge, mainly because they have to. The big difficulty is that there are two roles for teachers, on one hand you are a mentor and supposed to impart knowledge onto your students (the teaching part). On the other hand you are a gatekeeper, you are supposed to check that the thresholds for some qualification are met. Now if we had an ideal way to measure knowledge those two roles would not really be in conflict with ech other, but because we don't teachers have the difficult job of trying to teach a subject and at the same time find a good way to see if the students actually learnt what the were supposed to. All that with a limited amount of time that is available.
    • analog31 4y ago
      What do they do with the information? The threshold in most courses is to be able to pass the next course. The students who won't do that, tend to drop out, or switch to an easier major, of which there are many. Teachers do tend to change their content and methods if a large number of students are failing exams, but I think it's based more on a hunch, than on hoping that test scores will yield analytical quality data. This is the sense I get from talking to a lot of teachers. My only teaching experience was one semester at a big ten university, a long time ago.
• dasz 4y ago
  I'd say everyone has been a student so they all have an opinion. Its ripe for bikeshedding. That's the reason imho.
• rr808 4y ago
  > Testing .. HOW do you measure knowledge To me measuring knowledge is a minor reason of having tests. The main reason is to force students to study. If you have no test on knowledge most people will just gloss over the detail and not learn.
• scythe 4y ago
  >In the case of testing it’s because you choose to focus on the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? This sounds like an entirely different question. When you have a method for testing, you have at least two different measures of effectiveness: - how well the test measures knowledge when it is taken honestly - how likely is the test to be taken honestly vs. subverted I thought this thread was about the second question, but you seem to be focused on the first. But these problems require different kinds of solutions, and crucially, it is much easier (but still not easy) to verify success or failure in addressing the second question (cheating) than the first (predictivity).
• todd8 4y ago
  > Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount I have some thoughts about the education system, and despite not being a teacher or academic I like to believe that my opinions have some value because I'm an expert programmer that has worked in the field for over 50 years. I attended three different major universities and have degrees in Math, EE, and CS. I still code almost every day (my Emacs configuration is never finished!), and I have in the past taught or been a teaching assistant for both undergrad and graduate courses for four semesters. Cheating has always been a concern, but now things are different. The original article highlights the scale of exam cheating during the pandemic, but for us, the readers of HN, there is another problem with university learning that happens because of the internet. I've seen this affect virtually all of my younger friends pursuing degrees in CS. Programming assignments in school are unrealistically difficult, and it causes everyone to cheat. Here's a typical real-life example: after covering doubly linked lists in the undergrad data-structure's class the programming assignment is to write a GUI based text editor in Java using doubly linked lists. This isn't especially hard for a professional programmer, but this is the first programming assignment of the course. Students had to wrestle with Eclipse, learning the AWT/Swing interfaces, event loop programming, and how to translate low level pointer based data structures into non-idiomatic Java based imitations of linked lists that kind of simulated using pointers. Most of the students really couldn't do this on their own, but they didn't have to because they can find the solutions to this very problem right on the internet. Why would professors give such a program to beginning programmers to write? Because every student turns in a solution, and this causes the professors to lose touch with how difficult their assignments are. Over and over again difficult assignments are given, but the students are seemingly keeping up. The bomb lab assignment is a great assignment for CS students[1], but I've seen it given out with far too few attempts allowed to solve it. Again professors feel like a small number of attempts is all the students should need, they keep turning in the answers. The reason they can is that the complete solution is available on dozens of public Github repos and web sites. The consequence of such hard and challenging programming assignments is a kind of inflation of the difficulty. The high difficulty causes students to cheat more, since their fellow students are cheating by downloading, cutting and pasting, or simply sharing their programs. There are commercial web-sites like chegg.com that sell the solutions to virtually every homework problem found in CS textbooks. Why should an undergrad spend so much time working on their own homework solutions while other students work openly in big teams at table in the university library? This kind of cheating is pervasive at the undergrad level. How do we prevent our students to being pushed into cheating to keep up? Graduate school is different, the classes are smaller and more interactive. In my grad school classes I've often had to go to the board to demonstrate my code or proof to the class. Professor Dijkstra used to give individual oral exams to his students. So small interactive classes would help. I've also seen assembly language programming classes given that require all work to be done on lab computers. The lab computers weren't on the internet and students had to sign in with the lab proctor to use the machines for their assignments. This at least helped some with the problem. If I was teaching a programming class now, I would require everyone to maintain a git repo that could be checked for realistic commits of the programs as they are written. This might discourage the simple copying of a solution from GitHub the day before the assignment was due. [1] The text for the bomb-lab assignment (highly recommended by the way): Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, 3rd edition,Bryant and O’Hallaron, Prentice-Hall, 2016 (ISBN: 0-13-409266- X), a google search will return many bomb-lab assignments and solutions from colleges all over the world.
• bannedbybros 4y ago
• chrsig 4y ago
  > So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics. Cynically, because they're part of the problem. Personally I don't think the "obviously bad thing" is the current state of testing. I'd instead say that the problem is the intermingling of education and credentials. Society doesn't care about education, however all of the inspiration is geared around it. So you wind up with the case that students either become disillusioned with the system after realizing it's ripe with hypocrisy, or otherwise structured in a way that creates resentment in the system. As an anecdote, a friend I went to high school with dropped out when he was disallowed to participate in the school band, because it was his only source of motivation to show up every day. I don't think that was the intended goal, but when faced with the reality of the situation, the system is unbending. I think as a result, the ones you see succeeding in college tend to be more driven by either ambition or obligation rather than any actual desire to learn. So in that respect, I think colleges are self selecting for students that are more willing to think cheating is a good idea. And in many respects they may not be wrong. > Curious, isn’t it, how all these systems seem to fail in the same way? No...the systems haven't evolved independently. It's no more surprising to me than learning that felines could get covid. For what it's worth, I'm a community college dropout. The education and mental health systems were absolutely structured in a way where my severe adhd (and its best friends anxiety and depression) went undiagnosed and untreated through my senior year of high school. I loved learning, but there wasn't any way to get an education that could present the coursework in a way that could keep me engaged. And of course my inability to do homework was continually met with being told it was some personal failure on my part and I should just apply myself. So back to > So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics. _They're the ones that've made me think we'd be better of scrapping the system and starting over._
• oneoff786 4y ago
  The AP classes in American high school, which include a test which can provide college credits if passed were great in my opinion. Mostly because I felt the tests were really good. I took 11 of these tests and I learned a ton that has been relevant and stuck with me ever since. In particular statistics, comp sci, and Spanish seemed really good. Spanish was a hard test. It involved listening to pre recorded conversations and giving responses. Comp sci I didn’t take the class, just self studied for the test. It was my first exposure to comp sci and only intro to object oriented code. The test made you utilize an API for a little toy problem. That was very good in retrospect. I didn’t really grok APIs until that exact moment on the test. 12 years later fiddling around with game engines, object oriented concepts still seem familiar. I think the two things that made these exams good is they were very broad so you needed to have mastered the whole course, and they were not designed by a teacher incentivized to give good grades, so they were pretty hard and didn’t advertise exactly what would be tested. Not needing 90%+ to do very well on the test was good too. So much of school is avoiding tiny mistakes on otherwise easy content to get a perfect score. Not broadly getting the concepts mastered. Some neighbor schools offered AP classes but it was culturally accepted that students would not get high scores on the exams. Struck me as pretty pathetic. That was a rich kid private school doing worse than my (admittedly fairly wealthy) public school experience.
• overgard 4y ago
  Students are just as much a part of the system as teachers, so I don't think this elitism about who can have an opinion is helpful. I think there are a few constructive things that can be done. One is allowing curious students to design their own academic career (with guidance and supervision). I think students usually cheat because they think the course work is irrelevant to their future lives. Sure people need to be exposed to new things, but a semester on something you know you will never care about is torture. I have a computer science degree, but I remember being forced to take geology. To this day I can't think of a bigger waste of time, I remember nothing from it, and even if I did I would never use it. Vocational schools and apprenticeship should also really come back. I know parents want their kids to be part of the affluent elite, but in a good society being a car mechanic should be a good life. There's no point saddling people with student debt if their degree gets them a job at starbucks. I also think that things like essays are a lot better than quizzes. Sans plagiarism, it's hard to fake knowledge if you have to write it out.
  • xpe 4y ago
    > Students are just as much a part of the system as teachers, so I don't think this elitism about who can have an opinion is helpful. Of course everyone can have an opinion! But are these truly likely to contribute to solving the problem? Of course not. Some people are more likely to have the experience and skills to comprehend and advocate for better solutions. Yes, I tend to support democratic forms of government over others. However, I'm under no illusion that democracy's broad, sweeping claims about what government are "best" are really defensible when applied to the general problem of collective problem solving under real-world constraints. Having one person, one vote seems intuitive and valuable for certain decisions. In particular, it seems useful and practical for selecting certain representatives. But I (and many others) don't think it is a great way of making policy decisions in general. Just as one example: committees of experts can make sense in some contexts. But in general, we can do better than what most of us have seen so far. We have to do better than that. Look at how well government(s) at all levels are serving their constituents. I think it is self-evident that all can stand tremendous improvement. So, for any particular context, think about how to design mechanisms that are likely to work well. In so doing, one must account for many factors, including: human biases, cognitive limitations, cultural differences, imperfect communication, economic costs, time constraints, factions, self-interest, lack of experience, and so on. Keeping these in mind, how exactly would you select, organize, and structure an ongoing set of interactions between, say 1,000 people such that one can maximize the quality of their resulting collective recommendations? One option is to choose 1,000 people at random and weight their opinions evenly. But this is underspecified. How do you compress those recommendations into a form that others are likely to read? How do you discover collective preferences? There are dozens of key questions even if you generally adhere to the idea of "equally weighting each person's opinion". But there are manifold other options where each individual's starting opinion is not the driving factor. I encourage everyone here to study political economy, history, philosophy, and anthropology. Disregard your preconceived framings of how people make decisions. Look at how others have done it. Look at what theorists suggest might be alternatives. It is an amazing journey. I've been thinking about it for almost twenty years, and it is just as fascinating, if not more, as when I first got exposed to these ideas in policy school.
• staticassertion 4y ago
  I feel that school is criminal and I deeply resent how my childhood was spent due to school. So I'm going to opine on it.
  • johndevor 4y ago
    Well they do oddly resemble prisons for kids... In both function and appearance often.
• midhhhthrow 4y ago
  Why do we need to measure it in the first place?
• axblount 4y ago
  I taught high school math for 2 years. Which really isn't really enough to diagnose (much less solve) the system's problems. But it did give me a sense of how intractable the problem is. I find it enormously frustrating when people (not you) complain about "teaching to the test." Teaching to the test is good pedagogy! First, determine what you want to students to know/do. Then choose how you're going to assess their knowledge/ability. Then design instruction that prepares them for the assessment. This is called backwards design.
• einpoklum 4y ago
  > In the case of testing it’s because you choose to focus on the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? I would actually focus on the question of "Why do I need to quantify everybody's knowledge at a high resolution?" When I was TAing, I held the position - never accepted I should say - that we should make more courses pass/fail; and instead of investing effort in the numeric grading keys, try to give more meaningful feedback on assignments. Some alternative suggestions I brought up: * I suggested that the final grade be a combination of the assessment a roll of 1D6 points - to hammer it in that the grading is to a great extent artificial. Somehow this was even less popular of a suggestion... * I once proposed we offer people a perfect passing grade if they just never show up to class nor submit anything, and only people who want to learn would risk an imperfect grade. I really liked that proposal, because it put the two motivations - learning and making the grade - which are often conflated, at direct odds with each other. Of course none of this was taken seriously - even though I was serious. Kind of.
• cbsmith 4y ago
  > These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more. It's kind of hard to believe this needs to be said, because it is so obviously correct.
• strawhatguy 4y ago
  That last paragraph shows the real issue: that schooling is government controlled and provided. The only people that ought to be involved are the teachers (and other school employees) the students (and their parents) of that school. The fact the it might take ‘5 election cycles’ to see a reform through, is a disservice to the students, and often frustrating for the teachers as well. If government does it, that literally opens the door for everyone else to be involved, muddying otherwise clear waters.
  • oblio 4y ago
    How do you offer free universal education without government control?
    • brutusborn 4y ago
      Government vouchers for every child that can be used at any education institution whose curriculum includes the government mandated curriculum.
      • texaslonghorn5 4y ago
        But then people with resources to do so will shop for the best schools meeting this criteria, which hurts people who don't shop.
        • brutusborn 4y ago
          I would argue that the presence of a market structure would encourage schools to compete and thus drive educational advances that would eventually be used in all schools. In this way even parents who just choose the closest school without looking at the schools testing history or teaching approach are more likely to have better outcomes when competition is stronger.
      • oblio 4y ago
        1. How does the "government mandated curriculum" get enforced? 2. What are the barriers to entry and the fungibility of the educational market? If the educational market isn't truly a free market, then what's the point? More private monopolies and oligopolies without proper oversight?
• deterministic 4y ago
  Finland is a great example of a world class school system that doesn’t measure “knowledge”. So perhaps trying to measure “knowledge” is the real problem?
• kromem 4y ago
  You make it more important to be eventually right than initially right. Allow tests to be continuously regraded as the things students get wrong are corrected. Automation would go a long way towards making that more feasible (i.e. easier for a multiple choice test than a written one). But the emphasis on being right initially as the only thing that matters is unhealthy, and certainly in part what leads to the majority of people doubling down on confirmation bias rather than admitting being wrong and learning/incorporating the knowledge for the future. Yes, there are practical issues with improving the system. But I've had a few select teachers that had that policy in some form years ago, and it was often the best teachers that did. We'd benefit from a widespread adoption of similar and it might lower the inventive for trying to cheat to be right the first time, as to the kids being brought up in these systems and reflecting these systems, that's the only thing that matters.
• vintermann 4y ago
  > So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics. Yes, because they've proved they know things by passing through the system and getting good grades. Oh wait... Sorry for the joke, but seriously, you can't expect us civilians to shut up. Leaving education to educators is as pernicious as leaving law just to lawyers, or journalism just to journalists. In all cases, the outcomes are everyone's business, and because there are real conflicts of interest here (and not just disagreement on facts) it can't just be delegated to experts. Even calling for it will make people rightly suspicious of your agenda. Unlike with law or journalism though, pretty much everyone has A LOT of experience with the educational system in practice, by being on the receiving end of it for 12+ years. There's a challenge with sharing our experiences in a fruitful way and not just shouting over each other, sure, but suck it up: we have opinions about what education should be and can be, and we won't shut up and leave it to you.
• jokethrowaway 4y ago
  The real question is even higher. Why should we measure knowledge? If it's learning for the joy of learning you don't need a test. If it's to get a piece of paper you need for a job, then schools are just shitty interviews mostly uncorrelated to real world tasks. I think we should move to learning for the sake of learning (free, open door lessons or pick your own on the internet at your own time - no frontal lessons but still provide a space for students to socialise) and give the chance to students to work on projects that can prove they know something. Workplaces can look at these projects and find someone who fit with them. You built a robot? I can reasonably expect you to know something about electrical engineering and math.
• thawaya3113 4y ago
  And then us engineers come in and fix education just like we did taxis (regulatory arbitrage, offloading costs to the ordinary workers in surprising ways they aren’t aware of, increasing traffic congestion throughout cities, but hooking people onto the rides with unsustainable loss making introductory prices long enough that alternatives such as regular cabs and public transport become worse). Or the way we fixed productivity in ways that has led to no measurable increase in productivity despite nearly everyone having the most powerful device ever invented in the palm of their hands. Or the way we fixed housing through regulatory arbitrage, once again, converting housing for residents into short term rentals for vacationers, making housing for residents more expensive globally and making their communities worse. Or the way we fixed cable by going from bundled cable packages where we have to pay $70-$100 to get all our channels, to unbundled walled gardens where we have to pay $70-$100 to get a fraction of content plus we also have to pay internet fees in addition. Or the way we fixed messaging and phone calls by taking something like a $1/yr WhatsApp membership that offered safe encrypted chat and converting it into a data harvesting machine. Or the way we fixed stock investing by gamifying investing, bringing in a lot of people into active trading who have no business being in active trading and should just park their money in Fidelity, and then promising “free” trades by allowing big banks to trade against, leading to a massive wealth transfer from naive individuals to sophisticated banks at the best of times. Or how we destroyed inflation through BTC. Or saved art through NFTs. The list just goes on.
• MacroChip 4y ago
  This is true for so many other aspects of life as well. Things are the way they are for a reason. Not understanding the deep and complex factors that got the system to where it is dooms you to repeat the mistakes of the past. This is why I go for depth on what I complain and ideate on rather than breadth. Dive deep on something you care about instead of having an opinion about everything. Humans have done well with specialization. If you enjoy breadth, go for it. I just don't see it as very effective. I suppose that complaining without proposing solutions is akin to protesting. You may not necessarily know what you want specifically, but you don't want the current system.
• ghostoftesla 4y ago
  The petit-bourgeoisie elegies here are ridiculous. You take the higher moral ground by establishing that you have "studied pedagogy and know all about it" and then you proceed with providing cliché points on how education has failed. How can you apply critisism to a system you have been indoctrinated by? How fruitful is it gonna be?