4 ms·

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 lev

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.
  - hnarn 4y ago
    > So, that is a pretty good solution, too. Remove diplomas altogether, and let employers measure knowledge in a way they seem fit. It's not a "pretty good solution", which shows if you start breaking down how you would attempt to achieve this. How do you, first of all, "remove diplomas"? Do you suggest that we fundamentally overturn how our entire society works just to remove cheating? A "diploma", "certification" or whatever you want to call it, can be issued by many different entities: a collection of nation-states, a state itself, non- and for-profit organizations, even individuals. These all have varying degrees of value depending on the trust placed in the issuing body, from a certificate of having completed Bob's Weekend Sales Course to a state-issued certificate to perform a specific type of surgery. First of all, which of these are you saying should be "removed"? Only the ones from universities? All of them? Secondly, how do you remove them? Do you outlaw them? Thirdly, what happens when they're all gone? How do you certify a surgeon?
    - paskozdilar 4y ago
      > How do you, first of all, "remove diplomas"? Very simple - just stop giving them to people and let them be forgotten as a concept. > Do you suggest that we fundamentally overturn how our entire society works just to remove cheating? Are you suggesting that university diplomas are a fundamental factor of how our society works? If so, would you please explain how? > First of all, which of these are you saying should be "removed"? Only the ones from universities? All of them? Only those from the universities. Universities are officially recognized "places to learn" and they should be kept that way. Studying for longer than "appropriate" number of years should not be frowned upon, but encouraged. The whole process of "verification" should be completely independent of learning. Bundling "learning" and "verification", the way universities do, inevitably leads to hordes of people who want verification, but not learning - i.e. cheaters. > Secondly, how do you remove them? Do you outlaw them? Very simple - stop issuing them (I suppose a country-level ban of university diplomas could do, but politics depend on the country so I can't give you a general answer). If you want a certificate authority, make a certificate authority and make it its sole purpose to verify that people have the knowledge. Leave university out of that. > Thirdly, what happens when they're all gone? How do you certify a surgeon? A certificate authority (that only verifies surgeons' skills, and doesn't bundle the process with "learning").
imtringued 4y ago
It sounds more like we need students to be mentors so that the number of teachers scales with the number of students.
- spockz 4y ago
  This is what we do in companies with “train-the-trainer” and with satellite/ambassador engineers/teams. The only thing I know from education that does something similar is “Jena-plan” in elementary school and Teaching Assistants in uni. Nothing in our high school.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- trashtester 4y ago
  Interesting proposal. Let's say this was formalized as follows: Each student would be encouraged to serve as mentor for up to 3 younger students, starting on year 3 of their studies, and each semester thereafter, and receive some small stipend for each mentee. At the start of each semester, prospective mentors would be listed and students would be allowed to seek them out. Both parties would be allowed to know the grades of each other, and the mentees would be allowed to reach out to former mentees of the same mentor. Mentors would also be allowed to do some kind of self-promotion where they could "sell" their abilities as mentors. After each exam, the mentoring would count as having taken a course for the mentor, with the grade equal to the average grade of their students, and it would provide a numbe of "mentoring credits" equal to the number of students passing. This might seem unfair, but the idea is that this would encourage competition among mentors to "catch" the best students, encouraging the mentor to put effort in. For the next semester/course, new mentor student connections could be set up, or the same as the semester before could be kept, if both sides agreed. When a student receives their final diploma, all the mentoring results would be listed, both courses, average grade of students, and number of students, as well as total students*courses mentored and the average grade for those. I can imagine a lot of employers would be highly interested in this information, as it could be extremely predictive for some kinds of positions (in particular positions of leadership or teaching). Students who had repeatedly mentored other students who achieved great results would be likely to, in the future, be able to recruit and keep high quality employees and help maximize the output of a team. In both cases, it might be it would be the very students they had been mentoring that would be potential hires. Or, if employed by a university, would be likely to attract high quality post-graduate students as well be effective supervisors for them. Now shy, intravert or people with bad social skills might find this unfair. But I think there would still be room for people who focused exclusively on learning the subjects themselves, and these would have more time available for that. These might also care less about those jobs where mentoring success would be seen as crucial.
brazzy 4y ago
> My opinion - remove colleges, bring back guilds. How do you prevent them from becoming corrupt gatekeepers that maximize their own profits while ignoring learning as much as possible? "measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is exactly the tool to prevent that.
- paskozdilar 4y ago
  By removing any kind of formal authority by them. They should be places to learn, not a bureaucratic machine for deciding who is "worthy" and who is not. There could be another organization that specializes in knowledge verification and certification. But that should be completely independent of learning. Of course, now the question becomes "how do we prevent a verification and certification authority from abusing their power?" - but that question is not particular to this context and can be applied to any human organization of any kind. However, in this particular case, I think that employers would be the verification authorities themselves. They are the ones that need the real-world knowledge, so they should be the ones to measure it.

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.
- hnarn 4y ago
  > So, that is a pretty good solution, too. Remove diplomas altogether, and let employers measure knowledge in a way they seem fit. It's not a "pretty good solution", which shows if you start breaking down how you would attempt to achieve this. How do you, first of all, "remove diplomas"? Do you suggest that we fundamentally overturn how our entire society works just to remove cheating? A "diploma", "certification" or whatever you want to call it, can be issued by many different entities: a collection of nation-states, a state itself, non- and for-profit organizations, even individuals. These all have varying degrees of value depending on the trust placed in the issuing body, from a certificate of having completed Bob's Weekend Sales Course to a state-issued certificate to perform a specific type of surgery. First of all, which of these are you saying should be "removed"? Only the ones from universities? All of them? Secondly, how do you remove them? Do you outlaw them? Thirdly, what happens when they're all gone? How do you certify a surgeon?
  - paskozdilar 4y ago
    > How do you, first of all, "remove diplomas"? Very simple - just stop giving them to people and let them be forgotten as a concept. > Do you suggest that we fundamentally overturn how our entire society works just to remove cheating? Are you suggesting that university diplomas are a fundamental factor of how our society works? If so, would you please explain how? > First of all, which of these are you saying should be "removed"? Only the ones from universities? All of them? Only those from the universities. Universities are officially recognized "places to learn" and they should be kept that way. Studying for longer than "appropriate" number of years should not be frowned upon, but encouraged. The whole process of "verification" should be completely independent of learning. Bundling "learning" and "verification", the way universities do, inevitably leads to hordes of people who want verification, but not learning - i.e. cheaters. > Secondly, how do you remove them? Do you outlaw them? Very simple - stop issuing them (I suppose a country-level ban of university diplomas could do, but politics depend on the country so I can't give you a general answer). If you want a certificate authority, make a certificate authority and make it its sole purpose to verify that people have the knowledge. Leave university out of that. > Thirdly, what happens when they're all gone? How do you certify a surgeon? A certificate authority (that only verifies surgeons' skills, and doesn't bundle the process with "learning").

imtringued 4y ago

It sounds more like we need students to be mentors so that the number of teachers scales with the number of students.

spockz 4y ago
This is what we do in companies with “train-the-trainer” and with satellite/ambassador engineers/teams. The only thing I know from education that does something similar is “Jena-plan” in elementary school and Teaching Assistants in uni. Nothing in our high school.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
trashtester 4y ago
Interesting proposal. Let's say this was formalized as follows: Each student would be encouraged to serve as mentor for up to 3 younger students, starting on year 3 of their studies, and each semester thereafter, and receive some small stipend for each mentee. At the start of each semester, prospective mentors would be listed and students would be allowed to seek them out. Both parties would be allowed to know the grades of each other, and the mentees would be allowed to reach out to former mentees of the same mentor. Mentors would also be allowed to do some kind of self-promotion where they could "sell" their abilities as mentors. After each exam, the mentoring would count as having taken a course for the mentor, with the grade equal to the average grade of their students, and it would provide a numbe of "mentoring credits" equal to the number of students passing. This might seem unfair, but the idea is that this would encourage competition among mentors to "catch" the best students, encouraging the mentor to put effort in. For the next semester/course, new mentor student connections could be set up, or the same as the semester before could be kept, if both sides agreed. When a student receives their final diploma, all the mentoring results would be listed, both courses, average grade of students, and number of students, as well as total students*courses mentored and the average grade for those. I can imagine a lot of employers would be highly interested in this information, as it could be extremely predictive for some kinds of positions (in particular positions of leadership or teaching). Students who had repeatedly mentored other students who achieved great results would be likely to, in the future, be able to recruit and keep high quality employees and help maximize the output of a team. In both cases, it might be it would be the very students they had been mentoring that would be potential hires. Or, if employed by a university, would be likely to attract high quality post-graduate students as well be effective supervisors for them. Now shy, intravert or people with bad social skills might find this unfair. But I think there would still be room for people who focused exclusively on learning the subjects themselves, and these would have more time available for that. These might also care less about those jobs where mentoring success would be seen as crucial.

brazzy 4y ago

> My opinion - remove colleges, bring back guilds. How do you prevent them from becoming corrupt gatekeepers that maximize their own profits while ignoring learning as much as possible? "measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is exactly the tool to prevent that.

paskozdilar 4y ago
By removing any kind of formal authority by them. They should be places to learn, not a bureaucratic machine for deciding who is "worthy" and who is not. There could be another organization that specializes in knowledge verification and certification. But that should be completely independent of learning. Of course, now the question becomes "how do we prevent a verification and certification authority from abusing their power?" - but that question is not particular to this context and can be applied to any human organization of any kind. However, in this particular case, I think that employers would be the verification authorities themselves. They are the ones that need the real-world knowledge, so they should be the ones to measure it.