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I think in 10 years of teaching I met one student who genuinely might have skipped through the intro programming course without too much harm. Being able to pa

I think in 10 years of teaching I met one student who genuinely might have skipped through the intro programming course without too much harm. Being able to pass a test is indeed not a sign of mastery of the material (this might come as a shock to some! Just because you got good grades doesn’t mean you’ve mastered the subject! It just means you’re good at the test! But wait, why use tests then? Well, sit down, get comfortable and let me tell you a tale of how we got here…) The fact this conversation exists highlights that our education system is silly. Without evidence, I subjectively like the ideas in “One World Schoolhouse” as an alternative.

atoav 4y ago
The way I see it people who just like to get a degree will complain about having to take classes with material in it they already think they know. People who are really interested in the subject will not complain. I for example have been programming for the past 15 years and I will still read something like an introduction to C programming, just because there might be some ideas, explainations or examples in it that will help me deepen the fundamentals of what I already know. Arguably there are topics where this works better and topics where this works worse. In electronics or mechanics groking the fundamentals is so essential to the whole field that you should know them by hard. And the only way to know them by hard is spaced repetition. So having some overlap in the things you learn is not only necessary here, it is crucial.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  You mean “by heart”, right? I know you typed it twice, but I just never heard that expression.
  - tacitusarc 4y ago
    autocorrect, perhaps.
SilasX 4y ago
>Being able to pass a test is indeed not a sign of mastery of the material I think/hope you mean "guarantee" rather than "sign", because, yes, someone who has mastered the material is indeed much more likely to pass the test than someone who has not. The existence of non-representative counterexamples does not refute that.
- GolDDranks 4y ago
  A great point! (Sorry for a drive-by comment!)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

atoav 4y ago

The way I see it people who just like to get a degree will complain about having to take classes with material in it they already think they know. People who are really interested in the subject will not complain. I for example have been programming for the past 15 years and I will still read something like an introduction to C programming, just because there might be some ideas, explainations or examples in it that will help me deepen the fundamentals of what I already know. Arguably there are topics where this works better and topics where this works worse. In electronics or mechanics groking the fundamentals is so essential to the whole field that you should know them by hard. And the only way to know them by hard is spaced repetition. So having some overlap in the things you learn is not only necessary here, it is crucial.

tambourine_man 4y ago
You mean “by heart”, right? I know you typed it twice, but I just never heard that expression.
- tacitusarc 4y ago
  autocorrect, perhaps.

SilasX 4y ago

>Being able to pass a test is indeed not a sign of mastery of the material I think/hope you mean "guarantee" rather than "sign", because, yes, someone who has mastered the material is indeed much more likely to pass the test than someone who has not. The existence of non-representative counterexamples does not refute that.

GolDDranks 4y ago
A great point! (Sorry for a drive-by comment!)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]