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Making homework more secure seems like the wrong approach. The whole purpose of a grade is to certify fitness for the next course/year/job. Homework is exceptio

by hansvm 4y ago

Making homework more secure seems like the wrong approach. The whole purpose of a grade is to certify fitness for the next course/year/job. Homework is exceptionally poor at that task even without AI, and overloading it with grades almost invariably makes it worse at its primary task of better educating the student. Larger projects will still need to reckon with AI somehow, but would it not make more sense to just push grading back to a more controlled environment (e.g., ~6 tests in a semester where you can drop the lowest grade so that you can reduce the variance induced by not understanding what a particular professor is looking for and from life issues or test anxiety)? That'd have the added benefits of not wasting time giving individualized feedback for assignments where students know they half-assed it, not having to constrain assignments to those problems which can be fairly evaluated, not causing additional scheduling overhead and stress as students figure out how to hit so many minor deadlines with all-or-nothing impacts on each assignment, ....

darkwizard42 4y ago
I don't think homework is meant to educate the student. It is meant to help push repetition and mastery of concepts. It is likely very difficult for most students to master physics, mathematics, or other quantitative subjects with just 5 hours of instruction a week in person (and the large class sizes in the US and other countries probably don't help).
- hansvm 4y ago
  I disagree slightly (explanation below), but whether you take "educate" to mean some sort of deep exploration or just rote repetition, I think the the point still stands. The disagreement comes from n=1 anecdata drawn from my own education, but after 8th grade or so nearly all my homework was designed to complement rather than reinforce in-class instruction. Picking on mathematics as one of the things you mentioned, the in-class instruction would introduce a concept, and the homework would give you the opportunity to flounder a bit and probe the bounds of that concept. I particularly enjoyed questions like "the author made a mistake in this question; how would you correct it to be answerable?" In some sense that's repeating a concept, but when you're doing something more than repeating the same technique over and over there's a sense in which it's different too.

by hansvm 4y ago

darkwizard42 4y ago

I don't think homework is meant to educate the student. It is meant to help push repetition and mastery of concepts. It is likely very difficult for most students to master physics, mathematics, or other quantitative subjects with just 5 hours of instruction a week in person (and the large class sizes in the US and other countries probably don't help).

hansvm 4y ago
I disagree slightly (explanation below), but whether you take "educate" to mean some sort of deep exploration or just rote repetition, I think the the point still stands. The disagreement comes from n=1 anecdata drawn from my own education, but after 8th grade or so nearly all my homework was designed to complement rather than reinforce in-class instruction. Picking on mathematics as one of the things you mentioned, the in-class instruction would introduce a concept, and the homework would give you the opportunity to flounder a bit and probe the bounds of that concept. I particularly enjoyed questions like "the author made a mistake in this question; how would you correct it to be answerable?" In some sense that's repeating a concept, but when you're doing something more than repeating the same technique over and over there's a sense in which it's different too.