47 ms·

In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

154 points by pshaw 4y ago

pshaw 4y ago
via https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1614958291066535936 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1614958291066535936
- trynewideas 4y ago
  Paul Graham: > The reason his students find his problem sets "emotionally trying" is that they're getting a taste of what real work is like. Which Shengwu Li seems to disagree with, since the author retweeted this thread: https://twitter.com/bradchattergoon/status/1615105614560083969 https://twitter.com/bradchattergoon/status/16151056145600839... > Good on SL for setting expectations but I also want to comment a bit. If research is all about being comfortable with uncertainty, we have an adverse selection problem. I went through undergrad with this “comfort with uncertainty, just try things out” mentality and it hurt me. > Specifically, it hurt my grades, which in turn has hurt my applications to grad school etc. I’ve had to do work post-undergrad to make up for it and demonstrate I am actually a good student. The mindset I had to take on is one where I seek perfect certainty that I know the answer to every problem on every problem set in full so I can score close to 100% to lock in an A. It’s to the point where I was “emotionally drained” from trying to be perfect or near perfect on everything. > I am sure other students who make it to grad school have a similar mindset, and consequently a similar feeling of emotional fatigue from anxiety. I don’t have a better solution since the grading system is supposed to assess understanding of the material which would be important for grad school. But, it’s an adverse selection problem. And also replied to it: https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615106631821402118 https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615106631821402118 > I agree. The problem is that research requires both technical skill and ability to deal with uncertainty. And one of these is easily measured (grades), while the other is, if anything, mildly decreasing in grades. So the problem doesn't seem to be the students but use of grading as a system of measuring the progress of students who are on a research-heavy track of study.
  - cameldrv 4y ago
    Grade inflation exacerbates this problem. The straight A student of today might have been the straight B student of 40 years ago. Meanwhile, the student of 40 years ago that was exceptional in some subjects but mediocre in others can today only get an A for exceptional work, but may get a B for what used to be C level work. Truly exceptional work does not pay in grades anymore, only reliability. Now, reliability is a very important skill, but it should not be the only thing measured .
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      That's a good point; I nearly doubled the next highest score on the midterm in a class of mine. I was not even remotely the only student in the class to get an A.
    - ericd 4y ago
      Don't professor reccs and research opportunities for the standout students in a subject make up the difference?
  - cge 4y ago
    >So the problem doesn't seem to be the students but use of grading as a system of measuring the progress of students who are on a research-heavy track of study It can be a tricky problem. In more academic fields, I think there's a tendency to not weight grades very heavily in graduate applications, instead focusing on undergraduate research, recommendations, connections to research in your department (obviously, a research group directly wanting a student, and having funding for one, is all but a guarantee of admission), and maybe courses taken. Unlike for undergraduate applications, you'll often have few enough applications after filtering out obviously-unsuitable applicants that you can have discussions about specific individuals, and there will often be enough information about them as individuals that you can make decisions based on that, rather than grades. But at the same time, at least in the physics programs I was involved in, I got the sense that out of concern for grades potentially affecting futures or discouraging comfort with uncertainty and exploration, once classes were at a point where everyone was probably going to be going to graduate school, many ended up being de facto pass-fail: for the most part, everyone who showed a good understanding of the material would be given an A, and everyone who didn't would get a tap on the shoulder at some point and a suggestion that the professor would do whatever was necessary to let them drop (usually far past the ordinary drop deadline). I also recall that, for example, Kip Thorne simply refused to teach classes that were not pass-fail.
- mintplant 4y ago
  > The reason his students find his problem sets "emotionally trying" is that they're getting a taste of what real work is like. What? No, it's because they're already overworked with their actual research and don't have time/energy for this fake research on top of that.
genderwhy 4y ago
If you set this expectation up front, and explain the premise, this rules. If you simply present problems to students without this caveat, you are being needlessly cruel. It seems like the author found a good approach.
- kris_wayton 4y ago
  This was my initial reaction also. I can deal with approaches that are unusual, but don't surprise me with it.
thoughtpalette 4y ago
I was going to make an initial offhand comment about the author explanaing critical thinking skills, then I viewed the problem sets[0]. I def agree with the other commenter about setting expectations up front on these types of problems. [0]: https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615063879381569536/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615063879381569536/pho...
- chisquared 4y ago
  Interesting problems! It’s not hard to intuit the truth values of the conjectures in the first two questions. I don’t have proofs, though. No idea about the third one.
com2kid 4y ago
My favorite history professor in college gave open book essay exams. He asked your opinion on topics, "what were the motivations of the leaders of the US revolution?" Even better were the questions that ended in "why or why not?" There were no right or wrong answers, if you could justify your answer in a reasonable manner, you got full points. Some students hated his tests, some students loved his tests. The students who hated his tests really hated them, the students who loved them, really loved them. (I was in the loved them group!) Getting a Computer Science degree felt awfully similar, especially in higher level classes. Students of course had to do a senior project, 6 months to make something real in a group of 5. One group of students spun their project out commercially and and made some good money off of it. My group make a photo library management app that was designed to allow for rapidly tagging hundreds to thousands of photos, utilizing custom experimental UI concepts. (This is when Google Picassa was still a big deal) When we started out we didn't know if we'd succeed, after all "experimental UI", "handles libraries with thousands of photos" and "desktop app written in Java" weren't typically phrases that went hand in hand back in the mid 00s. But we did it! Which kind of summarizes my entire career in software engineering. If I'm not scared and uncertain of how I am going to do something, of if something is even possible, than I probably am not tackling a hard enough problem.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I would hate open-ended questions like that if I didn't know the professor and I didn't know the grading, because it relies on the professor's ability to evaluate what is reasonable justification. I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student. For example, if I was a black man and the teacher was white, my essays about slavery would be not about if I learned the material but my trying to work around determining how racist a teacher might be.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    That's rough, since getting to the point of being able to answer and evaluate answers to those kinds of questions is, like, a really big part of working in the humanities. It's probably the single most important skill for an undergrad in humanities courses to pick up.
was_a_dev 4y ago
Problem sets for a second year PhD? Is that common in the US?
- timy2shoes 4y ago
  First year is general classes (e.g. in economics that would be Micro, Macro, Econometrics, etc), 2nd year is classes more specific to your area of study.
  - was_a_dev 4y ago
    What about the following years? In my PhD in the UK, I had three months of part-time classes and then onto my research. Just curious, as I didn't realise it was such a difference
    - cge 4y ago
      PhD programs in the US and elsewhere are different: most PhD programs in the US are significantly longer, and could be seen as combined Master's and PhD programs, admitting students directly after their undergraduate degrees. The first year or two could be seen as more of a Master's program, and many programs give Master's degrees at some point in the process (some by request, such that the difference between having a Master's and not having one can be whether you decided to file a form or not). There can also be a certain filtering process at some point in the process, with some form of qualifying exams with three possible results of failing, being given a Master's degree but not being permitted to continue in the program, and continuing on to a PhD. The result is that for many PhD programs, the first year or two transitions from being fully class-based (though often very small classes) to more and more research, and then finally a switch to having no classes, and only research (and teaching).
      - was_a_dev 4y ago
        Great to know. Thank you
- solarmist 4y ago
cge 4y ago
Part of the difficulty with emotional views of problem sets and tests at universities is not so much that these sorts of problem sets are emotionally trying themselves, but that from the student perspective, going between institutions and class levels, the style, grading and expectations for problem sets and tests can change quite quickly. While I strongly prefer the sorts of problem sets being described, and preferred them as a student once I got used to them, it is likely helpful to have these sorts of explicit clarifications, even in situations where you might assume that students will already be acclimated to a particular style. For students taking unusual pathways through courses, they may not have been around for previous mentions in prior classes, may be taking a class out of their field or usual level, or may be more used to a institution, field, department, or simply instructors, with different expectations. Going from secondary school or community college to lower division undergraduate classes, upper division undergraduate classes, and graduate classes, depending on circumstances and field, you can, in a few years, go from assignments where you have 60 questions you are expected to be able to answer, and getting 50 right will result in a poor grade or even failing, to assignments where answering 3 out of 5 is considered great. Without context, it can be terrifying to get a problem set where you assume that having trouble with a problem means you don't understand the material well, when in reality it's expected that you won't finish it perfectly even as an excellent student. In my undergraduate experience, going from a community college, to upper division undergraduate physics courses, to graduate physics courses taken in my senior year, I went, from the finals one term to the midterms of the next, from classes where I walked into tests expecting that I should be able to answer every question perfectly, to classes where my 70% score on the midterm (of a handful of questions) was considered an excellent result, with no explicit indication beforehand that this would be the case. That switch was only a year before I was in a small graduate class where answering two out of four questions correctly on an assignment merited a congratulatory email from the professor. Even rationally having a sense that the expectations and styles were changing, it can be a massive, rapid shift.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  I can give you prof perspective on this. Going between different stages of education, you can't really double or triple the amount of time you study, but you need to change your study and thinking techniques to learn 2x or 3x more [1]. The problem is that if the teachers try to set up too easy a ramp at the start of a new stage, many students refuse to upgrade their study/thinking techniques. They continue to use suboptimal methods from their last stage, because its easier. But before they know it, they progress to a point where their suboptimal techniques are wildy unrealistic. At this point, they try to upgrade, except its much harder to upgrade your techniques at MATH301 then it is at MATH101. One way out of it is to jolt incoming students with assessments where the old techniques simply don't work, and they are forced to upgrade immediately. It is kind of cruel, but it works well. [1] For instance, a freshman PHY101 Mechanics course covers the same material as 1-1.5 years of high school with higher difficulty.
defrost 4y ago
That takes me back to third year applied mathematics in the 1980s. Small class, seriously smart hard working ederly professor notorious for setting conjectures from whatever areas of interest he currently had as exam questions. Failure was not even trying to answer, grading was scaled on how many you had a shot at and what kind of dent you made on them in the hour. Fun times.
- timy2shoes 4y ago
  Reminds me of my number theory professor. Open book take home exam, 20 problems and you choose 4 of them to answer. He graded us on how much we were able to do, and not just the answer itself. 6 of the problems were equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis (unbeknownst to the class). Fun times.
  - schlauerfox 4y ago
    Searching for Will Hunting?
- vharuck 4y ago
  My favorite math class (undergrad) was a new course one professor wanted to offer for seniors. He called it Math Seminar, and each week we were handed a set of problems chosen from abstract algebra, real analysis, topology, or number theory. Each student chose a problem and a day to present their solution next week. All class time was spent on presentations and questions to the presenters. IIRC, not finding the solution wasn't a big enough penalty to fail, as long as the professor thought you researched it and tried multiple approaches. I have fond memories of nights at a local bar, working through a problem.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Failure was not even trying to answer, grading was scaled on how many you had a shot at and what kind of dent you made on them in the hour. I remember one instructor who told us at the beginning of the course that he would be giving a "you are not expected to finish" exam. The problems wouldn't be difficult, as they were all variations on a theme, but there would be a large number of them. Having an expectation of what I would be facing, I "studied" by practicing my writing speed and mental arithmetic. Even with my writing speed being the bottleneck, I ended up finishing all of them ahead of time, and I still remember the look on his face as I handed it in. I'm pretty sure I didn't get them all correct, but apparently it was enough to severely skew the distribution of results. Later, I heard that he decided to make the exam twice as long in the next instance he taught. That was a long time ago, before the use of computer-generated exams was common.
dekhn 4y ago
The extra-credit question on one of my finals in grad school was: "What is the time-resolved fluorescence of a fluorophore in 4 spatial dimensions?" We had covered 2D and 3D cases in class. my housemate started the question on Friday night (after finishing the regular questions) and was done some time Monday- she said it was pretty hard problem that involved deriving several new equations for 4 spatial dimensions, throw in some tensor calculus, finally some ugly integrals, and then out pops an analytical expression. I didn't even attempt it because I knew it would be beyond emotionally trying.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Do you come from a parallel universe with an extra spatial dimension
  - defrost 4y ago
    Fluorescence is spectrum shifted retransmission. Energy arrives on some wavelengths, it departs on others. "Three spatial dimensions" Vs. "Four spatial dimensions" is suggesting the existence of a further spatial dimension orthogonal to our own and is a bit fanciful, however ... It's legit to look at the evolution of analytic forms from 2 to 3 to 4 to higher (N) dimensions not just for the fun of abstraction but also for the application to phase spaces [1] .. where systems are described using multiple independent orthoganl dimensions to plot the system state at any time and the transitions from one state to another. I see no issue with looking at energy transposition through phase space, and there are applications. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space
    - samplatt 4y ago
      Man, I gotta try reading the harder Greg Egan novels again. I'm fine with the biological and even some of the topographical stuff, but when he starts basing character development on actually visualising shifting through orthogonal dimensions like what you're talking about, my brain just exits via my arsehole and I give up.
xupybd 4y ago
I remember a lecturer responding to similar feedback from one of my class mates. I'll never forget his reply. "Life is hard. Then you die"
- hughes 4y ago
  All I remember from Linear Algebra is my lecturer telling us "everybody dies alone".
- progman32 4y ago
  Sometimes, of course, things are artificially hard for reasons that don't stand up to scrutiny. These should not be accepted as inevitable.
  - xupybd 4y ago
    You're right but his response at the time was hilarious.
- martopix 4y ago
  This is a very frustrating answer. It basically sounds like "suck it up, mate", which is not what education should be about.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
Title suggests (to me) a starkly different attitude in the tweet than what’s actually in it. The quotes are verbatim, but I was expecting a dismissal of the quoted students’ disposition, rather than a professor meaningfully addressing their concerns by making the expectations more emotionally supportive. I’m not suggesting a change to the title, it’s probably best to keep it. This was a pleasant surprise and one I think other readers might benefit from.
deskamess 4y ago
Pretty much most senior level/grad algorithm classes are like this. They introduce a framework for solution and then give you about 2-3 example lecture problems that they walk you through. 2-3 weeks after being introduced to 5/6 frameworks its Exam day. You are given unique word problems that, in the eyes of someone experienced like a prof or PhD student, is trivial. But you are struggling with 1 week of homework experience to fit a word problem into one of the frameworks you studied. There just was not enough time dedicated to dissecting how to parse word problem, look for patterns, map it to a framework. It was basically left to the student to figure it out in 1 week based on 3-4 homework problems. On exam day you are just emotionally devastated looking at the problem not knowing where to start - you keep throwing various framework structures on the problem hoping some hints of a solution bounce back at you. But there are smart people who get all this stuff "easily" (previous practice, exposure). The rest of us walk out of the exam wondering how many trucks hit us.
- marmetio 4y ago
  This is a problem all across engineering. Professors and textbook authors are so concerned about reserving problems to grade you on that they forget to teach the material in the first place. Imagine trying to learn a spoken language with very little input or speaking practice.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Many professors don't care about teaching. I've had conversations with physics/math/engineering academics which go "Those who are smart and motivated will get it, and I don't care about the rest."
    - blackbear_ 4y ago
      I believe that a lot of this cynicism comes after years of teaching and seeing that most students do not really care about the topic and do not want to put in more than the minimum effort required to pass. You don't realize how easy it is to tell apart those who are interested from those who are not until are on the other side.
p1necone 4y ago
The "if you get 3/5 you're doing fine" thing only works if you actually give As for 3/5 answers. Otherwise no amount of placation is going to make students ignore reality.
- feet 4y ago
  3/5 is 60% which is barely not failing and in classes for the major wouldn't even get you credit
  - magneticnorth 4y ago
    Classes like this would be graded "on a curve". In a 2nd-year PhD level theory class I'd assume the default grade is an A. The point of classes at that level is to provide background and skills for research, and the teachers trust the students to be doing the work to get what they need out of a class. Some students will really want to master the material, some will only feel they need some familiarity, and the test as to whether they got what they need will come in their PhD research over the next few years, not in an exam. In a course with "real" grades, it still may well be that 60% is an A; I've had classes like that. In that case, it's just divided so that the top 20% get an A, next 30% get a B, and so on.
dan-robertson 4y ago
These threads are often fun because of the variety of ways people were taught things. It’s hard to guess how they compare because most people only end up doing one of the ways and there isn’t much randomisation in education. Where I studied, problem sets were purely pedagogical and didn’t contribute towards grades. It meant exams could be stressful but the questions in the homework could cover a wider range of difficulty including things that would be fun to have a crack at even if you didn’t know the answer. The struggle of trying to figure it out felt good for understanding the material. We’d review answers and solutions in small groups after attempting the homework. It was pretty normal to get prove-or-disprove or could-one-prove questions but this was mathematics not economics. A few problems I remember in particular: - in an introductory course a few weeks in there was a question like ‘find a function R -> R that takes every value on every non empty open interval’ and there’s a standard construction that we didn’t generally know so there were often fun errors or weird constructions. - ‘find a space X which deformation-retracts to the annulus and to the mobius band’ which I mostly remember because I had some horrid intuitive solution where I took a disk times a circle, embedded it in R3, and then carefully wrote out retracts, but I think the good solution was to just take the product space and then rely on some theorems that I no longer remember - ‘what’s yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?’
- turminal 4y ago
  > ‘what’s yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?’ A yellow Tychonoff's theorem, obviously.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    I think it was Zorn’s lemon.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> On exam day you are just emotionally devastated looking at the problem not knowing where to start I honestly understand the frustration,but not the "emotionally devasted" part. Emotionally devasted to me means losing someone. When I studied CS I went to the exams knowing very well if I had studied or not and how much, and did not expect anything. The exam was the easiest part, you either know how to solve the problems or don't and walk away If something was out of the scope or "impossible knowledge" I would book a personal appointment with the professor to talk about it. For any too hard to solve exam, there have been more than one that I passed having honestly not spent enough time studying. Luck is an important factor and usually it levels out in the long run. also those kinds of failures teached me to focus on the things I could solve instead of those that I couldn't and eventually go back and give them a second shot. It boosts your confidence and helps look at the problems from a different angle.
- smcl 4y ago
  Where are you reading "emotionally devastated" - both the Tweet and the title say they were described as "emotionally trying". That said, I can easily see someone going through the stress of the exam period, maybe juggling that with part-time work to pay for bills, studying extensively to the brink of burnout and describing feeling "devastated" when they can't crack a few questions in an important exam they thought they'd studied appropriately.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > Where are you reading "emotionally devastated" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34421487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34421487 On exam day you are just emotionally devastated > describing feeling "devastated" when they can't crack a few questions in an important exam they thought they'd studied appropriately maybe the expectations are too high? You are a student, it's in the name, you don't know stuff because you are learning. Maybe I can't understand what you're talking about because I am not American. School is called school for a reason. Once you finish school you realize how easy school was compared to real life problems, that sometimes have no easy solution or no solution at all, no matter how hard you try. If an exam makes you feel emotionally devasted, what will happen when life throws life/death problems at you? Maybe it's a matter of re-balancing priorities and not putting so much pressure on yourself, life doesn't end for a failed exam. Maybe it's not exams that are too hard, it's the system that is pressuring students to finish as soon as possible, because it costs them so much, that the risk of going bankrupt it's too high, some form of sunk cost fallacy at play. OTOH, in that system, who would pay premium rates for a lesser education where exams are so easy that anybody can pass them? I started working at the age of 19, full time (6 hours a day/ 5days a week), while also studying at university and paying for my bills. I still believe exams where the easiest part of the process, the bureaucracy it's what was killing me. And I feel I have to specify that I am in no way a genius, I was just an average student with a soft spot for CS problems, meaning I liked solving them, not that I had it particularly easy.
_pastel 4y ago
I had a graduate algorithms class that was graded like this, but the teacher didn't explain and I was clueless. I spent the whole semester super stressed and convinced I was failing, then was shocked and befuddled by an A. "Emotionally trying" is an accurate description of how it felt. Props to this professor; struggling in confusion is a lot more fun if you know that's the game you're supposed to be playing.
tpoacher 4y ago
I can't quite put my finger on it at a glance, but my immediate instinct is that this sounds nice at a very superficial / philosophical level, but actually flies in the face of actual pedagogical literature over the last few decades. For one, you're describing research, not education. The fact that it "can" be done (sub-optimally) in this manner, and the "this is how we've always done it" impetus behind it, doesn't necessarily make it a good idea educationally.
gregors 4y ago
Maybe I'm misinterpreting the quote, but it sounds like dunking on 2nd year Phd students? 1. As a professor, you don't get to dictate how something emotionally impacts another human. A frustrating problem set....should in fact be frustrating. no? 2. The students' performance directly reflects the professor's performance I do like that they are stating their expectations. Seems like the professor is growing as well. Live and learn.
reidjs 4y ago
The sad thing is, I would have totally love to have studied computer science in school, but the classes were too damn hard.

154 points by pshaw 4y ago

pshaw 4y ago

via https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1614958291066535936 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1614958291066535936

trynewideas 4y ago
Paul Graham: > The reason his students find his problem sets "emotionally trying" is that they're getting a taste of what real work is like. Which Shengwu Li seems to disagree with, since the author retweeted this thread: https://twitter.com/bradchattergoon/status/1615105614560083969 https://twitter.com/bradchattergoon/status/16151056145600839... > Good on SL for setting expectations but I also want to comment a bit. If research is all about being comfortable with uncertainty, we have an adverse selection problem. I went through undergrad with this “comfort with uncertainty, just try things out” mentality and it hurt me. > Specifically, it hurt my grades, which in turn has hurt my applications to grad school etc. I’ve had to do work post-undergrad to make up for it and demonstrate I am actually a good student. The mindset I had to take on is one where I seek perfect certainty that I know the answer to every problem on every problem set in full so I can score close to 100% to lock in an A. It’s to the point where I was “emotionally drained” from trying to be perfect or near perfect on everything. > I am sure other students who make it to grad school have a similar mindset, and consequently a similar feeling of emotional fatigue from anxiety. I don’t have a better solution since the grading system is supposed to assess understanding of the material which would be important for grad school. But, it’s an adverse selection problem. And also replied to it: https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615106631821402118 https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615106631821402118 > I agree. The problem is that research requires both technical skill and ability to deal with uncertainty. And one of these is easily measured (grades), while the other is, if anything, mildly decreasing in grades. So the problem doesn't seem to be the students but use of grading as a system of measuring the progress of students who are on a research-heavy track of study.
- cameldrv 4y ago
  Grade inflation exacerbates this problem. The straight A student of today might have been the straight B student of 40 years ago. Meanwhile, the student of 40 years ago that was exceptional in some subjects but mediocre in others can today only get an A for exceptional work, but may get a B for what used to be C level work. Truly exceptional work does not pay in grades anymore, only reliability. Now, reliability is a very important skill, but it should not be the only thing measured .
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    That's a good point; I nearly doubled the next highest score on the midterm in a class of mine. I was not even remotely the only student in the class to get an A.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Don't professor reccs and research opportunities for the standout students in a subject make up the difference?
- cge 4y ago
  >So the problem doesn't seem to be the students but use of grading as a system of measuring the progress of students who are on a research-heavy track of study It can be a tricky problem. In more academic fields, I think there's a tendency to not weight grades very heavily in graduate applications, instead focusing on undergraduate research, recommendations, connections to research in your department (obviously, a research group directly wanting a student, and having funding for one, is all but a guarantee of admission), and maybe courses taken. Unlike for undergraduate applications, you'll often have few enough applications after filtering out obviously-unsuitable applicants that you can have discussions about specific individuals, and there will often be enough information about them as individuals that you can make decisions based on that, rather than grades. But at the same time, at least in the physics programs I was involved in, I got the sense that out of concern for grades potentially affecting futures or discouraging comfort with uncertainty and exploration, once classes were at a point where everyone was probably going to be going to graduate school, many ended up being de facto pass-fail: for the most part, everyone who showed a good understanding of the material would be given an A, and everyone who didn't would get a tap on the shoulder at some point and a suggestion that the professor would do whatever was necessary to let them drop (usually far past the ordinary drop deadline). I also recall that, for example, Kip Thorne simply refused to teach classes that were not pass-fail.
mintplant 4y ago
> The reason his students find his problem sets "emotionally trying" is that they're getting a taste of what real work is like. What? No, it's because they're already overworked with their actual research and don't have time/energy for this fake research on top of that.

genderwhy 4y ago

If you set this expectation up front, and explain the premise, this rules. If you simply present problems to students without this caveat, you are being needlessly cruel. It seems like the author found a good approach.

kris_wayton 4y ago
This was my initial reaction also. I can deal with approaches that are unusual, but don't surprise me with it.

thoughtpalette 4y ago

I was going to make an initial offhand comment about the author explanaing critical thinking skills, then I viewed the problem sets[0]. I def agree with the other commenter about setting expectations up front on these types of problems. [0]: https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615063879381569536/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615063879381569536/pho...

chisquared 4y ago
Interesting problems! It’s not hard to intuit the truth values of the conjectures in the first two questions. I don’t have proofs, though. No idea about the third one.

com2kid 4y ago

My favorite history professor in college gave open book essay exams. He asked your opinion on topics, "what were the motivations of the leaders of the US revolution?" Even better were the questions that ended in "why or why not?" There were no right or wrong answers, if you could justify your answer in a reasonable manner, you got full points. Some students hated his tests, some students loved his tests. The students who hated his tests really hated them, the students who loved them, really loved them. (I was in the loved them group!) Getting a Computer Science degree felt awfully similar, especially in higher level classes. Students of course had to do a senior project, 6 months to make something real in a group of 5. One group of students spun their project out commercially and and made some good money off of it. My group make a photo library management app that was designed to allow for rapidly tagging hundreds to thousands of photos, utilizing custom experimental UI concepts. (This is when Google Picassa was still a big deal) When we started out we didn't know if we'd succeed, after all "experimental UI", "handles libraries with thousands of photos" and "desktop app written in Java" weren't typically phrases that went hand in hand back in the mid 00s. But we did it! Which kind of summarizes my entire career in software engineering. If I'm not scared and uncertain of how I am going to do something, of if something is even possible, than I probably am not tackling a hard enough problem.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I would hate open-ended questions like that if I didn't know the professor and I didn't know the grading, because it relies on the professor's ability to evaluate what is reasonable justification. I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student. For example, if I was a black man and the teacher was white, my essays about slavery would be not about if I learned the material but my trying to work around determining how racist a teacher might be.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  That's rough, since getting to the point of being able to answer and evaluate answers to those kinds of questions is, like, a really big part of working in the humanities. It's probably the single most important skill for an undergrad in humanities courses to pick up.

was_a_dev 4y ago

Problem sets for a second year PhD? Is that common in the US?

timy2shoes 4y ago
First year is general classes (e.g. in economics that would be Micro, Macro, Econometrics, etc), 2nd year is classes more specific to your area of study.
- was_a_dev 4y ago
  What about the following years? In my PhD in the UK, I had three months of part-time classes and then onto my research. Just curious, as I didn't realise it was such a difference
  - cge 4y ago
    PhD programs in the US and elsewhere are different: most PhD programs in the US are significantly longer, and could be seen as combined Master's and PhD programs, admitting students directly after their undergraduate degrees. The first year or two could be seen as more of a Master's program, and many programs give Master's degrees at some point in the process (some by request, such that the difference between having a Master's and not having one can be whether you decided to file a form or not). There can also be a certain filtering process at some point in the process, with some form of qualifying exams with three possible results of failing, being given a Master's degree but not being permitted to continue in the program, and continuing on to a PhD. The result is that for many PhD programs, the first year or two transitions from being fully class-based (though often very small classes) to more and more research, and then finally a switch to having no classes, and only research (and teaching).
    - was_a_dev 4y ago
      Great to know. Thank you
solarmist 4y ago

cge 4y ago

Part of the difficulty with emotional views of problem sets and tests at universities is not so much that these sorts of problem sets are emotionally trying themselves, but that from the student perspective, going between institutions and class levels, the style, grading and expectations for problem sets and tests can change quite quickly. While I strongly prefer the sorts of problem sets being described, and preferred them as a student once I got used to them, it is likely helpful to have these sorts of explicit clarifications, even in situations where you might assume that students will already be acclimated to a particular style. For students taking unusual pathways through courses, they may not have been around for previous mentions in prior classes, may be taking a class out of their field or usual level, or may be more used to a institution, field, department, or simply instructors, with different expectations. Going from secondary school or community college to lower division undergraduate classes, upper division undergraduate classes, and graduate classes, depending on circumstances and field, you can, in a few years, go from assignments where you have 60 questions you are expected to be able to answer, and getting 50 right will result in a poor grade or even failing, to assignments where answering 3 out of 5 is considered great. Without context, it can be terrifying to get a problem set where you assume that having trouble with a problem means you don't understand the material well, when in reality it's expected that you won't finish it perfectly even as an excellent student. In my undergraduate experience, going from a community college, to upper division undergraduate physics courses, to graduate physics courses taken in my senior year, I went, from the finals one term to the midterms of the next, from classes where I walked into tests expecting that I should be able to answer every question perfectly, to classes where my 70% score on the midterm (of a handful of questions) was considered an excellent result, with no explicit indication beforehand that this would be the case. That switch was only a year before I was in a small graduate class where answering two out of four questions correctly on an assignment merited a congratulatory email from the professor. Even rationally having a sense that the expectations and styles were changing, it can be a massive, rapid shift.

abdullahkhalids 4y ago
I can give you prof perspective on this. Going between different stages of education, you can't really double or triple the amount of time you study, but you need to change your study and thinking techniques to learn 2x or 3x more [1]. The problem is that if the teachers try to set up too easy a ramp at the start of a new stage, many students refuse to upgrade their study/thinking techniques. They continue to use suboptimal methods from their last stage, because its easier. But before they know it, they progress to a point where their suboptimal techniques are wildy unrealistic. At this point, they try to upgrade, except its much harder to upgrade your techniques at MATH301 then it is at MATH101. One way out of it is to jolt incoming students with assessments where the old techniques simply don't work, and they are forced to upgrade immediately. It is kind of cruel, but it works well. [1] For instance, a freshman PHY101 Mechanics course covers the same material as 1-1.5 years of high school with higher difficulty.

defrost 4y ago

That takes me back to third year applied mathematics in the 1980s. Small class, seriously smart hard working ederly professor notorious for setting conjectures from whatever areas of interest he currently had as exam questions. Failure was not even trying to answer, grading was scaled on how many you had a shot at and what kind of dent you made on them in the hour. Fun times.

timy2shoes 4y ago
Reminds me of my number theory professor. Open book take home exam, 20 problems and you choose 4 of them to answer. He graded us on how much we were able to do, and not just the answer itself. 6 of the problems were equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis (unbeknownst to the class). Fun times.
- schlauerfox 4y ago
  Searching for Will Hunting?
vharuck 4y ago
My favorite math class (undergrad) was a new course one professor wanted to offer for seniors. He called it Math Seminar, and each week we were handed a set of problems chosen from abstract algebra, real analysis, topology, or number theory. Each student chose a problem and a day to present their solution next week. All class time was spent on presentations and questions to the presenters. IIRC, not finding the solution wasn't a big enough penalty to fail, as long as the professor thought you researched it and tried multiple approaches. I have fond memories of nights at a local bar, working through a problem.
userbinator 4y ago
Failure was not even trying to answer, grading was scaled on how many you had a shot at and what kind of dent you made on them in the hour. I remember one instructor who told us at the beginning of the course that he would be giving a "you are not expected to finish" exam. The problems wouldn't be difficult, as they were all variations on a theme, but there would be a large number of them. Having an expectation of what I would be facing, I "studied" by practicing my writing speed and mental arithmetic. Even with my writing speed being the bottleneck, I ended up finishing all of them ahead of time, and I still remember the look on his face as I handed it in. I'm pretty sure I didn't get them all correct, but apparently it was enough to severely skew the distribution of results. Later, I heard that he decided to make the exam twice as long in the next instance he taught. That was a long time ago, before the use of computer-generated exams was common.

dekhn 4y ago

The extra-credit question on one of my finals in grad school was: "What is the time-resolved fluorescence of a fluorophore in 4 spatial dimensions?" We had covered 2D and 3D cases in class. my housemate started the question on Friday night (after finishing the regular questions) and was done some time Monday- she said it was pretty hard problem that involved deriving several new equations for 4 spatial dimensions, throw in some tensor calculus, finally some ugly integrals, and then out pops an analytical expression. I didn't even attempt it because I knew it would be beyond emotionally trying.

mhh__ 4y ago
Do you come from a parallel universe with an extra spatial dimension
- defrost 4y ago
  Fluorescence is spectrum shifted retransmission. Energy arrives on some wavelengths, it departs on others. "Three spatial dimensions" Vs. "Four spatial dimensions" is suggesting the existence of a further spatial dimension orthogonal to our own and is a bit fanciful, however ... It's legit to look at the evolution of analytic forms from 2 to 3 to 4 to higher (N) dimensions not just for the fun of abstraction but also for the application to phase spaces [1] .. where systems are described using multiple independent orthoganl dimensions to plot the system state at any time and the transitions from one state to another. I see no issue with looking at energy transposition through phase space, and there are applications. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space
  - samplatt 4y ago
    Man, I gotta try reading the harder Greg Egan novels again. I'm fine with the biological and even some of the topographical stuff, but when he starts basing character development on actually visualising shifting through orthogonal dimensions like what you're talking about, my brain just exits via my arsehole and I give up.

xupybd 4y ago

I remember a lecturer responding to similar feedback from one of my class mates. I'll never forget his reply. "Life is hard. Then you die"

hughes 4y ago
All I remember from Linear Algebra is my lecturer telling us "everybody dies alone".
progman32 4y ago
Sometimes, of course, things are artificially hard for reasons that don't stand up to scrutiny. These should not be accepted as inevitable.
- xupybd 4y ago
  You're right but his response at the time was hilarious.
martopix 4y ago
This is a very frustrating answer. It basically sounds like "suck it up, mate", which is not what education should be about.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

Title suggests (to me) a starkly different attitude in the tweet than what’s actually in it. The quotes are verbatim, but I was expecting a dismissal of the quoted students’ disposition, rather than a professor meaningfully addressing their concerns by making the expectations more emotionally supportive. I’m not suggesting a change to the title, it’s probably best to keep it. This was a pleasant surprise and one I think other readers might benefit from.

deskamess 4y ago

Pretty much most senior level/grad algorithm classes are like this. They introduce a framework for solution and then give you about 2-3 example lecture problems that they walk you through. 2-3 weeks after being introduced to 5/6 frameworks its Exam day. You are given unique word problems that, in the eyes of someone experienced like a prof or PhD student, is trivial. But you are struggling with 1 week of homework experience to fit a word problem into one of the frameworks you studied. There just was not enough time dedicated to dissecting how to parse word problem, look for patterns, map it to a framework. It was basically left to the student to figure it out in 1 week based on 3-4 homework problems. On exam day you are just emotionally devastated looking at the problem not knowing where to start - you keep throwing various framework structures on the problem hoping some hints of a solution bounce back at you. But there are smart people who get all this stuff "easily" (previous practice, exposure). The rest of us walk out of the exam wondering how many trucks hit us.

marmetio 4y ago
This is a problem all across engineering. Professors and textbook authors are so concerned about reserving problems to grade you on that they forget to teach the material in the first place. Imagine trying to learn a spoken language with very little input or speaking practice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Many professors don't care about teaching. I've had conversations with physics/math/engineering academics which go "Those who are smart and motivated will get it, and I don't care about the rest."
  - blackbear_ 4y ago
    I believe that a lot of this cynicism comes after years of teaching and seeing that most students do not really care about the topic and do not want to put in more than the minimum effort required to pass. You don't realize how easy it is to tell apart those who are interested from those who are not until are on the other side.

p1necone 4y ago

The "if you get 3/5 you're doing fine" thing only works if you actually give As for 3/5 answers. Otherwise no amount of placation is going to make students ignore reality.

feet 4y ago
3/5 is 60% which is barely not failing and in classes for the major wouldn't even get you credit
- magneticnorth 4y ago
  Classes like this would be graded "on a curve". In a 2nd-year PhD level theory class I'd assume the default grade is an A. The point of classes at that level is to provide background and skills for research, and the teachers trust the students to be doing the work to get what they need out of a class. Some students will really want to master the material, some will only feel they need some familiarity, and the test as to whether they got what they need will come in their PhD research over the next few years, not in an exam. In a course with "real" grades, it still may well be that 60% is an A; I've had classes like that. In that case, it's just divided so that the top 20% get an A, next 30% get a B, and so on.

dan-robertson 4y ago

These threads are often fun because of the variety of ways people were taught things. It’s hard to guess how they compare because most people only end up doing one of the ways and there isn’t much randomisation in education. Where I studied, problem sets were purely pedagogical and didn’t contribute towards grades. It meant exams could be stressful but the questions in the homework could cover a wider range of difficulty including things that would be fun to have a crack at even if you didn’t know the answer. The struggle of trying to figure it out felt good for understanding the material. We’d review answers and solutions in small groups after attempting the homework. It was pretty normal to get prove-or-disprove or could-one-prove questions but this was mathematics not economics. A few problems I remember in particular: - in an introductory course a few weeks in there was a question like ‘find a function R -> R that takes every value on every non empty open interval’ and there’s a standard construction that we didn’t generally know so there were often fun errors or weird constructions. - ‘find a space X which deformation-retracts to the annulus and to the mobius band’ which I mostly remember because I had some horrid intuitive solution where I took a disk times a circle, embedded it in R3, and then carefully wrote out retracts, but I think the good solution was to just take the product space and then rely on some theorems that I no longer remember - ‘what’s yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?’

turminal 4y ago
> ‘what’s yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?’ A yellow Tychonoff's theorem, obviously.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I think it was Zorn’s lemon.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> On exam day you are just emotionally devastated looking at the problem not knowing where to start I honestly understand the frustration,but not the "emotionally devasted" part. Emotionally devasted to me means losing someone. When I studied CS I went to the exams knowing very well if I had studied or not and how much, and did not expect anything. The exam was the easiest part, you either know how to solve the problems or don't and walk away If something was out of the scope or "impossible knowledge" I would book a personal appointment with the professor to talk about it. For any too hard to solve exam, there have been more than one that I passed having honestly not spent enough time studying. Luck is an important factor and usually it levels out in the long run. also those kinds of failures teached me to focus on the things I could solve instead of those that I couldn't and eventually go back and give them a second shot. It boosts your confidence and helps look at the problems from a different angle.

smcl 4y ago
Where are you reading "emotionally devastated" - both the Tweet and the title say they were described as "emotionally trying". That said, I can easily see someone going through the stress of the exam period, maybe juggling that with part-time work to pay for bills, studying extensively to the brink of burnout and describing feeling "devastated" when they can't crack a few questions in an important exam they thought they'd studied appropriately.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Where are you reading "emotionally devastated" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34421487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34421487 On exam day you are just emotionally devastated > describing feeling "devastated" when they can't crack a few questions in an important exam they thought they'd studied appropriately maybe the expectations are too high? You are a student, it's in the name, you don't know stuff because you are learning. Maybe I can't understand what you're talking about because I am not American. School is called school for a reason. Once you finish school you realize how easy school was compared to real life problems, that sometimes have no easy solution or no solution at all, no matter how hard you try. If an exam makes you feel emotionally devasted, what will happen when life throws life/death problems at you? Maybe it's a matter of re-balancing priorities and not putting so much pressure on yourself, life doesn't end for a failed exam. Maybe it's not exams that are too hard, it's the system that is pressuring students to finish as soon as possible, because it costs them so much, that the risk of going bankrupt it's too high, some form of sunk cost fallacy at play. OTOH, in that system, who would pay premium rates for a lesser education where exams are so easy that anybody can pass them? I started working at the age of 19, full time (6 hours a day/ 5days a week), while also studying at university and paying for my bills. I still believe exams where the easiest part of the process, the bureaucracy it's what was killing me. And I feel I have to specify that I am in no way a genius, I was just an average student with a soft spot for CS problems, meaning I liked solving them, not that I had it particularly easy.

_pastel 4y ago

I had a graduate algorithms class that was graded like this, but the teacher didn't explain and I was clueless. I spent the whole semester super stressed and convinced I was failing, then was shocked and befuddled by an A. "Emotionally trying" is an accurate description of how it felt. Props to this professor; struggling in confusion is a lot more fun if you know that's the game you're supposed to be playing.

tpoacher 4y ago

I can't quite put my finger on it at a glance, but my immediate instinct is that this sounds nice at a very superficial / philosophical level, but actually flies in the face of actual pedagogical literature over the last few decades. For one, you're describing research, not education. The fact that it "can" be done (sub-optimally) in this manner, and the "this is how we've always done it" impetus behind it, doesn't necessarily make it a good idea educationally.

gregors 4y ago

Maybe I'm misinterpreting the quote, but it sounds like dunking on 2nd year Phd students? 1. As a professor, you don't get to dictate how something emotionally impacts another human. A frustrating problem set....should in fact be frustrating. no? 2. The students' performance directly reflects the professor's performance I do like that they are stating their expectations. Seems like the professor is growing as well. Live and learn.

reidjs 4y ago

The sad thing is, I would have totally love to have studied computer science in school, but the classes were too damn hard.