6 ms·

I disagree with his points. Beginning with his "failure #2"; >The common argument is that we need grades in order to differentiate the "good" from the "bad" s

by mrlase 15y ago

I disagree with his points. Beginning with his "failure #2"; >The common argument is that we need grades in order to differentiate the "good" from the "bad" students. No, no its not. Its to show that you've learned the material. He goes on to say: > Presumably the idea is that if you can't get through a course in the 12-to-13 week semester then you deserve to fail, regardless of whatever is going on in your life and whether you could have learned everything over a longer time span, or with more help, or whatever. 12-13 weeks is plenty long to learn the material for a course. A student is at a college to learn. It should be their top priority to learn the material during the course. As for "failure #3", lectures have been used for hundreds of years because they work. You gain insight from someone very knowledgeable in a field that you might not get at first without it being pointed out to you. He also seems to miss the fact that for science courses, you need labs. You cannot do chemistry labs online. You won't be able to do field work in biology by watching a video. A somewhat agree with point #1, but more so to the fact about how expensive college is. That needs to be changed. You lose the overall atmosphere of a learning environment through online courses, and that is not something I'd want to give up.

anatoly 15y ago
>>The common argument is that we need grades in order to differentiate the "good" from the "bad" students. >No, no its not. Its to show that you've learned the material. I disagree with both of you. It's to motivate the student to learn.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  I don't really see a pretty much imaginary, arbitrary number on a piece of paper judging my performance in an artificial testing environment as a motivation in any way, shape or form. On the contrary, I think it's highly discouraging. In my opinion, if your not at the university to learn first and foremost, then what the fuck are you doing at the university in the first place?
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    True, I find the same thing myself. I find a good mark in a test provides only short term satisfaction whereas having a thorough knowledge of something can serve me for years to come. There are however a lot of students who see academics as something of a game and measure their achievement by score, the fact that they may learn a few things along the way is secondary to their desire to be able to say "hey , look at me I'm a high achiever please pay me lots of money". These people would probably be lost without a grading system of some kind and a lot of them are actually very smart people who probably should be at university.
    - slowpoke 15y ago
      That's an interesting point, however I doubt that the personal ego of some people is a strong enough reason to impose the grading system on everyone. And while this more of a philosophical point than anything, I think that this form of competitiveness ("look, I'm better than you") is a major problem of today's society. Education should teach to work together, not against each other.
      - _delirium 15y ago
        I agree to some extent, though that could be one reason employers are so happy about grades: they really do want people with those kinds of competitive characteristics. Experiments in reducing the grade-centricness of universities have mostly foundered on employer objections. UC Santa Cruz for a while was famous for giving narrative evaluations instead of grades. Clases were formally graded pass/fail to indicate whether you met the minimum requirements to move on, and then in either case the professor wrote a one-page or so explanation of what you did well and poorly in the class, some advice, etc. In a sense the evaluation was still quite rigorous, just not boiled down to a single letter. Companies hated this because they wanted to know which students had the 4.0 GPAs, and which had the 2.0 GPAs: a string of passes plus a stack of narrative reports didn't fit their evaluation model. So UCSC moved to allowing students who wanted to receive a grade along with the evaluation to opt into an A/B/C/D/F grading model alongside the narrative evaluation; eventually they made that mandatory; and finally just dropped the narrative evaluations.
arctangent 15y ago
> 12-13 weeks is plenty long to learn the material for a course. The course has presumably been designed so that a motivated and intelligent student can understand it in this time. But what happens when life interferes with a student's plans? I can think of lots of reasons why a student may be distracted by legitimate life events in this period of time, e.g. illness, or a family wedding/birth/death etc. Online courses do give you the flexibility to work around things like this. They also allow people with full time jobs to access the material at a pace which suits them.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  I don't know why you are getting downvoted, you present valid objections to the assumption that everything will always go smoothly. Education should be highly fault-tolerant instead of punishing failure which might not even have been in your power to prevent.
slowpoke 15y ago
>No, no its not. Its to show that you've learned the material. But it doesn't do that. It merely shows you were able to perform well in a contrived testing environment that has little to do with how you'd actually approach problems in the "real world" (that is, everywhere but a test). >12-13 weeks is plenty long to learn the material for a course. A student is at a college to learn. It should be their top priority to learn the material during the course. I think you're missing the author's point here. Yes, a student is at college/university to learn. However, the job of the institution should be to teach, not to weed out students, and that's where the true failure is taking place. And again, nobody is always in full control of their life. Shit happens, as they say, and just two weeks of illness (or really any unforeseen circumstances) can cost you a whole semester. Some students need to juggle studies, work and getting enough sleep while pretty much having no life because of the horrendous costs of attending higher education (which is a whole other problem entirely). >As for "failure #3", lectures have been used for hundreds of years because they work. That's an appeal to tradition. They haven't been used because they work, but because there was no viable alternative. But now, we have such an alternative - video lectures and online courses. >He also seems to miss the fact that for science courses, you need labs. You cannot do chemistry labs online. You won't be able to do field work in biology by watching a video. That's true indeed. I don't think it's productive to attack universities as a whole, either. They serve a lot more purpose than just holding lectures. You can meet people in the same or adjacent fields as you, you can form connections, work in research (and maybe even stay there after graduation) and many other things. But that doesn't change the point of the article, which is that lectures as a teaching format suck when compared to the alternative. >You lose the overall atmosphere of a learning environment through online courses, and that is not something I'd want to give up. You'll have to excuse me for being a bit snarky now, but if by "atmosphere of a learning environment" you mean cramped lecture rooms, long and drawn-out lectures without much (if any) interaction with the lecturer with the overall process often being more of a hassle than anything else for all involved parties, then no, I don't think that's something worth clinging to because we've done it this way for the last thousand years.
- yequalsx 15y ago
  The data at my college shows that students who get an A or B in a math class have a very high probability of passing the next math class. Students who get a C in a math class have a much lower probability of passing the next math class. I think that at some level an A or B indicates something related to knowledge and capabilities. My personal experience is that tests are an effective method of determining who should proceed and who should not. It's not fair to other students and teachers if a student takes Calc II without knowing Calc I. Some mechanism is needed to weed out those who shouldn't move on. Lectures do work. They have been working for hundreds of years. This isn't an appeal to tradition. This is a statement about evidence that they work. Lectures work so effectively that people want to put them online so anyone can watch them. But guess what happens with students in online classes? My anecdotal experience is that they won't watch the lectures. They won't sit through a 20 minute lecture on how to solve quadratic equations. (Except a core group of good students.) The passing rate of students in online math courses at my college is lower than for the face-to-face courses.

by mrlase 15y ago

anatoly 15y ago

>>The common argument is that we need grades in order to differentiate the "good" from the "bad" students. >No, no its not. Its to show that you've learned the material. I disagree with both of you. It's to motivate the student to learn.

slowpoke 15y ago
I don't really see a pretty much imaginary, arbitrary number on a piece of paper judging my performance in an artificial testing environment as a motivation in any way, shape or form. On the contrary, I think it's highly discouraging. In my opinion, if your not at the university to learn first and foremost, then what the fuck are you doing at the university in the first place?
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  True, I find the same thing myself. I find a good mark in a test provides only short term satisfaction whereas having a thorough knowledge of something can serve me for years to come. There are however a lot of students who see academics as something of a game and measure their achievement by score, the fact that they may learn a few things along the way is secondary to their desire to be able to say "hey , look at me I'm a high achiever please pay me lots of money". These people would probably be lost without a grading system of some kind and a lot of them are actually very smart people who probably should be at university.
  - slowpoke 15y ago
    That's an interesting point, however I doubt that the personal ego of some people is a strong enough reason to impose the grading system on everyone. And while this more of a philosophical point than anything, I think that this form of competitiveness ("look, I'm better than you") is a major problem of today's society. Education should teach to work together, not against each other.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      I agree to some extent, though that could be one reason employers are so happy about grades: they really do want people with those kinds of competitive characteristics. Experiments in reducing the grade-centricness of universities have mostly foundered on employer objections. UC Santa Cruz for a while was famous for giving narrative evaluations instead of grades. Clases were formally graded pass/fail to indicate whether you met the minimum requirements to move on, and then in either case the professor wrote a one-page or so explanation of what you did well and poorly in the class, some advice, etc. In a sense the evaluation was still quite rigorous, just not boiled down to a single letter. Companies hated this because they wanted to know which students had the 4.0 GPAs, and which had the 2.0 GPAs: a string of passes plus a stack of narrative reports didn't fit their evaluation model. So UCSC moved to allowing students who wanted to receive a grade along with the evaluation to opt into an A/B/C/D/F grading model alongside the narrative evaluation; eventually they made that mandatory; and finally just dropped the narrative evaluations.

arctangent 15y ago

> 12-13 weeks is plenty long to learn the material for a course. The course has presumably been designed so that a motivated and intelligent student can understand it in this time. But what happens when life interferes with a student's plans? I can think of lots of reasons why a student may be distracted by legitimate life events in this period of time, e.g. illness, or a family wedding/birth/death etc. Online courses do give you the flexibility to work around things like this. They also allow people with full time jobs to access the material at a pace which suits them.

slowpoke 15y ago
I don't know why you are getting downvoted, you present valid objections to the assumption that everything will always go smoothly. Education should be highly fault-tolerant instead of punishing failure which might not even have been in your power to prevent.

slowpoke 15y ago

>No, no its not. Its to show that you've learned the material. But it doesn't do that. It merely shows you were able to perform well in a contrived testing environment that has little to do with how you'd actually approach problems in the "real world" (that is, everywhere but a test). >12-13 weeks is plenty long to learn the material for a course. A student is at a college to learn. It should be their top priority to learn the material during the course. I think you're missing the author's point here. Yes, a student is at college/university to learn. However, the job of the institution should be to teach, not to weed out students, and that's where the true failure is taking place. And again, nobody is always in full control of their life. Shit happens, as they say, and just two weeks of illness (or really any unforeseen circumstances) can cost you a whole semester. Some students need to juggle studies, work and getting enough sleep while pretty much having no life because of the horrendous costs of attending higher education (which is a whole other problem entirely). >As for "failure #3", lectures have been used for hundreds of years because they work. That's an appeal to tradition. They haven't been used because they work, but because there was no viable alternative. But now, we have such an alternative - video lectures and online courses. >He also seems to miss the fact that for science courses, you need labs. You cannot do chemistry labs online. You won't be able to do field work in biology by watching a video. That's true indeed. I don't think it's productive to attack universities as a whole, either. They serve a lot more purpose than just holding lectures. You can meet people in the same or adjacent fields as you, you can form connections, work in research (and maybe even stay there after graduation) and many other things. But that doesn't change the point of the article, which is that lectures as a teaching format suck when compared to the alternative. >You lose the overall atmosphere of a learning environment through online courses, and that is not something I'd want to give up. You'll have to excuse me for being a bit snarky now, but if by "atmosphere of a learning environment" you mean cramped lecture rooms, long and drawn-out lectures without much (if any) interaction with the lecturer with the overall process often being more of a hassle than anything else for all involved parties, then no, I don't think that's something worth clinging to because we've done it this way for the last thousand years.

yequalsx 15y ago
The data at my college shows that students who get an A or B in a math class have a very high probability of passing the next math class. Students who get a C in a math class have a much lower probability of passing the next math class. I think that at some level an A or B indicates something related to knowledge and capabilities. My personal experience is that tests are an effective method of determining who should proceed and who should not. It's not fair to other students and teachers if a student takes Calc II without knowing Calc I. Some mechanism is needed to weed out those who shouldn't move on. Lectures do work. They have been working for hundreds of years. This isn't an appeal to tradition. This is a statement about evidence that they work. Lectures work so effectively that people want to put them online so anyone can watch them. But guess what happens with students in online classes? My anecdotal experience is that they won't watch the lectures. They won't sit through a 20 minute lecture on how to solve quadratic equations. (Except a core group of good students.) The passing rate of students in online math courses at my college is lower than for the face-to-face courses.