5 ms·

> Such as? We need an answer now because students are being assessed now. Two decades ago, when I was in engineering school, grades were 90% based on in-person

> Such as? We need an answer now because students are being assessed now. Two decades ago, when I was in engineering school, grades were 90% based on in-person, proctored, handwritten exams. So assignments had enough weight to be worth completing, but little enough that if someone cheated, it didn't really matter as the exam was the deciding factor. > Return to the old "viva voce" exam? Still used for PhDs. But that doesn't scale at all. What? Sure it does. Every extra full-time student at Central Methodist University (from the article) means an extra $27,480 per year in tuition. It's absolutely, entirely scalable to provide a student taking ten courses with a 15-minute conversation with a professor per class when that student is paying twenty-seven thousand dollars.

light_hue_1 2y ago
Oh yes. When I'm teaching a class of 200 students it's totally plausible that we're going to do 10 15 minute one on one conversations with every student. Because that's only 20 days non stop with no sleep. We would need to increase the amount of teaching staff by well over 10x to do this. The costs would be astronomical.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  When they're paying 27k maybe they deserve a lower student to instructor ratio. And for that matter, a lower administration to student ratio. The whole system is very inefficient, there's a lot of room for improvement.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  >The costs would be astronomical. Countries have no problem spending astronomical amounts on old people. If the country wants productive young people, the country will find a way.
  - arrowsmith 2y ago
    We’ve already found a way: it’s called “mass immigration.” Why bother training and educating the young people who are already here when you can just import them from poorer countries?
- kubb 2y ago
  But you can read 200 essays? At this point you can be replaced with AI, you’re not adding any value anymore.
  - abenga 2y ago
    Essays are async and easier to delegate.
    - thechao 2y ago
      If I'm paying 30k$/yr the professor is damn well reading my essay. If they don't want to teach & grade, they can get a pure research position. Fun fact: pure research positions don't pay as well.
      - lupire 2y ago
        Pure taching positions pay barely minimum wage. Look up "adjunct".
        lupusreal 2y ago
        If their situation is that bad they can walk into a local staffing agency and get a factory job that pays 3x the federal minimum wage. Poor pay as a adjunct is a situation they choose for themselves for some reason.
        analog31 2y ago
        I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, many years ago. Like you say, there's usually a reason, such as collecting benefits while running some kind of side hustle. A teaching gig lends itself to this because the hours are flexible (outside of your scheduled class time), there is utterly no supervision, and no questions asked about what your other income sources are. My office mate in engineering was trying to get funding for a start-up. I was trying to get a consulting business off the ground. Neither of us achieved those things, but whatever. He got a teaching gig at the community college, which is unionized and actually a pretty good situation. I found a regular day job through his network. A friend of mine had an adjunct gig in the humanities, and used his off-time to learn how to code. A lot of academic spouses get adjunct gigs, especially if they want to balance part time work with child care.
- michaelt 2y ago
  I said one conversation per student per class, and ten classes per year. Not 10 conversations per class per student. > The costs would be astronomical. Those 200 students have paid the college $549,600 for your class. The costs are already astronomical. Is it so unreasonable for some of that money to be spent on providing education?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - light_hue_1 2y ago
    I can't express how out of touch with reality this reply is. The students paid me nothing. The university provides some TAs, that's it. But even if they gave me all of that money in cash to spend, this would be totally impossible. I'm supposed to grade a student based on 1 conversation? Do you know how grading and teaching work? Can you imagine the complains that would come out of this process? How unfair it is to say that you have one 15 minute shot at a grade? But fine, even if we say that I can grade someone based on 1 conversation. What am I supposed to ask during this 15 minute conversation? Because if I ask the every student the same thing, they'll just share the questions and we're back to being useless. So now I need to prep unique questions for 200 people? Reading their background materials, projects, test results, and then thinking of questions? I need to do that and review it all before every session. Even with a team of TAs this would be impossible. But even if I do all of this. I spend hours per student to figure out what they did and know. I ask unique questions for 15 minutes so that we can talk without information leakage mattering. You know what the outcome will be? Everyone will complain that my questions to them were harder than those that I asked others. And we'll be in office hours with 200 people for weeks on end sorting this out and dealing with all the paperwork for the complaints. This is just the beginning of the disaster that this idea would be. It's easy to sit in the peanut gallery and say "Oh, wow, why didn't my arm surgery take 10 minutes, they just screwed two bones together right?" until you actually need to do the thing and you notice that it's far more complex than you thought.
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      OK, so how is it that USSR made this work?
- lwhi 2y ago
  Would AI be used to carry out the conversation?
- screcth 2y ago
  Well, you could pick only 10% of the class for one on ones. Pick that 10% randomly or based on your intuition on the authenticity of their work. That threat may be enough to dissuade students from cheating with AI.
  - lnsru 2y ago
    Pick 4 students per slot for oral examination and bring an assistant. That’s how my last exam worked. Assistant went through standard questionary and the main lector asked complex questions. The group of 50 was processed in a day with official grades and paperwork.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  >We would need to increase the amount of teaching staff by well over 10x to do this. The costs would be astronomical. We all know they'll just exploit grad students rather than hire real teachers.
- batch12 2y ago
  200 students at 15 minutes is 50 hours or 33 hours and 20 minutes with 10 minute sessions. So just around the amount of time in a typical work week.
- lupire 2y ago
  That's what teaching fellows are for.
ninalanyon 2y ago
There are institutions that still require a public defence for a PhD, not merely a viva. Oslo University for instance: https://www.uio.no/english/research/phd/ https://www.uio.no/english/research/phd/
- warner25 2y ago
  What PhD program doesn't require a public defense? I'm currently a PhD candidate, and our program includes separate written and oral qualifying exams during the first year or two, and a public defense of the dissertation at the end. I thought some minor variation of this was nearly universal. It's also my observation, by the way, that the public dissertation defense (and even the written dissertation itself) is less of a big deal than outsiders tend to think. What matters is doing the research that the advisor / committee wants, and working on some number of papers that get accepted into workshops / conferences / journals (depending on the field). Everything else seems to be kind of a check-the-box formality. By the time the committee agrees that someone has done enough to defend, it's pretty much a done deal.
  - calf 2y ago
    Imagine Alan Turing's defense being a summary of 3 papers. The actual issue is that advanced education is increasingly not about doing fundamental scholarship but a pipeline for (re)producing a clerisy-intellectual class. There are a lot of leftist academics who point out this sea change in academia over the last century, see for example Norm Finkelstein's remarks on this but there are others who talk about this.
    - warner25 2y ago
      Oh yeah, there's a whole different discussion to be had (and HN does have it often), about the problems with peer reviewed publications and citations being the end-all for graduate students and professors. My particular school and department is interesting because it doesn't have any hard requirement for publications, and it aims to have students finish a PhD in about three years of full-time work (assuming one enters the program with a relevant master's degree already in-hand). There has been some tension between the younger assistant professors (who are still fighting for tenure) and the older full professors (who got tenure in, say, the 1990s). In practice, the assistant professors expect to see their students publish (with the professors as co-authors, of course) and would strongly prefer to see a dissertation comprised of three papers stapled together, regardless of the what the school and department officially says. The full professors, on the other hand, seem to prefer something more like a monograph that is of "publishable" quality, maybe to be submitted somewhere after graduation. They argue that the assistant professors should be able to judge quality work for themselves instead of outsourcing it to anonymous reviewers. Clearly, there are different incentives at play.
bigfudge 2y ago
Interestingly, in the UK strong student preferences against proctored exams and nervousness about how mental health issues interact with exams means universities are resisting dropping coursework, despite everyone knowing that most coursework is ai generated.
- noodlesUK 2y ago
  I think this varies dramatically from subject to subject. CS students at my university probably had overall 70% weighting on invigilated exams, but classics or business students probably had only 20% weighting and far fewer exams.
matthewdgreen 2y ago
I have 53 students in my class right now. A 15-minute oral exam works out to 13.25 hours of exam time, assuming perfect efficiency. As a comparison, our in-class time (3 hours over 16 weeks) works out to only about 48 hours. So a single oral exam works out to 1/4th of all class time. But in principle this is not a problem for me, I already spend at least this much time grading papers, and an oral exam would be much more pleasant. The real problems will come up when (1) students are forced to schedule these 15-minute slots, and (2) they complain about the lack of time and non-objective grading rubric.

light_hue_1 2y ago

Oh yes. When I'm teaching a class of 200 students it's totally plausible that we're going to do 10 15 minute one on one conversations with every student. Because that's only 20 days non stop with no sleep. We would need to increase the amount of teaching staff by well over 10x to do this. The costs would be astronomical.

lupusreal 2y ago
When they're paying 27k maybe they deserve a lower student to instructor ratio. And for that matter, a lower administration to student ratio. The whole system is very inefficient, there's a lot of room for improvement.
lotsofpulp 2y ago
>The costs would be astronomical. Countries have no problem spending astronomical amounts on old people. If the country wants productive young people, the country will find a way.
- arrowsmith 2y ago
  We’ve already found a way: it’s called “mass immigration.” Why bother training and educating the young people who are already here when you can just import them from poorer countries?
kubb 2y ago
But you can read 200 essays? At this point you can be replaced with AI, you’re not adding any value anymore.
- abenga 2y ago
  Essays are async and easier to delegate.
  - thechao 2y ago
    If I'm paying 30k$/yr the professor is damn well reading my essay. If they don't want to teach & grade, they can get a pure research position. Fun fact: pure research positions don't pay as well.
    - lupire 2y ago
      Pure taching positions pay barely minimum wage. Look up "adjunct".
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        If their situation is that bad they can walk into a local staffing agency and get a factory job that pays 3x the federal minimum wage. Poor pay as a adjunct is a situation they choose for themselves for some reason.
        analog31 2y ago
        I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, many years ago. Like you say, there's usually a reason, such as collecting benefits while running some kind of side hustle. A teaching gig lends itself to this because the hours are flexible (outside of your scheduled class time), there is utterly no supervision, and no questions asked about what your other income sources are. My office mate in engineering was trying to get funding for a start-up. I was trying to get a consulting business off the ground. Neither of us achieved those things, but whatever. He got a teaching gig at the community college, which is unionized and actually a pretty good situation. I found a regular day job through his network. A friend of mine had an adjunct gig in the humanities, and used his off-time to learn how to code. A lot of academic spouses get adjunct gigs, especially if they want to balance part time work with child care.
michaelt 2y ago
I said one conversation per student per class, and ten classes per year. Not 10 conversations per class per student. > The costs would be astronomical. Those 200 students have paid the college $549,600 for your class. The costs are already astronomical. Is it so unreasonable for some of that money to be spent on providing education?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- light_hue_1 2y ago
  I can't express how out of touch with reality this reply is. The students paid me nothing. The university provides some TAs, that's it. But even if they gave me all of that money in cash to spend, this would be totally impossible. I'm supposed to grade a student based on 1 conversation? Do you know how grading and teaching work? Can you imagine the complains that would come out of this process? How unfair it is to say that you have one 15 minute shot at a grade? But fine, even if we say that I can grade someone based on 1 conversation. What am I supposed to ask during this 15 minute conversation? Because if I ask the every student the same thing, they'll just share the questions and we're back to being useless. So now I need to prep unique questions for 200 people? Reading their background materials, projects, test results, and then thinking of questions? I need to do that and review it all before every session. Even with a team of TAs this would be impossible. But even if I do all of this. I spend hours per student to figure out what they did and know. I ask unique questions for 15 minutes so that we can talk without information leakage mattering. You know what the outcome will be? Everyone will complain that my questions to them were harder than those that I asked others. And we'll be in office hours with 200 people for weeks on end sorting this out and dealing with all the paperwork for the complaints. This is just the beginning of the disaster that this idea would be. It's easy to sit in the peanut gallery and say "Oh, wow, why didn't my arm surgery take 10 minutes, they just screwed two bones together right?" until you actually need to do the thing and you notice that it's far more complex than you thought.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    OK, so how is it that USSR made this work?
lwhi 2y ago
Would AI be used to carry out the conversation?
screcth 2y ago
Well, you could pick only 10% of the class for one on ones. Pick that 10% randomly or based on your intuition on the authenticity of their work. That threat may be enough to dissuade students from cheating with AI.
- lnsru 2y ago
  Pick 4 students per slot for oral examination and bring an assistant. That’s how my last exam worked. Assistant went through standard questionary and the main lector asked complex questions. The group of 50 was processed in a day with official grades and paperwork.
potato3732842 2y ago
>We would need to increase the amount of teaching staff by well over 10x to do this. The costs would be astronomical. We all know they'll just exploit grad students rather than hire real teachers.
batch12 2y ago
200 students at 15 minutes is 50 hours or 33 hours and 20 minutes with 10 minute sessions. So just around the amount of time in a typical work week.
lupire 2y ago
That's what teaching fellows are for.

ninalanyon 2y ago

There are institutions that still require a public defence for a PhD, not merely a viva. Oslo University for instance: https://www.uio.no/english/research/phd/ https://www.uio.no/english/research/phd/

warner25 2y ago
What PhD program doesn't require a public defense? I'm currently a PhD candidate, and our program includes separate written and oral qualifying exams during the first year or two, and a public defense of the dissertation at the end. I thought some minor variation of this was nearly universal. It's also my observation, by the way, that the public dissertation defense (and even the written dissertation itself) is less of a big deal than outsiders tend to think. What matters is doing the research that the advisor / committee wants, and working on some number of papers that get accepted into workshops / conferences / journals (depending on the field). Everything else seems to be kind of a check-the-box formality. By the time the committee agrees that someone has done enough to defend, it's pretty much a done deal.
- calf 2y ago
  Imagine Alan Turing's defense being a summary of 3 papers. The actual issue is that advanced education is increasingly not about doing fundamental scholarship but a pipeline for (re)producing a clerisy-intellectual class. There are a lot of leftist academics who point out this sea change in academia over the last century, see for example Norm Finkelstein's remarks on this but there are others who talk about this.
  - warner25 2y ago
    Oh yeah, there's a whole different discussion to be had (and HN does have it often), about the problems with peer reviewed publications and citations being the end-all for graduate students and professors. My particular school and department is interesting because it doesn't have any hard requirement for publications, and it aims to have students finish a PhD in about three years of full-time work (assuming one enters the program with a relevant master's degree already in-hand). There has been some tension between the younger assistant professors (who are still fighting for tenure) and the older full professors (who got tenure in, say, the 1990s). In practice, the assistant professors expect to see their students publish (with the professors as co-authors, of course) and would strongly prefer to see a dissertation comprised of three papers stapled together, regardless of the what the school and department officially says. The full professors, on the other hand, seem to prefer something more like a monograph that is of "publishable" quality, maybe to be submitted somewhere after graduation. They argue that the assistant professors should be able to judge quality work for themselves instead of outsourcing it to anonymous reviewers. Clearly, there are different incentives at play.

bigfudge 2y ago

Interestingly, in the UK strong student preferences against proctored exams and nervousness about how mental health issues interact with exams means universities are resisting dropping coursework, despite everyone knowing that most coursework is ai generated.

noodlesUK 2y ago
I think this varies dramatically from subject to subject. CS students at my university probably had overall 70% weighting on invigilated exams, but classics or business students probably had only 20% weighting and far fewer exams.

matthewdgreen 2y ago

I have 53 students in my class right now. A 15-minute oral exam works out to 13.25 hours of exam time, assuming perfect efficiency. As a comparison, our in-class time (3 hours over 16 weeks) works out to only about 48 hours. So a single oral exam works out to 1/4th of all class time. But in principle this is not a problem for me, I already spend at least this much time grading papers, and an oral exam would be much more pleasant. The real problems will come up when (1) students are forced to schedule these 15-minute slots, and (2) they complain about the lack of time and non-objective grading rubric.