3 ms·

> I don't see why this is so hard, other than the usual intergenerational whining / a heaping pile of student entitlement. You know that grading paper exams is

• bongodongobob 1y ago
  Why can't the teachers use LLMs to grade?
  • eru 1y ago
    Might be interesting. You can at least use modern AI to turn scans of hand-scrawled-on paper into something readable.
  • obscurette 1y ago
    In general – why I'd put my effort into visiting (and paying for) a school and learning in such case? That's not what schools are for. I can get any amount of grades I want from LLM myself.
    • bongodongobob 1y ago
      Grading is already mechanical, it's just a human does it. I'm not sure what you're objecting to here.
      • qotgalaxy 1y ago
        [dead]
  • greenavocado 1y ago
    Ah, the eternal dream of offloading all human labor to machines. Why can't teachers just let an LLM grade? Because, of course, nothing says "educational integrity" like a glorified autocomplete deciding whether little Timmy's essay on Shakespeare adequately captures the existential dread of Hamlet. Sure, let's trust a model that hallucinates citations. But fine, if we're really committed to stripping all nuance from education, why stop there? Let's just plug students into Anki's FSRS algorithm and call it a day. Just assign grades based on how fast their retention decays, because nothing says "holistic assessment" like reducing a human being to a set of coefficients in a spaced repetition formula. Never mind that actual learning involves things like critical thinking or, heaven forbid, creativity. No, no, we'll just reduce the entire process to a forgetting curve. Because nothing inspires a love of knowledge like treating human minds as poorly optimized flashcard decks, mechanically processed and discarded the moment their retention scores dip below acceptable thresholds.
• timr 1y ago
  ...and yet, somehow we managed? > Show some imagination for why other people hold their positions. I say that as someone who has also graded piles of paper exams in graduate school (also not that long ago!) I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if the primary objection really is that teachers have to grade, then no, I don't have any sympathy.
  • bee_rider 1y ago
    It sorta depends on the material… I always thought paper programming tests were dumb: when I was taking them and when I was proctoring/grading them. It is not that similar to writing a program in an IDE where it will tell you if you make a little mistake, and often help you work your way through it. We made it. But, that’s survivorship bias, right? We can’t really know how much potential has wasted.
    • falcor84 1y ago
      Hear, hear! Doing programming on paper seems to me like assessing someone's skills in acrobatics by watching them do the motions in a zero-gravity environment. Without the affordances given by the computer, it's just not the same activity.
      • timr 1y ago
        Computer science, the academic discipline, is to programming as mechanics is to bowling. You can very easily test CS concepts on paper, and programming is demonstrated via group projects.
        • falcor84 1y ago
          Absolutely. It makes good sense to describe algorithms on paper via pseudo-code and diagrams, but they shouldn't be expected to write working code on paper.
      • m4rtink 1y ago
        I kinda had this sentiment until I actually started working - quite often an issue only manifests at an obscure customer system or is a race condition that it too rare to catch reliably, yet happens often enough so you can't just ignore it. To solve those in a reasonable amount of time, you need to form a mental model of what is going on & how to fix it. Having access to a computer by itself won't really help for those. In that context paper exams for computer science make much more sense to me now - they want you to understand the problem and provide a solution, with pen and paper being the output format.