6 ms·

My school solved this quite well, I think. Homework wasn't graded. You were supposed to build a project or a series of projects. There was a practical exam at t

by nextos 1y ago

My school solved this quite well, I think. Homework wasn't graded. You were supposed to build a project or a series of projects. There was a practical exam at the end of the term where you were asked to make one big change to your homework project, and you were given 3 or 4 hours to do it in the computer room. It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out.

sebmellen 1y ago
Brilliant solution. But how was the change that the student would be asked to implement evaluated for fairness?
- nextos 1y ago
  The requested change was the same for everyone. They would have also run your project through a series of unit tests and would let you fix your code if they had encountered any bugs. Being able to implement the change was a necessary condition to prove you had authored the code and pass but, overall, the project would be graded based on architectural decisions, algorithms and data structures, coding style, etc. I guess this is not done at other schools because it's a hell lot of work for teachers and passing rates are low. It's quite brutal.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    I'm not a big fan of final exam/related serious pass/fail screens. Students have (probably) made a big investment in time and money and , absent pretty serious deficiencies, they should probably be able to eek out a gentleman's C.
    - kaonwarb 1y ago
      It sounds to me like you're in favor of grading on effort. I don't believe that investment made in time or money should factor in to assessing a student's mastery.
      - Henchman21 1y ago
        I don’t believe money should ever be a factor for students. In any way. Yet, when I was a student I was incredibly loud about “I am a paying customer of this institution and you’re gonna teach me. Late to class and not allowed in? Great, I paid for this class and I’ll take it up with whomever has the ability to reprimand you/fire you if you aren’t tenured/generally make your life hell.” Money in education perverts everything. More generally money is the root of all evil, eh? But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.
        afavour 1y ago
        Eh, you paid and agreed to terms and conditions. > you took my cash and I get nothing? If I book a hotel room then turn up a week later than my booking date trying to get a room I can expect to receive nothing.
        Henchman21 1y ago
        Sure; but also the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I got my education and a couple of my professors got forced to be decent to their students. In my case it worked out. YMMV.
        afavour 1y ago
        YMMV on the definition of “decent”. Arriving late to class is disruptive to all the other paying customers in the room so IMO it should be disincentivised. There are reasonable and unreasonable levels of disincentive, of course.
        Henchman21 1y ago
        Agreed. I had a professor who’d whip whatever was on the desk at whomever was late. Some poor girl got hit with a stapler. So you know, that mileage is a highly variable thing!
    - HenryBemis 1y ago
      Having been the guy who got a couple of F's, and retook the exams in Sept and passed them to continue to my next years of studies and eventually my BSc I can say.. no! Do the work. Deserve the A/B/C. Get the A/B/C. I don't believe I'm the only one that suspects how the test will go, knows what the test result will be once I see the question, and know what I should have done to get that A/B/C mark. I get it that shit happens in life (imagine someone having exams two days after they buried a father/mother/brother/sister), now THAT person, yeah, boost their results by 'one step' because if they got a 40% going through THAT, then they would have gotten 60% in a normal/BAU situation. But don't hand out degrees to people who don't deserve them. It dilutes the degrees of those who do.
      - dgacmu 1y ago
        That's what incompletes are for. When life strikes - as it does - give the students a break and let them pick up where they left off with no penalty after the fan blades aren't covered in you know what any more. (This is, at least, my policy. A grade reflects mastery and only mastery, but it's my job to help students get there and sometimes that means finding creative solutions.)
        ghaff 1y ago
        To be honest, I squeaked through undergrad in various ways. And my undergrad profs, etc. helped me with that. And things worked out and Alumni Affairs is probably happy with how things worked out. And I don't think the companies I've worked for have been that unhappy either.
  - andrewflnr 1y ago
    The passing rates at least seem solvable, by making the required changes a little easier. Is it not viable to do this with changes that are automatically testable, so it's not as hard on the teachers?
    - apparent 1y ago
      Or by grading on a curve, so that students who worked in good faith and seemed to know their code were given good grades, even if they did not 100% finish in the few hour timeframe.
- WrongAssumption 1y ago
  I doubt the change was relevant. I would expect if they can reasonably make a change even if not totally ideal, the work as first submitted can be evaluated on it’s own as it is shown to be original work.
  - nextos 1y ago
    Changes were often designed to be impossible to perform if your architecture was not flexible, or to show your algorithms had poor time or space behavior. So, changes were designed both to test you were the author and to fail poorly designed projects.
- riffraff 1y ago
  Do the same in change for all? E.g. implement a simple compiler for a C-ish language with only functions, if and while loops; as the big change, ask to add for loops.
jwilber 1y ago
This is a brilliant solution for a project-based course. It does take a decent amount of effort to go through each students project and give them an ask that you know isn’t ChatGPT-able. Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.
mschuster91 1y ago
> It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out. ... and required an awful lot of resources to grade, unsustainable for modern academia that has been perverted to be mostly a diploma mill. No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless - people only do it because employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. The purpose of academia isn't science and advancing it anymore, it is raking in tuition money on one side and molding people to corporate drone conformity.
- busyant 1y ago
  > employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. I think the simpler explanation is that the CS degree is supposed to be an independent verification that the student has learned and can employ fundamental aspects of CS. I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.
  - add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    I dropped out of school and made an artisan career for myself in engineering and loved it, it's who I am and can't pretend to be something different. But there is friction to navigate that way and not everyone will be able to make it work. Staying within the lines is the path of least resistance for most people.
    - ode 1y ago
      Have you ever written about your story? I know I would be interested in reading it.
      - 1y ago
ttoinou 1y ago
Nice. It required teachers that are good though. Maybe not anymore with AI
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Shorel 1y ago
I love this approach. It is both practical and constructive. Do you have examples of projects used?

by nextos 1y ago

sebmellen 1y ago

Brilliant solution. But how was the change that the student would be asked to implement evaluated for fairness?

nextos 1y ago
The requested change was the same for everyone. They would have also run your project through a series of unit tests and would let you fix your code if they had encountered any bugs. Being able to implement the change was a necessary condition to prove you had authored the code and pass but, overall, the project would be graded based on architectural decisions, algorithms and data structures, coding style, etc. I guess this is not done at other schools because it's a hell lot of work for teachers and passing rates are low. It's quite brutal.
- ghaff 1y ago
  I'm not a big fan of final exam/related serious pass/fail screens. Students have (probably) made a big investment in time and money and , absent pretty serious deficiencies, they should probably be able to eek out a gentleman's C.
  - kaonwarb 1y ago
    It sounds to me like you're in favor of grading on effort. I don't believe that investment made in time or money should factor in to assessing a student's mastery.
    - Henchman21 1y ago
      I don’t believe money should ever be a factor for students. In any way. Yet, when I was a student I was incredibly loud about “I am a paying customer of this institution and you’re gonna teach me. Late to class and not allowed in? Great, I paid for this class and I’ll take it up with whomever has the ability to reprimand you/fire you if you aren’t tenured/generally make your life hell.” Money in education perverts everything. More generally money is the root of all evil, eh? But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.
      - afavour 1y ago
        Eh, you paid and agreed to terms and conditions. > you took my cash and I get nothing? If I book a hotel room then turn up a week later than my booking date trying to get a room I can expect to receive nothing.
        Henchman21 1y ago
        Sure; but also the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I got my education and a couple of my professors got forced to be decent to their students. In my case it worked out. YMMV.
        afavour 1y ago
        YMMV on the definition of “decent”. Arriving late to class is disruptive to all the other paying customers in the room so IMO it should be disincentivised. There are reasonable and unreasonable levels of disincentive, of course.
        Henchman21 1y ago
        Agreed. I had a professor who’d whip whatever was on the desk at whomever was late. Some poor girl got hit with a stapler. So you know, that mileage is a highly variable thing!
  - HenryBemis 1y ago
    Having been the guy who got a couple of F's, and retook the exams in Sept and passed them to continue to my next years of studies and eventually my BSc I can say.. no! Do the work. Deserve the A/B/C. Get the A/B/C. I don't believe I'm the only one that suspects how the test will go, knows what the test result will be once I see the question, and know what I should have done to get that A/B/C mark. I get it that shit happens in life (imagine someone having exams two days after they buried a father/mother/brother/sister), now THAT person, yeah, boost their results by 'one step' because if they got a 40% going through THAT, then they would have gotten 60% in a normal/BAU situation. But don't hand out degrees to people who don't deserve them. It dilutes the degrees of those who do.
    - dgacmu 1y ago
      That's what incompletes are for. When life strikes - as it does - give the students a break and let them pick up where they left off with no penalty after the fan blades aren't covered in you know what any more. (This is, at least, my policy. A grade reflects mastery and only mastery, but it's my job to help students get there and sometimes that means finding creative solutions.)
      - ghaff 1y ago
        To be honest, I squeaked through undergrad in various ways. And my undergrad profs, etc. helped me with that. And things worked out and Alumni Affairs is probably happy with how things worked out. And I don't think the companies I've worked for have been that unhappy either.
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  The passing rates at least seem solvable, by making the required changes a little easier. Is it not viable to do this with changes that are automatically testable, so it's not as hard on the teachers?
  - apparent 1y ago
    Or by grading on a curve, so that students who worked in good faith and seemed to know their code were given good grades, even if they did not 100% finish in the few hour timeframe.
WrongAssumption 1y ago
I doubt the change was relevant. I would expect if they can reasonably make a change even if not totally ideal, the work as first submitted can be evaluated on it’s own as it is shown to be original work.
- nextos 1y ago
  Changes were often designed to be impossible to perform if your architecture was not flexible, or to show your algorithms had poor time or space behavior. So, changes were designed both to test you were the author and to fail poorly designed projects.
riffraff 1y ago
Do the same in change for all? E.g. implement a simple compiler for a C-ish language with only functions, if and while loops; as the big change, ask to add for loops.

jwilber 1y ago

This is a brilliant solution for a project-based course. It does take a decent amount of effort to go through each students project and give them an ask that you know isn’t ChatGPT-able. Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.

mschuster91 1y ago

> It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out. ... and required an awful lot of resources to grade, unsustainable for modern academia that has been perverted to be mostly a diploma mill. No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless - people only do it because employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. The purpose of academia isn't science and advancing it anymore, it is raking in tuition money on one side and molding people to corporate drone conformity.

busyant 1y ago
> employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. I think the simpler explanation is that the CS degree is supposed to be an independent verification that the student has learned and can employ fundamental aspects of CS. I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  I dropped out of school and made an artisan career for myself in engineering and loved it, it's who I am and can't pretend to be something different. But there is friction to navigate that way and not everyone will be able to make it work. Staying within the lines is the path of least resistance for most people.
  - ode 1y ago
    Have you ever written about your story? I know I would be interested in reading it.
    - 1y ago

ttoinou 1y ago

Nice. It required teachers that are good though. Maybe not anymore with AI

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Shorel 1y ago

I love this approach. It is both practical and constructive. Do you have examples of projects used?