5 ms·

A lot of students, even at the college level, don't think that far ahead and make bad decisions because of short term thinking. Look at any list of advice for

A lot of students, even at the college level, don't think that far ahead and make bad decisions because of short term thinking. Look at any list of advice for new college students and almost every one of them includes "go to class". Simply attending class is way easier than homework and yet, when there's no short term consequences for not doing it, plenty of students will just not do it. Cheating is another great example. Cheating in college is rampant because kids don't want to do the work they're assigned. I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway. They're already choosing to ignore the long term benefits of homework even when there are short term consequences, so I don't see how removing those short term consequences will make things better. If you tell kids there are no immediate consequences for not doing homework, many of them just won't do it and they will fail because they haven't learned anything. Maybe you're okay with that. Honestly, I'm not actually trying to convince you that it's a bad idea. I just think if your proposal is based on the idea that kids will choose to something boring that they don't have to do in the short term because it benefits them in the long term you're overestimating a lot of kids (and adults for that matter).

raincole 1y ago
> I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway. I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it. Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating. The big issue of exam-only approach is that a one-hour exam is not enough to evaluate a student's performance, unless your educational goal is just to make students memorize stuff by rote. I'd consider a 3-hour open-book exam bare minimal. But if every class does that it'll be too exhausting.
- wombatpm 1y ago
  Do Universities no longer do that? All of my finals were 3hrs. There was a special schedule during finals week with 3 slots per day. The time of your final exam was based on when the first lecture session of a class took place. Really sucked to get an 8-11 AM slot when your classes never started before 11. Fun prank: set all of the clocks in your dorm neighbor’s room to different wrong times. Guy across the hall knew we were messing with him, trusted his watch - which had the correct time, but wrong alarm time. Realized he had a problem when he had hot water in the shower and no one was around. He was only 45 min late to the exam. Good times.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Different groups have different standards of course, but that prank seems pretty cruel.
  - ctenb 1y ago
    I don't see how potentially ruining someone's exam classifies as fun
    - wombatpm 1y ago
      We had the alarms going off early. Like every half hour from 6:00 AM. We knocked on his door and his roommate told him when he was leaving for breakfast. He did fine in his exam. 3 hrs was overkill. Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. It was the 80’s. I guess kids these days are soft.
  - Cheer2171 1y ago
    This is sociopathy, not a fun prank.
  - 48terry 1y ago
    I'm a little confused so I could use some clarification: where did the "fun" in the fun prank kick in? You caused him to be late and risk his exam. Could you break down the fun for me?
somenameforme 1y ago
This, in general, seems like a great thing. The goal of a university should be to produce premium students, and nothing's better than a trial by fire. We actually had this exact thing at my university. One sophomore level weed out class was a "self paced" electrical engineering class. It was called self paced because you were given a textbook and were free to work through it at your own pace. But to finish the class by the end of the semester you had to average 2 chapters completed per week, and completing a chapter not only included finishing a problem set and taking a test which you had to score 90%+ on (and were required to finish another problem set and retake it otherwise), but on occasion also demoing some skill in the lab. It was brutal, but one of the most educational classes I've ever taken - and obviously not just because of what I learned about electrical engineering. Of course it seems modern universities have just become profit-driven degree treadmills. Weeding out students? That's reducing profit! And yeah looking back at my uni's page it seems this class is no longer self paced. Lol. And that's at a top 10 school. The enshittification of education.
- quailfarmer 1y ago
  Part of the issue is with the purpose as you describe it. Sure, at top 10 schools, a trial by fire would result in much needed “growing up” as the gifted but undisciplined (speaking for myself and many users of this site) students find their way to more durable motivations. But at the vast majority of schools, a trial by fire would end with a lot of students burned. Perhaps that begs the question, if those kids can’t handle self-directed education, why are we putting them there in the first place, but that’s definitely a grey area, and there are hundreds of thousands of students who are smart enough to do well in higher education and skilled work, but weren’t disciplined enough to handle what you’re describing as freshmen.
  - mountainb 1y ago
    Many employers pay a premium for predictably elite cadres of students. The schools want to try to pass off mediocre graduates as having some of the elite special sauce even though only a small number of students have what it takes. We know exactly what to do to produce elite cadres by aggressive sorting. But the incentives created by the federal government encourage the institutions to extrude mediocre students like a chicken nugget machine produces processed meat product. Every hot student-nugget is worth a tens of thousands of dollars a year in freshly printed loan money directed towards administrators and rent on dorms and apartments irrespective of quality; so the incentive is to stuff the students with filler.
lumost 1y ago
On the class topic, I suspect that attendance was more impactful for students pre-internet as the alternative was to wade through the library piecing together material. With lecture notes/slides available online, well prepared books and study forums readily available - in-person attendance can feel archaic. We may be experiencing a similar dynamic in education with AI. In a world where we can create individualized curriculum’s for each student encompassing the entire tree of knowledge - Perhaps it’s time to rethink how we educate students rather than push them into lecture halls designed for the Middle Ages.
- sdenton4 1y ago
  Here's an alternative hypothesis... People thrive under regularity, and young people (especially) tend not to understand that. Similarly, being able to focus on a single thing is a kind of super-power, while multi-tasking generally hurts performance on tasks. Going to class (and paying attention) means that you've got a regular period of focus on the class topic. That combination of regularity and focus translates into long-term learning and better performance.
Nition 1y ago
There's a section in Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) where Persig takes this all the way to the final conclusion that there should be no grades at University, and no degree at the end, and then and only then will everyone who goes there actually be learning-motivated.
- jrm4 1y ago
  So. I teach at a university and I do give an "assignment" exactly like this. In a few of my classes, I have final projects that teams work on. I also have presentations. I used to require them of all students; and quickly learned this is a good way to waste valuable time. Now, all my presentations are completely optional for NO CREDIT. You don't get penalized if you don't do them, and perhaps more importantly, I give ZERO EXTRA CREDIT for doing them. As you can imagine, every single presentation I've gotten from this has been absolutely worth it.
  - DANmode 1y ago
    What were the best three?
    - jrm4 1y ago
      Hmm, I mean been doing this for years. Some were interesting because they DIDN'T accomplish much and things went bad but then we could kind of post-mortem in the class. Others had some pretty cool things that ended up in real life; I believe the official timers for the Florida Supreme Court testimony things came from one of my classes.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - tsukikage 1y ago
    What proportion of students bother?
    - jrm4 1y ago
eru 1y ago
Well, neither in school nor in university did homework count for grades for me (growing up in Germany, and with some very rare exceptions). So this isn't all that crazy.
- lucraft 1y ago
  Right - for me each year of university (in UK) was a year of learning with exams at the end, that was it, and it was normal.
- yorwba 1y ago
  During my undergrad in Germany, the CS department was in the process of switching from optional homework to various forms of mandatory homework (either directly counting towards the final grade, or requiring a minimum score on the homework before allowing registration for the exam). AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result. I think optional homework works for classes that are obscure enough only somewhat intrinsically motivated students would consider taking them, but in mandatory classes or trendy majors, there's going to be many people who need a bit more external motivation to study.
  - raphman 1y ago
    I have been teaching CS at German universities for close to two decades now. > AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result. True. That's the real Dunning-Kruger problem: incompetent people do not know how much help they need to get competent. It is our job to show them their weaknesses as early as possible so that they can effectively work on them. (I believe that state-funded universities (as in Germany) have some obligation to not only educate the self-motivated top 1% but also offer a solid education even for less perfect students - at least if there is a societal need for their competences.) Another, more important, reason is that written exams are not good tests of programming competence - especially as tasks and frameworks get more complex. We want to assign good grades to students who are competent at developing software in realistic settings, not in highly artificial exam settings.
yonaguska 1y ago
Dealing with untreated ADHD through college, "do the ungraded homework and spend time with the TAs" was way more valuable than "go to class". lectures for me were borderline useless. Fortunately this was something that I figured out on high school.
skeezyboy 1y ago
personally, id resent paying thousands of dollars a year to be given textbook sums to complete... i could have downloaded that myself, wheres the actual value these educators bring?
coderatlarge 1y ago
my kid attends a school in which they’ve given up on lectures. each “class” is basically a proctored mini self learning test from a booklet that’s a mix of content and exercises to work through individually. a teacher is around to answer questions and grade the booklets. many kids fail to make the transition from spoon-feeding to self-learning, but those who do then begin to realize that they can go as fast as they are able and need not follow the herd. they also develop a strong sense of whether they’ve understood each booklet or not. it leads to a competition for learning fast AND well because there are also traditional proctored checkpoint exams from time to time plus kids do the ordinary standardized tests to calibrate. i feel it’s an excellent system that prioritizes learning over conformity though it is obviously not a candidate for mass adoption because many kids wash out after making no progress for a while.

raincole 1y ago

> I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway. I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it. Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating. The big issue of exam-only approach is that a one-hour exam is not enough to evaluate a student's performance, unless your educational goal is just to make students memorize stuff by rote. I'd consider a 3-hour open-book exam bare minimal. But if every class does that it'll be too exhausting.

wombatpm 1y ago
Do Universities no longer do that? All of my finals were 3hrs. There was a special schedule during finals week with 3 slots per day. The time of your final exam was based on when the first lecture session of a class took place. Really sucked to get an 8-11 AM slot when your classes never started before 11. Fun prank: set all of the clocks in your dorm neighbor’s room to different wrong times. Guy across the hall knew we were messing with him, trusted his watch - which had the correct time, but wrong alarm time. Realized he had a problem when he had hot water in the shower and no one was around. He was only 45 min late to the exam. Good times.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Different groups have different standards of course, but that prank seems pretty cruel.
- ctenb 1y ago
  I don't see how potentially ruining someone's exam classifies as fun
  - wombatpm 1y ago
    We had the alarms going off early. Like every half hour from 6:00 AM. We knocked on his door and his roommate told him when he was leaving for breakfast. He did fine in his exam. 3 hrs was overkill. Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. It was the 80’s. I guess kids these days are soft.
- Cheer2171 1y ago
  This is sociopathy, not a fun prank.
- 48terry 1y ago
  I'm a little confused so I could use some clarification: where did the "fun" in the fun prank kick in? You caused him to be late and risk his exam. Could you break down the fun for me?

somenameforme 1y ago

This, in general, seems like a great thing. The goal of a university should be to produce premium students, and nothing's better than a trial by fire. We actually had this exact thing at my university. One sophomore level weed out class was a "self paced" electrical engineering class. It was called self paced because you were given a textbook and were free to work through it at your own pace. But to finish the class by the end of the semester you had to average 2 chapters completed per week, and completing a chapter not only included finishing a problem set and taking a test which you had to score 90%+ on (and were required to finish another problem set and retake it otherwise), but on occasion also demoing some skill in the lab. It was brutal, but one of the most educational classes I've ever taken - and obviously not just because of what I learned about electrical engineering. Of course it seems modern universities have just become profit-driven degree treadmills. Weeding out students? That's reducing profit! And yeah looking back at my uni's page it seems this class is no longer self paced. Lol. And that's at a top 10 school. The enshittification of education.

quailfarmer 1y ago
Part of the issue is with the purpose as you describe it. Sure, at top 10 schools, a trial by fire would result in much needed “growing up” as the gifted but undisciplined (speaking for myself and many users of this site) students find their way to more durable motivations. But at the vast majority of schools, a trial by fire would end with a lot of students burned. Perhaps that begs the question, if those kids can’t handle self-directed education, why are we putting them there in the first place, but that’s definitely a grey area, and there are hundreds of thousands of students who are smart enough to do well in higher education and skilled work, but weren’t disciplined enough to handle what you’re describing as freshmen.
- mountainb 1y ago
  Many employers pay a premium for predictably elite cadres of students. The schools want to try to pass off mediocre graduates as having some of the elite special sauce even though only a small number of students have what it takes. We know exactly what to do to produce elite cadres by aggressive sorting. But the incentives created by the federal government encourage the institutions to extrude mediocre students like a chicken nugget machine produces processed meat product. Every hot student-nugget is worth a tens of thousands of dollars a year in freshly printed loan money directed towards administrators and rent on dorms and apartments irrespective of quality; so the incentive is to stuff the students with filler.

lumost 1y ago

On the class topic, I suspect that attendance was more impactful for students pre-internet as the alternative was to wade through the library piecing together material. With lecture notes/slides available online, well prepared books and study forums readily available - in-person attendance can feel archaic. We may be experiencing a similar dynamic in education with AI. In a world where we can create individualized curriculum’s for each student encompassing the entire tree of knowledge - Perhaps it’s time to rethink how we educate students rather than push them into lecture halls designed for the Middle Ages.

sdenton4 1y ago
Here's an alternative hypothesis... People thrive under regularity, and young people (especially) tend not to understand that. Similarly, being able to focus on a single thing is a kind of super-power, while multi-tasking generally hurts performance on tasks. Going to class (and paying attention) means that you've got a regular period of focus on the class topic. That combination of regularity and focus translates into long-term learning and better performance.

Nition 1y ago

There's a section in Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) where Persig takes this all the way to the final conclusion that there should be no grades at University, and no degree at the end, and then and only then will everyone who goes there actually be learning-motivated.

jrm4 1y ago
So. I teach at a university and I do give an "assignment" exactly like this. In a few of my classes, I have final projects that teams work on. I also have presentations. I used to require them of all students; and quickly learned this is a good way to waste valuable time. Now, all my presentations are completely optional for NO CREDIT. You don't get penalized if you don't do them, and perhaps more importantly, I give ZERO EXTRA CREDIT for doing them. As you can imagine, every single presentation I've gotten from this has been absolutely worth it.
- DANmode 1y ago
  What were the best three?
  - jrm4 1y ago
    Hmm, I mean been doing this for years. Some were interesting because they DIDN'T accomplish much and things went bad but then we could kind of post-mortem in the class. Others had some pretty cool things that ended up in real life; I believe the official timers for the Florida Supreme Court testimony things came from one of my classes.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- tsukikage 1y ago
  What proportion of students bother?
  - jrm4 1y ago

eru 1y ago

Well, neither in school nor in university did homework count for grades for me (growing up in Germany, and with some very rare exceptions). So this isn't all that crazy.

lucraft 1y ago
Right - for me each year of university (in UK) was a year of learning with exams at the end, that was it, and it was normal.
yorwba 1y ago
During my undergrad in Germany, the CS department was in the process of switching from optional homework to various forms of mandatory homework (either directly counting towards the final grade, or requiring a minimum score on the homework before allowing registration for the exam). AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result. I think optional homework works for classes that are obscure enough only somewhat intrinsically motivated students would consider taking them, but in mandatory classes or trendy majors, there's going to be many people who need a bit more external motivation to study.
- raphman 1y ago
  I have been teaching CS at German universities for close to two decades now. > AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result. True. That's the real Dunning-Kruger problem: incompetent people do not know how much help they need to get competent. It is our job to show them their weaknesses as early as possible so that they can effectively work on them. (I believe that state-funded universities (as in Germany) have some obligation to not only educate the self-motivated top 1% but also offer a solid education even for less perfect students - at least if there is a societal need for their competences.) Another, more important, reason is that written exams are not good tests of programming competence - especially as tasks and frameworks get more complex. We want to assign good grades to students who are competent at developing software in realistic settings, not in highly artificial exam settings.

yonaguska 1y ago

Dealing with untreated ADHD through college, "do the ungraded homework and spend time with the TAs" was way more valuable than "go to class". lectures for me were borderline useless. Fortunately this was something that I figured out on high school.

skeezyboy 1y ago

personally, id resent paying thousands of dollars a year to be given textbook sums to complete... i could have downloaded that myself, wheres the actual value these educators bring?

coderatlarge 1y ago

my kid attends a school in which they’ve given up on lectures. each “class” is basically a proctored mini self learning test from a booklet that’s a mix of content and exercises to work through individually. a teacher is around to answer questions and grade the booklets. many kids fail to make the transition from spoon-feeding to self-learning, but those who do then begin to realize that they can go as fast as they are able and need not follow the herd. they also develop a strong sense of whether they’ve understood each booklet or not. it leads to a competition for learning fast AND well because there are also traditional proctored checkpoint exams from time to time plus kids do the ordinary standardized tests to calibrate. i feel it’s an excellent system that prioritizes learning over conformity though it is obviously not a candidate for mass adoption because many kids wash out after making no progress for a while.