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I just started teaching undergrad CS courses after ~20 years of various non-academic jobs and it took me about two semesters to realize that almost nothing matt
by jkhdigital 1mo ago
I just started teaching undergrad CS courses after ~20 years of various non-academic jobs and it took me about two semesters to realize that almost nothing matters except how I assess students.
Two weeks of ADHD-fueled research later, I concluded that academia is actively resistant to implementing assessment reform because it would expose the utter pointlessness of most of what happens in university classrooms.
The reality is that we have no idea what most university exams measure because they are ad hoc, written by amateurs (yes, most professors are untrained in pedagogical methods) with zero psychometric validity analysis.
- fn-mote 1mo ago> almost nothing matters except how I assess students This is a reasonable opinion after two semesters. IMO, with more experience you should have modified your stance. If all classes were pointless, students would leave at the same point they entered. Since we observe that is not the case, something is happening in class. Do more of that.
- jkhdigital 1mo agoYou’re conflating the course and the classroom. The explicitly stated goal of most courses is mastery of a well-defined set of domain-specific knowledge and skills. The only way to objectively determine if the course achieved that goal for a given student is comprehensive assessment. Bad assessment design, much like bad experiment design in science, is worse than useless—it actively misleads and confuses. A well-designed, repeatable, reliable assessment is a prerequisite before one can even consider the effects of particular pedagogical methods inside or outside of the classroom itself.