9 ms·

Excellent, excellent. Could this be applied on a wider scale, or would the loss of novelty dull the effect on students?

by swombat 17y ago

tomjen2 17y ago
I can't imagine the trick of the none lie would work more than once or twice (at least, before the students consider it an option that should be explored further) but I don't see how having the students trying to find the lies should stop working, assuming the professor doesn't have a problem with students who question him.
xenophanes 17y ago
Why is the sibling to this (my) comment dead? I don't see anything horribly wrong with it!
- ynniv 17y ago
  I've seen this happen to users before. Looking at tomjen2's history, all comments from the last 11 days have been killed with 1 point. I take this to mean that they were killed quickly and automatically before anyone voted on them. Of course, if you aren't +showdead, you would never know.
  - swombat 17y ago
    My guess would be http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936379 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936379 had something to do with it.
- dschobel 17y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=796014 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=796014 shhhh!
  - xenophanes 17y ago
    I see. I think the "do not notify" policy is evil in most cases. Humans should not be treated like spam bots. Look how much time/effort he wasted writing perfectly legit comments afterwards.
tierack 17y ago
It seems like it would only work for subjects where students have the capacity to figure out errors on their own. It would be disastrous in a foreign language class if you were told the word for "mother" was "banana". As I've mentioned in another discussion, I once had a math professor who would sneak in impossible problems into the homework (e.g. prove the continuum hypothesis). It worked very well to get us to spend countless hours just trying things out, and eventually to spur us to prove decidability of the problems, all of which made us much better. But I imagine it would get old fast if every class I took did something similar.
- iterationx 17y ago
  reminds me of a Monty Python skit
  - pmiller2 17y ago
    No it doesn't.
- dbz 17y ago
  As soon as I read that comment I thought the exact same thing; however, I thought about it for math. Not above calculus level math (because the students in those classes should be smart enough to call something fishy out immediately), but high school or elementary school math. A simple lie could destroy a students math career. Especially one a day!
  - amalcon 17y ago
    When I was In a numerical approximations course, one other student in the class and I managed to correct the professor about once a week. He wasn't deliberately lying; actually, it was because he had a very poor textbook to work with and was trusting it too much. We were just in the process of doing this again when he demonstrated that you can legitimately say O(n) when you mean O(n^2). Come to find out, he was a math prof, and very much not an algorithms guy. There are two versions of big-oh notation: one for algorithmic complexity, and one for accuracy of approximations. They are exact opposites of each other: higher numbers are "better" for approximation accuracy, at least in the sense they were used in the course. He was unaware of the former, but both of us were unaware of the latter. Not such a great teacher, no. Still, the last mistake was an entirely reasonable one. It's a great example of how even math students need to be on their toes.
tetsuo13 17y ago
I'm reminded of the reference book "Writing CGI Applications with Perl." In the introduction the author warned that there will be several purposeful mistakes in every chapter as an exercise to the reader to find and correct. Using this technique in a reference manual was bad enough but it made things even more difficult given that there was no key. I got rid of the book. Tough to learn from a book that lies.
- cyen 17y ago
  How absurd. The best part of this learning technique is the discussion and the collaboration between students to solve the puzzle - you even learn by pointing out false positives, with someone correcting you and reinforcing that bit of information. A textbook / reference book is entirely different from a classroom - what was that author thinking?
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    I think that author was thinking "hmm, how can I skip a long editorial fact-checking process without looking completely unprofessional."
tetha 17y ago
In fact, this is happening to me right now around the third time in the row, and it still is interesting. However, in our case, this is happening, because this is the third time in a row we organized and talked a professor to give us a lecture around 6 people (which, at the moment, is 1/3 of all students in this term and study course). The conclusion is that the professor is not that prepared, and because the entire course is pretty math-heavy, errors in proofs and lemmas just slip in. Pretty often, they are just little typos, but it still is fun to hunt and spot them.

Excellent, excellent. Could this be applied on a wider scale, or would the loss of novelty dull the effect on students?

by swombat 17y ago

Excellent, excellent. Could this be applied on a wider scale, or would the loss of novelty dull the effect on students?

I can't imagine the trick of the none lie would work more than once or twice (at least, before the students consider it an option that should be explored further) but I don't see how having the students trying to find the lies should stop working, assuming the professor doesn't have a problem with students who question him.

xenophanes 17y ago

Why is the sibling to this (my) comment dead? I don't see anything horribly wrong with it!

ynniv 17y ago
I've seen this happen to users before. Looking at tomjen2's history, all comments from the last 11 days have been killed with 1 point. I take this to mean that they were killed quickly and automatically before anyone voted on them. Of course, if you aren't +showdead, you would never know.
- swombat 17y ago
  My guess would be http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936379 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936379 had something to do with it.
dschobel 17y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=796014 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=796014 shhhh!
- xenophanes 17y ago
  I see. I think the "do not notify" policy is evil in most cases. Humans should not be treated like spam bots. Look how much time/effort he wasted writing perfectly legit comments afterwards.

tierack 17y ago

It seems like it would only work for subjects where students have the capacity to figure out errors on their own. It would be disastrous in a foreign language class if you were told the word for "mother" was "banana". As I've mentioned in another discussion, I once had a math professor who would sneak in impossible problems into the homework (e.g. prove the continuum hypothesis). It worked very well to get us to spend countless hours just trying things out, and eventually to spur us to prove decidability of the problems, all of which made us much better. But I imagine it would get old fast if every class I took did something similar.

iterationx 17y ago
reminds me of a Monty Python skit
- pmiller2 17y ago
  No it doesn't.
dbz 17y ago
As soon as I read that comment I thought the exact same thing; however, I thought about it for math. Not above calculus level math (because the students in those classes should be smart enough to call something fishy out immediately), but high school or elementary school math. A simple lie could destroy a students math career. Especially one a day!
- amalcon 17y ago
  When I was In a numerical approximations course, one other student in the class and I managed to correct the professor about once a week. He wasn't deliberately lying; actually, it was because he had a very poor textbook to work with and was trusting it too much. We were just in the process of doing this again when he demonstrated that you can legitimately say O(n) when you mean O(n^2). Come to find out, he was a math prof, and very much not an algorithms guy. There are two versions of big-oh notation: one for algorithmic complexity, and one for accuracy of approximations. They are exact opposites of each other: higher numbers are "better" for approximation accuracy, at least in the sense they were used in the course. He was unaware of the former, but both of us were unaware of the latter. Not such a great teacher, no. Still, the last mistake was an entirely reasonable one. It's a great example of how even math students need to be on their toes.

tetsuo13 17y ago

I'm reminded of the reference book "Writing CGI Applications with Perl." In the introduction the author warned that there will be several purposeful mistakes in every chapter as an exercise to the reader to find and correct. Using this technique in a reference manual was bad enough but it made things even more difficult given that there was no key. I got rid of the book. Tough to learn from a book that lies.

cyen 17y ago
How absurd. The best part of this learning technique is the discussion and the collaboration between students to solve the puzzle - you even learn by pointing out false positives, with someone correcting you and reinforcing that bit of information. A textbook / reference book is entirely different from a classroom - what was that author thinking?
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  I think that author was thinking "hmm, how can I skip a long editorial fact-checking process without looking completely unprofessional."

tetha 17y ago

In fact, this is happening to me right now around the third time in the row, and it still is interesting. However, in our case, this is happening, because this is the third time in a row we organized and talked a professor to give us a lecture around 6 people (which, at the moment, is 1/3 of all students in this term and study course). The conclusion is that the professor is not that prepared, and because the entire course is pretty math-heavy, errors in proofs and lemmas just slip in. Pretty often, they are just little typos, but it still is fun to hunt and spot them.