Hacker News Reader

Comment by jboogie77 | Hacker News Reader

This should be obvious to any person who tutors people online. If you check out sites like https://schoolsolver.com or https://chegg.com they have become havens for programming questions. One could make the argument that it's partly the teachers fault for reusing old programming assignments. On the other hand, especially on something like school solver, there are plenty of programmers, living in 3rd world countries, willing to do original complex programming assignments for a paltry amount of money.

View on HN

They were havens for traditional engineering questions when I was in college too (Dynamics, Statics, Fluids, etc). Every homework question we had seemed to be available online somewhere and it let to kids simply copying answers instead of simply learning the same material they were copying. It got so bad the whole MechEng dept at my school got rid of homework in favor of problem sets that were solved in a given classroom, at a given time, with a TA supervising.

I can only imagine it is much worse now.

My favorite class which I think I learned the best in, homework was given with answers and partial solutions. It was still graded, but more for "did you do stuff" and "this is what/where you did wrong".

It made homework not a test of how clever you were or how resourceful you were ... "collaborating" with your peers. It made it about solving problems with instant feedback. Waiting two weeks between doing a problem is a lot less helpful.

I agree. Thats how all of my upper level classes were taught once everything got a bit more specific and trustworthy.

When I was studying eng problem sets like this were the norm for courses like statics, fluid dynamics, thermo etc. They were considered optional and you usually collaborated on them in groups - university even encouraged it by helping to advertise/organize study groups.

Mostly you'd sit in group everyone would work on problems independently then "What did you get for problem 3?" "100 kPa" "Yeah that's what I got." No different from looking up answer in back of textbook.

Our assignments in these classes (i.e what counted towards your grade) was usually based off of lab reports i.e. I remember for thermo we had to play around with heat exchangers in various configurations and then compute their efficiency based on measurements we took.

That is what they changed the weekly problem sets to be... except not optional and graded before you left the session. It was a much better system, at least for me.

> It got so bad the whole MechEng dept at my school got rid of homework in favor of problem sets that were solved in a given classroom, at a given time, with a TA supervising.

Sounds like the Khan Academy format. Which is probably a better way for everyone to learn, to be honest. Why spend hours going down the wrong rabbit hole only to get the wrong answer anyway? Might as well have a TA around to help guide your approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com