Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

Anyway, I appreciate the article as someone who will soon try my hand at teaching. I will have a lot to learn.

OTOH when I took operating systems I got an assignment that said “implement a job scheduler, using FIFO, LIFO or round-robin job scheduling”. So I picked FIFO, got it working and I had time left over so I thought, “what the hell? I’ll do LIFO too”. So I did, and I still had time so I took a crack at round-robin, but I didn’t have time so I turned it what I had, proud of myself for going above and beyond.

I got back a 66 on the assignment. I asked why and he said, “you didn’t even attempt round robin”. I pulled up the assignment where it VERY CLEARLY said “or” and he said, “well, it should have been obvious I meant ‘and’”.

If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly from its own organization. It would find all of the top performers outside of the organization, perfecting arbitrating wage vs. value benefits. Profits from this would be divested back into the organization forming an infinite virtuous cycle.

Later it would supersede whatever nation it's in, conquering it by finding the best military leaders and soldiers using the same "perfect evaluation" ability. It would get the best diplomats and business leaders. Later it would turn an eye to other nations, then the world. Eventually the galaxy and the entire universe.

""" Here’s what will happen:

Like most other humans, your students will be lazy and fallible. So many of them will procrastinate and not do the homework. So they won’t learn anything. So they will get a terrible grade on the final. And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework """

This is almost exactly how adjunct teaching went for me. It was not the experience I had hoped it would be in almost any way.

1. Give students a list of about 100 questions in advance, more than you could memorise. Some were simple like “write down the formula for X”, some were more complex like “derive the backprop update algorithm”.

2. Pick the first question difficulty based on the student’s assignment grades

3. If they go to it right, pick a harder question, otherwise an easier one. If you aren’t sure whether they really understand, interrogate them about the answer, ask follow up questions etc.

4. Choose a grade based on which questions they got right.

Firstly this was highly effective at making students actually learn the material because most were worried enough about embarrassing themselves in front of the professor that they prepared well. But also, it was extremely fair because it’s essentially impossible to cheat and fake what you know.

I suspect many professors would avoid this because it’s harder to justify the grades at the end to a third party. But if you record the exams, and the student is clearly failing to answer simple questions, it’s quite hard for them to argue they were treated unfairly.

Of all the written exams I’ve seen and taken, I’ve never seen a process as fair or effective as these oral exams.

One of the best thing about nope-ing out of that lifestyle has been this:

I still teach people.

I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly validating.

I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly validating and they find this useful.

I teach new things to musicians I play with. I mentor my coworkers when they are working with new things. I help my friends and partners learn new things. The best is that I know how to research ideas and commit to learning them myself.

Much of formal education has systematic problems that make it struggle to achieve its stated goals.

But "teaching" as a form of human interaction is a wonderful thing.

- if you reach the milestone before 6pm you gain one "cookie" - if you reach it after 6pm but before midnight, no cookie - you lose 1 cookie for each day it's late, starting at midnight the day after it was due - if you at any point during the semester reach a negative amount of cookies, you instantly fail the class - the final paper is graded pass/fail

This has the advantage that it keeps students on track, but the final grade is just a result of their actual knowledge and the final paper. The first few milestones were trivial to meet so you get a little buffer if you're late for some reason. In my year not a single person failed due to lack of cookies either

(The other reason I take attendance is so that I can recognize at least most of them by mid-semester, so can call on them by name when they raise their hand.)

And I'm often torn with taking points off for submitting work late. On one hand, why should it matter exactly when they submitted the work, if it's good work? On the other hand, I know that if I just said that there's no late penalty, some significant fraction of the students would wait till the end of the semester, then realize that they haven't been keeping up, then create headaches for everyone involved, including themselves.

Most are better off without a degree.

Most who get a degree would be better off with an apprenticeship tailored to their field.

Most of the rest would benefit from getting a few years of real life experience first.

The reduction in attendance would lower costs and reduce degree inflation in the job market. More productive years would be available and people could replace their college debt with a mortgage and have something of tangible value when they were done.

The root cause, I think, is that humans are really bad at considering both the specific and the general in their decision-making. A new procedure might perfectly solve the problem you're having right now, but the cumulative effect of all these new procedures is to make the overall system useless.

Long-lasting systems provide for ways to throw away whole parts of the system and replace them with something simpler, without throwing away the system itself. Whole industries get outcompeted by a nimble startup. Codebases get refactored, and gnarly subsystems deprecated and replaced with clean interfaces. Elected officials get thrown out of office.

Perhaps the right way to look at this is to embrace change, and position yourself as the destroyer and replacer of systems that have become overcomplicated and bloated. That's why the tech and finance industries have been so highly compensated over the last 20 years: together, they're throwing away whole parts of the 1980/90s institutions that had become bloated through 40-50 years of progressive micro-optimization.

This ends up (somewhat) preventing asshole behavior at the expense of making life worse for all of the non-assholes. But in reality, assholes will find new and imaginative ways to be assholes, no matter how many specific rules are in place.

One hopes that better solutions are possible. In the teaching example, we could imagine keeping the rules broad and simple, and including a reward for any student who doesn't require 'special treatment' through regrade requests, etc. (I have seen systems where regrades include a grade reduction if no errors are found.)

In AirBNB, deposits and waive-able cleaning fees serve a similar purpose.

Edit: I did not come up with [0], but I also don't remember where I saw it.

The traditional model, the one implicitly adopted in the posts, is one where the instructor presents material, maybe with some discussion or engagement with the material in the form of activities or assignments, and then evaluates understanding on an exam of some sort. In this model, the exam is a measurement. It makes sense from this standpoint that all you really need is some megaexam that measures your comprehension of the material, and if you pass it, you pass. There is something to be said for this in all sorts of areas of life.

There's another model, though, where the teacher is a sort of coach. In this paradigm, your role as instructor isn't just to present material and then measure it, but to provide incentives along the way for the student to engage with the material and process it. In this model, the exam is activity. You present a series of quizzes or exams for the student to problem solve, and you incentivize this by giving credit or not giving credit. It's the equivalent of training drills in sport. All those assignments and midterm exams are incentives for staying engaged with the material along the way, to practice.

I suppose you could say something like "well taking the final exam repeatedly could serve that role, and you can't literally give the same exam over and over again due to cheating and learning to the test, so what you'd really be doing is giving multiple exams, which is kinda like assignments" but then at that point you've redefined things so much it's a moot point. There's also little point in assigning material the student doesn't understand yet, so what you end up with is what usually is done, which is units, with assignments or interim exams that are graded along the way.

Ideally you'd have tailored material, activities, and exams that are tailored to specific students and their specific progress, but in practice at universities there's just not enough resources to do that. It's too expensive, if you include social components as part of the learning process. There are also general trends that are too hard to ignore (most students whereever you are will be in some peak of a bell curve of some sort), and so you end up with what usually happens (which is sort of the point of the author).

See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits.

I would have the studies elective.

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself.

The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/1175...

Reminds me of The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

But it's the other side of the coin

The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.

There were 4 exams: two quarterlies, a half, and the final.

I don’t think it ever struck any of us that if we failed to study for an exam that it was anyone’s fault but our own.

I actually really like articles like this because they have so many unnecessary assumptions:

“Things are this way because students will complain if they suck at things”

The unstated assumptions are that students in this schooling system mostly have external loci of control.

The second thing is that courses are designed in an adding-epicycles manner based on the least reasonable member of the previous class. That is, it is a cost function that aims to minimize the failure of the greatest idiot which implicitly leads to it adding cost for the smart guy.

So you have built a schooling system optimized for the greatest idiot who believes someone else is responsible for all of his failures. This actually explains why so many college students here are like they are.

A lot of this is sensitive to context. Students in high school, college, and grad school have different levels of maturity. There are also different incentives for each setting.

I would say that high school and college students are more similar than grad students though.

Perhaps more important is the fact that the power the teachers have in each setting is different as well: high school teachers have little power whereas college professors have much more leeway in designing and grading their courses.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#/media/File...

That people procrastinate and need incentives is human nature — no more use bemoaning this than bemoaning politics. The job of instructor is precisely to enforce a system of rules and incentives while not being too dogmatic about them that the class turns into a grind while promoting enthusiasm for learning while creating inspired course content, while balancing all this with the instructor’s own scholarship priorities. It’s a tall order and very few people do it well.

That mastery is difficult and subtle does not distinguish pedagogy from other professions, but what is different is that every shmo off the street remembers being a student, so thinks they know the secret formula for pedagogy.

So my question to educators here would be: Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students?

School pedagogical approaches are weird and appears broadly to be testing a student's ability to endure forcing themselves to learn material they may not find interesting. Obviously, this divides the student population and people with better executive functioning, or stricter parents, float to the top. It's what we've done for so long, we're anchored around the concept. From a motivational standpoint, for many students this can kill curiosity and desire for learning.

Goal attainment research consensus clearly demonstrates specific and sufficiently difficult tasks lead to better performance. It's even more ideal when the individual sets the goal or at the very least is involved in developing the organizational goal. This goes against the grain in schools. Sometimes teachers are incredibly vague, others specific. And, unless the student is in a highly individualized learning environment, like working on a capstone project, they do not play a role in course goal setting.

You start to see the potential problems when research demonstrates, the highest individual performance occurs when individuals are provided a specific and sufficiently difficult goal with a learning oriented approach and decreased emphasis on performance (tests and grades). On the other hand, when an individual already possesses skills and knowledge for assigned goals, then a performance approach, not a learning approach, yields an overall higher performance rating. Also, by far, the worst goal orientation, among the aforementioned, is performance avoidance, that is performing to avoid negative consequences.

Students are in school, they're in the process of obtaining skills and knowledge for a career they may not even have solidified yet. Students are largely falling into the performance avoidance category, then the performance approach category, and, finally, for the luckier few, the learning approach category. Add in the teacher quality variable, whether they assign specific or vague and easy or sufficiently difficult assignments, and you start to see how this creates problems for students and for society.

I speak from experience. I failed miserably during school, even dropping out of high school, for a variety of reasons outside of my control and am extremely fortunate to be where I am today.

I let them know mostly early on: I do grades because I have to, not because I enjoy them. I've settled on the following: I try to make the biggest assignment an ongoing project-thing that they "turn in" more than once, and try to coach them into primarily learning and doing -- and turning in something that I can reasonably slap a good grade on.

I do one or two small quiz type deals on top of that. Very hard multiple choice, but take-home, and you're on your honor to not to consult live humans. Also, I do the nice type of "curve," so if your fellow students' grades are average low, that helps you. Honestly, this is much more to maintain classic ideas about grading, though I suppose it helps keep the younger ones on their toes. Also, I find the psychological effect of "QUIZ" to be sufficient to get people to prepare, even when they don't check the syllabus and see that these aren't all that much of their final grade.

This seems to be a pretty good way to do IT type classes.

When I used to teach at college and university I would think "there's no way you are ever getting a job in this field" and then when I did professional corporate training I would think "I have no idea how you keep your job, but I do know that if I showed up for an interview, you wouldn't give me the time of day."

You can argue with "well maybe you're a lousy teacher" and whether that is true or not, it doesn't account for the flat out denial and debating, and dare I say it, outright lying, about why the assignment wasn't done.

* There will be a short quiz every week covering recent material.

* Homework is optional for any student who got an A on the last quiz (due to the length of the quizzes, that essentially meant 100%).

* Anyone with an A average in the class so far and an A on the last quiz is permitted to sleep in class.

It worked great. Nobody's time was being wasted on busy work, nor were people recklessly left behind.

You have to think like a software engineer. Test first: write the requirements fro the perspective of a test which fails if the requirements are not met.

Rather than dictating irrelevant details of the apparatus that is to be made during the assignment, describe a procedure by which it can be verified to meet the requirements.

"Build a temperature monitor circuit.": what is it monitoring: the temperature of what? Where is that taken? What is the output? Decimal temperature in Celsius to the tenth of a degree? In what range? Or else is there just a control output: is there a hysteresis to turn something on and off like a thermostat? Etc.

"Test it to prove it works." That's a poor way of giving requirements. You need specific test cases. You may have to have specialized equipment on hand that the students can use, like a controlled source of reference temperature.

1. Grades should be a continuum (percentage), not bins (A, B, C,..). "When you are forced to discretize into a small number of bins, injustice is inevitable." Report cards have no rational reason for not being an aggregate of numbers rather than low resolution numbers (letters).

The crux of the justification given for enacting these policies students hate is that students need motivation; their human nature, even given a clear end goal, is not enough for most of them to learn at the required pace without intermediate and forced goals. Of course this leads into the problem of carefully interpreting assignments to do as little work as possible, and lowering the quality of all student's experience to make assignments painfully clear.

All this leads so naturally back into the temptation to loosen standards of the class. If students are going to lazily and disingenuously complete assignments, they will not learn, and it should reflect on their exam grades - but making every student perform the same problems every time will waste half the students time if your assignments are catered to the slowest learners - the fastest learners will feel completely patronized and waste the most time. Don't punish your best students.

The real solution is breaking up classes. One class as a monolithic, multi-month, atomic unit causes problems. Each intermediate exam should serve to split the class into many smaller classes, which can be failed and retaken modularily. In fact, students should decide when they want to take that modular class's exam, and can stay in or attempt to test out at their discretion. Now all of the sudden the relationship between doing assignments and performing on these intermediary tests is tangible, and need not be forced through forced assignments and over-specified instructions. Students can still be required complete a final exam encapsulating all material from each modular class (longer re-test periods could be applied if need be), and if they performed poorly students would have the option to retake those modular sections to build up a more robust understanding.

This has other benefits as well: pre-requisites can be much smaller, and more specific pursuits of knowledge can have constructed an express course of just the strictly necessary modular courses from each full course. Students wanting complete understandings can always go back and pick up where they left off.

Compsci is perfect for this, because students can fix their bug quickly and resubmit their whole assignment. For math, I guess you'd want to avoid having them repeat problems they already got correct. But for other subjects that don't really have a place for "random input", I guess this doesn't work?

Even though I taught for about 7 years my theory was that 3 years was a good amount of time to put in to teaching before starting to burn out. Sort of treating it like the public service it feels like.

Not that everyone has the option of leaving. But financially speaking I observed that even fewer people had the option / privilege of teaching indefinitely without the financial support of a spouse or roommate living situations into middle-age. Thinking mainly about the growing percentage of non-fulltime teaching roles.

And right along with that, small enough class environments that the grade for the course is pass or fail, and the exam is oral. You either know the material or you don't.

Maybe we could do this in software and try to cut back on the need for leetcode interviews. Ha!

But things are changing, and the pandemic is speeding that process. A decade ago James Paul Gee outlined where we want to go, and I think it will largely come to fruition before the end of this decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNfPdaKYOPI

"Teaching in public schools suffers from the same problems as cooking in public cafeterias - and generally produces similarly mediocre results."

I don't buy into the sentiment that public education is a mistake, or even that it's outputs are generally mediocre. I do, however, think that the insight that public education is more akin to an industrial process than an interpersonal relationship holds some water.

By removing grades on homework, and making it so that what is being evaluated is not collection of points, but rather ability to demonstrate the skill against a rubric while retesting, it allows learning closer to the actual target skill. It also more closely mirrors an actual career: if you are running a project at a company and do not hit your quarterly goal, then you don’t just say “Oh well, guess I got a F” and move on to phase 2 of the plan. You revise and try phase 1 again until you reach the objective.

It should be noted that switching from normal grading styles to standards-based grading is not trivial. In school districts there are in fact entire training programs and coaches like my family member that help teachers, administrators, and parents understand the concept and put it into practice. There are not only practical obstacles, but also paradigm shifts that have to slowly happen. But the results are worth it, it is overwhelmingly more effective.

Yeah, so why insist on doing that? Because that's what's easy for the schools and the teachers of this rather inhumane mass education system. How else are they to evaluate the performance of hundreds of students? They can't know each student individually. They must create artificial tests which they can apply at scale. They must create a grade economy. They must reduce humans to statistics.

Why even have grade boundaries? The difference between 89.95% and 90% is no doubt statistically insignificant. Why cause pain by creating rigid A-F boundaries?

> But some teachers are principled and are determined to police cheating anyway.

The problem is much of what is considered "cheating" by these people is actually perfectly normal real world behavior. Research and team work are absolutely normal and expected in the real world but in the artificially difficult dream world of academia they are frowned upon.

Why? Because allowing these things would force them to use less efficient evaluation methods. Much easier to ask a ton of questions in timed high pressure exams that will single-handledly decide the student's future.

Designing systems of incentives is hard.

That said, several of the mentioned problems seem like they have solutioms.

- Excessive detail: keep both or several sets of instructions. The detailed version is authoritative in the case of a dispute by the student, but as long as they don't dispute, it's fine if they follow the spirit of the instructions.

- Deadlines: Give X "extension tokens" per semester, which allow students to submit one day late, no questions asked. Max 2 tokens per assignment (48h extension). My undergrad CS department did this and it was great.

I would guess the latter would work well for regrades as well. A generous but bounded number of regrade tokens. You could even do something like make unused tokens worth 1 bonus % on the final exam, if you want to further disincentive abuse.

As a functional, working class adult, I carry a conviction that specific aspects of my life would improve if I was forced to give up a portion of my autonomy by an external party for what some people may term "my own good." And I don't mean this in the sense of finding enjoyable hobbies, but in doing the things that need to be done for the maintenance grounded in hard physics and biology, such as exercise and diet - two things I have little interest in, and for which I have no luxury of external deadlines for. There are limits to certain other strategies. Amphetamines don't exactly help with falling to sleep on time, for example.

For some reason, I believe this in spite of the issues my upbrining caused me, and it gives me conflicting feelings. As other commentators have pointed out, there can be numerous lifelong problems stemming from how one was raised by their parents. In my case, I suffered numerous traumas that I believe I have yet to fully move on from. Criticizing those methods, or the lack of them in the present, makes me feel like I'm shifting the blame to the world around me instead of taking responsibility for myself, as "an adult".

Yet, at the same time, I feel as if I can't be trusted to just expect myself to do the right thing because I've gained financial autonomy and the "adult" label. There are times when the perfect solution makes its appearance ("just" exercise daily), and yet the drive to pursue it fades before my eyes. There are disorders of the mind that are known to interfere with the very capability of someone to take responsibility, such as ADHD.

I sometimes imagine what it would be like to have access to a set of data on the exact dates and times of how people exercise each day, or how they plan their meals (knowing full well that those insights might not necessarily work for me), and the resulting health statistics/ages lived for those people. In some racing games, there is a "ghost" feature that shows you the runs of the players with the best times, to use as a guide for your own strategies. With the current Internet, at times it feels like there's only a massive pile of conflicting information and no sense of direction, which ignores what actual people ultimately do with their lives.

Here’s a story from my father. He was teaching a course for working professionals that had a large project component. He—being naive and idealistic—decided that as long as the students eventually finished the project, they had learned the material, so they should get full credit. Thus, his policy was that students could submit the project, get it graded, and then repeat this process as many times as they wanted. He knew this would mean extra work for him, but thought it would be worth it for the students.

The result, of course, was catastrophe.

To call the strategy many students took “abuse” gives no measure of their ingenuity. They realized that they could skip learning the material, and instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm with my father’s grading as a reward function.

Edit: I will say though, I would give this grading scheme a poor grade too. The teacher recognizes it's more work for them, but doesn't seem to recognize it's also far more work for the students. Particularly those who care about their grades and are actually trying to abide by the spirit of the thing and not game the system.

There has to be choice and freedom, both for the students and the teachers. I know I’m speaking vaguely but that’s because I myself can’t articulate a solution. But I know there’s a better way.

> And you know what? When the students blame you, maybe they are right. The teacher is supposed to use their experience to help students learn. Shouldn’t you help the actual imperfect humans in front of them, rather than imagining a bunch of perfectly rational Platonic objects?

This is an extremely mean accusation. As a former student, I've never ever blamed any of my professors for not giving me enough homework. I am sure I passed the final exam classes with much better grades and knowledge than the homework classes (which I usually failed and dropped very early). And if I've not, I've still felt extremely annoyed and mad about the system, and how nonsense and unfair it is.

I can accept a statistics about homework and no homework classes (which the article fails to provide), that the majority of students perform better, or the average is better, or the lower range is better, or anything. But this kind of arguing is simply worthless (less than worthless).

Why have homework grades? Well, if you don't, "they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework."

Why have deadlines? If you don't, they "blame you for not imposing deadlines on them."

I get why someone would want to avoid blame or conflict, but it shouldn't influence what you're grading people on.

His reasoning for participation grades is bogus.

1. Classes are not better if everyone is talking and asking questions. Often, this actually causes class to move more slowly and cover less ground and questions would be better after class one on one.

2. He doesn't want kids to act up and is punishing the kids that do by removing their future opportunities, which is not great because the kids most likely to act up are the ones most likely to have learning difficulties or hard home lives. So this makes things worse for kids that need the most help.

3. Participation grades are arbitrary and a tool for control. The initial arguments for other grades about how they can't be arbitrary and you need to be rigid are thrown out the window with participation grades.

4. You don't really have a major freeloader problem in classes, in part because it's not a commons. It's managed and controlled by one person or an administration. It is my opinion that it is unnecessary to punish what freeloading exists, which is what participation grades do.

5. Participation grades are not really an incentive, they are a penalty. If you make participation worth something you are forcing people to participate if they want the same grade they would have previously gotten without participation. You are penalizing non-participation by lowering their grade. For it to be a pure incentive, they would need to get extra points or something for participation, but they don't.

I don't believe students are necessarily the best judges of learning outcomes. In face I have learned that students tend to be the most conservative entities at university. Try to make any change in a course and they will hammer you on the evaluations. The detailed instruction example is a perfect example of this. In my experience it is not so much that students find creative ways to misinterpret loose instructions, instead I had students literally complain they had to think for labs or homework. I find this attitude very weird, as if when they start working they will always be given the detailed step by step instructions.

They sat apart on the next test day. I forget which one of them was the one who failed the next test, but both stopped coming to class after that (I'm assuming the one who was providing the answers was only in the class to provide the answers to the cheater).

If you're trying to learn, and if other people are involved, the process goes something like this:

1. you find a mentor, a peer group, or a teacher

2. you read or watch the resources they give you, and do some exercises

3. you ask them to critique your work, possibly in exchange for money[0]

4. they give you actionable feedback, you thank them, and go back to step 2

This is because you want to learn, they want to teach you, and they're not the same person who's going to be testing you later.

[0] A good example of when you'd pay money is Drawabox's official critiques

>[...]I suspect this proposal hasn’t seen much contact with people who’ve actually taught classes

This is how a fair number of classes at my university are graded. Particularly math classes are structured so that you could literally ignore the class for 3 months and then just show up and take the exam and that decides 100% of the grade. Some homework is available for bonus points, but it only contributes to going from a failing grade to passing. While retaking the exam to get a higher grade isn't technically part of the system they will let you do it if there is space.

However, I found that quite a few students skipped assignments and also did poorly in the exam. Of course, the strong students sailed through either path. But the weaker ones also matter. And, after all, the point of grading is not just to assess. It is also to motivate students, and to signal to them which things are important.

Unless the class is quite strong, it makes sense to balance assignments and examinations. And, as in the article, it is helpful to pick a scheme and stick to it.

In reality a good teacher will learn they can’t make everyone happy and learn to deal with students who complain.

At one point I said to a student - "You should really work as hard at learning as you do trying to negotiate a higher grade!" I assume they rated me low, but I stopped reading those things years ago.

Gave a makeup exam to one student with an altered programming problem than the original exam. The student answered the original problem, not the one on the exam they was given. That made it very clearcut.

I also had a written requirement that students must be able to explain their homework programs to me. Had a few that couldn't explain what parts of "their" own program was doing.

1) About a year ago I was teaching a class that included working with a user group from a country in Africa. 2/3rd of the way through the semester, after submitting an extensive (and well done) research paper on the country's culture, norms, people, and public health needs a student asked me flat out "Is Chad a real country or did you invent it for this project". School is so internalized as a game that they don't even know that they are approaching school as a game.

2) I recently gave a test and received a number of regrade requests. One student had written two paragraphs to answer a question needing one sentence. His regrade request (after seeing the key) was to include the first five words of the first sentence, and ellipses, and the last four words of his last sentence and ask for credit "because the answer was in there". Another asked for a partial credit because 'I understood it even if my answer wasn't right'

Lets take this at face value.

There is no reason pay academia for the entire class. If I can pass the final (and pay for that part) which demonstrate my knowledge, there is no reason for me to spend the entire semester/quarter/period in class or pay for it.

Prove me wrong.

This is how it works with real-world licensing and certifications.

89.483% rounds to 89.5%, but not 89.50%; it's just a matter of significant figures. I see significant figures often being misunderstood. You can only ever compare values of the same number of significant figures, it's just that most of the time that's done implicitly, so it's not acknowledged.

People will find ways to optimise for the metric.

If you give bonuses based on number of commits created or number of tickets closed you'll end up with a lot of useless commits and tickets.

If the only thing that matters in order to pass a course is to do an exam, people will optimise for that. If someone doesn't like the subject or doesn't like the teacher or doesn't like being taught (especially disagreeable boys), they will happily skip the subject and just try to get a passing score.

In university I was already working as a professional developer and I attended only a few classes I cared about and hacked my way out of exams with a mix of cheating and cramming the night before.

I enjoyed all the project work instead and I excelled at that. But that was worth just 1-2 points out of 30. Why was I forced to memorise bullshit I didn't need and that I would have not remembered 3 seconds after the exams in order to get a piece of paper saying I graduated? Isn't being able to do the projects more important than that?

When I hired people with degrees from "good schools" I was always surprised to realise how little were they able to get done on their own. I quickly stopped even checking their qualifications as they're completely worthless for anything related to work.

If I had to reform education I would make it totally based on projects. There would be no grades or titles when you get a job, just an increasingly longer list of projects you worked on.

When I was in school I had to take a Latin class. I didn't want to take it but I picked the best course according to my interest - and unfortunately it had Latin.

I spent those lessons secretly working on my own projects, then I downloaded a bunch of famous texts with their translation and I just wrote a J2ME application to look things up and used it for 5 years (Mobile internet was very expensive back then and searching on the internet would have been way harder).

After I finished my written finals in all the subjects, luckily my score was already high enough not too pass, even if I got zero at the oral exam and I kind of bullshitted my way through that last exam.

Was there any point in trying to force me to learn something? Why do we put people in this situation?

There is no point in cheating on exercice, but there is on evaluation.

I don’t want to read 2000 words for something that could be explained in under 100.

Have been thinking of a 200word limit per article version of Wikipedia.

That minority is not going to be spoon fed when they enter the real world.

that said for most lower division material projects are unsuitable, for that stuff the system i saw i liked the most i first saw online for an undergrad intro ai course at mit. it was pretty simple, the course had a handful of carefully designed uncurved but not tricky half exams units that were given throughout the term. the final was two half exam spaces for any units you wanted to try again, if you did well all semester, you didn't have to show up for the final, if you messed up, it's your chance to retake the specific units you wish to improve. goal: demonstrate you learned all the techniques in the course, that's it.

sometimes it felt like putting more weight on homeworks was for student comfort and to reduce stress on exams for everyone, sadly sometimes i think it had the opposite effect of producing lazier exam design and more reliance on curves. i once took a course which had no official notes, fairly weak lectures and the claim "i teach at a level above the assigned textbook." no, he didn't, he wasted everyone's time.

i once went to see a professor after the fact to go over the final, i told him explicitly i just wanted to understand the things i got wrong but he kept returning points even after multiple statements that i didn't care. this made me very sad to think that he probably sat for hours with people arguing over points rather than discussing material.

overall it felt like some professors (or maybe their students) spent hundreds of hours designing amazing courses and some spent less than ten. those in the former camp were often prickly in terms of their specific asks, but obviously in those cases it didn't matter as the care and craftsmanship that went into the course design justified any particularity. it was the waste of time courses that were the worst (even if they did sometimes come with generous mea culpa grading).

You need a rate limiter to prevent students from just spamming regrades until the evaluation returns "A", and you want to incentivize the desired behavior--homework is intended to help students develop skills.

If you want to learn more, some useful keywords and phrases to find cutting edge thought: "ungrading", "Standards Based Grading", "learning objectives-based assessment"

There is literature on this, but don't let that stop you! It's much more fun to speculate about pedagogical practices based solely on what you remember from high school and college.

We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who they study with they can freely choose. But it is not going to happen, and we will stay with the whole grading and testing bullshit.

I'm dealing with something now outside academia, where there is absurd bureaucracy, and I'm sidestepping and shortcutting it because I see the mission outcome as separate from the prescribed process, and the trickling and breadcrumbing of details is an abuse of my time, so I sympathize with the student perspective - but in an educational setting, the prescribed process is essentially a sacrificial cost that enables you to "become," a person who has mastered it, as it makes the skill the effect of a skill, and not just the affect of the outcome. Education is necessarily transformative, otherwise it's just rote training.

Example would be, I take music lessons, I'm difficult to teach because I really like Bach and Chopin and I can play some simple preludes by ear, but my sight reading is maybe at a gr. 2 level, which is just enough to get the pieces under my fingers with a hill climbing struggle, but makes me useless as an actual musician, and probably very irritating to musicians whose performances are the effect of their years of real skills, and not the affect of hackery or savantism that an unskilled observer can't easily distinguish. Even if we played the same piece, comparing them to me would be insulting and debasing to them because it's like saying a recording of something is the same as a performance of it, so it's very diminishing.

In the case of the temperature monitoring circuit in the article, the process is designed to facilitate a mental transformation of exercising elementary skills, and being educated means being able to commit to that process of being molded by the experience. The details are to force commitment to the process and filter out those who aren't. Unfortuately, credentialism incentivises this affect of skills and drives enrollment, so if you are doing a job oriented degree, you're basically trained and not really educated through a process of becoming.

It would almost make sense to offer students a deal, where they can choose a training track that leads to a 52% / C- grade and do the minimum, which takes them out of the way of the TAs, they don't participate in discussions, and they can coast and draft others, maybe date each other and say they went there, but they can't impose costs, where others can elect to aim higher and choose the education track with an understanding of what that means.

Unless you have a power to remove cheaters, you will have to throw rules at them. At expense of everyone else.

I still hold the line, but do suffer sometimes.

Draw the rest of the fudging owl.

It feels there is very little experimentation in the space, mostly trying to mimic a classroom in digital

But I worry that the argument has strayed too far from one based on Chesterton’s fence to one with a lot of status quo bias and rationalisation. I say this because my university (outside the United States) followed a system much like the one the author is arguing against.

- Almost all of the degree was determined by a final exam. In fact there wasn’t even a final grade for the degree but one for each year and the convention was to take your final-year grade so in some sense only the final exam mattered (you might be expelled or advised to transfer to another course/university if you did particularly poorly in earlier exams). However, there were no resits.

- There was homework but it was not graded (at least for my subject. Your individual questions would be marked as right/wrong and problems would be pointed out)

- Attendance to lectures was not required however one had to spend a certain reasonable number of nights at the university (for a particular definition of ‘at’ and ‘university’) in order to graduate.

- Attendance to lectures was strongly encouraged (because you would struggle to get notes/homework without attendance as ~everything was handwritten or on physical paper)

- Attempting homework was strongly encouraged because you would go to small (one on one or one on two) group teaching sessions to discuss it, so there was social pressure to not be (extremely conspicuously) absent and to have something to discuss Let me now briefly discuss how this alternative system addressed some of the author’s points.

- Preparing for exams by doing homework (and also a ‘homework’ set of example exam questions) was incentivised by the social pressure of it being very obvious if you didn’t do the work

- The homework system also addressed the problems of asking questions being scary in a big group and the (not discussed) system where lots of students in the US don’t realise that they are meant to seek out help in office hours (and worse, I understand this is a particular problem for poorer students who are less likely to know that unlike high school you aren’t meant to touch it out alone)

- Because homework wasn’t graded, some questions would be very difficult (because attempts and discussion could be interesting) or chosen for the pedagogical value. Looking at homework offered good opportunities for feedback

- Converting examinations to grades was complicated (you would get regular partial credit marks plus two different kinds of bonus mark for different levels of significant progress on a question which got outsize rewards to encourage doing fewer questions well over having a crack at more questions; there was a vector which you could dot with your vector of the three marks to get an ‘overall mark’) and borderline candidates would have their submitted answers carefully reviewed by the examination committee to allow for more fair subjective grading

- The university didn’t really offer many opportunities to appeal which reduced the pressure on teachers but has its own problems. There were some rare allowances for extenuating circumstances but in general it was encouraged to not start exams if there were serious complications (eg some health problem) and to wait a year, which was also a problematic system.

- But they did try to be particularly fair to students, e.g. they would collect the rubbish paper after the exams and if some student claimed that they had answered a question for which no answer had been submitted, the bins would be searched

- Cheating was relatively difficult as there was only one big opportunity for it: the final exams of which there were four (to allow for more time and averaging out a several days) which contained questions from all courses. More could be invested in invigilation for these few exams.

That doesn’t mean the system was without complaints. The big complaints were (1) pressure, which was slightly mitigated by the selection procedures of the university somewhat selecting students who were able to handle big exams; (2) unfairness with regards to poor performance during the exam week for random reasons (e.g. injury/personal circumstances/mild illness like a bad cold); (3) different standards for different courses, particularly a divide between pure and applied and harder courses tending to have easier questions; (4) The university is selective and many students felt that they could have gotten a higher grade by going to a less selective university, and many students felt their future would depend on the grade and not the institution next to it (many companies claimed to have ‘institution blind’ hiring for example) and therefore the university was unfairly damaging students’ career prospects with their desire to grade students based on how much they might be allowed to continue education/research at the university.

The realization of human nature really disappoints.

OK? So your students tried to do something and failed creatively. Sounds good. Reward them for their efforts, ask them to try again if you feel that they still need to get something out of the assignment.

> But some don’t, and they keep complaining and asking for regrades, and if those aren’t accepted they (or their parents) contact the principal/chair/dean/ombudsperson, who are required to have an investigation.

OK.

> hat gets misinterpreted too, so more details are added, and by the time the teacher retires you have a monstrosity that’s universally despised but almost impossible to complain about.

So your bad solution is good because it started off bad and ended worse. OK.

> Well, enjoy re-grading every single assignment from every student near a boundary,

Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the 90. Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and want regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross out the old grade and add the new one. How onerous...

> As far as I can tell, most follow the incentives and make little effort to stop cheating.

Cool. Most of the time cheating entails something like access to notes on a test that is artificially made more difficult by requiring memorization. That's why open note tests are far better.

> But some teachers are principled

Bummer. They don't sound principled so much as they sound unimaginative.

> Say you suspect students are copying from each other on an exam. You can silently prepare multiple versions of the exam with “micro differences” in questions.

Sounds dumb, I don't like the idea of trying to "trap" kids. I cheated exactly once on a test and got away with it - why? Because I was unhappy in school and I went home and spent my time distracting myself rather than preparing for it. Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my life, you trapping me and once again teaching me that education goes hand in hand with punishment would have done years of damage.

> They realized that they could skip learning the material, and instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm with my father’s grading as a reward function.

Creative. Without knowing more about the assignment it's hard to judge, but I'm wary of any assignment that you can just brute force like that.

> your students will be lazy and fallible.

I had to undo years of being told I was "smart but lazy". Teachers need to erase that word from their vocabulary.

> So they won’t learn anything. That's OK, most people don't learn much from school.

> And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework.

a) OK

b) I mean, maybe the parents would? I frankly don't believe that any student will blame a teacher for not forcing them to do homework.

> Surely what matters is if a student understands things, not if they ask questions in class?

Good question. What exactly is the point? To me, education serves a few functions.

1. Babysitting kids so that parents can work

2. Providing young people with a safe place for them to explore their emerging identities, interests, and view of the world

3. Stoking an interest in learning and providing the tools and resources to build a baseline knowledge for future education

So, is understanding really the goal? I don't see understanding as being particularly critical to the education system.

> Participation credit helps to internalize positive externalities.

100% agreed.

My transcript is an odd mix of grades - even within a single class, within a single semester I could go from an A or B to a D or F, or coast by on a C. What I value most is that during that time I dated, made lifelong friends, read books on physics and philosophy, discovered New York City while I skipped classes, played video games, learned to bike, etc. All of the stuff you're talking about, it's the stuff that got in the way of everything that has produced value in my life.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I think school is pretty stupid, as is, but I find that I pretty much exclusively disagree with teachers about why. I sometimes read /r/teachers and the self indulgent pity party, and the "I wanted to be good but I just hate kids now!" theme, is sickening.

I also find it sad that so many people become what they hate. I think people seem to have an incredibly hard time empathizing with their former selves, which I find so weird. But I've had adults trivialize teenagers' problems, as if just because now they have "adult problems" that somehow means that when they were a kid they were just dramatic.

Maybe try to regain some insight into why your younger self would be disappointed, and what they might suggest.

I guess the context here is mainly a university? Or is it senior high?

Anyway, I spent around three years in college and the value-add for me wasn’t the grades I got. The value I got out of it was the foundation that I laid and the inspiration I got. I got in touch with materials/domains that I might never have encountered otherwise. And to me that’s truly a gift that keeps on giving.