""" 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.
In college however, students are grappling with their own burgeoning adulthood. They realize a TA is just another student with a few years on them. While the professor might be a bit out of reach, for a narcissistic person, it is easy to justify to themselves that they are actually above the TA in status/rank/morality/righteousness/sociability. Subsequently they can beat down the TA in the way that you mentioned. "All my problems are the result of your failures to address them". "I would have done better but the TA didn't like me." "Oh I hated that class the TA was a total nerd." "No one ever told me I had to do the assignments, I didn't realize I would be tested on this."
It doesn't help that people who choose to become a TA are often a 'helpful' kind of person, the exact kind of person that tends to be a little bit susceptible to these kinds of criticisms, even if they are untrue. The only way to move forward as a TA (and as a person) in this environment is to harden yourself in the ways that the article and many other commenters mention. That's my 2c anyhow.
Perhaps that why some groups of people tend to gravitate to STEM, where teacher bias is less likely to have an impact.
There is a flip side...a lot of students are reaching college now without the experience of the decision or blame being on them. College is viewed as so important that it cannot be left to these children who will screw it up. Grades are inflated, kids are told to do more activities but with less depth...everyone is trying to game every metric. It is a functionally nihilistic world view that becomes embedded in students minds in a way that totally lacks agency.
They feel that if they fail its because the teacher failed them...because in their priors the teacher fixed it, because failing and the consequences were not an option - especially for the 'gifted' students. It isn't a personality, it's a lived experience. Its confusing to the students just as much as to me because they don't understand what has happened or how their parents/teachers/leaders/society have failed them.
Doing problem sets in university without this made it way less valuable because you need the immediate feedback loop to learn and waiting until office hours or recitation takes too long and you forget.
Good classes (from grade clarity perspective) were ones where it was clear what would be tested and how to prepare. Then you could leverage the optional homework to focus on areas you didn’t understand yet.
There were classes I enjoyed that did this poorly by either forcing homework grading without answer keys (feedback loop too slow, often can’t focus on what you don’t know) - or made it very hard to know what the test format would be like to prepare for.
I like learning and enjoyed my CS classes - I also kept a high gpa at a university known to be hard (was also preparing for medschool where gpa is critical in the US), but the stress around grades was miserable.
Getting good grades is a skill that’s related to learning, but also its own thing. Sometimes to optimize grades you have to do things that hurt learning (rather than focus on how a compiler works and digging into interesting details here, you must focus your attention on the specific types of puzzles that will be tested).
I get why this is done, but I still wish there was a better way to handle this. I think ISAs and job market validation of skills is an improvement (like lambda school) but those students still blame everyone else for their own failures even in that case so it’s a hard problem.
As a TA, it was funny to see the ways a few students would overfit those tests. In one extreme case I literally saw a student replace a complicated function definition with a if-else chain that just determined which of the 4 test cases it was being run on…
Practically everyone who "played fair" got the same grade for both. Occasionally, I would add a test that tripped everybody up and I'd have to go see what happened. Anybody who overfitted, however, got crushed.
My favorite assignment was always the next to last project (before end of semester deadlines start getting crushing). I created only a single unit test to verify the test suite runner was functional, and the students had to submit the rest of the pre-deadline unit tests. And I would switch in my full suite at the deadline. I told people that anybody who passed that suite would get bonus points that everybody was always bugging me for.
It was always absolute chaos. I only ever had one student pass the switched in suite (he got some nice bonus points out of that--didn't need them, of course). I would then reopen the project for a week (I planned for it) to let everybody else clean up their work and resubmit.
You could see and feel the difference in the students after that assignment. The fact that testing was an integral part of programming and that testing was, in and of itself, a difficult problem was a revelation--and not a particularly welcome one.
It is possible that the problem is poorly written (I'm just a TA, I didn't write it, and it looks pretty clear to me), or it is possible that I'm just really gullible and they aren't actually asking in good faith (I'm a trusting person, but I've been doing this kind of work for a while and so I've seen most of the dishonest questions, this doesn't look like one to me). I dunno, I think I'll just chalk it up to the long tail of weirdness that can occur when dealing with a bunch of students.
This is hard to understand and adapt to and stresses out students that have been trained (for years) to learn the expected script.
You eventually get to this level in math, but only way later in post graduate work (unless you’re exceptional).
I think there’s likely a benefit in explicitly tackling this directly for young/new students, it might help them see the bigger picture. At least the earnest ones struggling to do well anyway.
It is such an immense amount of labor. Now i know why people regurgitate the same content everywhere or dont bother
The students that attended didn't need an attendance policy because they were inclined to attend anyway. The question is how much forced attendance would have improved the scores of the bad performance/low attendance group versus how much it would have hurt the good performance/low attendance group (including missed opportunities at the same time slot). I don't see a policy that realistically helps all of the struggling students without hurting any of the top students, so a tradeoff has to be made.
Perhaps offering attendance as extra credit without making it a penalty could be a good middle ground, but I don't think it would help all of the low attendance/poor performance students. By the time they realize they need extra credit they would already be behind, and they may not care about an extra credit offer at the start of the semester.
Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?
The most creative students I've met have been the ones that didn't accumulate credentials, and often suffered because of (possibly undiagnosed) ADHD. They did well when they found their passion, either because they found it later in life or because they really, really cared about it. Our system doesn't do as well with these people, but they can usually make their way through.
Unfortunately there's a downside to this: all the creativity in the world isn't going to help you if you can't execute. A brilliant idea only takes you so far. And gaining sufficient background to have brilliant ideas is often an even more demanding task, which passion alone doesn't suffice for. I don't exactly know what to do about all this. What I do know is that a system that bases future success on how well individuals do at age 16 is fundamentally, profoundly stupid... And I wish I had a better one.
Source: extreme ADD sufferer who has "wasted" tons of time swimming upstream to learn to do things easy for some others but insanely difficult for me, simply because I wanted to.
This may be more relevant to "twice exceptional" students that can still pick up on the material without following the whole class. There is certainly heterogeneity and I don't mean to speak for all ADHD students in what they would prefer. I just think it is funny your comment could be read as supporting either side of the debate without the parent context. And given the parent context I have to say I disagree.
Now whether the hand holding of attendance policies and weekly assignments and the like is better for the class on the whole I can't comment on. It's not an easy tradeoff and I don't think the decision should be made primarily based on how people with ADHD perform, unless you are teaching a class where it is disproportionately represented.