Using tools outside class to practice for the in-class work would make a lot of sense however, as students could then rapidly see what a decent essay or code body looks like.
Of course. I don't understand how essays written at home are acceptable. It's a good exercise to do them (if done properly) but they shouldn't count for the final grade.
Before AI there were professional essay-writers, or tutors, or parents. In a sense AI is progress because now everyone can cheat, instead of only the wealthy.
Having such an exam adds enormous extraneous pressure that does not reflect the reality of conducting research, but it is this pressure that guarantees (with some exceptions) that the student has been coerced into learning the material to a sufficient standard. There will always be the cramming psychopath who grabs a first after just a week of study and who retains nothing of it, but most students just have to learn intensely over the course of a year to pass through the filter. In some ways, this is also why it's common in the UK for employers to not care so much about the specific degree, just that you have one with good grades from a reputable institution.
My concern is for the students who study intensely, learn as much as anyone else, but don't pass the filter. Universities in other European countries allow single units to be retaken without retaking an entire year, and it seems to me that this provides a fairer system without devaluing the qualification in any way.
And a degree consists of a good number of courses, each of which will have its own exams - so if you do poorly in one or two exams, there are plenty of chances to bring your average back up.
I've attended 3. Two of them made students retake the entire year if they needed to resit an exam. The other one based students' entire grade on one set of final exams at the end of the 3 years and had no provision for resits at all.
I believe the first two are typical in the UK.
> And a degree consists of a good number of courses, each of which will have its own exams - so if you do poorly in one or two exams, there are plenty of chances to bring your average back up
That's true, but it's also true that a more lenient system would be more compassionate (student mental health is a huge topic for universities) whilst simultaneously being a better measure of student's true abilities.
Of course there is. One of my classmates milked this system to remain a student for about twice as long as the rest of us. He was good at manipulating the bureaucracy, not so good at physics; probably should have studied law or some sort of social science instead.
I lament, though, that students are often either (A) so overburdened with distractions that they don't have time to learn, (B) so pressured to get high grades that they cannot afford to get a bad grade, and thus must cheat, or (C) just don't care. There are a few gems that are willing to put in the work to learn and appreciate a subject, though. I just wish that more students put in the work required to learn.
Relevant quote: "Every truth has four corners. As a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three." (Confucius)
But your napkin calc isn't addressing the bit where you only take 1-2 classes like that per semester and pad the rest out with things like literature and electives so you could have a life.
You mean like how today they study well-regarded human works? I’m not sure how the ML adds anything except which words tend to appear close to each other across a large corpus. The moment where young writers believe that ML is creating anything new and they try to learn from that is when modern civilization starts to eat its own tail.
Given that a typical programmer on a typical day has online access, and given the creative lengths students will go to to maintain access to said resources during exams, it seems worth considering allowing online access for programming exams. To address the obvious problems with that approach, could we use AI to generate unique variations on the problems we want the students to solve?
Teaching, even at the collegiate level, has become "how can I do the least so I can do what I want". Tenured research professors generally make terrible teachers...perhaps we need professional teachers.
The hardest exam I ever took was my final exam for Linear Algebra. It was so "open" that people could use matlab on a shared computer that was also projected to the entire class. Turns out, the best students in the class didn't need help on a computer, so it turned into this kind of mind-fuck where you weren't sure if they got a different answer than you because they were wrong, or because you were. To add to the excitement, the questions all tied together and used the answer from the previous one, so if you missed one, you were guaranteed to miss every subsequent question.
Theoretically they could copy it from offscreen but unless they’re really good at faking going back and changing things and getting stuck at the right points it would probably be fairly easy to tell.
On the flip side there’d be no definitive proof.