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Comment by J253 | Hacker News Reader

As easy solution to this is the just not give any credit for homework that goes toward a final grade.

Have a number of in person closed book tests that are difficult enough to prove satisfactory understanding of the topic.

Homework is just a mechanism for a teacher/professor to force a student to dig into and really understand a subject. If the student can use these AI tools to subvert that, then instead of wasting energy or god forbid even more AI to fight the AI, just give students a good enough incentive to actually do the homework. Having the entire grade rely on several of these difficult-enough in-person closed-book tests should be incentive enough.

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That would pretty much guarantee nobody would do any homework ever again.

Homework isn't effective at making students "dig into and really understand a subject" - it's a method of externalizing school expenses onto parents, because teacher time and school funds are finite, and the time of parents and children is... not the school's problem. Making the final grade conditioned on homework performance is just about the only way to ensure kids do it (or are made to do it) at all.

Now, I'm not saying homework is entirely a bad idea - I'm complaining that it's being treated as an externality, making it almost unbounded. Teachers don't coordinate among themselves the amount of homework each of them assigns, so the only thing limiting the total amount of homework is a good chunk of the class being systematically exhausted by it, or (hopefully) parents making a fuss before things reach this level. But, the only reason the teachers can push so much homework on kids in the first place is that homework grades matter for the finals.

that's a good point, I just made a comment next to yours responding to the same original comment about whether homework should exist at all, and I think you're idea that it is a way to extend the "learning time" of students without requiring more time and resources from teachers is a good counter-point.

If you have the time to read my other comment, what would you think about the idea of only making homework mandatory for students who's quiz/test grades are below a certain level, say 70% for example

About your idea, I'm not sure either way. On the surface it makes sense, and there probably is a real correlation between test performance and amount of after-school learning, so it would make sense to make homework mandatory for kids who scored low. It would also work as punishment, but at the same time reinforcing the kids' perception of homework as punishment.

What makes me really unsure, however, is parents. Families differ by the amount of time and resources they can, or are willing, to spend on child education. This is part of why I don't like the homework-as-externality model: even ignoring how students themselves feel about it, if the school is trying to maximize the amount of work they do after school, the first kids to hit the limit are ones with e.g. a single parent doing two jobs, poor household, or dysfunctional family that doesn't care. Overloading students with homework implicitly disadvantages those that don't have supporting parents with lots of free time. And those same kids will also be ones more likely to fail at tests, in which case dumping extra after-school work at them might do the opposite of the effect you intend.

But this is me speculating, I don't work in education, and I'm sure there's been research done on how to balance the amount of after-school work for the environment children live in. My complaint about homework-as-externality isn't trying to deny the work of education sciences - it's pointing out that even if the research is there and results are solid, it's not being applied anyway, because teachers are uncoordinated and they all individually think, "oh, that's just half an hour worth of work, no big deal". Almost textbook tragedy of the commons.

I resonate a lot with what you said. Homework or in the way it is used today as reinforcement work is most needed for those who have trouble picking up new concepts during limited instruction time. However, those who have trouble picking up concepts quickly will also have overlap with not having much time/resources outside of live instruction time. That just leads to a double whammy in terms of how homework further disadvantages them.

In the reading I've done, I've seen most advocate for smaller class sizes with more educators per class to help provide more 1:1 attention. This is again at odds with how public schools are funded where I am (US) so I don't know if anything will ever change.

My personal experience is homework was an excellent way to reinforce what was taught in school. For me, it felt especially useful in quantitative subjects and languages (French & Spanish) which both felt like they benefitted from having a concept stick. For qualitative subjects like writing, reading comprehension, I actually now look back and see homework as a way for teachers to see samples of your progress. "After reading this passage, did you learn how to construct a summary? Did you learn how to pull the author's main message? Did you learn how to make a convincing argument for or against the passage's main point" and I can't think of a fast way to do this in any kind of live instruction setting.

I personally prefer open-book exams: they discourage cheating in terms of “smuggling definitions by writing them on a calculator”, and force teachers to ask questions that require reasoning and deeper understanding

Agreed, but there are some levels of study where open-book just doesn't work well.

I think it would be hard to ask any kind of pre-college mathematics questions that don't become incredibly easy with an open book. The other challenge with open-book exams which focus on deeper understanding and reasoning is they still require understanding fundamentals to be successful, so how do you test for fundamentals?

In a college hackathon, I wrote a chrome extension that crowd sources answers for online tests and displays them next to the questions. So if one person with the extension took the test already, everyone would get the answers even if the questions/answers are randomized. And in the cases where no answer was available (because the test system doesn't show you the correct answers at the end, or something like that), then it would fall back to showing you percentages so you have an idea of which answer everyone else was choosing.

The reason I built that was just because I was annoyed by how lazy my professors were. Almost every single class (which I was paying for) was graded based on your performance on copy and pasted, endlessly reused tests on Blackboard. Sometimes you could just search the question on Google, and find pdf dumps of the exact same test from 5+ years ago. If you don't cheat, you risk getting a lower grade than the people who do cheat (aka everyone). Why spend all that money going to college if you're just going to let other people get ahead of you so easily? The point of degree is to make you more competitive in the job market, but deciding to not cheat is risking that investment.

Unfortunately, I never actually used it or deployed it once. Coordinating a whole class to install and use a chrome extension for cheating isn't exactly easy. And as far as cheating in online tests goes, there are easier ways to do it.

But yeah, in-person proctored exams are how it should be done. It's the only thing that's fair to everyone.

I agree, and can we have a discussion in general about homework being included in the grade in general? It's purpose is to help students learn the material, which should be reflected on the test.

If the student can perform well on the test without that, then they shouldn't be forced to do it and penalized when they don't(which you can imagine happens often, as if the student understand the material well enough already the homework is just useless busywork.

If the student can't perform well on the test without that, they will be forced to do the homework. In this case, including homework as part of the grade might be detrimental because they can cheat/copy/us AI to complete homework and boost their grade enough to pass while not understanding the material well enough to pass the tests.

The counter-argument here(that I can think of) is that doing homework, even if - or especially if - it's just easy busywork for the student, prepares them for the future where such tasks will almost always be necessary to succeed. A lot of good learners end up not developing this skill/discipline because they aren't forced to work hard in school, which causes them to fail when faced with tasks/problems that require serious effort, and this would arguably make things more difficult for them. In my opinion this problem would be better addressed by funneling kids into classes that are appropriately challenging for them rather than forcing them to do busywork, but that's a much more difficult thing to do, and also learning to complete easy/"useless" busywork is a related but different skill than learning to focus on and complete challenging tasks

sounds like law school

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