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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

It feels more and more like we need to rethink what scoring schoolwork means.

Worksheets and exams can show how familiar you are with the material, or they can be gamed or useless in some other way. But the best they can ever do is show familiarity.

What I really want as a consumer of someone's grade or academic history is how well they WORK in the subject area, along with how well they work with other people, not just a score that may correlate with regurgitation of facts.

I feel cheated by my school years, because I was led to believe that regurgitation of facts is very important. I also feel like this previous comment will be very emotional for some people.

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One of the best professors I ever had took a radically different approach to grading than I've seen anywhere else but history books: he gave you a grade based on his perception of your understanding of the material.

He graded assignments and exams, out of a courtesy to those who needed a numeric style of feedback, but there was no set way to translate your total scores on assignments into your final grade in the course.

Exams would be, in a word, brutal, in that no one was expected to ace them, or even complete them. What he wanted to see was that you'd be able to apply the course material to novel situations. He'd meet with every student during the course of longer term projects, just to get some insight into their work.

Ultimately, it wouldn't have scaled well beyond the 50-odd of us were in his course, but it was certainly AI proof.

At the time, I thoroughly enjoyed it because it drove the kids who were hyper-fixated on grades and point grubbing up a wall. Looking back, it was the best teaching style I ever experienced.

> One of the best professors I ever had took a radically different approach to grading than I've seen anywhere else but history books: he gave you a grade based on his perception of your understanding of the material.

This is fine--until the professor doesn't like you, personally.

You would have to give students much more flexibility to drop courses (basically up to almost the end of class) to avoid the social failure scenarios.

> I feel cheated by my school years, because I was led to believe that regurgitation of facts is very important.

Which school is that?

I guess that's probably true of primary or middle / lower secondary school, but I don't feel like regurgitation of facts was particularly endorsed in my experience at upper secondary level, let alone at university level.

There might of course be quite a bit of variation between countries, schools and even individual teachers in this.

> but I don't feel like regurgitation of facts was particularly endorsed in my experience at upper secondary level,

In my high school experience, most classes could be aced through rote regurgitation of facts.

Math class required another step - identification of which category of problem you have, and rote application of one of a few pre-calc/calc algorithms.

Damn right! I got awesome grades, no idea how anything worked(s) though!

There were definitely people in my uni course who got worse grades, but who had a better understanding of the material.

That was my experience as well, and totally ruined my first year at university. The lecturers expected I'd been taught application and derivation of proofs, but in reality I'd only been taught the proofs required to pass the high school exams.

> I guess that's probably true of primary or middle / lower secondary school, but I don't feel like regurgitation of facts was particularly endorsed in my experience at upper secondary level, let alone at university level.

The problem is that by the time someone gets to graduate level courses, their mode of thinking has been set.

I like your direction of thought, but I think we should make sure we don’t over correlate education with vocational utility. School isn’t always about work, and not all education should be about work or jobs or whatever.

That’s why I really like that you included how well they work with others.

Personally, I never felt like school was about memorizing facts (maybe some history classes…), but I also had two parents with advanced degrees who repeatedly told me that school was about learning to think and learning to learn (and learning to time manage). I feel like the vocational focus a lot of people have on education really hurts some fields of study - the humanities gets a lot of hate both on HN and in the media.

Ideally, classes with projects and essays should push people to think and show understanding of the subject not facts, like you said. The infinitely mocked “why did the author say the curtains were green” tropes actually show this - understanding why authors use certain imagery requires understanding intent, historic context, deeper understanding, etc. especially when applied to new works. I think people like cut and dry fact memorization and objective grading, and this doesn’t fit that cleanly.

Maybe there's a better word than 'work'. When I say

> how well they WORK in the subject area

I don't mean 'perform in a paid job', I mean 'take productive steps'. So even if you're just noodling around having fun with a musical instrument, you can be working, if you're improving your control and understanding. Messing around without a productive aim can still be very productive.

College admissions have known this for a long time which is why test scores aren't an automatic entrance. Your schools sound irresponsibly myopic.

Colleges are no different at the undergraduate level in many, if not most, courses. Identify what the professor wants to see or hear, repeat it back.

Lab work is probably the biggest exception, in that you tend to need to apply some practical knowledge, but even then I found TAs were very willing to hold your hand through it if you at least demonstrated you had reviewed and memorized any prep materials.

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