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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant solution. But how was the change that the student would be asked to implement evaluated for fairness?

The requested change was the same for everyone. They would have also run your project through a series of unit tests and would let you fix your code if they had encountered any bugs. Being able to implement the change was a necessary condition to prove you had authored the code and pass but, overall, the project would be graded based on architectural decisions, algorithms and data structures, coding style, etc. I guess this is not done at other schools because it's a hell lot of work for teachers and passing rates are low. It's quite brutal.

I'm not a big fan of final exam/related serious pass/fail screens. Students have (probably) made a big investment in time and money and , absent pretty serious deficiencies, they should probably be able to eek out a gentleman's C.

It sounds to me like you're in favor of grading on effort.

I don't believe that investment made in time or money should factor in to assessing a student's mastery.

I don’t believe money should ever be a factor for students. In any way. Yet, when I was a student I was incredibly loud about “I am a paying customer of this institution and you’re gonna teach me. Late to class and not allowed in? Great, I paid for this class and I’ll take it up with whomever has the ability to reprimand you/fire you if you aren’t tenured/generally make your life hell.”

Money in education perverts everything. More generally money is the root of all evil, eh? But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.

Eh, you paid and agreed to terms and conditions.

> you took my cash and I get nothing?

If I book a hotel room then turn up a week later than my booking date trying to get a room I can expect to receive nothing.

Sure; but also the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I got my education and a couple of my professors got forced to be decent to their students. In my case it worked out. YMMV.

YMMV on the definition of “decent”. Arriving late to class is disruptive to all the other paying customers in the room so IMO it should be disincentivised. There are reasonable and unreasonable levels of disincentive, of course.

Agreed. I had a professor who’d whip whatever was on the desk at whomever was late. Some poor girl got hit with a stapler. So you know, that mileage is a highly variable thing!

That’s physical assault and i would report it to the police and then to the educational institution in that order. If the professor retaliates in any way i would further report that too.

On one theory of college, you get someone to hold you to certain standards (which many people have trouble holding themselves to) and then verify that you were held to those standards, providing a signal that you can meet high standards.

Somehow, I missed this theory and also just wanted to skip all my classes with no repercussions, but I wish it had been explained to me better.

Meanwhile I knew perfectly well that's the theory of a functioning academy and _still_ chose to skip class and get high/drunk with my friends.

Guess I'm a terrible person/s

> But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.

Maybe in america... but at the end of the day its not that hard to tell the customer to fuck off. The value proposition of a university is either the credential or self-improvement. Its not their customer service.

Not really. But I'm generally not in favor of all or nothing end-of-term evaluations rather than mid-course correction feedback. And also not in favor of admitting students that will probably be out of their depth. As was the case with a course I TAd and did some tutoring for. (Not engineering.)

Grading on effort with a ceiling of a C is pretty different from grading on effort full stop.

Getting a 100% final grade doesn't indicate mastery.

Having been the guy who got a couple of F's, and retook the exams in Sept and passed them to continue to my next years of studies and eventually my BSc I can say.. no! Do the work. Deserve the A/B/C. Get the A/B/C. I don't believe I'm the only one that suspects how the test will go, knows what the test result will be once I see the question, and know what I should have done to get that A/B/C mark.

I get it that shit happens in life (imagine someone having exams two days after they buried a father/mother/brother/sister), now THAT person, yeah, boost their results by 'one step' because if they got a 40% going through THAT, then they would have gotten 60% in a normal/BAU situation.

But don't hand out degrees to people who don't deserve them. It dilutes the degrees of those who do.

That's what incompletes are for. When life strikes - as it does - give the students a break and let them pick up where they left off with no penalty after the fan blades aren't covered in you know what any more.

(This is, at least, my policy. A grade reflects mastery and only mastery, but it's my job to help students get there and sometimes that means finding creative solutions.)

To be honest, I squeaked through undergrad in various ways. And my undergrad profs, etc. helped me with that. And things worked out and Alumni Affairs is probably happy with how things worked out. And I don't think the companies I've worked for have been that unhappy either.

The passing rates at least seem solvable, by making the required changes a little easier. Is it not viable to do this with changes that are automatically testable, so it's not as hard on the teachers?

Or by grading on a curve, so that students who worked in good faith and seemed to know their code were given good grades, even if they did not 100% finish in the few hour timeframe.

Do the same in change for all?

E.g. implement a simple compiler for a C-ish language with only functions, if and while loops; as the big change, ask to add for loops.

I doubt the change was relevant. I would expect if they can reasonably make a change even if not totally ideal, the work as first submitted can be evaluated on it’s own as it is shown to be original work.

Changes were often designed to be impossible to perform if your architecture was not flexible, or to show your algorithms had poor time or space behavior. So, changes were designed both to test you were the author and to fail poorly designed projects.

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