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There's a section in Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) where Persig takes this all the way to the final conclusion that there should be no grades at University, and no degree at the end, and then and only then will everyone who goes there actually be learning-motivated.

So. I teach at a university and I do give an "assignment" exactly like this.

In a few of my classes, I have final projects that teams work on. I also have presentations. I used to require them of all students; and quickly learned this is a good way to waste valuable time.

Now, all my presentations are completely optional for NO CREDIT. You don't get penalized if you don't do them, and perhaps more importantly, I give ZERO EXTRA CREDIT for doing them.

As you can imagine, every single presentation I've gotten from this has been absolutely worth it.

What were the best three?

Hmm, I mean been doing this for years. Some were interesting because they DIDN'T accomplish much and things went bad but then we could kind of post-mortem in the class.

Others had some pretty cool things that ended up in real life; I believe the official timers for the Florida Supreme Court testimony things came from one of my classes.

What proportion of students bother?

It seems to go in waves? Rarely is it one or two, I imagine there's some peer pressure thing going on. Something like all or nothing.

I do the same in my classes, and it´s common practice in many courses my dept which may help, as the students know what is expected of them. I don´t think it's wasting time. It motivates the students to know that they have to present in front of their peers, helps the shy ones get practice, and yes the quality varies, but it´s a very good way to share information within the class about different projects, even with a not so good presentation.

which students fail your class?

I get very few failures, but that's a selection thing; it's a junior senior "big picture" IT class.

understood thanks - but in those few cases how do you even determine who fails?

The problem is that the motivation from above (i.e., administration, state legislatures, employers, etc.) is no longer really about learning. We could have an entirely learning-motivated university right now and it would be considered a bad thing by many powerful people because it's not aimed at "preparing people for the workforce" (in part simply by providing that degree).

The students also want a certificate for their efforts. It's impossible to avoid signalling.

> It's impossible to avoid signalling

You can take that one step further. What kind of signal does “I can afford to go to University and not worry about credentials” send? I’d argue that’s realistic only for people who are willing to admit that they belong to a leisure class. In the US at least, we like to flatter the leisure class with the pretense that they worked hard to get there.

I learned recently that most universities in Switzerland have open admissions where entry to the program is pretty easy. However they do not hold anybody's hand and you have to pass your classes or can get kicked out quite easily. I am not sure if what I am saying is completely accurate feel like this is one model that would weed out people who are serious from who aren't.

The Open University in the UK (which has been running for decades) doesn’t have any entry requirements for the first year of its undergrad courses and the early modules definitely include a focus on getting people up to speed on academic writing, use of library tools, etc. I don’t know how many people make it to reach the year 2 modules (which require passing year 1)

I was recommended that book many years ago, when I was far too young to appreciate it. Maybe it's time to give it another go...

university provides in the following order: prestige, connections, knowledge in exchange for money

If you missed “practice space to learn how to learn and to work with other people”, your understanding is too flawed to forgive the obvious so-edge take.

I assume that would fall under the listed "knowledge" category.

Perhaps, but to my mind knowledge and skills are qualitatively different.

I went to a state school, and didn't get much prestige or many connections. I did learn how to be an engineer, and more importantly I learned how to be an adult. I think my time there was worth it.

Maybe this is true of liberal arts or business degrees? I don't know, but I don't think this is the opinion of anyone who went to engineering school.

There are institutions like that. For example, the Collège de France started in 1530, still active, doesn't administer tests nor grants degrees. It's purely about learning.

https://www.college-de-france.fr/en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collège_de_France

This is great, but is incompatible with charging people a year's income for it.

> I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway.

I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it.

Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating.

The big issue of exam-only approach is that a one-hour exam is not enough to evaluate a student's performance, unless your educational goal is just to make students memorize stuff by rote. I'd consider a 3-hour open-book exam bare minimal. But if every class does that it'll be too exhausting.

Do Universities no longer do that? All of my finals were 3hrs. There was a special schedule during finals week with 3 slots per day. The time of your final exam was based on when the first lecture session of a class took place. Really sucked to get an 8-11 AM slot when your classes never started before 11.

Fun prank: set all of the clocks in your dorm neighbor’s room to different wrong times. Guy across the hall knew we were messing with him, trusted his watch - which had the correct time, but wrong alarm time. Realized he had a problem when he had hot water in the shower and no one was around. He was only 45 min late to the exam. Good times.

Different groups have different standards of course, but that prank seems pretty cruel.

I don't see how potentially ruining someone's exam classifies as fun

We had the alarms going off early. Like every half hour from 6:00 AM. We knocked on his door and his roommate told him when he was leaving for breakfast.

He did fine in his exam. 3 hrs was overkill. Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy.

It was the 80’s. I guess kids these days are soft.

This is sociopathy, not a fun prank.

I'm a little confused so I could use some clarification: where did the "fun" in the fun prank kick in? You caused him to be late and risk his exam. Could you break down the fun for me?

Unfortunately English "fun" is used both for good wholesome fun and for the cruel fun that is "making fun of" people (laughing at their misfortune).

They will not choose to write it. Would you work on something consistently if nobody cared about it?

There needs to be a reward for doing essays. That reward can be emotional eg. "the teacher I respect liked my essay" or "my essay was read in class" or "the teacher gives feedback that makes me feel a sense of growth". In that case, maybe kids will do it.

However, I think it's hard for a teacher to inspire respect to a classroom and the difficulty scales with the number of people in the class, so grades are used as a hack.

Exactly. In school I only did the stuff teachers told me isn't important and I don't need to do.

You want me to don't know something? I better make sure to get to know everything about that. You push me to do stuff? Why should I care, if you already do.

Well, agreed, but nobody said anything about 60min exams x) In fact I don't remember ever having an exam at uni that was less than 2h.

I agree that open-book exams, or at least a closed-book portion followed by an open-book portion, is important to actually gauge the student's abilities rather than his/her capability to cram.

> Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating.

I am 100% certain quite a lot of people cheat because they procrastinated and don't have time to learn. Or because they indeed were lazy to learn. Or because they cant learn, because they course is too hard for them.

Or because video games and youtube are more fun.

When I read this suggestion it sticks out that un-spoonfed, people with deficits in thier study skills, executive function, and institutional literacy would be most disadvantaged.

So, you have 2 kids who are equally bright, and you tell one "you don't have to do these assignments but there is a test at the end" and the other "you have an 80% chance if failing if you don't do these assignments. Analyse each assignments and feedback for shiboleths like the way they ask you to structure your introduction and optimize for demonstrating you know these shiboleths over everything else"

University is a wonderful petri dish for growing into who you want to be. You have access to expertise and resources abs a certain kind of institutional credibility. Few students actually use these fully and the ones who do were told to. You need some idea who you want to be and why, and this is developed in you by other people. Children don't just know stuff.

I think these are positive changes if and only if we accompany them with systematic study skills and self management courses and bridge this gap.

I’d expect that a lower proportion of those who wrote it would have cheated, but certainly not that more would write it.

> I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it.

I seriously doubt that. In my experience many students won't do anything that doesn't directly contribute to their grade.

Well, neither in school nor in university did homework count for grades for me (growing up in Germany, and with some very rare exceptions).

So this isn't all that crazy.

Right - for me each year of university (in UK) was a year of learning with exams at the end, that was it, and it was normal.

During my undergrad in Germany, the CS department was in the process of switching from optional homework to various forms of mandatory homework (either directly counting towards the final grade, or requiring a minimum score on the homework before allowing registration for the exam). AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result.

I think optional homework works for classes that are obscure enough only somewhat intrinsically motivated students would consider taking them, but in mandatory classes or trendy majors, there's going to be many people who need a bit more external motivation to study.

I have been teaching CS at German universities for close to two decades now.

> AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result.

True. That's the real Dunning-Kruger problem: incompetent people do not know how much help they need to get competent. It is our job to show them their weaknesses as early as possible so that they can effectively work on them.

(I believe that state-funded universities (as in Germany) have some obligation to not only educate the self-motivated top 1% but also offer a solid education even for less perfect students - at least if there is a societal need for their competences.)

Another, more important, reason is that written exams are not good tests of programming competence - especially as tasks and frameworks get more complex. We want to assign good grades to students who are competent at developing software in realistic settings, not in highly artificial exam settings.

> That's the real Dunning-Kruger problem: incompetent people do not know how much help they need to get competent.

Of course, the paper by 'Dunning-Kruger' never showed anything like that.

Huh - what do you mean? I just checked again, and this is IMHO exactly what Kruger and Dunning reported:

From the abstract:

"Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities."

https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1999-kruger.pdf

Oh, that's what they say in the abstract. But have a look at the actual experiment and analysis.

All they found was a statistical artefact.

You can just have a look at the big picture at the top of the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

> Relation between average self-perceived performance and average actual performance on a college exam.[1] The red area shows the tendency of low performers to overestimate their abilities. Nevertheless, low performers' self-assessment is lower than that of high performers.

So regression towards the mean explain the entire effect.

Thanks a lot for the explanation and link. I had read the original papers a long time ago, and was not aware of the more recent discussions. That said, I just read a few of the critical papers, and it seems that even Gignac and others do not dispute that the effect is observable. They just don't believe that unskilled people are inherently worse than skilled people in estimating their own skill but that all people overestimate their skill (better-than-average effect).

This is still very much compatible with my claim that unskilled people profit from being reminded (repeatedly, not just in the exam at the end of the semester) that they know less than they think. I will avoid conflating this with the Dunning-Kruger effect in the future (Thanks!).

An recent study found that medical students' estimate of their own intelligence gets lower right after taking an IQ test (confirming the better-than-average effect). But one week later, their self-estimated intelligence returns back to their pre-test levels. To me this suggests that students (and all others) will overestimate their abilities - and invest less time in learning - if they are not constantly given feedback.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...

I studied math, and all our exams were oral exams. The professor had to actively accept you for the exam, which was usually a given, if you did your homework. (But you could probably get into the exam without doing the homework, too, if you convinced them.)

This, in general, seems like a great thing. The goal of a university should be to produce premium students, and nothing's better than a trial by fire.

We actually had this exact thing at my university. One sophomore level weed out class was a "self paced" electrical engineering class. It was called self paced because you were given a textbook and were free to work through it at your own pace. But to finish the class by the end of the semester you had to average 2 chapters completed per week, and completing a chapter not only included finishing a problem set and taking a test which you had to score 90%+ on (and were required to finish another problem set and retake it otherwise), but on occasion also demoing some skill in the lab.

It was brutal, but one of the most educational classes I've ever taken - and obviously not just because of what I learned about electrical engineering. Of course it seems modern universities have just become profit-driven degree treadmills. Weeding out students? That's reducing profit! And yeah looking back at my uni's page it seems this class is no longer self paced. Lol. And that's at a top 10 school. The enshittification of education.

Part of the issue is with the purpose as you describe it. Sure, at top 10 schools, a trial by fire would result in much needed “growing up” as the gifted but undisciplined (speaking for myself and many users of this site) students find their way to more durable motivations. But at the vast majority of schools, a trial by fire would end with a lot of students burned.

Perhaps that begs the question, if those kids can’t handle self-directed education, why are we putting them there in the first place, but that’s definitely a grey area, and there are hundreds of thousands of students who are smart enough to do well in higher education and skilled work, but weren’t disciplined enough to handle what you’re describing as freshmen.

Many employers pay a premium for predictably elite cadres of students. The schools want to try to pass off mediocre graduates as having some of the elite special sauce even though only a small number of students have what it takes. We know exactly what to do to produce elite cadres by aggressive sorting. But the incentives created by the federal government encourage the institutions to extrude mediocre students like a chicken nugget machine produces processed meat product. Every hot student-nugget is worth a tens of thousands of dollars a year in freshly printed loan money directed towards administrators and rent on dorms and apartments irrespective of quality; so the incentive is to stuff the students with filler.

The idea of "weeding out" students implies that many students are "weeds" who need to be uprooted and thrown away rather than grown.

A teacher who thinks this way is probably in the wrong profession. A university that operates this way is failing to educate the students it admitted.

Weeding out as I've seen it is a class that requires a certain level of commitment and ability to either plan your work or tough it out that a high school just can't really prepare anyone for. So in a way the student isn't a "weed" but their motivation or maturity might be and they're free to retake the class once they know that university will require them to put in more work than high school. If they can't put in the work then completing a thesis and graduating is going to be very hard and that happens the last year of uni so better to set the expectations early with a "weed out" class.

We have too many university graduates that can't get jobs in their fields, in a time where there is a growing deficit of people in trades.

Ideally it's not weeding out but distributing into education paths which fit every student.

From my experience studying electrical and computer engineering, I definitely prefer that they chose to put hard electrical engineering courses in the first semesters because I knew immediately not to focus on them because I didn't like them.

I think there should be a better onramp to EE, as there often is in CS.

Either the unfit and uninterested get weeded out at the education stage or they get weeded out by no employer being willing to hire them; the former seems kinder than the latter.

Who are the "unfit" students? Why were they admitted and what do you think should happen to them?

I think the problem is that no teacher has the time to babysit a student. If they just don't care about their education or can't put the time in, they shouldn't be wasting their time and money.

Some students also just don't have the aptitude for an Engineering or Computer Science degree. It's better for everyone if this is figured out early. I know plenty of people that dropped out of a Computer Science degree because they hated it or thought it would be a great way to make money and were in over their head.

We had classes that were for 'weeding out' students in Computer Science. They involved calculus because if you couldn't pass this class, you wouldn't be able to handle the 5 or so classes after this class that required it.

I studied computer science and have been working as a programmer for about 20 years. The downside is that you're filtering a lot of people who would actually potentially be great programmers but are for whatever reason not good at calculus.

my kid attends a school in which they’ve given up on lectures. each “class” is basically a proctored mini self learning test from a booklet that’s a mix of content and exercises to work through individually. a teacher is around to answer questions and grade the booklets.

many kids fail to make the transition from spoon-feeding to self-learning, but those who do then begin to realize that they can go as fast as they are able and need not follow the herd. they also develop a strong sense of whether they’ve understood each booklet or not. it leads to a competition for learning fast AND well because there are also traditional proctored checkpoint exams from time to time plus kids do the ordinary standardized tests to calibrate.

i feel it’s an excellent system that prioritizes learning over conformity though it is obviously not a candidate for mass adoption because many kids wash out after making no progress for a while.

Dealing with untreated ADHD through college, "do the ungraded homework and spend time with the TAs" was way more valuable than "go to class". lectures for me were borderline useless. Fortunately this was something that I figured out on high school.

On the class topic, I suspect that attendance was more impactful for students pre-internet as the alternative was to wade through the library piecing together material.

With lecture notes/slides available online, well prepared books and study forums readily available - in-person attendance can feel archaic.

We may be experiencing a similar dynamic in education with AI. In a world where we can create individualized curriculum’s for each student encompassing the entire tree of knowledge - Perhaps it’s time to rethink how we educate students rather than push them into lecture halls designed for the Middle Ages.

Here's an alternative hypothesis...

People thrive under regularity, and young people (especially) tend not to understand that. Similarly, being able to focus on a single thing is a kind of super-power, while multi-tasking generally hurts performance on tasks.

Going to class (and paying attention) means that you've got a regular period of focus on the class topic. That combination of regularity and focus translates into long-term learning and better performance.

personally, id resent paying thousands of dollars a year to be given textbook sums to complete... i could have downloaded that myself, wheres the actual value these educators bring?