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Comment by kayo_20211030 | Hacker News Reader

kayo_20211030

If you have spent several days structuring a 20 page argument in October on any topic you'll have learnt a great deal about the subject matter. When you get to the exam hall in, say, May it will stand to you.

That knowledge will show up in the blue book vis-a-vis the other exam candidates.

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Sure--yes--the student will learn something if they actually wrote a 20-page paper on some given topic. But how are you going to evaluate their ability to compose the 20-page argument?

I would prefer not to be confrontational here, but I am having a hard time imagining that you've deeply considered the pedagogy of how to teach and evaluate students on squishy skills like this.

Knowing a bunch of facts about something is a world apart from structuring a compelling in-depth argument about it.

In the simplest case, where we'll say the exam question was precisely the topic of the 20 page paper, the candidate would be golden. Of course, it's unlikely in a 3 hr. exam that you'll be asked to write a 20 page response; but in edited form, you could definitely produce three cogent pages about some particular aspect of the original paper - if you've done the work. If you truly wrote the 20 page paper, you can surely produce three literate, cogent, responsive and topical pages.

I think schools need to set up additional, new proctoring sessions for this type of work. This will likely be something they have to hire for. A student can come and work for four hours, then hand in their in-progress draft and leave, then return later to finish it. (And please for the love of god, let students do this on offline computers, don't make them handwrite everything!)

What stops a student from going home and asking chatGPT to write about few bullet points about how to answer and coming back the next day doing what chatGPT told him to do?

They'd need a very good memory. You can't make cheating impossible, before ChatGPT they could have asked a friend for help.

This assumes that the assignments and the exam cover the same material. That's not always the case.

That would be really poor course design :-)

There are many disciplines in which students work on effectively distinct projects.

For example, the life-changingly-well-designed newswriting course I took in college assigned every single student a different story to spend several weeks reporting out so that we wouldn't all be out harassing the same poor people for interviews.

Genuinely interested. What was the final like? This seems more in the experimental science (ok, journalism) category. I may have to adjust my thinking to be more expansive and also include things like "vocational".

Grammar and AP style rules, iirc. (I may not. It's been enough years now. I did try and fail to find the syllabus in my box of five-star notebooks. We mostly used reporters notebooks for this class, and I took it over the summer. The materials are probably in a plastic bag somewhere...)

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