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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing does cause serious issues evaluating students.

On one hand, students, employers and lecturers all agree (I think) that allowing students to do larger projects, over a period of time, allows them to better show their strengths and tackle interesting problems.

On the other hand, without locking people in a room with nothing but a pen for 3 hours or so, it is very difficult to check they aren't getting someone else to do all their work for them.

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I still like to push the idea that my school's CS department uses: grading appointments. 40% of your grade is the code actually working, 60% is you being able to explain it to the TA.

that is a great idea

I second that it is a wonderful idea. One on one project code reviews where the student explains their rationale and the professor points out issues would be a great way to judge progress as well as practice for code reviews the student will face in the real world.

The down side is that grading becomes more subjective. I have had one or two TAs could not accurately judge students understanding of the subject. It is a good tool though and did determine part of my grade in undergrad CS. This combined with in house programming quizzes/tests should go a long way to evaluating a student knowledge.

If the TA has a grasp of spoken language, that might work. (In the past I've dropped labs and classes when profs/TAs couldn't communicate clearly.)

Well, in that case I'd get 40% of the full mark just by getting some code from github, and another 20-30% just by quickly going through the comments just before the defence.

1:1 conversations or personalized essay questions about a particular detail of the project that they turned in should suffice for determining whether or not they actually did the work; I've never heard of this happening for anything less than a thesis defense, but I can't see why it wouldn't work for lower-level courses.

Sun actually did something like that for their Enterprise Architect certification, which had three parts: first a multiple choice test, then a take-home design for a system (given these requirements, produce some UML diagrams), and finally some essay questions about the design (the one I remember was how the design adresses scalability).

I like how my AP Calculus teacher ran things. Weekly quizzes at the beginning of class, two exams, and a large amount of homework that was corrected, but not graded. The homework was only practice for the AP exam; if you didn't do it, you probably wouldn't be able to answer the actual exam questions efficiently.

Of course, this probably won't work for students that don't want to be in the class anyway, but that wasn't a problem in AP calc.

> This kind of thing does cause serious issues evaluating students.

It's a problem if you're trying to operate an industrial-scale student-assembly-line of a course. Which I'll grant is how most courses do operate today.

But it's increasingly clear that that's a really bad way to organize education anyway.

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