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Comment by alcidesfonseca | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Here at U. Lisbon, we are following the recommendation by the recent MIT report: Evaluate students by talking with them, making it a social interaction, which they are lacking.

We need students to work together and share their experiences. Then we need each one to achieve the learning goals (and we should not assess work they did far from our eyes. We should assess their understanding and skills in front of us).

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I had a CS professor who worked like this. We had assignments and tests, and they did have grades, but your overall grade in the course ultimately boiled down to convincing him that you understood the course material. As someone who excelled at the material, but could be a bit hit-or-miss on bothering to complete assignments, I loved it. Students who were used to optimizing their efforts and obsessing over each point hated it. It didn't come up in that course, but the issue with such a grading scheme is that sometimes students and professors really don't see eye-to-eye. Most of the time it's the professor's fault, holding some sort of prejudice. A grading scheme like I described would be disastrous for such students.

This is a good approach, and is used in some situations. But, it has challenges in terms of scalability. It is not impossible for larger enrollment courses (this course had 600 students), but there are certainly trade-offs in terms of consistency in grading, overall student experience, etc.

Sounds like to me maybe universities should stop focusing on being cash grabbing machines and instead properly teach with a useful instructor-to-student ratio?

Sorry, if your answer as to why using a beneficial pedagogical approach is your class sizes are too large, then it sounds like your class sizes are too large!

You're not wrong. But, that type of concern usually needs to be addressed by someone at a higher pay grade than professor ;-)

learning to think is orthogonal to american universities, who's goal is to get government money via fed backed loans to fund professors real hobby: doin cool science

standardized and written tests, online school, homework, etc is just a way for professors (and increasingly, just TA's) who have no interest in teaching, to get the job done with less time and more efficiently.

Oral exams solve this problem entirely

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