> But some are an assault on reason, with every word of the assignment creatively misinterpreted. It was never stated which temperature circuit to build or how to prove it works or what level of explanation was necessary. And who’s to say what “build” means?
OK? So your students tried to do something and failed creatively. Sounds good. Reward them for their efforts, ask them to try again if you feel that they still need to get something out of the assignment.
> But some don’t, and they keep complaining and asking for regrades, and if those aren’t accepted they (or their parents) contact the principal/chair/dean/ombudsperson, who are required to have an investigation.
OK.
> hat gets misinterpreted too, so more details are added, and by the time the teacher retires you have a monstrosity that’s universally despised but almost impossible to complain about.
So your bad solution is good because it started off bad and ended worse. OK.
> Well, enjoy re-grading every single assignment from every student near a boundary,
Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the 90. Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and want regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross out the old grade and add the new one. How onerous...
> As far as I can tell, most follow the incentives and make little effort to stop cheating.
Cool. Most of the time cheating entails something like access to notes on a test that is artificially made more difficult by requiring memorization. That's why open note tests are far better.
> But some teachers are principled
Bummer. They don't sound principled so much as they sound unimaginative.
> Say you suspect students are copying from each other on an exam. You can silently prepare multiple versions of the exam with “micro differences” in questions.
Sounds dumb, I don't like the idea of trying to "trap" kids. I cheated exactly once on a test and got away with it - why? Because I was unhappy in school and I went home and spent my time distracting myself rather than preparing for it. Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my life, you trapping me and once again teaching me that education goes hand in hand with punishment would have done years of damage.
> They realized that they could skip learning the material, and instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm with my father’s grading as a reward function.
Creative. Without knowing more about the assignment it's hard to judge, but I'm wary of any assignment that you can just brute force like that.
> your students will be lazy and fallible.
I had to undo years of being told I was "smart but lazy". Teachers need to erase that word from their vocabulary.
> So they won’t learn anything.
That's OK, most people don't learn much from school.
> And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework.
a) OK
b) I mean, maybe the parents would? I frankly don't believe that any student will blame a teacher for not forcing them to do homework.
> Surely what matters is if a student understands things, not if they ask questions in class?
Good question. What exactly is the point? To me, education serves a few functions.
1. Babysitting kids so that parents can work
2. Providing young people with a safe place for them to explore their emerging identities, interests, and view of the world
3. Stoking an interest in learning and providing the tools and resources to build a baseline knowledge for future education
So, is understanding really the goal? I don't see understanding as being particularly critical to the education system.
> Participation credit helps to internalize positive externalities.
100% agreed.
My transcript is an odd mix of grades - even within a single class, within a single semester I could go from an A or B to a D or F, or coast by on a C. What I value most is that during that time I dated, made lifelong friends, read books on physics and philosophy, discovered New York City while I skipped classes, played video games, learned to bike, etc. All of the stuff you're talking about, it's the stuff that got in the way of everything that has produced value in my life.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. I think school is pretty stupid, as is, but I find that I pretty much exclusively disagree with teachers about why. I sometimes read /r/teachers and the self indulgent pity party, and the "I wanted to be good but I just hate kids now!" theme, is sickening.
I also find it sad that so many people become what they hate. I think people seem to have an incredibly hard time empathizing with their former selves, which I find so weird. But I've had adults trivialize teenagers' problems, as if just because now they have "adult problems" that somehow means that when they were a kid they were just dramatic.
Maybe try to regain some insight into why your younger self would be disappointed, and what they might suggest.
>Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the 90. Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and want regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross out the old grade and add the new one. How onerous...
Ahh, here speaks someone who's never taught a class :) If word gets out that you round 89 up to 90, then next you'll be dealing with all the people who got 88.5. At some point you have to have a grade boundary. It may just as well be at 90 as at 89 or 88.5.
>Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my life
As the article explains, cheating has negative effects on everyone else. Of course cheating can be good from the cheater's point of view – that's why people cheat!
> If word gets out that you round 89 up to 90, then next you'll be dealing with all the people who got 88.5.
Why would word get out if you just grade that way? No one would know you were rounding up...
> As the article explains, cheating has negative effects on everyone else. Of course cheating can be good from the cheater's point of view – that's why people cheat!
I think you've completely missed my point. Cheating had no negative impact - on anyone, at all. Getting caught cheating would have huge negative impact.
>Why would word get out if you just grade that way?
Students compare grades and talk to each other. It's also not uncommon for students to ask about your policy on rounding in the first class, when you're going through the syllabus.
>Cheating had no negative impact - on anyone, at all.
I'm afraid your cheating did have a negative impact on others, albeit a small one. For example, suppose that the class you took was graded on a curve. Then by adding a false datapoint, you may have pushed up the cut off point for the higher grades. More generally, the larger the number of cheaters, the less meaningful grades become for everyone. Every fake A grade contributes to the devaluation of real A grades.
>Getting caught cheating would have huge negative impact.
You'd be surprised. As the article explains, punishing cheaters isn't really in anyone's narrow interests. It's sadly rather easy to get away with cheating at university, even if you do get caught.
>That works for multiple choice. Given the ".5" I'm assuming partial credit is discretionary. So you can just discretionarily choose to give +.5.
Yep, and then you'll deal with the students who want to know why their friends got the discretionary +.5 and they didn't! And you'll be in a difficult position, because arbitrarily adding points to some answers and not others does seem pretty unfair on the face of it. (Remember that the students who weren't sitting on a grade boundary will be comparing their scores with the students who were, so they'll see if you added +0.5 points to question 1 for Jack on 89.5 but not for Jane on 85.)
By the way, "partial credit" in this context means "credit for a partially correct answer", not "non-integer credit". You can perfectly well have a scoring system where a single correct answer is worth 0.5 points, as test points are a completely arbitrary unit :)
> My point isn't "cheating good".
It's not clear to me what your point is regarding cheating. You seem to not like the idea of people being punished for cheating. But as cheating is easy to do, it would run rampant without at least a tangible possibility of punishment. So I don't really understand how you (i) think that cheating is bad, (ii) recognize that it happens frequently, and yet (iii) don't think that cheaters should be punished.
Naturally. If you give people stupid chores they will almost universally try to find a way to avoid them.
> don't think that cheaters should be punished.
Even if I bought into everything else ie: that testing is good and cheating is bad, I would still not punish cheaters. As I said, I cheated that one time because I had other issues that made school difficult. Punishing would have done nothing except add additional stress, making me retreat further from my education. But of course, as I just said, I don't buy into all of that other stuff, so it's not only an ineffective and cruel way to approach education, but it serves no purpose.
> It's not clear to me what your point is regarding cheating.
My point is that most tests are stupid, and a lot of what "cheating" is is just making them less stupid. For example, I remember students would hide their notes during a test so that they could reference them. That's just good sense - in what real world situation do you need to have instant recall for arbitrary information? It teaches kids to memorize shit, which is damaging.
Two students checking each others answers? Sounds a lot like any normal adult problem solving.
So you can try to "tweak" the system until cheating is impossible or so scary that people will rarely try, or you can "give up" and let people cheat... or you can take a step back and realize that you've made up a problem with no solution.
As I said, school should focus on the three things I mentioned. Nonsensical testing strategies and finding ways to trick kids for doing what is, frankly, the sane thing to do, is purely damaging.
If you were smarter you would recognize that in many cases there are substantial financial rewards for good grades. And many classes are curved. It's not just wrong its evil to screw other pre meds for example by cheating. Of course you are obviously right its good to work together on problems, but what does that have to do with exams? Obviously in hard classes everyone could in fact would "work together" with the top students.
OK? So your students tried to do something and failed creatively. Sounds good. Reward them for their efforts, ask them to try again if you feel that they still need to get something out of the assignment.
> But some don’t, and they keep complaining and asking for regrades, and if those aren’t accepted they (or their parents) contact the principal/chair/dean/ombudsperson, who are required to have an investigation.
OK.
> hat gets misinterpreted too, so more details are added, and by the time the teacher retires you have a monstrosity that’s universally despised but almost impossible to complain about.
So your bad solution is good because it started off bad and ended worse. OK.
> Well, enjoy re-grading every single assignment from every student near a boundary,
Round up by default? If someone has an 89, just give them the 90. Honestly, who cares if a few students come up to you and want regrades, I imagine it takes all of 30 seconds to cross out the old grade and add the new one. How onerous...
> As far as I can tell, most follow the incentives and make little effort to stop cheating.
Cool. Most of the time cheating entails something like access to notes on a test that is artificially made more difficult by requiring memorization. That's why open note tests are far better.
> But some teachers are principled
Bummer. They don't sound principled so much as they sound unimaginative.
> Say you suspect students are copying from each other on an exam. You can silently prepare multiple versions of the exam with “micro differences” in questions.
Sounds dumb, I don't like the idea of trying to "trap" kids. I cheated exactly once on a test and got away with it - why? Because I was unhappy in school and I went home and spent my time distracting myself rather than preparing for it. Me cheating one time had literally no negative impact on my life, you trapping me and once again teaching me that education goes hand in hand with punishment would have done years of damage.
> They realized that they could skip learning the material, and instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm with my father’s grading as a reward function.
Creative. Without knowing more about the assignment it's hard to judge, but I'm wary of any assignment that you can just brute force like that.
> your students will be lazy and fallible.
I had to undo years of being told I was "smart but lazy". Teachers need to erase that word from their vocabulary.
> So they won’t learn anything. That's OK, most people don't learn much from school.
> And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework.
a) OK
b) I mean, maybe the parents would? I frankly don't believe that any student will blame a teacher for not forcing them to do homework.
> Surely what matters is if a student understands things, not if they ask questions in class?
Good question. What exactly is the point? To me, education serves a few functions.
1. Babysitting kids so that parents can work
2. Providing young people with a safe place for them to explore their emerging identities, interests, and view of the world
3. Stoking an interest in learning and providing the tools and resources to build a baseline knowledge for future education
So, is understanding really the goal? I don't see understanding as being particularly critical to the education system.
> Participation credit helps to internalize positive externalities.
100% agreed.
My transcript is an odd mix of grades - even within a single class, within a single semester I could go from an A or B to a D or F, or coast by on a C. What I value most is that during that time I dated, made lifelong friends, read books on physics and philosophy, discovered New York City while I skipped classes, played video games, learned to bike, etc. All of the stuff you're talking about, it's the stuff that got in the way of everything that has produced value in my life.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. I think school is pretty stupid, as is, but I find that I pretty much exclusively disagree with teachers about why. I sometimes read /r/teachers and the self indulgent pity party, and the "I wanted to be good but I just hate kids now!" theme, is sickening.
I also find it sad that so many people become what they hate. I think people seem to have an incredibly hard time empathizing with their former selves, which I find so weird. But I've had adults trivialize teenagers' problems, as if just because now they have "adult problems" that somehow means that when they were a kid they were just dramatic.
Maybe try to regain some insight into why your younger self would be disappointed, and what they might suggest.