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This perfectly describes my experience as a TA in graduate school. At first I didn't understand why my advisor insisted on being so precise in assignment instru

• beebmam 5y ago
  When I was a TA, I convinced my professor to stop giving graded assignments. it was obvious on tests who had done the assignments and who hadn't.
  • yodsanklai 5y ago
    Graded assignments are useful to give feedback to students. And more importantly they force students to work regularly and not wait for the last minute to study.
    • moltke 5y ago
      Personally I always preferred quizzes for that. I've always been a very strong autodidact though, there are probably people who prefer getting dragged through things by homework.
    • lupire 5y ago
      Thus we see the problem that universities are admitting students who aren't ready for tertiary education.
    • bee_rider 5y ago
      I think it is mostly the latter. At least -- I rarely got useful feedback other than a little x (best case it would be on the error, more likely on the questions). Personally, when grading I keep a file of all my feedback so I can easily copy-paste it into their feedback files (since everything is digital nowadays). For a given assignment, usually only a handful of mistakes are made (repeated by each student). If anything, having the file makes my grading more consistent -- same points for the same error. I'm under the impression that this is a not-unpopular system, but try as I might, I cannot get anyone else to adopt it.
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    Professors grade the assignments to make sure that students do them. There are many other options for evaluating the students, but not many to force them to learn something.
  • lumost 5y ago
    After just starting a grad program after 12 years in industry. I'd have to disagree. While a large fraction of homework is busy work designed to give the illusion of challenge and rigor - tests simply estimate whether someone has memorized the material sufficiently for a short 1 hour exam. In CS, a ~4-20 hour project is vastly more representative of how well someone understands the material and could apply it in a real world setting than a 40 minute multiple choice exam. At the advanced levels this is true for fields such as Physics, English, History or any others. Maybe we should ask ourselves how to give better assignments in a class that aren't simply busy work?
    • nvarsj 5y ago
      I get what you're saying but I also disagree with it as a generalization, and say it would depend on the subject. For theoretical subjects, an exam is about the only way to test your understanding. Memorization is not going to help you solve math problems.
      • vlovich123 5y ago
        I’m someone who crammed their way through 4 years of computer engineering exams at a challenging university. It’s possible. It’s hard and the worst few weeks of life before exams, but it’s possible.
        • chaosite 5y ago
          Cramming is not memorization. It's not optimal studying, sure, but you've still learned something.
          • treis 5y ago
            In my experience there's little long term retention from cramming.
            • vlovich123 5y ago
  • ModernMech 5y ago
    This is tough because it creates a strong incentive for them to make bad long-term decisions. Think of it from the perspective of a student: you're taking 6 other courses, all of them very demanding with graded assignments, except for this one class where the assignments are not graded. You have a limited budget of time over the week, and time is getting short. Do you: a) work really hard on your ungraded assignment and turn in your best effort for no impact on your grade or b) tell yourself that you'll make up the work at a later point in time, and then focus on your other graded assignments to make sure you optimize those grade. Then you will focus on the other course later on during spring break or something. Sure everyone says they'll do a but really, this sets a lot of students up for a trap. They think they will have time to make all of this up later, but really what will happen is they will just fall behind in the class. The assignments from other courses keep piling up, so the free time never really materializes. In fact, the same scenario repeats: the student will forego a second assignment, having already done so once before. Then the deferred responsibilities pile up and you end up with a student who is failing your course (even though on paper the grade is undetermined (kind of like a wave function), in all actuality it's just waiting to collapse to a grade of F at test time. Look at it this way: it's like a reinforcement learning problem. If your reward schedule is that you only give a reward to the agent when it achieves the end goal, sometimes training that agent takes a very long time; if the search space is too large, then the agent can go any which way and will take a long time to reach that goal. That's ungraded assignments. Instead, if you give the agent little rewards along the way when it makes some significant progress, then the agent can converge to the goal state much faster, in a way that avoid a lot of unpleasantness for everyone. I don't like giving Fs, and they don't like receiving Fs. I feel like if I give an F that's really more on me than them. Part of my job is not just to put course content into student brains, but to also shape their ability to manage their time and juggle a variety of projects. It's the kind of thing I spend many semesters (4) instilling in my students and grades are one of the effective tools I use to do so. You may say just do away with all grades and we can talk about that. There are different models we could use. But as long as others are using grades it's kind of a baked in assumption at this point. Very hard to change that kind of system.
    • hnfong 5y ago
      It does sound like a pointless arms race (between different courses) I majored in Law but took a couple CS courses on the side so I saw the contrast between traditions in different departments. CS courses had a constant stream of non-trivial graded homework. Even if I knew the materials it took me quite some time to complete them. Law courses usually one essay that counts for ~15-25% (or less frequently, a mid-term test), and the rest is the final exam. Obviously, both methods work (I guess). But if you're already in an environment where courses give out lots of graded assignments, your concerns definitely make sense.
  • opportune 5y ago
    When I was a college student, I wasn't diligent enough to always do ungraded assignments. I'd do reading, but for actual questions I'd only do them maybe 50% of the time when preparing for a test on the material. And out of my peers I felt like even doing assigned reading and trying to do ungraded homework put me well ahead of the pack. I think it's a maturity thing. Probably until I was ~24 I just didn't have the executive function to be able to do things like that. It seems beneficial to have graded assignments as a forcing function especially given some college students are literally teenagers. Also, I took an accelerated math curriculum as a freshman where I went from never having written a proof/knowing how to prove something rigorously, to pretty good at it. The feedback from the assigned homework was absolutely crucial in helping me learn these skills. It's easy to follow a proof from the answer section, but since there are usually several ways to prove something, it doesn't always help just to see an answer, plus you don't know what kind of divergences/hand waves are acceptable or not without feedback.
• raverbashing 5y ago
  So, I don't know where I read this (might have been here on HN) something like: If you create the rules for the pathological cases, then you're "optimizing" for those. Not for the majority. Whereas the pathological cases should be dealt exactly like those. Though sure, sometimes explanations can be better, but you can only play the game up to a point
  • ryandrake 5y ago
    On the other hand, if you don't address the pathological cases in writing, 90% of your time will be taken up by the 10% of people who rules-lawyer their way through life: Pointing out the lack of written clarity, complaining about 'hidden rules', writing a letter to object, appealing to your boss, appealing to boss's boss, lodging a formal complaint with leadership implying discrimination, getting actual lawyers involved, and on and on and on. There are a small number of people who just live for the thrill of taking advantage of poorly documented rules or process. They act disingenuously under the guise of sincerity. "I'm just trying to clarify: Nowhere is it written that [$obvious_bad_behavior] is not allowed, therefore how am I supposed to know??" People who spend more time scrutinizing their university's Policies, Rules and Regulations, and Code Of Conduct, looking for exploitable flaws, than they would ever spend actually reading their assignments. Happens in the business world too. I've seen salesmen who couldn't multiply two three-digit numbers together turn into Albert Einstein when the year's bonus structure got published.
    • raverbashing 5y ago
      Yeah that's why you can have a catch-all rule like "TA is conferred final discretion on evaluations" Though as I said, some things are good to have in writing, if it's an exception that happens with some frequency or some corner case that's not as rare as thought
    • kelnos 5y ago
      > I've seen salesmen who couldn't multiply two three-digit numbers together turn into Albert Einstein when the year's bonus structure got published. I kinda think you are arguing against your point, here. IMO these sorts of sales people are a result of over-specifying homework questions to this degree, because they haven't been shut down or washed out at the stage where you find out they can't deal with a reasonable (or even too-low) level of detail. But the problems you talk about in your first paragraph are real problems, and the solution is that the entirety of the school's administration needs to take a zero-tolerance approach with this sort of behavior. Rules-lawyering should be shut down at every step of the way. Yes, that might result in some actual lawsuits, which will suck up time and money, but I think that's just the price of educating people. And might still end up being less trouble overall.
• sanderjd 5y ago
  I thought the article was fairly strong except for in the two points you highlighted here. In the first case, I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life. And in the second case it seems like just not worrying about cheaters and letting it be their own funeral (or not) is optimal. I remember who the cheaters were in my classes and a couple decades later it's clear that to a one, I would much rather be in the shoes of the diligent hard workers than the cheaters.
  • finexplained 5y ago
    In the first case, they complain, and there's ~750 of them (in the course I TAed) so even a small number can take up a lot of time. The right way to think about it is for a small additional bit of time spent clarifying instructions you save yourself a larger amount of time later. In the second case, it does depend upon how much the instructor feels it's their duty to uphold the integrity of the grades in their class. I'm not sure if I would have made the same choice in my advisor's shoes, but that is the decision he made.
    • sanderjd 5y ago
      I was a TA too, though not for a course that large. I guess my feeling is that complainers should just be noted and ignored.
  • musingsole 5y ago
    > I still don't understand why you don't just mark their answer from creatively misinterpreted instructions wrong and move on with life Because the actual incidents are often in fuzzy areas where it seems possible the teacher's instructions were confusing. You're stuck making a character judgment of your student instead of evaluating knowledge. Over a career, it becomes easier to cordon off fuzzy areas than it is to risk a moral challenge.
    • professoretc 5y ago
      > it seems possible the teacher's instructions were confusing. Yes; I've been on both sides. I've written assignments that I thought were clear and unambiguous, only to find that a significant number of students misunderstood what I meant. They weren't intentionally trying to make the problems easier, they just weren't sure what I wanted. (And, of course, who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to make more work for themselves? A few students will do it both ways -- the easier interpretation and the harder one -- but most won't.) And on the other side, I've taken continuing education classes taught by other teachers where the instructions were confusing, ambiguous, or sometimes just plain impossible to follow ("You'll find the answers to this quiz in the article you just read." but the article was revised and now uses different terminology from the quiz.)
• ModernMech 5y ago
  > Then when TAing with him I saw how students could creatively misinterpret instructions, even when I could not imagine how to make them more precise. The best part is if you do make it more precise by specifying the problem in more detail, they will just not read it and ask questions that you answered explicitly in the assignment.
  • bee_rider 5y ago
    At least if it is in the assignment, you can passive-aggressively copy-paste the text of the document to them.
    • ModernMech 5y ago
      My favorite phrase is "As per the syllabus..."
      • bee_rider 5y ago
        OTOH, I've definitely taken classes with years out-of-date syllabi. It is a funny thing, where some instructors consider it to be the fundamental contract between them and the student, and others consider it to be an annoying bit of extra busywork.
  • leetcrew 5y ago
    sometimes "precise" in the mind of the instructor is "unintelligibly technical" to the student. I'm tutoring an (ESL) friend through an intro to programming course right now, and every time she gets an assignment she sends me the full text of it just to ask me what the instructions mean. to me, the instructions are almost describing line-by-line exactly what to write. but to someone who isn't already at the level where they can just read and understand random pages on cppreference, it's basically impenetrable. this is a course designed for people who not only have zero programming experience, but also don't even intend to pursue a CS major/minor.
• wuyishan 5y ago
  Did someone ask the students why they were cheating or creatively interpreted instructions? And then tried to address the underlying problem?
  • ryan93 5y ago
    Seems like a trivial thing to say there is an underlying cause. Student should still be failed for cheating. Definitely not like a research physicists job to address a students personal issues
  • chias 5y ago
    You can't address the underlying problem that a difference in an A and a A- could very well have lasting effects on a person's life. You can't address the underlying problem of someone making it to their late teens and being a little shit. You can't address the underlying problem that some people don't even really want to be in your class but "have" to take it because they want a degree. You can't address the underlying problem that some students have spent the last 19 years rules-lawyering their parents and always getting their way. You can't address the underlying problem that any concessions you make for the 20 year old mother of two struggling with two full-time jobs on top of college will also be vehemently claimed by the stoner 20 year old with a parent on the Board and who thinks college is awesome except for the classes. You can't address the underlying problem that the university gave you a class size three times what it would need to be for you to be able to provide each student with the requisite attention to really address anything other than "did they meet the criteria".
• vishnugupta 5y ago
  > class of 1400 Is it a normal thing in the west? The largest class I’ve been part of in India had 105 students and I thought that was nuts. 1400 is like crazy to me.
  • omegaham 5y ago
    1400 is huge. It's common at large state universities for the introductory classes to have somewhere between 200 and 300 students. The professor lectures in a large auditorium, and grading (and questions!) are delegated to a staff of TAs. If you get a good TA and have some good classmates, it's totally fine. Unfortunately, it's common for your TA to be crap, at which point grading becomes a nightmare. I avoided all of this by taking introductory classes at the community college, where they teach the same material to classes of 25 students.
  • gruez 5y ago
    "class of 1400" just means a given course has an enrollment of 1400 in a given semester, not necessarily that they packed 1400 students into one lecture hall and taught them all at the same time.