gchallen

6 ms·

1.
by gchallen 3mo ago
Harvard's larger courses enroll over 500 students. These are also introductory courses where you're most likely to see large cheating instances.
2.
by gchallen 3mo ago
> He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League I'd like a citation for this being the "biggest known scandal&q
3.
by gchallen 3mo ago
There are limits to what you can assess on timed assessments, and there are students whose performance on such assessments is not a good signal of their intellectual ability. In addition, at many institutions such tests are given infrequent
4.
by gchallen 3mo ago
A group of people sitting together listening to one person talk are not socializing. Once one person stops monopolizing their collective attention, then they can socialize. The more effective alternatives to lecture bring learners into more
5.
by gchallen 3mo ago
You're describing your response to a performance, not to a learning opportunity. Is it fun to watch a great performer? Sure. Is that an effective way to learn? No. Does lecturing have a place in disseminating ideas? Sure. I love that s
6.
by gchallen 3mo ago
Lectures have been an incredibly ineffective way to learn forever. Faculty continue to lecture, and we continue to build lecture-style classrooms, further enshrining this poor approach. Active learning works, and yet both faculty and studen
7.
by gchallen 4mo ago
They have not succeeded in forcing me, yet. But it's sad how many computing faculty apparently can't operate the basic online infrastructure needed to support their courses. Not that universities make it easy for us. And of course
8.
by gchallen 5mo ago
I took a course from him as a graduate student. I was not (and am still not) a theoretician. But I enjoyed the class and Professor Rabin's lectures. A friend of mine was one of his graduate students and a teaching assistant for the cla
9.
by gchallen 6mo ago
I teach computing at the University of Illinois. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how to adapt my own courses and our degree programs. I'm actually at a workshop about incorporating AI into computing education, so this wa
10.
by gchallen 8mo ago
I've built several bespoke "apps" that are essentially Claude Code + a folder with files in it. For example, I have Claude Coach, which designs ultimate frisbee workouts for me. We started with a few Markdown files—one with m
11.
by gchallen 9mo ago
Teach high school English.
12.
by gchallen 10mo ago
As a teacher, I agree. There's a ton of covert AI grading taking place on college campuses. Some of it by actual permanent faculty, but I suspect most of it by overworked adjuncts and graduate student teaching assistants. I've see
13.
by gchallen 1y ago
Immediate feedback from a good autograder provides a much more interactive learning experience for students. They are able to face and correct their mistakes in real time until they arrive at a correct solution. That's a real learning
14.
by gchallen 1y ago
We've been doing this at Illinois for 10 years now. Here's the website with a description of the facility: https://cbtf.illinois.edu/ . My colleagues have also published multiple papers on the testing center—operat
15.
Ask HN: What book should my CS1 students read?
5 points by gchallen 1y ago|5 comments
16.
by gchallen 3y ago
And the proud Illinois tradition of some mission-critical service crashing on the first day of class continues. In this case, it is an external service. However, I also suspect that the Duo outage is probably shielding other on-campus servi
17.
by gchallen 3y ago
> That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today. Potentially quite a bit. Here's some recent data about admissions into the highly-competitive Illinois CS program: https:
18.
by gchallen 3y ago
As a CS faculty member at Illinois (aka UIUC), I don't think that we fit this model. At least according to my quick reading of the article, ASU has a significant focus on inclusion as a core value. Overall Illinois does admit a large p
19.
by gchallen 3y ago
I've taught CS1 for going on 6 years now, to almost 10K students. I'll admit I found this post depressing to read. Because many of these pain points have obvious solutions that have been in use at many institutions for years. (Som
20.
by gchallen 3y ago
Absolutely. The article makes it sound like problems with poor advising are confined to community colleges. That's ludicrous. And it's not just state schools. When my wife went back to RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology, an ex
21.
by gchallen 3y ago
One of the biggest problems with overheads is that administrators are frequently simply unable to explain or justify them. The vast majority of research-active universities in the US are non-profit, and so it doesn't really make sense
22.
by gchallen 3y ago
This varies a lot from faculty to faculty and from position to position. Some will work nonstop regardless of how many grants they have. (If you have grants, use them; if not, write them.) For pre-tenure research faculty, behaving this way
23.
by gchallen 3y ago
I find this unsurprising. But I think the problem is upstream. Getting into a top-tier CS program has gotten incredibly competitive, and college has gotten incredibly expensive. At Illinois (where I teach), the university admits 40% of its
24.
by gchallen 4y ago
Related reading which I didn't see posted yet: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/mit-admiss... Lot of great stuff in there, but here's one quote: > Richer students don’t just
25.
by gchallen 4y ago
One thing to always note in these studies, particularly at the college level, is whether students were randomly-assigned to different sections. (I glanced at the study and couldn't confirm that this was how it was done, although they d
26.
by gchallen 4y ago
Language ability, manner of speaking, physical stature and presentation, reputation from previous interactions with staff, you name it—all worsened by the fact that many of these are probably going to be done by course staff. It's not
27.
by gchallen 4y ago
I teach CS1. A lot of this post resonated with me. In particular, I don't think that beginners are well-served by relying on AI to complete their assignments. Later on, once they've developed some computational thinking abilities,
28.
by gchallen 4y ago
> I prefer to create things that are infinitely reusable rather than teaching directly. Also: teaching directly can be done by creating things that are infinitely reusable :-).
29.
by gchallen 4y ago
> Although I do personally prefer that futurecoder rarely shows/tells without actually forcing users to run code and see for themselves, so they always have to be engaged. Yup. I agree with this approach. However, I think that in so
30.
by gchallen 4y ago
Thanks for sharing! This is really cool. I maintain my own learn-to-program site, so I have a sense of how much work this is. One interactive component that we use heavily that might interest you for futurecoder is what we call an interacti

More ›