Viewing profile — gchallen

Harvard's larger courses enroll over 500 students. These are also introductory courses where you're most likely to see large cheating instances.

> 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 citat…

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 ad…

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 mor…

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 h…

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 appr…

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 th…

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…

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 inc…

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…

Teach high school English.

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 …

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 the…

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 p…

tl;dr: I teach introductory computer science (CS1) at the University of Illinois (https://www.cs124.org/). What book should my students read to help introduce them to the field of …

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 tha…

> 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 …

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…

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 hav…

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 bac…

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 …

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, writ…

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…

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 …

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…