In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
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Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
#2Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
#3If you set this expectation up front, and explain the premise, this rules. If you simply present problems to students without this caveat, you are being needlessly cruel.
It seems like the author found a good approach.
Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
#4I was going to make an initial offhand comment about the author explanaing critical thinking skills, then I viewed the problem sets[0].
I def agree with the other commenter about setting expectations up front on these types of problems.
[0]: https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615063879381569536/pho...
Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
#5My favorite history professor in college gave open book essay exams.
He asked your opinion on topics, "what were the motivations of the leaders of the US revolution?" Even better were the questions that ended in "why or why not?"
There were no right or wrong answers, if you could justify your answer in a reasonable manner, you got full points.
Some students hated his tests, some students loved his tests. The students who hated his tests really hated them, the students who loved them, really loved them. (I was in the loved them group!)
Getting a Computer Science degree felt awfully similar, especially in higher level classes. Students of course had to do a senior project, 6 months to make something real in a group of 5. One group of students spun their project out commercially and and made some good money off of it.
My group make a photo library management app that was designed to allow for rapidly tagging hundreds to thousands of photos, utilizing custom experimental UI concepts. (This is when Google Picassa was still a big deal) When we started out we didn't know if we'd succeed, after all "experimental UI", "handles libraries with thousands of photos" and "desktop app written in Java" weren't typically phrases that went hand in hand back in the mid 00s.
But we did it! Which kind of summarizes my entire career in software engineering. If I'm not scared and uncertain of how I am going to do something, of if something is even possible, than I probably am not tackling a hard enough problem.
Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
#6Problem sets for a second year PhD?
Is that common in the US?
Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
#7Problem sets for a second year PhD? Is that common in the US?
First year is general classes (e.g. in economics that would be Micro, Macro, Econometrics, etc), 2nd year is classes more specific to your area of study.
Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
#8via https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1614958291066535936
Paul Graham:
> The reason his students find his problem sets "emotionally trying" is that they're getting a taste of what real work is like.
Which Shengwu Li seems to disagree with, since the author retweeted this thread: https://twitter.com/bradchattergoon/status/16151056145600839...
> Good on SL for setting expectations but I also want to comment a bit. If research is all about being comfortable with uncertainty, we have an adverse selection problem. I went through undergrad with this “comfort with uncertainty, just try things out” mentality and it hurt me.
> Specifically, it hurt my grades, which in turn has hurt my applications to grad school etc. I’ve had to do work post-undergrad to make up for it and demonstrate I am actually a good student. The mindset I had to take on is one where I seek perfect certainty that I know the answer to every problem on every problem set in full so I can score close to 100% to lock in an A. It’s to the point where I was “emotionally drained” from trying to be perfect or near perfect on everything.
> I am sure other students who make it to grad school have a similar mindset, and consequently a similar feeling of emotional fatigue from anxiety. I don’t have a better solution since the grading system is supposed to assess understanding of the material which would be important for grad school. But, it’s an adverse selection problem.
And also replied to it: https://twitter.com/ShengwuLi/status/1615106631821402118
> I agree. The problem is that research requires both technical skill and ability to deal with uncertainty. And one of these is easily measured (grades), while the other is, if anything, mildly decreasing in grades.
So the problem doesn't seem to be the students but use of grading as a system of measuring the progress of students who are on a research-heavy track of study.
Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
#9Problem sets for a second year PhD? Is that common in the US?
First year is general classes (e.g. in economics that would be Micro, Macro, Econometrics, etc), 2nd year is classes more specific to your area of study.
What about the following years?
In my PhD in the UK, I had three months of part-time classes and then onto my research.
Just curious, as I didn't realise it was such a difference
Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
#10Problem sets for a second year PhD? Is that common in the US?
Yes, the first two years in STEM Ph.D. programs are typically coursework-heavy and include qualification exams as part of your courses. You must pass X quals, of which Y must be from this subset.
Because of this, if you leave the program after the first two years, they will often issue a terminal master's degree as a consolation.