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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”

#31

Post by philwelch »

lumb63 wrote: post #25
com2kid wrote: post #5

My 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…

A similar phenomenon I’ve found, is if I know something can be done, I will work at it until it is done. For example, I’ve come up with solutions in interviews that I thought were the best, and then the interviewer says, “can it be done in O(n) time?” At that point, something clicks in my brain that says, “oh, of course it can!” If only I could find a way to tap into that in advance.

There is a possibly apocryphal story of Heisenberg and the other German a-bomb scientists basically doing this in captivity upon learning of the success of the Manhattan Project (not building a working bomb, but reasoning out how it was done!)

Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

#32

Post by hughes »

xupybd wrote: post #21

I remember a lecturer responding to similar feedback from one of my class mates. I'll never forget his reply. "Life is hard. Then you die"

All I remember from Linear Algebra is my lecturer telling us "everybody dies alone".

Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

#33

Post by xupybd »

barry-cotter wrote: post #29
xupybd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in New Zealand you cannot go directly into a PHD. You have to get a first class honours or complete a masters before you can start a PHD.

An honours degree is a Bachelor’s degree. It’s a Bachelor’s degree, with honours.

Correct, my wording was poor. You can go from Bachelor's to PHD but only if you achieve first class honours.

Here honours is an additional year of study as well.

Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

#34

Post by com2kid »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #11
com2kid wrote: post #5

My 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…

I would hate open-ended questions like that if I didn't know the professor and I didn't know the grading, because it relies on the professor's ability to evaluate what is reasonable justification. I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student. For example, if I was a black man and the teacher was white, my essays about slavery would be n…

> I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student.

He was a quality professor who gave full marks to answers that disagreed with what he presented in class, so long as the answers were well justified.

You are right though, these types of exams can easily end up becoming a game of "can I answer how the professor wants me to answer".

Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

#35

Post by bigmattystyles »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #11
com2kid wrote: post #5

My 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…

I would hate open-ended questions like that if I didn't know the professor and I didn't know the grading, because it relies on the professor's ability to evaluate what is reasonable justification. I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student. For example, if I was a black man and the teacher was white, my essays about slavery would be n…

Replace professor with TA. But yea, bias on subjective questions is a thing for sure. Racism is probably the big one, though in your scenario, a white student could wonder, if you, a theoretical black student, got a better grade because the professor didn’t want to appear racist. You can drive yourself insane thinking about it.

Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

#36

Post by heavyset_go »

com2kid wrote: post #5

My 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…

I had a teacher that did that in high school, but they were clearly looking for certain answers to open ended questions. An aspect of the class was determining just what kind of answers the grader would grade highly over other equally valid answers.

At least with other kinds of tests, there's much less room for bias or interpretation, even if it still exists.

Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

#37

Post by cge »

trynewideas wrote: post #8
pshaw wrote: post #2

via 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, w…

>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

It can be a tricky problem. In more academic fields, I think there's a tendency to not weight grades very heavily in graduate applications, instead focusing on undergraduate research, recommendations, connections to research in your department (obviously, a research group directly wanting a student, and having funding for one, is all but a guarantee of admission), and maybe courses taken. Unlike for undergraduate applications, you'll often have few enough applications after filtering out obviously-unsuitable applicants that you can have discussions about specific individuals, and there will often be enough information about them as individuals that you can make decisions based on that, rather than grades.

But at the same time, at least in the physics programs I was involved in, I got the sense that out of concern for grades potentially affecting futures or discouraging comfort with uncertainty and exploration, once classes were at a point where everyone was probably going to be going to graduate school, many ended up being de facto pass-fail: for the most part, everyone who showed a good understanding of the material would be given an A, and everyone who didn't would get a tap on the shoulder at some point and a suggestion that the professor would do whatever was necessary to let them drop (usually far past the ordinary drop deadline). I also recall that, for example, Kip Thorne simply refused to teach classes that were not pass-fail.

Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

#38

Post by solarmist »

xupybd wrote: post #33
barry-cotter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An honours degree is a Bachelor’s degree. It’s a Bachelor’s degree, with honours.

Correct, my wording was poor. You can go from Bachelor's to PHD but only if you achieve first class honours. Here honours is an additional year of study as well.

That's another big difference with the US. Honors are about GPA here, nothing else.

The whole A-level system was confusing for a long time because of this kind of conflation of terms between the systems.

Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

#39

Post by abdullahkhalids »

cge wrote: post #12

Part of the difficulty with emotional views of problem sets and tests at universities is not so much that these sorts of problem sets are emotionally trying themselves, but that from the student perspective, going between institutions and class levels, the style, grading and expectations for problem sets and tests can change quite quickly. While I strongly prefer the sorts of problem sets being described, and preferr…

I can give you prof perspective on this. Going between different stages of education, you can't really double or triple the amount of time you study, but you need to change your study and thinking techniques to learn 2x or 3x more [1].

The problem is that if the teachers try to set up too easy a ramp at the start of a new stage, many students refuse to upgrade their study/thinking techniques. They continue to use suboptimal methods from their last stage, because its easier. But before they know it, they progress to a point where their suboptimal techniques are wildy unrealistic. At this point, they try to upgrade, except its much harder to upgrade your techniques at MATH301 then it is at MATH101.

One way out of it is to jolt incoming students with assessments where the old techniques simply don't work, and they are forced to upgrade immediately. It is kind of cruel, but it works well.

[1] For instance, a freshman PHY101 Mechanics course covers the same material as 1-1.5 years of high school with higher difficulty.

Re: In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”

#40

Post by defrost »

mhh__ wrote: post #24
dekhn wrote: post #20

The extra-credit question on one of my finals in grad school was: "What is the time-resolved fluorescence of a fluorophore in 4 spatial dimensions?" We had covered 2D and 3D cases in class. my housemate started the question on Friday night (after finishing the regular questions) and was done some time Monday- she said it was pretty hard problem that involved deriving several new equations for 4 spatial dimensions, th…

Do you come from a parallel universe with an extra spatial dimension

Fluorescence is spectrum shifted retransmission.

Energy arrives on some wavelengths, it departs on others.

"Three spatial dimensions" Vs. "Four spatial dimensions" is suggesting the existence of a further spatial dimension orthogonal to our own and is a bit fanciful, however ...

It's legit to look at the evolution of analytic forms from 2 to 3 to 4 to higher (N) dimensions not just for the fun of abstraction but also for the application to phase spaces [1] .. where systems are described using multiple independent orthoganl dimensions to plot the system state at any time and the transitions from one state to another.

I see no issue with looking at energy transposition through phase space, and there are applications.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space

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