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I think we're headed into a world where remote degrees have little value for this reason. Universities which have remote or take-home exams won't be far behind. Which sadly only makes it more of a rich kids' game, because the name-brand universities become the only ones that can be trusted. You see an out-of-state university that isn't a household name on someone's resume and you can't tell if it's one where students…
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IMO many CS classes should be lab based already, except the theory heavy ones. I still wonder why MIT needs to test students of OS courses on paper when the labs cover a lot of the ground. If I can do well in the labs I wouldn’t bother to memorize stuffs for the exams.
You have to test to make sure the student who you are giving the grade to is the student who did the work. Without certifying someone’s abilities, the degree doesn’t mean much.
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> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now…
> I think everybody should be able to write cursive As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?
The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
His research is in Game Theory. He should have realized that, in a situation where all competitors are (possibly) using LLMs, the game theoretic optimal choice is to use LLMs.
"We economists understand reality as a set of people responding to optimization problems with restrictions."
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Doing work with handwriting helps in learning the material. I don't know why that works, but my experience (and others') clearly shows it does.
And I strongly disagree. The moment I have to write stuff down my focus is gone and I might as well be taking a nap. And having to read my own handwriting assures I’ll never look at that page, again. Different strokes
I mean, I have no way of knowing if it's the former or the latter. But I've been noticing recently when people treat their traits as changeable and when they treat them as core to their being. I don't really have any faith that, in most cases, one can differentiate the two as much as one thinks one can.
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> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now…
What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
(Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)
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"best not to blame the students" There are dozens for every one who didn't get the opportunity to attend an Ivy. The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. I'll note as a hiring manager the college degree won't be worth shit unless the school can show their students have any integrity.
I doubt it. The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions like law. Everywhere else it is just collaboration or learning or simply something nobody cares about. I would say that tech largely rewards the behaviours people in academia call cheating.
What? The concept of cheating exists in marriages, sports, relationships, business agreements, accounting, and nearly every facet of human life.
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> It's news to me that they weren't already. It’s an old (and outdated IMO) tradition at some Ivy Leagues, as the article notes. It may have worked in the era when students had a little more fear of repercussions and a little more sense that cheating on a test would only cause them problems when courses got harder later. Now it seems there is little interest in dealing with cheating, as evidenced by how hard it was f…
It's an old enough tradition that there are jokes that rely on you knowing the tradition. My favorite: professor known for being VERY strict tells class repeatedly in weeks leading up to exam, "You will have exactly two hours to finish your exam, and no more. I will not accept exam booklets turned in even one minute past the two hour mark: they will score a zero. Be warned." Exam day comes, and all but one student ar…
Nobody would hire a chess coach and then use Stockfish to cheat on the problems. Whatever the students are paying for here, it certainly isn't an education.
As a university professor, I honestly don't understand the point of grading. Who will look at and care about grades? Likely company HR. But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free? Also, grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.
Wow. Do you care at all about the reputation of your university? I worked briefly in post-secondary CS education a long time ago, before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today, and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job. Also, grades have long been inflated Then stop inflating them. This is also what standardised testing is good for --- but no surprise, so many are against it becaus…
Interestingly, at Reed, there is a low emphasis (or even anti-emphasis) on grades — a student has to go out of their way to obtain them. Instead, emphasis is on written feedback and discussion, to understand one's performance on assignments.
All this to say: de-emphasizing grades in school is not necessarily a bad thing, and does not necessarily harm the reputation of the university. It can be a sign of good priorities (eg: learning, rather than numbers-gaming).