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Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

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Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#101

Post by cwnyth »

azalemeth wrote: post #3

This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's ve…

This is also the case for many graduate programs in the US as well, but what this article is suggesting is that there are now specific oral exams to defend a student's paper, not just general oral exams.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#102

Post by SoftTalker »

datahack wrote: post #56

This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments. But what it does threaten to do is effectively abandon all the efficiencies of the written word. When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be han…

It shouldn't take long for educators suss out whether students know the subject they are talking about. You don't have to question them exhaustively to determine that they likely did or didn't do the work they are claiming. TFA is about high school projects, not PhD defenses.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#103

Post by silversmith »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #35

This is a nightmare for students that don't think on their feet.

If you don't have enough of a mastery over a subject to rapidly respond, maybe you are not fit to pass exam certifying your mastery over a subject.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#104

Post by Aurornis »

subhobroto wrote: post #58

The more I read about articles like these, I grow even more convinced that the education industry as a whole, regardless of the country or stature, has kind of lost their plot. Sometimes I even wonder if this is the outcome of sheer laziness, fear or both. When I speak to professors, teachers and students - It's also surprising that "top tier" institutions are fighting AI harder (outside extremely specific courses li…

> In my opinion, the bulk of traditional education has been a mix of memorization of facts, knowing inference rules, and applying inference rules to those facts, coupled with recall.

These are important skills to develop, even in a world with LLMs.

> All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best.

If a 3rd grader complained about having to learn multiplication because calculators exist, would you agree with them?

Why do we make kids learn how to do math if they can pull out their phone and open the calculator app? Because learning how to learn is important and there is value in understanding how the answer is produced, even if you have a machine that can produce it for you.

Universities can teach a separate class on how to use LLMs. The existing classes should be focused on teaching their existing subject matter, not becoming an extension of a how-to-LLM class

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#106

Post by talon8635 »

azalemeth wrote: post #3

This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's ve…

I have always disliked public speaking and oral defense since I was a child, to the point of fairly profound anxiety. But please withhold you woe—these people are, as I am today, adults. Masters students. Coddling them and holding low expectations has proven to be a sort of “killing them with kindness” approach to handling modern youth. People need to be encouraged (and required) to do things they don’t like to become proper functioning adults. I didnt like it, and I still don’t, as it the case with most everyone. But we all grow from it.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#107

Post by jsrozner »

As a thought experiment: In-person testing or oral defense approaches work until we get implants. If people have implants, what then? Demand that the implant be turned off? Demand that the implant's data connection be turned off? In the latter case, the person with more storage or a better local model wins.

In the long run, in the AGI world, if everyone has implants, then everyone is roughly equal because computer-aided computation will be better than what any individual can do. Those without implants are screwed.

(I don't want an implant; nor do I want others to have implants.)

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#108

Post by winter_blue »

azalemeth wrote: post #3

This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's ve…

This is truly awesome and fantastic, and I hope it becomes a thing all around the world.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#109

Post by whateverboat »

azalemeth wrote: post #3

This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's ve…

> Of course, woe betide those with social phobias...

The professors at my grad school had a very amazing tact to get through this as well. They had enough time for specific students who they knew struggled with such issues during the mid semester orals and then had an amazing way of getting answers from them even in the discomfort.

It is amazing how much can be done with soft talking, slow progression and pauses in between from professors who care.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#110

Post by scoofy »

jimbokun wrote: post #94
scoofy wrote: post #67

I had to do an oral defense of my thesis in graduate school. When you've spent months and months writing something extremely obscure... well, I'd hope that it's not that difficult.

You suddenly realize the foremost expert on the research in your dissertation…is you.

Yes!

A fun anecdote from my defense was that this element of logic "did not exist before some time" or something.

One of my citations was a book from like, the 1700's or something, and it absolutely blew away one of the committee members that I'd found it. He asked me "how on earth did you find this reference?" and I just told him that I look at all the math/logic libraries in Boston I had access to, I looked up all their logic books that predated the cut off I was looking for, and I skimmed them.

I didn't even have to leave my university's library, because one of the first five books had the counter-factual I was looking for. Sure, it was a rare book and I had read it in a special room, but it wasn't particularly hard to find.

Before that defense, I was 100% the only person alive with that information.

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