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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

#141

Post by fabian2k »

scarlehoff wrote: post #111
bonoboTP wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oral exams are still common in Germany and many European countries in case of smaller courses taken by 20-30 students in a semester, and sometimes even in larger courses, and the task of examining is then split among multiple professors and lecturers. In Hungary it's a pipeline. You go in a room, you pick a piece of paper out of a hat, which gives you some task or topic to prepare for. Then you sit down at a desk (th…

I'm not familiar with the German universiry system, but I think a 1 hour, 2 professors (or one professor and one PhD student) would be impossible to scale. A class of about 100 students could take an entire month! (or better, 2-months of professor-hours!)

But that is how certain exams are done right now. Though it's usually 30 minutes including overhead. It's not something you can do in classes with multiple hundred students, but it's certainly done at scale.

I was the PhD student in the room in dozens of these exams, and I toke some of them myself. But that was for classes with a bit less than 40 to maybe 60-80 students. The load for the larger ones was shared among professors, if I remember correctly. But it was certainly the case that a single professor spent 1-2 days doing nothing else but these exams.

And it was 1 professor and 1 PhD students, and those don't count. They essentially grow on trees and are always available, if you need some.

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

#142

Post by OptionOfT »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #35

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

Part of college is growing as a human, and part of that is social interaction.

For the same reason a lot of universities in Europe require you to take philosophy. It's completely unrelated to C++ or data-structures, but it adds to your acumen as a whole.

Not that different from some universities that require you to be able to swim[0].

[0]: https://perec.columbia.edu/swim-test-requirement

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

#143

Post by subhobroto »

jltsiren wrote: post #113
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…

Two points: There are two kinds of engineers in Finland. Some received a more theoretical education at research universities. Most went to more applied institutions that focus more on practical skills. Regardless of what employers say, they generally prefer the theoretical engineers from research universities. Because the higher status of those universities attracts more talented individuals, because theoretical unde…

> because theoretical understanding tends to stay valid longer than practical skills, and because it's easier to learn practical skills at work

depends. If you're building a datacenter and need welders to weld two very specific set of metals together, allocating a PhD in metallurgy to do that welding, I argue would be a huge misallocation of resources.

Now your argument seems to be whether the PhD in metallurgy can pivot to doing something else entirely compared to someone who has been narrowly trained to only weld two very specific set of metals together.

If I interpret your take on the matter, your point seems to be that the former is "intellectually superior and more flexible" than the latter.

I dont take that position - I find most humans to be extremely capable. Just because one human was able to grasp the intricacies of metallurgy doesn't necessarily imply they have more capability than someone who didn't.

The fact that employers in Finland can be so very picky says more about the productivity of Finland than the employee's capabilities. At peak productivity, Finland would just not be hiring anyone who could breathe but import labor because there's not enough people in Finland.

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

#144

Post by jambalaya8 »

talon8635 wrote: post #106
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 becom…

If you aren't capable of this, in most careers you won't be able to use your degree anyway. The only other even marginally acceptable compromise is something like the essay portions of what used to be sit down tests with only pen and paper, but longform and supervised closely.

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

#145

Post by zem »

LoganDark wrote: post #135
zem wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But please withhold you woe as a side note, "woe betide you" roughly means "you're in for a very bad time", not "I feel sorry for you".

"Woe" is also sometimes used to tell someone to just suck it up and deal with it. In those cases it is a way to make fun of someone for being too sensitive or complaining too much.

sure, but what I was pointing out here is that "woe betide you" is a specific idiomatic phrase. it's usually used as a threat, i.e. "woe betide you if you do that".

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

#146

Post by hackyhacky »

otterley wrote: post #52
hackyhacky wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a metaphor. They are literally the customer.

They're a customer in the same way that a martial arts student is a customer: getting your butt kicked is literally what you're paying for.

Sure. And just like with a martial arts student, if you kick their butt too hard, you will lose the customer and might get sued.

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

#147

Post by jambalaya8 »

talon8635 wrote: post #106
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 becom…

(Note I say this because optimally, this encourages less "supervisory" desires by others later in one's career. If your peers and overseers get out of your way, maybe you will relax more and not feel so anxious all the time. Sorry for the second comment not an edit, testing new HN clients.)

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

#148

Post by leros »

This is how we used to grade labs when I was a TA in college. Students worked in groups of two and showed up with a working project to get graded. Afterwards, we'd ask the two students questions and it was extremely obvious if one or both of them didn't work on it.

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

#149

Post by moffkalast »

zero_shift wrote: post #125
moffkalast wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective? Universities are entirely elective…

I feel this was already a severe problem pre-AI. From what I hear from my partner (in university administration), nearly half the students demand accomodations for disabilities. Many of those conditions are very difficult to falsify It doesn't feel good, but at some point we have to ask, can we support every single case, at the expense of the whole? I'd like to be convinced that's not a necessary tradeoff

I don't think it's that bad yet, but it's certainly on its way there. We're like at this intersection of lots of conditions that previously weren't documented becoming actual diagnoses, that pulling along a lot of peer-pressure kind of trendiness to have some kind of fault that makes you more unique, and the practicality of a system that was designed to give massive benefits to rare exceptions, for which now so many easily qualify on paper.

The list of conditions that qualify for what will most likely have to be redone completely from scratch.

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

#150

Post by hx8 »

scarlehoff wrote: post #111
bonoboTP wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oral exams are still common in Germany and many European countries in case of smaller courses taken by 20-30 students in a semester, and sometimes even in larger courses, and the task of examining is then split among multiple professors and lecturers. In Hungary it's a pipeline. You go in a room, you pick a piece of paper out of a hat, which gives you some task or topic to prepare for. Then you sit down at a desk (th…

I'm not familiar with the German universiry system, but I think a 1 hour, 2 professors (or one professor and one PhD student) would be impossible to scale. A class of about 100 students could take an entire month! (or better, 2-months of professor-hours!)

> would be impossible to scale

I think education is something better scaled horizontally than vertically. More schools, with more professors instead increasing the student per professor throughput. The classes where I learned the absolute most, and had the best experience, were closer in size to 25 than 100.

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