31–38 of 38 posts
Engineers have one more grade than the rest of us: fail, 3, 4, 5
It wouldn't work. Homework is there so that you learn the material well before the exams instead of cramming. If it doesn't count towards the final grade, people won't do it. I had a professor who said that having frequent (like twice-weekly) quizzes, which has the some purpose as assigning homework, had reduced the number of failures in the class considerably.
But with this system, the "safe" option is still to do all the homework assignments. If you're implying that making them option "punishes" the "bad" students (by bad I simply mean more likely to fail), then by that logic requiring the homework punishes the "good" students.
It seems to me that learning material over a long period of time is better than just "crashing" for exams, which this author's proposed system would encourage. It is easy to imagine that a student will skip an assignment at one point, then stop doing homework altogether. The student will realize he should have done the homework toward the end when he realizes his grade, but by then it will be too late -- his homework…
His suggestion just saves the people who already know the material or who learn in other ways than homework from being penalized by having to do a ton of pointless busy work. If a person who thinks they can learn the material without doing the homework ends up trying to cram and then failing the test, that's his/her own problem. That person should just do the homework unless they're sure that they can learn the mater…
It seems that the prevalence of homework => test in schools today is a result mainly of larger class sizes requiring the teacher to make compromises for students with varying levels of ability, motivation, and parental involvement.
Making homework optional across the board (e.g. you can get an A if you ace the exams) is silly. It makes sense for a few courses (e.g. freshman writing, calculus sequence, intro language) which exist to train a specific mastery that can be objectively tested in a short period of time. It doesn't make sense, though, to pass a CS major based on exams alone (as opposed to programs), an English major without papers, or…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His suggestion just saves the people who already know the material or who learn in other ways than homework from being penalized by having to do a ton of pointless busy work. If a person who thinks they can learn the material without doing the homework ends up trying to cram and then failing the test, that's his/her own problem. That person should just do the homework unless they're sure that they can learn the mater…
I don't think it is only their own problem. Many people in school simply cannot recognize when doing the homework is necessary to learn the material versus when they already sufficiently understand it. Good teachers actually teach students how to learn effectively, and can help recognize how a student learns best. It seems that the prevalence of homework => test in schools today is a result mainly of larger class siz…
The whole point of a class is to go from a point of lesser knowledge to a point of more knowledge on a subject, but by simply averaging out student's scores over the course of the semester, there is no evidence of their progression. By using a combination of a moving average and the total average, a teacher can more accurately see how well the student is progressing.
"Making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic." I got an 89.4% in a CS class and asked the professor, whose office hours I frequented, if he could bump me up to an A since I was so close. His response was: "If you truly understood the material and deserved an A, you would have earned an A by a large margin rather than missing it by a small one."
Then your teacher is admitting that my design only the few tenths of percents surrounding the letter grade cutoffs are worth anything. I suppose it's just a matter of opinion, but I find this system remarkably arbitrary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it is only their own problem. Many people in school simply cannot recognize when doing the homework is necessary to learn the material versus when they already sufficiently understand it. Good teachers actually teach students how to learn effectively, and can help recognize how a student learns best. It seems that the prevalence of homework => test in schools today is a result mainly of larger class siz…
Then they should just always do the homework and be on the safe side. Anyway, even if they screw up once and think they can get by without the homework, that's one F and they'll quickly figure out that that approach doesn't work for them.