Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

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This is tough because it creates a strong incentive for them to make bad long-term decisions. Think of it from the perspective of a student: you're taking 6 other courses, all of them very demanding with graded assignments, except for this one class where the assignments are not graded. You have a limited budget of time over the week, and time is getting short. Do you: a) work really hard on your ungraded assignment and turn in your best effort for no impact on your grade or b) tell yourself that you'll make up the work at a later point in time, and then focus on your other graded assignments to make sure you optimize those grade. Then you will focus on the other course later on during spring break or something.

Sure everyone says they'll do a but really, this sets a lot of students up for a trap. They think they will have time to make all of this up later, but really what will happen is they will just fall behind in the class. The assignments from other courses keep piling up, so the free time never really materializes. In fact, the same scenario repeats: the student will forego a second assignment, having already done so once before. Then the deferred responsibilities pile up and you end up with a student who is failing your course (even though on paper the grade is undetermined (kind of like a wave function), in all actuality it's just waiting to collapse to a grade of F at test time.

Look at it this way: it's like a reinforcement learning problem. If your reward schedule is that you only give a reward to the agent when it achieves the end goal, sometimes training that agent takes a very long time; if the search space is too large, then the agent can go any which way and will take a long time to reach that goal. That's ungraded assignments.

Instead, if you give the agent little rewards along the way when it makes some significant progress, then the agent can converge to the goal state much faster, in a way that avoid a lot of unpleasantness for everyone. I don't like giving Fs, and they don't like receiving Fs. I feel like if I give an F that's really more on me than them. Part of my job is not just to put course content into student brains, but to also shape their ability to manage their time and juggle a variety of projects. It's the kind of thing I spend many semesters (4) instilling in my students and grades are one of the effective tools I use to do so.

You may say just do away with all grades and we can talk about that. There are different models we could use. But as long as others are using grades it's kind of a baked in assumption at this point. Very hard to change that kind of system.

I would be curious to know the name of that school.

> Memorization is not going to help you solve math problems.

On the contrary, memorization is the way most people I know got through most of their math classes, at least through calculus and linear algebra. You memorize the steps by rote repetition without really learning why they work, then the test is mostly an exercise in guessing which steps and formulas you should apply to the given problem.

So I've taught a lot at the university level, and reading this and the original blog post they were responding to I realized that I gradually shifted in how I saw exams.

The traditional model, the one implicitly adopted in the posts, is one where the instructor presents material, maybe with some discussion or engagement with the material in the form of activities or assignments, and then evaluates understanding on an exam of some sort. In this model, the exam is a measurement. It makes sense from this standpoint that all you really need is some megaexam that measures your comprehension of the material, and if you pass it, you pass. There is something to be said for this in all sorts of areas of life.

There's another model, though, where the teacher is a sort of coach. In this paradigm, your role as instructor isn't just to present material and then measure it, but to provide incentives along the way for the student to engage with the material and process it. In this model, the exam is activity. You present a series of quizzes or exams for the student to problem solve, and you incentivize this by giving credit or not giving credit. It's the equivalent of training drills in sport. All those assignments and midterm exams are incentives for staying engaged with the material along the way, to practice.

I suppose you could say something like "well taking the final exam repeatedly could serve that role, and you can't literally give the same exam over and over again due to cheating and learning to the test, so what you'd really be doing is giving multiple exams, which is kinda like assignments" but then at that point you've redefined things so much it's a moot point. There's also little point in assigning material the student doesn't understand yet, so what you end up with is what usually is done, which is units, with assignments or interim exams that are graded along the way.

Ideally you'd have tailored material, activities, and exams that are tailored to specific students and their specific progress, but in practice at universities there's just not enough resources to do that. It's too expensive, if you include social components as part of the learning process. There are also general trends that are too hard to ignore (most students whereever you are will be in some peak of a bell curve of some sort), and so you end up with what usually happens (which is sort of the point of the author).