21–30 of 158 posts
How about challenging students with problems that are difficult even when modern technology is used to its fullest extend? Or teaching students how to build tools that solve their homework?
It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field. Some students will inevitably have access to tutors or parents who can give them the full answer. With wolfram|Alpha all students have access to this. What this really show is that homework isn't the best tool for gauging student prowess.
Homework's largely supposed to be about reinforcing the lesson for math courses. For other courses it's largely about reading which shouldn't be done in class. Tests/essays are for assessment.
You may cheat all you want on your homework, but if calculus tests are like they were when I was in college, taking your exam with no notes or calculator, if you've only cut and pasted from Wolfram Alpha all semester is going to lead you to getting an F in the course.
Grumble grumble back in my day grumble grumble
Dry lectures aren't the best way to learn something: hand-on work is. Listening to a teacher read a powerpoint is a waste of time, because you could just read (or watch a video) on your own.
But having an expert on the material standing over your shoulder, helping you through tough spots while you're working through it? That's valuable.
You may cheat all you want on your homework, but if calculus tests are like they were when I was in college, taking your exam with no notes or calculator, if you've only cut and pasted from Wolfram Alpha all semester is going to lead you to getting an F in the course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too right; it may help being able to just provide the answers, but homework made up a small percentage compared to the actual exams, which of course were done without any notes and were simple enough not to need a calculator. It may be difficult trying to teach these kids how to perform the math itself when they can show the homework, but ultimately they are failing themselves when it comes down to needing a fundamen…
My impression is that the article is about highschool students, where homework tends to be on the order of 75% of your grade simply because you get so much of it. If someone were really serious about abusing the service they could pull out a C in the class even with hard failures of the tests.
I think I found the problem.
I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of stuff. I met a bunch of interesting people and it was a blast.
I also fell asleep at my keyboard more than once. It was a beautiful summer, biking to work and working with what I still think is one of, if not the, best language ever.
Here's why all this is relevant - I came back to real life to study CompSci on these old Sparc machines. And it was like, here's the power button. What's an object in Java? What's a compiler? All reasonable stuff.
But: Wolfram Research and Mathematica had, in a sense, ruined my undergraduate life before it started. Why were we using all these bizarre tools? Can't we do this a million times faster? Why are we learning all these bizarre integrals?
It was similar to being denied graphing calculators in A-Level Mathematics (in the UK, think high school). I get it - we need to learn 'the basics' and survive without tools to some degree. But, it would have been nice to use them in some contexts and not just deny their existence.
There's an anecdote I think about Milton Friedman being shown people building a dam with shovels and not digging machines, to keep people employed in some God-forsaken country. He asked, why don't you use spoons instead? Then, more people would be employed.
Mathematica and Alpha are wonderful tools, and I highly recommend applying for an internship if you're of the right age or whatever the requirements are today.
You may cheat all you want on your homework, but if calculus tests are like they were when I was in college, taking your exam with no notes or calculator, if you've only cut and pasted from Wolfram Alpha all semester is going to lead you to getting an F in the course.
Too right; it may help being able to just provide the answers, but homework made up a small percentage compared to the actual exams, which of course were done without any notes and were simple enough not to need a calculator. It may be difficult trying to teach these kids how to perform the math itself when they can show the homework, but ultimately they are failing themselves when it comes down to needing a fundamen…
One of the easiest ways to inflate grades without explicitly lowering standards is to decrease the proportion of the final grade that depends on the midterm and final. Cut out the midterm for "more instruction time" and leave a 20% final. Homework is now worth an absurd 80% of the grade... that's no good. Throw in a project, participation, or auto-graded "e-labs" with infinite attempts. Suddenly it's really difficult to get anything less than a B unless you really just don't give a crap. But also kinda difficult to actually learn because So. Much. Busy. Work. And, on top of everything else, we're punishing the one student who's not cheating.
Any time I see a lower division syllabus where closed-book exams are worth less than 40% of the grade, I'm instantly suspicious.
> but ultimately they are failing themselves when it comes down to needing a fundamental understanding on the process itself.
Yup.
> It comes down to the students' willingness to learn, not how to thwart cheating on homework.
In fact, you can leverage the calculator or WA to teach the material at greater depth. No longer need lots of practice with trig identities or u substitution? Great. Maybe we can write a few proofs instead, or use the time to work through a large case study.
Am I the only one here that would program their TI-83 in high school to run equations for me so I didn't have to solve them by hand? I wasn't even that dev-savvy (and still am not), but it was super easy and was a huge time-saver on timed tests. I obviously had to learn the concept in order to program the equation, but once I did - why should I have to go through everything manually every single time?
We had the calculators force reset before every test.
You may cheat all you want on your homework, but if calculus tests are like they were when I was in college, taking your exam with no notes or calculator, if you've only cut and pasted from Wolfram Alpha all semester is going to lead you to getting an F in the course.