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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

#241

Post by jrapdx3 »

viccis wrote: post #215
jrapdx3 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treating many ADHD adult students some did take advantage of accommodations available to them. Problems with test-taking varied, but common issues were getting distracted by extraneous stimuli in "regular" classrooms. Frequently ADHD students were slow readers and really did need/use extra time. But the biggest problem was test-taking anxiety, often quite prominent, contributing to difficulty with tests. Interestingl…

Part of the problem here is that this college has <5% acceptance rate. Very hard to get into and prestigious. The students who get in have been minmaxing and exploiting every advantage they can for their entire life.

> The students who get in have been minmaxing and exploiting every advantage they can for their entire life.

Not a school I'd be tempted to apply to. Scholastic competition is one thing, but scrapping for every conceivable speck of "I'm better than the next guy" is not a bit attractive. I wonder about the campus atmosphere. Seems likely contesting would be a hard to break habit. I feel tense just thinking about it :/

Of course, ADHD students are less likely to achieve near-perfect grades than non-ADHD peers. Though it's not impossible for an ADHD student to succeed. Anyway, not at all uncommon for a student to do very well until subjects become more complex and challenging. Conceivably a student could look promising, but then suddenly have great difficulty keeping up.

So a safe bet that at least a few students at the top-level school have ADHD. If the school offers little or no accommodation, affected students probably have to accept getting educated elsewhere. Fortunately, more than not ADHD treatment is effective, a favorable response can make a pivotal difference in the student's outcome.

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

#242

Post by talon8635 »

khazhoux wrote: post #154
talon8635 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Classic “get over it” condescension. Some people are unable to control their strong physiological reaction to in-person judgement. Go tell professional orchestra players who rely on propranolol to control their stage fright to just grow up and start becoming a “proper functioning adult.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.70031 https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-night-at-the-symphony/ar...

Those are proper functioning adults. Maybe they need meds. Most don’t, but I never said no one does.

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

#243

Post by golem14 »

Fun story: Final oral exam (in history, I believe -- a thing back then), I took a whole A4 paper and turned it into hundreds of little balls in front of 3 teachers over the duration of the oral exam.

I had no idea I was doing this until one of the teacher pointed to the heap in front of me, but it saved my bacon as I did otherwise well.

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

#244

Post by otterley »

fluidcruft wrote: post #236
otterley wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your brother actually a full tenured professor? Does he bring in grants and endowments and is well known in the research community? Is he being threatened with serious punitive action for not giving into individual student demands? There is a tremendous difference in treatment between those who are fully tenured and those who aren’t. Lecturers and adjunct professors are frequently treated differently, and I accoun…

I don't give a shit what you "accounted for", you're hot air with no teeth in the game passing yourself off as some sort of "expert" or knowledgeable about anything. I might as well talk to a LLM.

You’ve gone fully off the rails and are making things personal. I’m done with this thread.

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

#246

Post by fluidcruft »

otterley wrote: post #244
fluidcruft wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't give a shit what you "accounted for", you're hot air with no teeth in the game passing yourself off as some sort of "expert" or knowledgeable about anything. I might as well talk to a LLM.

You’ve gone fully off the rails and are making things personal. I’m done with this thread.

I appreciate you and that you still believe the lies of how academics works.

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

#247

Post by Aurornis »

subhobroto wrote: post #131
Aurornis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

> 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. I actually appreciate this question very much because this question is extremely pertinent to our discussion. Before I continue my response, I want to t…

> i. Would it be sufficient if they proved they understood what addition, subtraction, multiplication and division was? Or do they need to be able to correctly calculate what 4592 * 314 is? What if they could show you using diagrams of squares and rectangles why (a + b)* 2 expands to the equation it does but refused to chart out results for various values of a and b?

I’m not an educator by profession but I’ve done a lot of training and mentoring.

There is no replacement for actually doing the work. People who study something but don’t go through the exercises feel they understand topics better than they do. It’s only when they are put in a position where they have to apply it that the cracks in their understanding are revealed.

This would 100% result in students who thought they could explain multiplication but only had a surface level idea. The knowledge would also be fleeting because actually doing the thing makes the knowledge stick more than just observing and understanding the thing.

So yes, you still need to have the students do the thing.

Replace math with writing and it will be more obvious. It’s easy to look at someone’s writing and critique it. It’s much harder to write well without practicing.

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

#248

Post by userbinator »

singingtoday wrote: post #222
userbinator wrote: post #133

It was already long-standing practice, when I was teaching many many years ago, to interview suspected cheaters (it's usually quite obvious) to see if they actually knew what they claimed they knew.

Only the dumb ones are obvious. In my school (SFU/BC) most of the students in almost all of my classes cheated. VERY FEW got caught. I heard instructors say all too often that it was obvious when somebody was cheating, but somehow they missed the guy paying his cousin to write the final.

Sometimes it's just an empty threat, and instructors don't want to deal with the rest of the fallout.

Even more so these days with the infusion of identity politics in education.

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

#250

Post by jltsiren »

subhobroto wrote: post #240
jltsiren wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had two main points. First, employers favor applicants from prestigious schools over those from less prestigious schools, because prestigious schools are more selective. That seems to be at least as true in the US as in Finland. Second, theoretical education is more useful in the long term, because it's a better foundation for learning new skills. It can be a disadvantage when you are trying to get your first job,…

I heard your points - you communicated them very well. I failed to communicate that the first, while true, isn't going to matter in a few years time and the second is not true. I will repeat what I said - if an employer arbitrarily restricts their talent pool to legacy credentials, they are optimizing for signaling rather than raw productivity. By 2026, there is overwhelming anecdote and evidence that credentials and…

The actual Finnish kid who wrote a somewhat successful OS kernel was born in Helsinki, to an upper middle class family with a communist father. He chose to study in the most prestigious university in the country, largely due to his family ties. Because the CS program was theoretical, it didn't take that much of his time. He could enjoy student life and also pursue his other interests. The OS kernel emerged from the latter.

That's what education in a research university is like, when you actually take advantage of it. You don't have to focus on whatever seems useful and practical in the short term, you don't have to compete against your peers, and you don't have to overwork yourself. Instead, you have a socially acceptable opportunity to study whatever interests you, and you hopefully gain the attitude that you can learn whatever you need to learn.

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