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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

#261

Post by hyperman1 »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #179
cloudie78 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, former student with social phobia and terrified of public speaking. Today: adult with no problems doing public speaking in front of hundreds. What fixed me: more public speaking and not having the option of avoiding the task.

Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for posting this. It drives me absolutely freaking crazy when people do the "Oh, I'm just not _____," having essentially decided they are not _____, and therefore will never learn or change. Like every time I hear "Oh I'm just not a math person." It's not that I expect everyone to like math because I do, not at all. But I do expect people to not artificially limit themselves. :/

I'm not a drawing person. I wish I could draw a lot better. I used to try once in a while, and the results were universally bad.

So a few years ago, I took a drawing course, and pushed it as fas as I could. The results were the best I ever did in my life, and not terrible, but still far from good. At this point, I've decided this is as good as things will get, and I should stop spending effort and focus on other things that I am good in.

If I happen to find myself in a situation that requires me to draw, I will make a honest effort. Maybe something will happen that makes me grow. But I have decided that for the forseeable future I am not a drawing person and that's fine.

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

#262

Post by InvOfSmallC »

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!)

it doesn't. in Italy we have been doing it for ages.

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

#263

Post by Athas »

cycomanic wrote: post #258
Athas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clarification for non-Danes: this post is not entirely accurate. Not all Master's courses in Denmark have oral examinations, and many courses before the Master's level (including elementary school) have oral exams. It is unrelated to the academic level, and instead related to the academic discipline and the size of the course. The latter is in my experience the main constraint, as oral exams are difficult to scale. T…

There was an interesting talk I heard a while ago about the scalability of oral exams vs written. They did quite a bit of study of typical exam preparation and marking times and the cross over point where oral exams were actually taking longer than written exams was surprisingly high, around 180 students or so. To be fair though I think they considered 15 min oral exams, but the gist is that in the scalability argume…

The problem is not the total time commitment, but the flexibility of when that time can be spent. The time expenditure for a written exam (writing the exam set, testing it, correcting submissions, having a grading meeting) can be spread over many weeks, with plenty of room to move things around to take care of other responsibilities, and easy tolerance for delays. Oral exams have to be scheduled in a dense block because students are only available during designated exam weeks, and any delays have cascading effects.

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

#265

Post by fennecbutt »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #238
sghiassy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with lifelong social anxiety. There is the concept of White Knuckling an event. If the anxiety is so far beyond your capability that start to panic, you only reinforce the fear instead of soothe it. That’s why exposure therapy with an anxiety ladder is important

Right, that’s the problem: for most people this works, but those it doesn’t work for, it can really fuck up. So what this amounts to in expected utility is you need guardrails before forcing things this way.

Well I think what ultimately helps is having a safe space to practice and learn in.

Fears are further reinforced if, when you trip over your words and get all anxious, your audience laughs at you rather than with you.

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

#266

Post by simonklitj »

subhobroto wrote: post #85
simonklitj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what skills you want the students to have. In e.g., philosophy, allowing students to write their assessments with the help of LLMs changes the students’ depth of understanding, as well as their ability to synthesize, formalize, and drum up their own arguments and objections. These are all useful skills, even in a post-LLM world.

> allowing students to write their assessments with the help of LLMs changes the students’ depth of understanding, as well as their ability to synthesize, formalize, and drum up their own arguments and objections indeed but LLMs improve these capabilities. Let me explain: Most educators behave as if using an LLM robs the student of their ability to think. That has not and never been my experience. You can just tell a…

> You can just tell an LLM to debate, find out inconsistencies and issues in your writing, and challenge you, and it will very well do that!

Sure, but the point is that you are supposed to be able to find these inconsistencies and issues in your writing. That is the skill.

Indeed, LLMs can be helpful as an alternative to a teacher, if thought of as a sophist (I have even done research on this [0]). But that is not the approach you are proposing.

If you want students to be able to reason about these things on their own, then LLMs doing the hard work of identifying the gaps in their logic is counter-intuitive.

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98197-5_31

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

#267

Post by erredois »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #214
silversmith wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have enough of a mastery over a subject to rapidly respond, maybe you are not fit to pass exam certifying your mastery over a subject.

I know world-leading experts in their field that avoid oral debates precisely because they don't think on their feet.

The article is light on details but I don't think they are proposing a debate anwsering questions or presentation. I would rather have the presentarion, and I would even allow them to have a one page note with outlines.

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

#268

Post by morningsam »

sandworm101 wrote: post #192
da_chicken wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of what fixed it for me. What really fixed it was three things: 1. Actually being very knowledgeable about the subject in question, to the extent that I can offer facts or well-reasoned opinion on the topic on essentially any reasonable question. In other words, not being a junior high school student asked to do a 15 minute speech on a topic drawn from a hat. 2. Not having the idea that the audience expec…

One thing doctor, and to a lesser extent lawyers, have to do is project confidence when they may in fact not have much. A doctor/lawyer regularly has to quickly become an expert on a subject, or seem like one, often overnight but sometimes much faster than that. Briefing something you are still new to, without getting it horribly wrong, is a skill that must be developed. I run into this in the military too. "The pers…

I would much prefer for a doctor who isn't sure to signal that fact somehow. It was annoying enough for LLMs to confidently lead you down wrong paths most of the time (they've gotten much better by now), we don't need humans doing it too. For lawyers it makes sense, of course.

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

#269

Post by sghiassy »

fennecbutt wrote: post #265
mananaysiempre wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that’s the problem: for most people this works, but those it doesn’t work for, it can really fuck up. So what this amounts to in expected utility is you need guardrails before forcing things this way.

Well I think what ultimately helps is having a safe space to practice and learn in. Fears are further reinforced if, when you trip over your words and get all anxious, your audience laughs at you rather than with you.

Agreed

And think of your whole education hinged on a presentation in front teachers and pupils.

Nightmare fuel for many

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

#270

Post by amanaplanacanal »

B-Con wrote: post #173
hx8 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The US has proved it can do horizontal scaling, as the majority of adults gets a college degree. The horizontal capacity is ineffectively used by having many degree mills and low-value degrees, but if we re-tooled the knowledge sets we could raise the bar.

Only about a third of US adults have a bachelor's degree or higher. Even if you count associates degrees it's still less than half.
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