Thread

1. nfrankel · 1790405760 · focus · HN ↗

   I have a fairly long experience of both teaching and grading, even though I stopped a couple of years ago. After a couple of years of trial-and-error, I think I found the "right" way:

   * Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot. Theory is necessary, but the attention span of people is very limited. * Grade either a homework assignment in the form of a real project with specifications. You give the assignment half-semester, so that students who start early can ask questions. Otherwise, grade a in-session exam, with every resource available, including the course and the whole Internet. However, you don't assess the knowledge, but if the student is able to apply their knowledge to the different tasks at hand.

   These approaches are now completely moot in the age of AI.

   I was surprised the first time a colleague asked me to do an oral exam. I thought it was a burden on people with poor social interaction skills. It went surprisingly well: you could see in a couple of minutes if the student had integrated the concepts of the course, even if they were shy. Now I wonder if it's the way to go. There's one caveat, though: it doesn't scale.

   1. leoedin · 1790406277 · focus · HN ↗

      I was thinking that one of the great ironies of artificial intelligence is that it will make good teaching even more labour intensive. Those kids that can afford the one to one tuition required to push past our natural inclination to be lazy will learn things, while everyone else will succumb to outsourcing all their thinking.

      There’s no way I’d have learnt everything I know now about software in today’s environment. So much of software development - debugging techniques, architectural decisions, structuring data etc is learned through trial and error. As the models get better is becoming easier and easier to just not look too closely at their output. I suspect it’s human nature.

   2. Propelloni · 1790406579 · focus · HN ↗

      Oral exams don't scale at the beginning with hundreds of students per course, agreed. So make them in-person written exams, German universities managed that just fine a few decades ago. Oral exams were reserved to advance from Grundstudium (basic) to Hauptstudium (main).

      In my very limited experience (I have German major degrees in Informatik and Philosophy, I was a TA for Logic in Philosophy) the more advanced the topic the thinner the attendance anyway.

      1. naveen99 · 1790423287 · focus · HN ↗

         They do scale if the examiner is an LLM.

         1. lostlogin · 1790468702 · focus · HN ↗

            The article mentions study content that AI has got confidently wrong. That’s going to be some crap markings.

            1. naveen99 · 1790646069 · focus · HN ↗

               If the ai is good enough to do the homework, it should be good enough to check the homework.

               I mean some people are good at Tetris and some aren’t. Tetris can tell you which ones are which.

               1. lostlogin · 1790670914 · focus · HN ↗

                  That’s the problem though - the article has an example of the AI screwing up the homework and the students don’t notice even when warned.
   3. lukehandcool · 1790407239 · focus · HN ↗

      The country of Argentina, despite its crippling debt, is able to provide free university education where the majority of classes for most majors are graded with an oral exam.

      They've shown that it is entirely possible to scale a system like that, as long as the society sincerely values the role of an educator.

   4. CrimsonRain · 1790414497 · focus · HN ↗

      It scales just fine. Use an AI to do oral exam (recorded). Flag the problematic orals and reevaluate the scripts/recorded session.

      Finally, if a student feels their result is unjustified, reevaluate the recorded session.

      1. Aeolun · 1790414860 · focus · HN ↗

         Use more AI to solve the problem of AI?

         1. CrimsonRain · 1790890278 · focus · HN ↗

            You never used fish oil to fry fish?

            Use the tool that's appropriate to solve an issue.

   5. universa1 · 1790416615 · focus · HN ↗

      The oral exams scale better than one might expect, at least if you're not just doing multiple choice exams and you have to actually grade the exam. The time spent on grading the exam could have also been spent on an oral exam... For bachelor level it's usually 15-20min (usually quicker for the well prepared students), and for master courses it is 30min.

      Usually you know after a few minutes if it's going to be a fail, and then otherwise you only need to figure out where on the passing scale the student ends up.

      1. kvemkon · 1790518954 · focus · HN ↗

         > and you have to actually grade the exam

         That's the point. As a professor you're allowed to outsource the grading of written exams to you assistants (ongoing PhD teaching stuff). But you must do an oral exam personally.

         > usually quicker for the well prepared students

         That's true. More time is needed only in case the answer is missing and you have to check whether you hit accidentally the only poorly understood material piece or there are more troubles.

   6. BeetleB · 1790470172 · focus · HN ↗

      > Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot.

      2 hours is a lot! In my universities, classes were either 50 minutes, or 70 minutes. I could handle 50 minute ones just fine, but would often have trouble with challenging courses that had 70 minutes. Particularly for stuff like math, I hadn't properly digested the material in the first half, and now he's already proving theorems with that material in the 2nd half. I can follow the logic, but the ideal is when you can digest the prior material before being exposed to theorems relying on them.

      Even when alternating theory/application like you say, the amount of attention I'd give to the application in the 70 minute class was less than the 50 minute one. I could follow, but I wouldn't think critically.

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