Comment by neilv
19 days ago
That homework setup sounds awful. I wonder how much it was shaped by educators, and how much by techbros.
19 days ago
That homework setup sounds awful. I wonder how much it was shaped by educators, and how much by techbros.
Unfortunately, the setup I'm talking about is the norm these days. It's the MyLab and Mastering software offered by Pearson.
It doesn't just stop at physics. I've seen it used in math courses and economics courses as well.
Sometimes professors will setup the system so that you can redo the problem with different numerical inputs for the variables, and that approach is fine to me as it lets me learn through trial and error without negatively impacting my grade.
Yeah the outsourcing of homework and grading to publishers is a sorry state of affairs.
It's on educators. It started well before tech.
They want kids to do homework, so they give a few free marks for doing it. Kids cheat and ignore anything not marked because that's how people respond to incentives. Then the lecturers wonder why no-one is doing stuff that isn't marked, and try to fill in the gaps by marking more things until they run out of capacity to police it all.
There are upsides to continuous assessment, but it's effectively micromanagement and has all the predictable downsides. "I applied hard incentives to make people give me X and Y, so why don't they they game the system, and why don't they also do Z, shocked picachu face."