Comment by eru
8 months ago
> I don't see why this is so hard, other than the usual intergenerational whining / a heaping pile of student entitlement.
You know that grading paper exams is a lot more hassle _for the teachers_?
Your overall point might or might not still stand. I'm just responding to your 'I don't see why this is so hard'. Show some imagination for why other people hold their positions.
(I'm sure there's lots of other factors that come into play that I am not thinking of here.)
...and yet, somehow we managed?
> Show some imagination for why other people hold their positions.
I say that as someone who has also graded piles of paper exams in graduate school (also not that long ago!)
I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if the primary objection really is that teachers have to grade, then no, I don't have any sympathy.
It sorta depends on the material… I always thought paper programming tests were dumb: when I was taking them and when I was proctoring/grading them. It is not that similar to writing a program in an IDE where it will tell you if you make a little mistake, and often help you work your way through it.
We made it. But, that’s survivorship bias, right? We can’t really know how much potential has wasted.
Hear, hear!
Doing programming on paper seems to me like assessing someone's skills in acrobatics by watching them do the motions in a zero-gravity environment. Without the affordances given by the computer, it's just not the same activity.
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> ...and yet, somehow we managed?
People in the past put up with all kinds of struggles. They had to.
> I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if the primary objection really is that teachers have to grade, then no, I don't have any sympathy.
I have no clue what the primary objection really is. I was responding to "I don't see why this is so hard", which just shows a lack of imagination.
You’re making it seem those guys worked the fields 14 hours straight. It’s just some paperwork..
Why can't the teachers use LLMs to grade?
Ah, the eternal dream of offloading all human labor to machines. Why can't teachers just let an LLM grade? Because, of course, nothing says "educational integrity" like a glorified autocomplete deciding whether little Timmy's essay on Shakespeare adequately captures the existential dread of Hamlet. Sure, let's trust a model that hallucinates citations. But fine, if we're really committed to stripping all nuance from education, why stop there? Let's just plug students into Anki's FSRS algorithm and call it a day. Just assign grades based on how fast their retention decays, because nothing says "holistic assessment" like reducing a human being to a set of coefficients in a spaced repetition formula. Never mind that actual learning involves things like critical thinking or, heaven forbid, creativity. No, no, we'll just reduce the entire process to a forgetting curve. Because nothing inspires a love of knowledge like treating human minds as poorly optimized flashcard decks, mechanically processed and discarded the moment their retention scores dip below acceptable thresholds.
In general – why I'd put my effort into visiting (and paying for) a school and learning in such case? That's not what schools are for. I can get any amount of grades I want from LLM myself.
Grading is already mechanical, it's just a human does it. I'm not sure what you're objecting to here.
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Might be interesting. You can at least use modern AI to turn scans of hand-scrawled-on paper into something readable.