Comment by bradleyjg
11 hours ago
I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.
I think you need to go a level up. Forget the people that flunked the class. Did the people that get good grades learn anything? Really? Do you think they still know it?
Was learning the point for anyone or any institution involved?
I think for at least a couple of the students, they really did learn the subject well.
A couple students took me up on my offer to do private tutoring [1], and I do think that they benefited from it. A couple of them would even ask interesting follow-up questions [2].
Of course, there's a pretty strong selection-bias there: if they are actively looking for help from a professional, they probably have some interest in the subject matter, so it's difficult to know how much I helped compared to them just looking things up on Google and/or doing the homework, but I would like to think that I helped at least a little more than they would have had otherwise.
[1] On my own free time; I wasn't given any direct budget for office hours.
[2] e.g. one person became extremely interested multithreading and multiprocessing, and so I pointed him to the ZeroMQ guide and walked him through some basic farmout patterns...I should see how he's doing actually, I think he has a lot of potential.