> Since education rather than money is calling the shots, we have the freedom to ask unheard-of questions.
Who is paying the bills, then?
> no grades
There's a reason why students cram at the end of the semester. Without pressure from grades, they won't do the work of learning. I know for a fact that I don't learn if there aren't exams and grades.
> I know for a fact that I don't learn if there aren't exams and grades.
The Wikipedia page about you says: “[Walter Bright] taught himself computer programming from the type-in programs in BASIC Computer Games” citing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28574770 as a source.
Was there a series of formal tests and grades involved there? Or do you disagree with your own claim that you learned computer programming from that untested, ungraded experience? Presumably most of your expert knowledge of compilers comes from practical experience implementing them yourself and independently studying other people’s implementations rather than from taking formal tests in graded university courses.
Just as you learned programming by satisfying your own curiosity, other people manage to learn about e.g. differential geometry, materials chemistry, entomology, Mesopotamian history, meteorology, electrical engineering, comparative linguistics, sports journalism, fine-art photography, pie baking, ... by similar self-directed experiences.
A formal education full of tests and grades can provide helpful structure for many students, but it is neither the most efficient nor the most effective way to get passionate students to learn and explore for themselves.
I have audited some programming classes, and learned very little, because I never did the exercises nor took the exams.
I know that there are some unicorns who learned math on their own. But I haven't encountered one in the real world.
(Ok, so I know one - Hal Finney. But that man was simply so smart, he learned it by flipping through the book, i.e. it was effortless for him.)
> it is neither the most efficient nor the most effective way
I simply don't buy that. After all, how do you determine if those students learned the material without tests? I've often thought I understood something, but when faced with solving a problem, realized I understood nothing.
I attended Caltech, where they selected for passion. I was passionate, too. With just auditing the classes, I figure I'd have learned maybe only 10% of what I did. That's neither efficient nor effective. Ditto for the bulk of the students. Even though I picked courses that I wanted to master.
I went to a high school with no grades. It was great. My peers and i wanted to learn and we did. And there was no grade hype/complaining/competition. It works.
The reality is as humans we love to learn things. Focus providing an environment that delivers that and the motivation is not a big issue.
1. How does one know one mastered the material? I've often thought I knew it, but found out I did not.
2. How does a college know one mastered the material?
3. Even when doing things one loves, there are always some boring things that need to be done, too.
BTW, in learning to program on my own, I later discovered there were yawning gaps in my knowledge that were conventional knowledge taught in CS classes. It was embarrassing.
> There's a reason why students cram at the end of the semester. Without pressure from grades, they won't do the work of learning. I know for a fact that I don't learn if there aren't exams and grades.
I can honestly say that grades got in the way of much of my learning, although I think that I’m atypical on this front.
University tests are typically very poorly designed (the folks who make them usually aren’t prepress I Al test developers), and quite a bit of effort needs to go into looking for old tests with model answers and going to either professor or TA office hours to get inside info on what is likely to be tested.
This took time away from me reading cited sources and cited sources from those cited sources, which was what (imho) gave me quite a bit of depth of knowledge of the subject area.
The good part was that I was often able to have conversations with the professor or TAs that went beyond the basics that were covered in the course, and sometimes this led to wonderful opportunities in further learning and/or research, but the loss of time spent on projects and tests for grades is time and learning that I will never get back.
Maybe you aren't everyone. There are already a number of colleges and universities that don't use grades, and many have been around for a half century or more and are among the most prestigious liberal arts institutions in the country.
> Without pressure from grades, [students] won't do the work of learning.
If it were qualified with ‘many’ students, there would be no such confusion. Your comment, as-is, is trivially falsified by the example of any auto-didact.
That's not how the English language works. The reason the adjective "all" exists is strong evidence that when one says students (plural) one is not saying "all" students.
If one meant "all" students, one would say "all students", "students without exception", "100% of students", "every student", etc.
"Among the requirements for the major are successful performance on a junior qualifying examination, completion of a yearlong senior thesis based on original research or artistic expression, and a successful oral defense of the thesis before an interdisciplinary faculty board."
I was answering a question about grades, not tests.
Also "demonstrate rigor" absolutely does not imply tests. In my undergrad (math) the level of rigor of tests was uniformly (and necessarily) much lower than homework and other assignments without the same time pressure. I would expect the same to be true in many other fields.
Pass/fail is still a grade, albeit a binary one. Caltech had pass/fail for freshman, and still most everyone felt the pressure at the end of the semester with the final exam looming, and worked hard to pass it.
> Also "demonstrate rigor" absolutely does not imply tests.
> There's a reason why students cram at the end of the semester. Without pressure from grades, they won't do the work of learning. I know for a fact that I don't learn if there aren't exams and grades.
We call this pumping-and-dumping. You pump the info into your brain then dump it on the test, then you forget it. This is not really meant for learning.
The type of student that won't learn unless strict deadlines and grades are placed on them is a very different type of student than one that will learn more with less deadlines and grades.
Take away deadlines and grades, and you will divide the class into two groups: that which genuinely learns the information better without deadlines and grades, and that which will slack off without strict deadlines and grades. The education system is (or should be!) designed to push students into the former category.
Unfortunately "desire to learn" is incredibly difficult to measure, let alone objectively, hence the standardized testing (you never get complaints about favoritism if everyone gets the same test).
Of the things you learned under pressure of exams and grades, how many of them do you actually remember? That is, did you learn for long enough to pass the test, or did you learn?
I'm well aware of the modern movement to discredit tests, arguing that doing well on tests have nothing to do with knowing the material. I'm not a subscriber to that. If you are, I expect you'll be disappointed with the results.
It's also why there are athletic competitions. It brings out the best in athletes as they strive to win. Are their achievements fake?
No one is saying tests 'have nothing to do with knowing the material'. The point is that a test environment isn't ideal for gauging how well someone knows materials.
Our system of testing incentivizes teaching to the test and a focus on pointless memorization.
Our schools aren't supposed to be competitions, at least not primarily. Comparing them to athletics events is silly. If we wanted to find out "who is the best at taking test", then a test is the most appropriate tool. If we want to find out "Can Timmy do geometry", a classical closed-book, timed test isn't the best measurement.
It comes down to, what is the point of testing students? What is gained by restricting access to clarifying materials or enforcing arbitrary time limits?
>Nobody said it was "ideal". Sheesh. But nobody has found a better way.
I mean, there are plenty of people who have found a better way. They get pushback from folks who think testing is the end-all-be-all of knowledge assessment.
>News flash: some tests are poorly conceived.
It's more like they are flawed from the get-go
>Allow me to reframe that. Would you get on an airplane piloted by a fellow who was never tested on his flying knowledge and skill?
I don't think it really benefits anyone to come up with irrelevant strawmen. Just like athletes, with pilots we care about their performance under specific conditions. Of course pilots should be tested in the conditions they should be working in. Obviously testing for specific things is necessary.
The problem with the analogy is that the testing we use in K-16 doesn't mimic any real world conditions.
A QB needs to be able to perform on the field and thats what we gauge them by. There is no reason an 8th grader needs to be able to solve X amount of problems in 50 minutes or whatever. It's adding elements to the assessment that are irrelevant for gauging knowledge.
> I don't think it really benefits anyone to come up with irrelevant strawmen.
It's perfectly relevant. Tests are used all the time to gauge mastery of a topic.
> irrelevant for gauging knowledge
It's not at all irrelevant. When you've mastered something, it doesn't take long to produce the answer. For example, the better at math I got, the faster I could answer the questions. If it takes one an hour to multiply 123x456, one is reinventing multiplication rather than knowing multiplication.
Mastery and speed are strongly correlated.
Caltech classes sometimes had "infinite time" exams. But the students hated them. There was always the temptation to do more on them, and the students wanted an end to it, as they had lots of classes with exams.
>It's perfectly relevant. Tests are used all the time to gauge mastery of a topic.
I think you must just be extremely mistaken on what people are talking about then. I can't understand why you think that anyone is calling for pilots not to be given tests.
>It's not at all irrelevant. When you've mastered something, it doesn't take long to produce the answer. For example, the better at math I got, the faster I could answer the questions. If it takes one an hour to multiply 123x456, one is reinventing multiplication rather than knowing multiplication.
You aren't everyone though. Some people get major test anxiety, some people are good at doing math but bad at memorizing equations.
Just call a spade a spade. Do we care about how fast a student can do 10 math problems? Or do we care that the student can do the 10 math problems? Those are just different things. Most people only care if the student can do the 10 math problems.
>Mastery and speed are strongly correlated.
But speed is irrelevant to mastery. You can master a skill without doing it as quickly as others.
> But the students hated them. There was always the temptation to do more on them, and the students wanted an end to it, as they had lots of classes with exams.
That sounds like a personal problem. Probably because they grew up taking tests that were more about memorization and regurgitation than they are about recognizing when you've answered a question completely.
At the end of the day it comes down what are metric for success is. If you can cram for a test, that is a good indication that the test is mostly a test of your ability to regurgitate answers. If two students can get 100% on a math test, and one student takes an hour and the other takes an hour and half, most people would consider them both proficient on those math questions.
You, for whatever reason, think speed at answering questions is important. Lots of others, including most people who study education, don't share that view.
> It's also why there are athletic competitions. It brings out the best in athletes as they strive to win.
Majority of people don't participate in athletic competitions. They checks out. These are for elite majority interested in finding out who is best of the best while everybody else sits on sofa and watches them on youtube.
Ideally, education should not have majority of students ignoring whole thing exists or merely watching others compete without every learning themselves.
You seem to be ascribing to me a position that I do not hold. I don't have a problem with test as a measure. I don't exactly have a problem with tests as a motivational device, either. I have a problem with cramming as a learning technique. I don't think it works very well for actual long-term learning.
False dichotomy. What you call "not studying" would vary between effectively dropping out (for the people who are only at uni to get drunk and end up with a degree at the end), gaining a more thorough holistic understand of the material, or diving really deep on some of the aspects that are most interesting at the cost of others.
The drink-and-get-a-certificate people will indeed profit from being encouraged to study, but the controversial opinion here would be that university should only or mainly care about those.
Is it controversial to say that cramming (remember, we're talking about studying under the deadline of a coming test) is not a great way to learn for long-term retention?
Is it better than not studying at all? Probably... but not much.
Not the original person you are replying to, but several including myself.
That said, I think that your question is a bit loaded. Textbook-level treatment of a subject is usually very shallow (depending on the subject, I suppose).
Nice to meet the unicorn! Meanwhile, how many textbooks are on the shelves at Barnes&Nobel? Not exactly bestsellers, right? Even the University of Washington bookstore puts the textbooks in a separate room in the basement.
> Textbook-level treatment of a subject is usually very shallow
Maybe the ones you read are. The ones Caltech uses aren't, like this one:
> There's a reason why students cram at the end of the semester. Without pressure from grades, they won't do the work of learning. I know for a fact that I don't learn if there aren't exams and grades.
How much of that supposed "learning" is actually retained though? Could these pass the same test a year later without the opportunity to study for it?
I don't think it needs to be an XOR. Being forced to cram a very rigid curriculum was not conducive to learning for me. But with no external pressure at all I also find it hard to deeply learn about a topic (I bounce around a lot). For me the perfect classes were the ones that had flexible assignments, where the largest portion of the grade would be a final project that could be related to anything from throughout the course. That way the project is self driven, but also with some constraints and a clear deadline/judgement process.
Who is paying the bills, then?
> no grades
There's a reason why students cram at the end of the semester. Without pressure from grades, they won't do the work of learning. I know for a fact that I don't learn if there aren't exams and grades.