Short digression:
It's been interesting to read the criticisms of Uber on HN. Every single one has been accompanied by harsh criticisms of the taxi medallion system. Now I'm quite certain that a tiny proportion of HN have any working knowledge of that system (where working knowledge would be something like your reading, teaching, and genre literacy in proofs), but the general uninformed opinion seems to be that Uber's disruption of that industry is welcome and has no significant drawbacks to speak of.
With that in mind, what do you think is going to happen when someone in Silicon Valley disrupts higher education accreditation and/or secondary degrees? Don't get me wrong-- I think there is a lot of value in university education and university life. But if people who have never even heard of taxi medallions are quick to write off the costs of it being replaced by an unregulated contractor, they are going to be even more willing to say goodbye to a system whose instructors (who themselves are mostly independent contractors) cannot or will not accurately assess the correctness of a student's work?
I don't mean to single you out here-- I've certainly done the similar. The point is everyone on HN has their own stories of experiencing this problem-- where the intellectual environment advertised by the university was violated. Coupled with the absurd debt students today carry (at least in the U.S.), that is more than enough ammunition for a disruptive company to put an enormous dent in the undergraduate degree. My fear is that will strip the money needed for grad programs-- where the real learning and research happens-- and the modern uni will fall like a house of cards.
Have you ever graded? If you have you would know that there is no such thing as "the correctness" in anything that isn't close to perfect. The OP had to decide to give a number somehow to something that was in small parts right, but completely misguided. And then they wrote a long comment explaining the problem.
That's far more useful to the student then just numbers. Maybe the student could actually read the comment and learn from it. Any violation of the intellectual promise in OP is from the student who doesn't put in the effort to learn.
I remember a physics academic I knew giving all his colleagues a short question and lots of sample incorrect answers and asking them how they would grade them out a certain mark. There was absolutely no agreement whatsoever. On the other hand I imagine that they all agreed that a correct answer would merit full marks.
Does it matter? In the UK, your final degree generally has one of only four classes and I expect most people end up roughly the right class. There are obviously borderlines but a first class student isn't going to get a lower second or vice versa because of subtleties in the marking scheme.
It's also an issue for me with too much weighting on coursework - work during the course should be for things like getting feedback on how to write proofs properly (if you are studying mathematics). By the time, you come to sit actual exams, you really shouldn't have any excuse for not knowing how to.
In terms of disruption to accreditation, I think one of the main things that a degree of a certain standard signals is whether a person works hard in an environment less structured that school and can learn independently. That is much harder to measure than knowledge or raw IQ.
> ...whose instructors... cannot or will not accurately assess the correctness of a student's work?
Have you graded proofs? GP's approach is entirely sensible.
Proofs are written for humans. Writing a proof upside down is wrong, even if the derivation is correct.
The underlying cause of that incorrectness could be a simple matter of poor communication, or the student might have a more fundamental misconception about how implication works (and/or quantifiers). Sometimes the instructor knows enough about the student to determine which is the case. Sometimes it's impossible without talking to the student. Hence the long note and (perhaps implicit) invitation to office hours.
I can't find anything in GP's post that indicates he "cannot or will not accurately assess the correctness of a student's work", aside from the obvious impossibility of projecting a multi-objective assessment of a fundamentally human task onto an integer in [0,100].
If anything, GP provides an excellent example of why auto-grading for upper division courses -- especially courses that are trying to teach students how to write for a human audience -- will probably require fundamental scientific advances in AI in addition to innovation on top of existing tech stacks. My money's on self-driving cars happening first.
> With that in mind, what do you think is going to happen when someone in Silicon Valley disrupts higher education accreditation and/or secondary degrees?
This already happened! University of Phoenix has been around for a while.
> The point is everyone on HN has their own stories of experiencing this problem-- where the intellectual environment advertised by the university was violated
If you want to know how people really feel, look at where they send their kids rather than they say/say they will do in online debates. Again, University of Phoenix et al have been around for a while.
> My fear is that will strip the money needed for grad programs-- where the real learning and research happens-- and the modern uni will fall like a house of cards.
Masters programs are cash cows.
Top Ph.D. programs usually aren't appreciably funded through undergraduate programs. And when they are, it's almost always backed by Ph.D. student labor. Which is crazy cheap, and which startups are going to have a very hard time competing with.
> Short digression: It's been interesting to read the criticisms of Uber on HN.
> Have you graded proofs? GP's approach is entirely sensible.
GP wrote characterized the mistake as a "significant misunderstanding" of the material. GP use of the word "just" strongly implied that the assessment inside the long, probably unread note was not reflect in the grade. If that is indeed the case then the student's "significant misunderstanding" of this material wasn't reflected in the calculation of their final grade, which is the textbook definition of grade inflation.
Again-- this kind of grade inflation happens often. (If the class size is greater than 75 and fulfills one of the uni's writing requirements, I'd argue it's almost a requirement that it happens.) It's a truth about an impossible situation with only bad choices, not an ad hominem.
> This already happened! University of Phoenix has been around for a while.
By disruption, I mean Uber/AirBnB style disruption. Disruption resulting in customers who leverage the technology saying things like, "Dude, it's changed the way I go out in Atlanta." I seriously doubt the existence of University of Phoenix has ever made an employer say anything close to that. (E.g., "it's changed the way we hire employees.")
I mean an accreditation service that basically tells an employer: look, do you really want to know if that employee is worth hiring?
I doubt this even requires any testing whatsoever-- just require incoming Freshman to get a Chromebook. But the end of their studies there could be a new Google "Fasttrack" app. You could make it almost like a digital scratch ticket-- giving Google the relevant permissions and you can see whether you really graduated with honors.
> If that is indeed the case then the student's "significant misunderstanding" of this material wasn't reflected in the calculation of their final grade, which is the textbook definition of grade inflation.
I don't know; it depends. I typically write my rubrics so that there are "style" points. In a really easy proof, style might be up to half the available points. In a very difficult proof perhaps only 1/10 or less.
But even that doesn't totally solve the problem. Some mistakes are on the border between style and substance. Grading and assessment aren't a perfect science.
> I seriously doubt the existence of University of Phoenix has ever made an employer say anything close to that.
Call me old-fashioned, but IMO the actual education is still the hard part of the Education Industry.
My comments have all assumed the goal is student understanding. IMO the obsession over grades (by students and by external observers), testing, and accreditation is completely mis-guided. Focus on exceptional student outcomes and the rest is easy.
Short digression: It's been interesting to read the criticisms of Uber on HN. Every single one has been accompanied by harsh criticisms of the taxi medallion system. Now I'm quite certain that a tiny proportion of HN have any working knowledge of that system (where working knowledge would be something like your reading, teaching, and genre literacy in proofs), but the general uninformed opinion seems to be that Uber's disruption of that industry is welcome and has no significant drawbacks to speak of.
With that in mind, what do you think is going to happen when someone in Silicon Valley disrupts higher education accreditation and/or secondary degrees? Don't get me wrong-- I think there is a lot of value in university education and university life. But if people who have never even heard of taxi medallions are quick to write off the costs of it being replaced by an unregulated contractor, they are going to be even more willing to say goodbye to a system whose instructors (who themselves are mostly independent contractors) cannot or will not accurately assess the correctness of a student's work?
I don't mean to single you out here-- I've certainly done the similar. The point is everyone on HN has their own stories of experiencing this problem-- where the intellectual environment advertised by the university was violated. Coupled with the absurd debt students today carry (at least in the U.S.), that is more than enough ammunition for a disruptive company to put an enormous dent in the undergraduate degree. My fear is that will strip the money needed for grad programs-- where the real learning and research happens-- and the modern uni will fall like a house of cards.