Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116397070356098122

In an ideal world courses would have pass/fail grades if they have grades at all. Grades get in the way of learning. (Students turn to LLMs to save their grades.)

So, I think part of this tension goes back to what we grade and why.

I'm lucky that in math I only ever assign grades for in-class tests.

In my CS classes I lean a lot on sharing student work. Fortunately my students like to show off for each other. They are excited to see what I and their peers think of their projects.

Show thread

myrmepropagandist 1d ago

Teacher feedback is precious. It takes time to read and write comments and provide guidance. Doing that kind of work on LLM slop is depressing. The teacher could have been writing feedback for a student who did the work and might learn from it.

How can the way we present this feedback emphisize its value?

What about "you may submit 3 essays per term for feedback" the feedback isn't a grade, it's just comments to help you when you write the final essay in class without an LLM?

Show thread

myrmepropagandist 1d ago

When I was in school I always wished my teachers would write more comments on my essays. I just wanted someone to read them and be impressed. I don't think that's changed.

Show thread

Paul Chernoff

@futurebird Flashbacks to a college course. Supposedly we were supposed to be learning critical thinking but the goal was to have students adopt political opinions.

If was a film course and we were to write in a journal after seeing each movie. We would see only comments from the graders (grad students). We were graded but didn't get to see the grades, only comments.

When we finally saw the grades they were much lower than most people expected. So the quality of comments weren't that good.