myrmepropagandist1d ago

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 threadmyrmepropagandist1d 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 threadKalenXI 🏳️‍🌈

@futurebird For me going through school (at least pre-college) I never really valued teacher feedback. Because most of the feedback was not "what does the teacher think of my work?" it was "how closely did I follow the rubric?"

It felt like the actual content of my work was largely irrelevant since we were graded entirely on how we wrote not what we wrote.

And every time I brought this up to a teacher the response I got was "Well we have to teach to the curriculum."

Apr 13 at 1:38pmWeb
Show threadKalenXI 🏳️‍🌈1d ago
@futurebird I imagine an LLM would probably have gotten better grades than me since strictly following a given format is something they're pretty good at.