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.

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The Worst Timeline

@futurebird one of my favorite/best-remembered exams was when the prof took some code we wrote at the start of the semester, broke it, and had us fix it. It was extra work on his part because each exam ended up with bespoke elements, but it was clearly effective if I remember it ~35y later.

Depending on how well you wrote (and commented!) it was either an easy or horrible task.

With genAI-sourced code—particularly if “it works the first time—there are lots of opportunities to trap students who don’t really know what the code is doing with that sort of exam challenge.