alt Hacker NewsI have a fairly long experience of both teaching and grading, even though I stopped a couple of years ago. After a couple of years of trial-and-error, I think I found the "right" way:
* Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot. Theory is necessary, but the attention span of people is very limited. * Grade either a homework assignment in the form of a real project with specifications. You give the assignment half-semester, so that students who start early can ask questions. Otherwise, grade a in-session exam, with every resource available, including the course and the whole Internet. However, you don't assess the knowledge, but if the student is able to apply their knowledge to the different tasks at hand.
These approaches are now completely moot in the age of AI.
I was surprised the first time a colleague asked me to do an oral exam. I thought it was a burden on people with poor social interaction skills. It went surprisingly well: you could see in a couple of minutes if the student had integrated the concepts of the course, even if they were shy. Now I wonder if it's the way to go. There's one caveat, though: it doesn't scale.
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Oral exams don't scale at the beginning with hundreds of students per course, agreed. So make them in-person written exams, German universities managed that just fine a few decades ago. Oral exams were reserved to advance from Grundstudium (basic) to Hauptstudium (main).
In my very limited experience (I have German major degrees in Informatik and Philosophy, I was a TA for Logic in Philosophy) the more advanced the topic the thinner the attendance anyway.
The country of Argentina, despite its crippling debt, is able to provide free university education where the majority of classes for most majors are graded with an oral exam.
They've shown that it is entirely possible to scale a system like that, as long as the society sincerely values the role of an educator.
I was thinking that one of the great ironies of artificial intelligence is that it will make good teaching even more labour intensive. Those kids that can afford the one to one tuition required to push past our natural inclination to be lazy will learn things, while everyone else will succumb to outsourcing all their thinking.
There’s no way I’d have learnt everything I know now about software in today’s environment. So much of software development - debugging techniques, architectural decisions, structuring data etc is learned through trial and error. As the models get better is becoming easier and easier to just not look too closely at their output. I suspect it’s human nature.