professorthread

Homework is a tool for students. It is where they practice. I see my job as a prof to curate the problems I think will help students best prepare for the exams, and use that space to help them gain the intuition about the problems I don't have sufficient time to cover in class, like through an application. As my profs before me used to say, true learning comes in doing problems.

I find bright people who are self-motivated tend to do problems on their own, but this is not the modal student. This is like the top 10-15% of any class. The modal student is motivated by getting a degree so they can enter the working world, and sees coursework as an obstacle to that. They'll take any and every shortcut to get the highest grades with the least amount of effort. However, particularly with first and second year undergrads (but I've also seen the same behavior in grad students), they do not understand the purpose of pedagogy. That doing problems is where you learn the material.

So if you make homework optional, the 10-15% hold steady and do it but the bulk of the class will stop doing problems and tank their grades on the exams. They will not internalize the lesson after that first bad exam, because it is morally and practially cheaper for them to believe they had a bad day or that their professor (me) is just a terrible meanie who constructed an exam with problems they've "never seen before" and "had no connection to the lecture" (actual evaluation comments I've had when I've tried to the homework-optional method).

This is the way it's always been, sadly. Before AI submissions I had to regularly look for where my materials were posted on sites like Course Hero. Students copy-pasted from Wiki, articles, blogs, etc without attribution. Before that, they were buying or finding solutions books and copying out of there, or hiring people to do their homework/write papers/sit exams for them.

The primary difference now is that the both costs of cheating and ability to verify cheating on the instructor side have decreased dramatically, in tandem. There's also been a kind of mass effect, a cultural change in the attitude of students, where the sheer prevalence of cheating among their peers has made them less likely to feel fear, shame, or guilt over cheating. Students in the past who were caught were likely to confess immediately. Students now are increasingly belligerent and more likely to deny cheating, not just because they believe the professor can't 100% prove it, but also because they believe being caught out for cheating when most of their peers are getting away with it is unfair.

This is a nice idea, but if you follow the Carnegie model of the number of hours per week it takes to learn a subject per credit hour, which is estimated at something between 6-9 hours total including classtime and out-of-class study per week for a normal-semester 3 credit course, then you can't meet the amount of time students need to be exposed to lecture (explanations, demonstrations, derivations), to do the background readings which provide necessary context that can't always be adequately covered in lecture, and to practice the concepts and tools on their own.

1. is not a terrible idea, if structured correctly, but it doesn't adequately incentive the learning process, which requires continuous practice. For 1, I'd say put 80% of the grade in three to four exams taken over the semester, and allow one midterm exam grade to be dropped or replaced by the final exam grade. The remaining 20% of the grade is to incentivize practicing problems: homework graded based on completeness not correctness, short in-class quizzes randomly sampling a homework problem to incentivize students to legitimately complete the homework that are graded for correctness, and student participation in classtime activities.

I teach math-heavy economics courses. I found that grading homeworks for completeness and pairing the homework due date with an in-class quiz on the problem set material (taken in class the day the problem set is due, after the set is turned in) has reduced the incentive for students to use LLMs to complete the homework. Exam questions closely mirror what's on the homework, and exam grades correlate with students who make legitimate attempts on their homework. I can sus out legit attempts typically by handwriting. No erasing and fast writing means it was copied.

For grade weights, I weight the homework the lowest of any grading category, with in-class quizzes next, and exams scores the highest.

I'm seeing so many students succumb to plagiarism and use of genAI in assignments because they do not know that they aren't supposed to be any good, yet, and that professors don't expect them to be any good, yet. I try to tell my grad students that if they could write and do research/math/coding at the professional level they wouldn't be in grad school, they'd be out enjoying a prolific career (of course this isn't universally true, but it is for most students).

Right. I'm surprised at the comments here that seem to be missing the bigger picture. If ultra-conservative proto-Gilead Texas is going after tenure, then that must mean the values we associate with a progressive good society are being incubated in academia, protected by tenure. Hence, tenure is good.

The heuristic often repeated by folks in the profession is that you've got a top 5% of students who match your description of students who've proven they're good at learning, a bottom 5% who is entirely unprepared for university life and who knows how they got admitted, and the rest whose understanding of the subject matter is influenced by the performance of the teacher.

Post-COVID, lots of us (and you can find articles about this by conducting a simple search) have noticed that the top 5% hasn't changed, but the bottom 5% seems to have gotten significantly larger--10%, sometimes 15% of students in introductory level courses seem unprepared for university. I've seen functional illiteracy in some of my students at my good R1, for the first time ever. Our university is also on a huge enrollment drive, and are constantly hinting that faculty need to grade more easily to keep students happy.

Some tenured professors slack on teaching, or were never that great at teaching to begin with. But tenure as an institution improves teaching quality. What professors teach is subject no less to academic freedom and the protections tenure provides than what professors research. Faculty subject to short-term contracts tend to have their contract renewal dependent on student evaluation scores, which study after study show are poorly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with student learning outcomes. Good teachers aren't necessarily popular; easy graders are popular. Conveying difficult subject matter that may be controversial or technically difficult to grok is crucial to learning outcomes. This is exactly what gets cut out when you lose academic freedom, become a cog of administrators who are out to maximize enrollments not learning outcomes, and have your job performance hinge upon student evaluations.