alt Hacker NewsI never saw any point in grading work ever
I went to Montessori school as a kid then I was in private school briefly till my parents went broke. Then I went to public school for the remainder of my career before I went to college and graduate school. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level and sat on academic boards for Purdue.
Graded and ranked assignments do nothing other than act as a filter for the structural organization to determine who they want to give resources to
The “educational” system has nothing to do with platonic or frankly any other thoughts of education for the polis
Good riddance
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So, the guy who does brain surgery on you... you want him to have taken some electives he was interested in, passed for having a pulse, then sent off to work in the operating room? Or, should he be required to have gotten at least 80% of questions right on a test of his surgical knowledge?
Well yeah, we just do in person assignments. We keep one every week, not necessarily a new topic every week, the difficulty is distributed, and take best K of N, which automatically allows for absentees and such. The system works well overall. For very weak students (bottom 10%ish) we customize it a bit and make a curriculum of sorts, sometimes re-covering content from a few weeks ago (AI is very useful for analysing answer transcripts and finding these weak points). And then, a final, also in person, for like 15% of the grade.
Large programming assignments also work decent (for now at least), where codex is encouraged, but we make the assignment research oriented and obscenely large with lots of messy and dependent steps, enough that you have to steer enough to do context management and not output slop reports/inferences. It is almost like a research project, where AI's "taste" is still extremely lacking (we often see totally circular/trivial-but-dressed-up investigative results from sloppers, very much like the slop neurips/iclr papers these days). Just one of these per course with a 10 minute in person viva at the end. Previously this used to be a project part of the course, but the old way with reports and presentations just ended up with way too much slop to use as a signal. Also, we just made it individual instead of a group project.
For this type of course, grading on a curve also made less sense, so we instead do a kind of "cluster" based grading. We start from the top giving S, see where the first big gap is, that starts A, the next big gap starts B, and so on. These clusters form really well in the above type of courses (empirically, undergrad lin alg, undergrad databases, and grad RL courses) and matches in-class judgement.
I'm a bit mixed on this. A lot of graded work is busywork, but a benchmark is needed to see whether concepts are landing or not before midterms or finals, and the easiest way for that is some kind of grading.
And why are you being downvoted to oblivion?!?
You're not wrong about grading being largely a numerical ranking system for resource allocation - with minimal effort from the allocator.
Even in the age of AI, I think I still prefer a portfolio system where you accumulate a body of work that you can present and defend in an interview for a job or graduate school position. Unfortunately diligent portfolio assessment can be a lot of work when there are hundreds of applicants for a single slot, so the first stage is usually reviewing a summary or list of work rather than the work itself, and that system can be gamed.
In any case, personalized feedback for student work is still very useful, and it may be more beneficial if it is focused on helping students individually rather than ranking them or sorting them into bins.
Without some sort of pre- and post-assessment, it can be hard to determine whether students actually learned anything in a course. The question is: how do you use that information? I think it should primarily be used as feedback to the students and the instructors, with the aim of improving learning.