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Comment by onionjake | Hacker News Reader

I took a class from Matt Might and I like how we were graded:

"Your grade is your tests grade or your projects grade, whichever is higher." http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/#gradin...

This allowed both the really good test takers to succeed and also those who did better on projects, without all the pressure.

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I am absolutely against that exam culture so I like that suggestion a lot. The exam perspective is just completely artificial which has nothing to do with the real world. That project based approach mirrors the real world much better where you can compensate for almost anything just by rising the effort one is putting into something.

...at the expense of people who are moderately good at both.

I believe the sentiment was more: I understand that you may have a bad day/week/month and do poorly on a project, but don't sweat it. If you really do know your stuff you can still prove it on the exams.

I think it is fair and better than purely weighted grades because it allows for momentary failure while still requiring knowledge of the material.

Not really. If you're moderately good at both then you'll get a similar score on both, and they will average out to about the same as both. So you'll still get the score you would've gotten before.

As opposed to everyone else who will get a higher score than they would've gotten before.

That means your grade will be worse than it would've been otherwise when compared to your peers (which is the only useful meaning of a grade).

People who are really good at one thing but not another are very useful in society, and this grading system would seem to reflect that fact.

That would seem to justify the commonly done separation of project courses from non-project courses. It's not a great idea to lump the two together, nearly always one or the other suffers if the project is non-trivial. But even then one can suffer, it's just spread out across all classes instead of the individual class. Project courses are tricky to integrate into a curriculum well.

i wouldn't say specialization in taking exams is a useful skill for society.

You can't do well at exams if you don't know the material.

It means your grade won't be artificially inflated by people who know the material but take tests badly.

If you're moderately good at both, in the combined grade you would have done... (wait for it) moderately.

So what's the problem?

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