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Comment by dot5xdev | Hacker News Reader

Moving everything in class seems like a good idea in theory. But in practice, kids need more time than 50 minutes of class time (assuming no lecture) to work on problems. Sometimes you will get stuck on 1 homework question for hours. If a student is actively working on something, yanking them away from their curiosity seems like the wrong thing to do.

On the other hand, kids do blindly use the hell out of ChatGPT. It's a hard call: teach to the cheaters or teach to the good kids?

I've landed on making take-home assignments worth little and making exams worth most of their grade. I'm considering making homework worth nothing and having their grade be only 2 in-class exams. Hopefully that removes the incentive to cheat. If you don't do homework, then you don't get practice, and you fail the two exams.

(Even with homework worth little, I still get copy-pasted ChatGPT answers on homework by some students... the ones that did poorly on the exams...)

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> If you don't do homework, then you don't get practice, and you fail the two exams.

I'd be cautious about that, because it means the kids with undiagnosed ADHD who are functionally incapable of studying without enforced assignments will just completely crash and burn without absorbing any of the material at all.

Or, at least, that's what happened to me in the one and only pre-college class I ever had where "all work is self-study and only the tests count" was the rule.

I completed college with unmanaged ADHD (diagnosed 10 years later; worst result my psych had ever seen on the TOVA lol).

My second and third semesters went exactly as you described for courses where I was exposed to new things and wasn't just repeating high school - mainly because I had no training or coping mechanisms for learning under that type of pedagogy.

After getting my ass kicked in exams and failing a class for the first time in my life, I finally grokked that optional homework assignments were the professor's way of communicating learning milestones to us, and that even though the professor said they weren't graded (unless you asked), you still had to do them or you wouldn't learn the material well enough to pass the exam.

Still had a few bad grades because of the shit foundation I built for myself, but I brought a 2.2 GPA up to a 3.3 by the end.

The point is that it takes is exposure to that style of teaching before it can really be effective.

> I've landed on making take-home assignments worth little and making exams worth most of their grade.

I feel like this is almost exactly moving all evaluation into the class. If "little" becomes nothing, it is exactly that.

I feel this was always the best strategy. In college, how much homework assignments were worth was an easy way to evaluate how bad the teacher was and how lightweight the class was going to be. My best professors dared you not to do your homework, and would congratulate you if you could pass their exams without having done it.

The very best ones didn't even want you to turn it in, they'd only assign problems that had answers in the back of the book. Why put you through a entire compile cycle of turning it in, having a TA go over it, and getting it back when you were supposed to be onto the next thing? Better and cheaper to find out you're wrong quickly.

  I'm considering making homework worth nothing and having their grade be only 2 in-class exams.

When I did A levels and my first undergraduate degree (in the UK) that's how it worked. The only measurements used to calculate my A level grades and degree class were:

- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of high school)

- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of university)

Minor quibble here: If a student gets stuck on a single homework problem for hours, they're probably hopelessly lost and would benefit from being interrupted. That or the problem is way too broad to be mere homework.

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