2008 Woodie Awards
Students too dizzy with busywork
Eli Gottlieb is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at egottlie@student.umass.edu.
Issue date: 9/2/08 Section: Editorial / Opinion
Well, the new semester has begun, and with it the academic year. We've all - hopefully - found our new classes and professors satisfactory. We've begun finding old friends again who we haven't seen since last May. The corruption of a new generation of innocent freshmen can begin. Oh, and we even have a presidential election coming up.
We're busy, busier and busiest. I for one, need to get my grades up over last semester's, after finally getting away from some serious health issues. So if I seem to be eating sour grapes during this column, go ahead and demand that I make wine of them. Though, if I must have metaphorical wine, can I have a white German Riesling?
But honestly, I do feel that I have a legitimate kvetch in one area. I truly and honestly think that we students get graded on our homework far too often.
OK - I heard you jump just now. All of you doing it at the same time caused a minor earthquake, but let me explain. When I say "homework," I almost exclusively mean weekly papers, questions answered on textbook reading, problem sets and in general anything that requires extremely little thinking.
And I don't even mean that we shouldn't receive homework. It helps us study. But I don't think we should receive a grade for it. Receiving a grade for getting answers correct when studying for only our own benefit just doesn't make any sense.
In contrast, we most definitely should receive grades for term papers, oral presentations, programming assignments, engineering projects, scientific labs, proofs of theorems and any research assignments. These represent substantial accomplishments, and professors currently assign them rarely enough that students can put real work into them instead of having to ever compromise between multiple courses.
So now that we can distinguish between the point I'm making and the various points I'm not making, we can get into the nitty-gritty details of the implementation and consequences.
Firstly, eliminating graded homework reduces work for everyone except the worst students. Why should teaching assistants or professors have to grade a bunch of papers every week? In practice, they often pass the work off to computer-grading systems that never quite seem to work correctly, and enable the teaching staff to give far more homework than they would willingly grade themselves.
We're busy, busier and busiest. I for one, need to get my grades up over last semester's, after finally getting away from some serious health issues. So if I seem to be eating sour grapes during this column, go ahead and demand that I make wine of them. Though, if I must have metaphorical wine, can I have a white German Riesling?
But honestly, I do feel that I have a legitimate kvetch in one area. I truly and honestly think that we students get graded on our homework far too often.
OK - I heard you jump just now. All of you doing it at the same time caused a minor earthquake, but let me explain. When I say "homework," I almost exclusively mean weekly papers, questions answered on textbook reading, problem sets and in general anything that requires extremely little thinking.
And I don't even mean that we shouldn't receive homework. It helps us study. But I don't think we should receive a grade for it. Receiving a grade for getting answers correct when studying for only our own benefit just doesn't make any sense.
In contrast, we most definitely should receive grades for term papers, oral presentations, programming assignments, engineering projects, scientific labs, proofs of theorems and any research assignments. These represent substantial accomplishments, and professors currently assign them rarely enough that students can put real work into them instead of having to ever compromise between multiple courses.
So now that we can distinguish between the point I'm making and the various points I'm not making, we can get into the nitty-gritty details of the implementation and consequences.
Firstly, eliminating graded homework reduces work for everyone except the worst students. Why should teaching assistants or professors have to grade a bunch of papers every week? In practice, they often pass the work off to computer-grading systems that never quite seem to work correctly, and enable the teaching staff to give far more homework than they would willingly grade themselves.
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Dan
posted 9/02/08 @ 12:15 PM EST
Everyone has had their problems with homework; There have been times when I have been inundated with assignments due the very next day, times when I have come to class only to then remember an assignment is due that day, and thanks to OWLS and other online assignments, times when I have misinterpreted a due date of "12:00AM Monday" to mean the midnight 24 hours after an assignment is actually due. (Continued…)
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