In article <843pnn$a2d$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
T.-S. Lim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
>>Herman Rubin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
>>: What is the purpose of homework? It should be to help learning,
>>: and this cannot be combined with being used for a grade. Those
>>: problems which do not contribute to learning are a waste of time.
>>I agree completely. In my class, homework gets graded, but students are
>>told up-front that grades are based on midterm and final examinations with
>>homework used rarely to decide borderline cases. They are also told that
>>if they don't do the homework, there's no way they can succeed on the
>>exams. The purpose of the homework is to give them a chance to
>>explore and fail without penalty if that's what it takes for them to
>>master the material.
>If homework scores don't matter in grade consideration, why should the students
>do them? You can keep telling students that they need to do the homeworks to
>pass the exams but the fact is students won't care. I find it silly to require
>students to do homeworks but then you don't account for the scores in
>determining the final grades.
This is the accumulation of "brownie points" attitude which
accounts for much of the poor knowledge of students after they
have completed the courses. Read the quotation from my posting
again; homework should be for learning. Having it used for
grades causes students to waste time on easy problems, which
they already know how to do, rather than to attack the problems
which are at the limits of what they can do.
It should be something like what happens on a good oral exam;
the proportion of what is correct is essentially constant, but
it is which questions are correctly answered which matters.
We SHOULD be trying to give the students an education, not a
bunch of grades. If the student does not know the concepts
years later, that course is essentially a waste. Details can
be looked up, and calculations done by machine, and those
just taught those are very likely to forget.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
