Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!waikato!coms2269 From: coms2269@waikato.ac.nz (Brent C Summers) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Resource & Responsibility (was Re: Automatic checking...) Message-ID: <2028.27218c6b@waikato.ac.nz> Date: 20 Oct 90 22:54:19 GMT References: Distribution: comp Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Lines: 73 juh@cs.hut.fi (Juha Hyv|nen) writes: > Presently, checking the homework is done by a person. Last spring, > over 500 students took part in the course. That meant that a total of > 500 students x 5 parts x 4 questions = 10,000 answers had to be > checked (and the results registered). At the rate of checking one > answer a minute it would take over 160 hours to check all the answers. > That is one working month! I think that the time should be spent > teaching than doing a routine job that could be done by a computer. I am one of three and two-half tutors in Comp. Sci. at our New Zealand university. Our positions exist primarily to administer our department's two part 1 courses in all aspects save lecturing (left to "proper" academic staff) i.e. weekly tutorials, lab supervision, marking of weekly assignments, administrivia etc. With all this person-power (plus a large corps of casually employed laboratory staff) we _still_ cannot adequately serve 1x1000 plus 1x350 (figures approx.) courses. Our main downfall is in turn-around time for the marking. It gets back to the students too late to be (or to be percieved as being) usefull feedback on their progress. Automated marking has been considered, but dismissed because of a) high implementation costs b) the restrictive nature of such a system on assignment form c) fear of Murphy's Law Instead, from next year, the laboratory staff will mark assignments on the spot as Fine/Attempted/Nothing, and the aggregate of these is to be combined with test results to form the internal component of assessment. > We do not have the resources for direct interaction other than the > classes (lectures). (Most students skip the classes -- attending is > voluntary.) Here are some other observations: > > The students could ask questions. They do not. > The students are asked questions. They do not want to answer. > > If the students are made to answer, even more of them tend to skip the > class. ...[Deleted]... > > Conclusion: direct interaction (with too limited resources) does > not work (with 500 Finns). Believe me, it's not just Finns. Our major crime over the last 4-5 years, in my opinion at least, has been an increasing willingness - even determination - to take responsibility for the students' education from them and upon ourselves. This is not to say that we (lecturers and tutors) should not be responsible for the quality of our teaching, but that we must stop pretending that we can force feed unwilling victims (we have numbers of these due to various degree regulations). To use a cliche: while we can talk until we turn blue, we can *teach* only with the permission of the individual student. > PS2. The course is valued (by the university) as being a "three-week" > course, i.e., the amount of work needed to learn and understand > all issues is about 3 working weeks (120 hours) -- including > classes, homework, and additional personal effort. The course > deals with sections 1...23 and 29...32 (Fundamentals, Sorting, > Searching, String Processing, and Graph Algorithms) of the book > > R. Sedgewick, Algorithms, 2nd ed. 650 p. Addison-Wesley, 1988. > ISBN 0-201-06673-4 > > Do you (the net people) think that 3 weeks is reasonable? All the > algorithms are supposed to be totally new to the students. Every > student here seem to think that it is a joke. Uh, I think this depends (haha - very useful). The chief determining factor of rate seems to be the mind-set of the students. Ours are generally what I might call "uninspired" (on a good day), but I think if their attitude could be engineered a little (and I have seen this done shamelessly and successfully) significantly greater rates might be possible without undue stress. I think 3 weeks sounds reasonable, for our students - I don't know yours. Regards - bcs (Oh, "All opinions expressed are, of course, soley my own.")