Re:Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
by jefferickson on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @08:45PM
(#18812121)
Of course the student is ultimately responsible for their own learning, but as the instructor, it's my responsibility to help them learn.
Dangling a juicy piece of bacon in front of their noses will not help them eat their vegetables.
There appears to be some evidence to suggest that traditional (grade-school style) "graded homework" at the advanced undergrad and higher level may just not be particularly good pedagogy though [1]. If possible, it may be better to assign ungraded homework with complete guided solutions provided, plus regular in-class quizzes (the latter to motivate students to actually spend time on that assigned homework every week) [2].
[1] https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/soecs-facpres/16/ [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00091383.2011.5...
While I understand the desire of a professor to help out their own students, at what point does this become a matter of individual responsibility? Shouldn’t it be the student who refrains from memorizing answers?
When I took my algorithms course, we had a reference textbook with questions at the end of the chapter, but no solutions. Some people at the beginning of the semester tried to crowdsource the answers using a Google doc but that effort failed. It didn’t really matter though, since our homework and exam questions were always renewed each semester through the work of course staff and the instructing professor. In hindsight, I may have taken this for granted as it seems other schools don’t have a “training” and a “testing” set of problems - I would say having both is better than only having one.