I never saw any point in grading work ever

I went to Montessori school as a kid then I was in private school briefly till my parents went broke. Then I went to public school for the remainder of my career before I went to college and graduate school. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level and sat on academic boards for Purdue.

Graded and ranked assignments do nothing other than act as a filter for the structural organization to determine who they want to give resources to

The “educational” system has nothing to do with platonic or frankly any other thoughts of education for the polis

Good riddance

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musicale 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're not wrong about grading being largely a numerical ranking system for resource allocation - with minimal effort from the allocator.

Even in the age of AI, I think I still prefer a portfolio system where you accumulate a body of work that you can present and defend in an interview for a job or graduate school position. Unfortunately diligent portfolio assessment can be a lot of work when there are hundreds of applicants for a single slot, so the first stage is usually reviewing a summary or list of work rather than the work itself, and that system can be gamed.

In any case, personalized feedback for student work is still very useful, and it may be more beneficial if it is focused on helping students individually rather than ranking them or sorting them into bins.

Without some sort of pre- and post-assessment, it can be hard to determine whether students actually learned anything in a course. The question is: how do you use that information? I think it should primarily be used as feedback to the students and the instructors, with the aim of improving learning.

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alephnerd 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm a bit mixed on this. A lot of graded work is busywork, but a benchmark is needed to see whether concepts are landing or not before midterms or finals, and the easiest way for that is some kind of grading.

And why are you being downvoted to oblivion?!?

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AndrewKemendo 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Again though why have midterms or finals?

Break down the learning objectives to measurable experiment replication then:

Show one, do one, teach one

If you can’t do one or teach one you dont move to the next step.

It’s literally just how apprenticeship works and there’s no reason you can’t do that for calculus or intro to economics and especially applicable to EE, ME, CE

Teaching in academic settings is absurdly inefficient and counterproductive in my experience

	▲	musicale 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Apprenticeship is a good model. The tutorial system also seems to work at some universities. Personally I have found well-organized, clearly presented university courses to be great ways to learn the material. The combination of readings, textbooks, lectures, tutorial sessions, writing, labs, problem sets, course projects, etc. has been effective for me. Good textbooks and online resources have also been very helpful. Obviously it only works if you actually do the work yourself.
	▲	alephnerd 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm not opposed to that. It would work really well for most applied sciences and engineering curricula. It's a similar approach the armed services use to train MOSes as well. Making the class pass-fail would also be more conducive for learning as well. But still, some sort of benchmark would be needed to at least give students the ability to gauge their proficiency.