The homework assignment incentives, and why it's now so extreme

[-][anonymous]4y*70

but if the dean had also been unsympathetic we would have had no recourse

I beg to differ. Maybe your school was particularly strict, but usually there are plenty of ways around homework assignments in high school: Copy homework from other classmates last minute, turn in fake homework, read the summary instead of a whole book, share workload with your friends, get solutions from older students, call in sick strategically on days with especially large workloads etc.

And the advance of technology isn't all bad, it also provides students with new options: GPT-3 for essays, Wolfram Alpha for math problems, mechanical-turk-like services to outsource homework, handwriting robots and soon, test-taking AIs. If you got hacking skills, well, let's just say you'd be surprised what sort of stuff teachers leave on the school server. And for online classes, keep in mind that it also becomes harder for the teacher to verify the authenticity of your homework. Be creative, think positive.

[-]Vanilla_cabs4y*10

True. The difference is that successfully appealing to the dean goes toward showing that the system has somewhat of a safeguard, while you solutions don't.

Also, the most honest students are the ones who will use your solutions less and keep suffering most, which makes the system (school requirements+your solutions) wicked. (edited for clarity)

[-][anonymous]4y20

I don't mean to sound overdramatic here, but equating honesty with obedience to authority is quite a sinister sleight of hand. Skipping excessive homework is not only advantageous, it is also righteous.

[-]Vanilla_cabs4y10

I'm not equating honesty with obedience to authority. An honest person can openly defy orders, by refusing to turn in homework for example. But your methods, outsourcing homework, hacking, calling in sick to avoid workload, require being dishonest with the system, thereby excluding honest persons.

[-]Dave92F14y50

It has been more than 40 years since I personally had to deal with this BS.

The stories I hear from my children confirm what you say. One result seems to have been students cooperating online to do homework. That seems to be impossible to police. For sure that would have been "cheating" when I was in school, but it seems there is no practical alternative for students who want to get decent grades. Perhaps peer pressure makes students try to contribute to the group effort, which might ensure that most of them learn some of the material. There may be positive effects - students to some extent specialize in doing homework in subjects they find easy, and get extra help on subjects they find hard. That could be a good thing (there's always a tension between exploiting natural talents and being "rounded").

AFAICT this doesn't seem to have reduced the amount students actually learn. But I worry about the effect on standards of probity (but have no evidence that there has in fact been a negative effect so far).

The simplest solution for school administrators might be to insist that teachers grade assignments personally (no outsourcing to students or the Internet) and promptly - within 48 hours of receiving the homework.

The students themselves could police that, and it would naturally place some limits on how much homework the teachers can assign.

[-]Andrew Vlahos4y20

How would students police that, exactly? Could you elaborate?

Also, coordination was tried, like when I made a deal with a friend named Griffin to do a homework exchange, but parents shut that down because that's considered plagiarism and "cheating is wrong".

[-][anonymous]4y80

I occasionally did homework swaps, and more often let friends copy off me. Such practices were rampant at my school, and I went to a small nerd high school. Your mistake was letting anyone except the person involved know about the trade.

[-]Viliam4y50

Yeah, my high school was a lot of teamwork, and the university even more so.

The right thing to tell the parents is "we are going to learn together".

[-][anonymous]4y10

"Want to study together? " was code for "want to split up the problems and copy off each other?".

[-]Dave92F14y10

By policing that, I mean if the students don't get the graded homework back in 48 hours, they can complain to administrators and parents, who can pressure the teacher. This assumes the administrators decide to make and enforce the 48 hour rule.

Re coordination, I've seen kids using "group chat" on Facebook or similar. In some schools (good ones) it seems to be de rigueur.

[-]Viliam4y40

From a cynical perspective, this is not a bug, this is a feature! You only need to accept that the real purpose of education system is to preserve class differences in the society.

Educated parents are more efficient at helping their kids with homework. Rich parents are more efficient at paying for help. Middle-class kids have more middle-class friends, and they can help each other with homeworks.

The system filters out the kids who have to help at home, and whose parents lack education and connections.

[-]Vanilla_cabs4y10

Doesn't have to be on purpose. If we could see all the ways an education system could fail, we'd see a lot of them fail in ways that favor children of educated parents. That seems like the default mode of failure, whereas failing while favoring children of uneducated parents instinctively feels like it would require more specific circumstances.

[-]mukashi4y10

In practical terms, the education system might work that way, but I doubt it is intended to do that by design. It is just an inadequate system trapped into a very stable Nash equilibrium from which the only families that can escape are the rich ones.

[-]ChristianKl4y20

One intersting article is Students Spend More Time on Homework but Teachers Say It's Worth It:

The survey of 1,000 K-12 teachers found, among other things, that high school teachers on average assign about 3.5 hours of homework each week. For high school students who typically have five classes with different teachers, that could mean as much as 17.5 hours each week. By comparison, the survey found middle school teachers assign about 3.2 hours of homework each week and kindergarten through fifth grade teachers assign about 2.9 hours each week.
[...]
"What has changed is not necessarily the magic number of how many hours they’re doing per night, but it’s the quality of the homework," says Ashley Norris, assistant dean of the university's college of education. Part of that shift in recent years, she says, may come from more schools implementing the Common Core State Standards, which are intended to put more of an emphasis on critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

The pointer to Common Core standards leads to another hypothesis. Maybe, standardized testing is to blame? If teachers are evaluated by scores of their students on standardized tests, they have a strong incentive to assign a lot of homework.

[-]JMatthews4y20

I would find highly unlikely in the UK that teachers are assigning anywhere near 3-5 hours of homework per day with the exception of exam years and even then I think that seems extreme. I'm also sceptical of homework beyond a bit of retrieval practice on past content. But if I assigned anymore than an hour per week (usually it's 30 minutes) I'd be inundated with parent emails. Perhaps you're focusing on elite schools?

[-]ChristianKl4y60

But if I assigned anymore than an hour per week (usually it's 30 minutes) I'd be inundated with parent emails.

You are likely just one teacher that the students have. How many teachers are assinging a similar amount to the same students?

[-]Andrew Vlahos4y20

I'm in the US, not UK (sorry for not clarifying). Maybe homework is functional there, and if so, great, but that isn't what happens here. Also, I wish homework was a bit of retrieval practice on past content, but it's not

[-]gjm4y20

Another UK data point: my daughter is in secondary school (= high school), not in a public-exam year. The school's officially stated policy is that pupils in her year should expect 1.5-2.5 hours of homework per day. At no point has she been set anywhere near that much. The typical total is more like half an hour per day. (She's very bright and it's hard to know for sure how much time it's meant to take; I'm guessing based on what she tells me.)

I'm fairly sure this varies a lot from school to school, even if we hold fixed what country, public-versus-private, etc.