🚀 go-pugleaf

clemenr@wmin.ac.uk wrote:
> BMJ wrote:
> 
>>Between the time I finished high school and I had those students,
>>standards started slipping.  Allowing calculators into school
> 
> classrooms
> 
>>was one of the biggest mistakes that could have been made as students
> 
> 
>>saw they were no longer required to think.  When I was an undergrad,
> 
> I
> 
>>used a slide rule until nearly the end of my second year.  The chief
>>benefit of that, however, was that I was required to not only reason
> 
> my
> 
>>way through problems, I had to clearly show what I was doing when I
>>wrote them up for submission.
> 
> 
> Hmmm.... Some of my assignments insist that students hand in fully
> detailed *hand-written* working. Many of my tutorials involve students
> sitting by their flash flatscreen computers actively scribbling away
> with pencil and paper. Anyone want to guess why I insist on this :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Ross-c
> 

I've insisted that students show *all* their work on assignments or exams.

I remember one mid-term I gave and one question on it involved solving 
some simultaneous linear equations in order to determine the 
characteristics of the electrical circuits being described.  One student 
didn't do that, so I penalized her, resulting in her throwing a tantrum. 
  She claimed that all she did was punch the necessary numbers into her 
calculator and that's how she got her result (so does that mean the 
calculator should have received the diploma instead of her?).  Now, get 
this:  she shrieked that I should have known that because everybody has 
the same calculator.

I encountered something like that about two years earlier when I was a 
TA marking for an electrical course while I was finishing my Ph. D. 
residency.  The prof told me that it wasn't a course in algebra, so I 
shouldn't penalize students if they didn't show the interim 
calculations.  I found that remark from him rather odd, as he was at the 
uni for about thirty years, so he should have remembered how students 
were expected to show all their own work.

I emphasized to my students that by doing so and continuing it in 
industry, they would be doing a favour to whoever is going to be looking 
at their calculations, even if it's them a few years later.  Also, 
saying "I punched the numbers into my calculator" likely won't be seen 
as a proper reason in a disciplinary hearing.  All of my preaching went 
in one ear and out the other, without encountering anything in between.