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| An observation on homework problems |
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| rhb:
Almost 40 years ago, I was told by an EE undergrad sitting next to me that I would never pass Physics II, EM, because I had a degree in English lit and "This is where they weed out the engineers." I had the highest score on the final, an 89. The class average was 45. This led to the following observation: Of the people I knew, the ones who made an A would beat on homework problems until they solved them and only sought help after 4 or more hours of failure. Those who made a B went for help after 3 hours. Those who made a C sought help after 2 hours. The D and F students sought help after only an hour or less of effort. The point of homework problems is to develop skills by exercising. It's just like building muscle. No exercise, no muscle. There are no shortcuts. You may get a sheet of paper, but without the exercise it has no value. |
| golden_labels:
Hmm… were you exercising for 40 years to pass the exam? That would confirm their assessment! </JOKE> ;) Of course there is no way to score good marks without exercises. It’s not only about acquiring knowledge. It is about speed. The time on an exam is limited and one is usually working under stress. Even if the student knows the subject perfectly, they will fail to recognize the path needed to solve a problem. Exercises make you automatically match partial solutions to typical situations in the blink of an eye. The years of exercises made me sensitive to some of the fallancies related to statistics, like concluding causation from correlation. In this particular case the students, who got worse grades, might have asked for help earlier because of the common factor that caused both the low score and the need for help. |
| rhb:
Correlation does not imply causation. David Hume showed that. No statistics required. Just logic. I worked physics problems 3-4 hrs/day 3-4 days/wk all semester. I had the great advantage over my classmates that I was a grad student and only had to carry 12 hours. So I had the time. The extra 3-4 hours the engineering students had to take made it impossible for most to put in the same amount of time on physics. I was working on an MS in geology. By the end of the 6th week I had read all my geology textbooks cover to cover. So I was just attending class to review what I had learned and ask questions. I'd sit in class and sometimes eat an orange while everyone else was taking notes. This led one instructor to pepper me with questions for the first 3-4 weeks of class. I always knew the answers so eventually he moved on to the other students. I was failing Calculus I at the start, 17 out of 100 on the first quiz. I was advised to take Precalculus. I took that for my BA math requirement and was so bored I did not do any homework and got a C. I'd taught myself algebra in 6th grade and trig in the 8th. No way I was taking Precalculus a 2nd time. I did calculus problems 3-4 hrs/day 5-6 days/wk. I went from 2 out of 20 on the weekly quiz to 18 or 19 at the end of the semester. The person that triggered the inference was the class hotshot from my Cal I class. We were sitting waiting for the physics TA to show up. We had both spent 4+ hours on the same problem the day before. My comment is really an extension of the common phenomenum of people giving up without even trying. I was barely a B student overall. I never cared about grades. My focus was on learning. If I thought something was important, that got the bulk of my attention. If the instructor thought something else was more important and I missed that on an exam, I did not care. I have a close friend who had a 4.0 GPA for is PhD work at Austin. We took several courses together. There have been a number of instances where I had to explain to him some basic facet of what we had both studied some years after we finished the course. That never happened often, but I was always quite surprised. The real shocker was the nature of the Cristoffel symbol in tensor analysis. I had to drop the class because I simply could not spend enough time on it. But a year or two later I was explaining to him that it was the derivative of one coordinate system in relation to another. Very basic. The real world is not an exam. It requires solving problems for which there may not be clear answers. It is experience trying multiple techniques for attacking a problem that matters in real life. The reduction of university education into job training has littered the landscape with "professionals" who are utterly incompetent. What do you call a scientist who took remedial classes? An engineer. Most of engineering is a few courses in physics and a lot of mathematics. The rest is an ocean of details which one needs to know to work quickly, but which are not essential prior knowledge for solving a problem. |
| HighVoltage:
In the last few years I come more and more across students in the field of science and engineering that believe that homework is a ridicules invention of the past generation. These students want to pass tests without ever doing any serious training and just look at problem shortly. And with many new rules, that you can pass with 39% of correct answers, some of these students even pass their test and proof to me that I was wrong. |
| rhb:
Most exemplified by: "If I need to know that I'll look it up on the internet." I usually respond by saying I am not good at predicting the future. So I learn everything I can just in case I need the knowledge. In fact, we only understand things in the context of what we already know. The advantage of age and experience is we acquire an ever greater range of contextual knowledge. Or at least, some of us do. |
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