Homework - good or bad?

[hobbsyoyo]

What are your thoughts on homework in general terms? Does your opinion differ much between grade school and university-level?

I have mixed feelings on homework. I think it's important practice overall but can also be abused (obvious hyperbole alert!) by professors at the university level. It becomes an issue when professors forget that their students have other classes than the one they teach and load their students down with overly long or numerous assignments.

I've been running into that a lot this semester. I will say it's only really a problem when professors start doing things like handing out two homework assignments at the same time and giving the class only 2 days turn around time. That's also happened a lot to me this semester and it becomes a grind.

Then there is professors who write homework assignments as if they were tests. By this I mean long assignments with multi-multi-part problems ( Problem 1 might have part A) B) C) and D) which each having parts i) ii) iii) ). That gets to be overwhelming and couple that with 2 day turn-around and it gets ridiculous. A standard excuse about 2 day turn arounds or long assignments is that 'we are behind' or 'we have to cover a lot' and so on. It's not the student's fault that the professor has time-management issues and they should not have to pay for that. I'm not saying they necessarily need to make every assignment a cake-walk, but they should be conscientious of the students time as well.

File systems also skew everything related to homework. If you aren't familiar, file systems are where Greek houses (or groups of friends) have access to files on classes where all the past homeworks and exams are available, which allows students with access to the files to breeze by and just copy last year's answers (which more often than not are this years answers as well). What are your thoughts on file systems?

Ungraded homework is just evil in my opinion.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I almost never have homework at my university. A few seminars are an exception. And I don't mind those exceptions.
I would absolutely hate to have graded homework. Would totally mess with the way I am used to how things work. Which is that presentations aside there is a final exam in the end (or a paper) and that is it. Which I very much like as it makes me feel like a free and self-responsible adult rather than a little student stuck in a hamster wheel like in high school.

I never heard of such a file system. I want.

 

[H4run]

I second Terxpahseyton

 

[really]

Flip it on its head - do the boring readin from the textbook or reading examples at home, answer the questions or do the problems in class.

 

[Camikaze]

I also rarely, if ever, get homework for university. My work solely consists of doing the readings and actual assignments, and studying. To me, 'homework' is something which by definition is not assessed, or doesn't contribute towards your final mark. If it's assessed, it's an assignment or assessment. So I wouldn't particularly care if others are cheating on homework, because they're only cheating themselves.

What is grade school?

 

[warpus]

I've got to take the side of the professors here, only because when I was in University I had TONS of assignments.

I had to build a goddamn operating system that fair enough was running on simulated hardware, but nevertheless, it was built up from scratch. Every freaking day I'd be in the lab after classes, well into the night. Computer graphics class? Same thing, I had to build the goddamn graphics pipeline from scratch. Compilers? Build a goddamn compiler from scratch.

Did I get all of my assignments done? Hell no, there wasn't enough time. This was all on top of advanced level calculus, statistics, linear algebra, logic..

Should everyone else have to suffer at least 50% as much as I did? I did so it's only fair.

Homework in highschool and earlier years was a joke and mostly had to do with repetitive nonsense that didn't require too much thought, but I'm probably misremembering because I'm a bit full of myself right now as you can tel.

 

[Zelig]

Don't really care, I just did whatever homework was interesting or necessary to understanding the material without much regard for the grading scheme on the syllabus.

In my experience if you suck up to university profs and ace their tests it doesn't much matter what you do otherwise.

 

[warpus]

I have an awesome memory of the time I re-took grade 12 math in summer school one year. I was the only person in class who got over 70% initially (72%). My parents had a rule that I have to have over 80% in math and science related subjects, and they didn't care about anything else. I also wanted to improve my mark for University admission purposes.

Anyway, everyone else in the class was an idiot, except for the teacher. He'd give us a homework assignment each class and halfway through the course (a month into it I think?) he asked us each to come up to his desk one by one and bring up all the homework we did over the last couple weeks. So people went up there with binders full of pages and showed them to him.

Then I went up with my ONE wrinkled piece of paper.. the guy with the highest mark in the class, by far. Yeah, I did like half a page of homework total, which was just maybe 2-4 short questions. I wasn't spending 2 hours each night working on that useless stuff! I wouldn't have learned crap, I already knew it. He looked at me and said ".. that's it?".. "Yep".. "Alright, whatever, that's fine, go back to your desk".

I ended up getting 97% in the class. I was acing all the tests so I guess the teacher assumed correctly that it would have been pointless for me to do the homework. Good teacher! I felt bad a bit by putting him on the spot like that. He had to show some favouritism, you know? I think the rest of the class was too dumb to get it so it didn't matter.

 

[downtown]

Like most things with pedagogy, homework can be good or bad, depending on specifically what the homework is, how it is graded, how to lines up with the rest of the curriculum, etc.

A good homework assignment gives practice on core course objectives that cannot be completely mastered just in classtime. For learning languages, for example, I think it's critical. Like just about everything else, you can execute it poorly, assign too much, assign too little, or not grade it properly.

I don't think people who are like "BOO HOMEWORK" completely have really created a credible alternative, especially for K12 kids.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I don't think people who are like "BOO HOMEWORK" completely have really created a credible alternative

I believe the alternative is called "NOO HOMEWORK"

Spoiler :

I am not actually against school homework

 

[Perfection]

I almost never did homework and I turned out okay.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Homework should just be suggested (i.e. students work on what they need practice with) readings and/or problems that help with understanding concepts.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Flip it on its head - do the boring readin from the textbook or reading examples at home, answer the questions or do the problems in class.

I had a professor who did exactly that. It had mixed results due to him being one person in a class of 30 or more. He also had other quirks like tests every other week (9 total + a final) as opposed to 3 or 4 big tests.

What is grade school?

K-12

I've got to take the side of the professors here, only because when I was in University I had TONS of assignments.

I had to build a goddamn operating system that fair enough was running on simulated hardware, but nevertheless, it was built up from scratch. Every freaking day I'd be in the lab after classes, well into the night. Computer graphics class? Same thing, I had to build the goddamn graphics pipeline from scratch. Compilers? Build a goddamn compiler from scratch.

Did I get all of my assignments done? Hell no, there wasn't enough time. This was all on top of advanced level calculus, statistics, linear algebra, logic..

Should everyone else have to suffer at least 50% as much as I did? I did so it's only fair.

Homework in highschool and earlier years was a joke and mostly had to do with repetitive nonsense that didn't require too much thought, but I'm probably misremembering because I'm a bit full of myself right now as you can tel.

That's what my assignments are becoming like (although based on aerospace stuff and not compsci stuff). One of my professors is having us create programs to compute orbital trajectories and deltav's for a cubesat mission that his design team is trying to send around the moon.

Homework should just be suggested (i.e. students work on what they need practice with) readings and/or problems that help with understanding concepts.

I actually hate this with a passion. I'm typically so loaded down with assignments that when a prof has 'optional homework' that he doesn't grade, I never do it because it drops to the bottom of my triage list. Then I do terrible on the tests.

 

[Kennigit]

Homework in general needs to develop sensitivity calculation skills better and understanding limiting parameters

While that is a STEM focused answer i fully believe it extends to all fields

 

[Antilogic]

Homework (which I am taking to mean any assignment that is not a written paper, presentation, or a test/quiz that is intended to be completed out of class) is good if it forces you to practice the skills required to master the subject but bad if such an excess is assigned students cannot complete it within a reasonable amount of time and still sleep at night.

 

[Commodore]

At the grade school level I think homework should only be assigned to the students who failed to grasp the day's lesson during the class period. The way you determine this is by giving a short quiz towards the end of the period. If you fail the quiz you get homework, if you pass then you don't.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I like this idea. Makes people pay attention and gives those in need practice. Double-Win
On the other hand, it may require me to attend and there are lectures where attendance really is no must if done responsibly.

 

[downtown]

At the grade school level I think homework should only be assigned to the students who failed to grasp the day's lesson during the class period. The way you determine this is by giving a short quiz towards the end of the period. If you fail the quiz you get homework, if you pass then you don't.

Giving a short quiz at the end of a lesson is a great way to check for initial understanding, but it's very rare that a lesson can be planned to give enough practice to master a concept in one shot. I think there is real value in having practice a few hours *after* the concept has been introduced, to check for memory and retention.

*note*, I'm talking about elementary and middle school kids here

 

[cybrxkhan]

At my university I almost get no homework to be honest.

That said, I more or less agree with Antilogic. I don't really have much against homework, what I do have issue with is excess amounts of homework and study because teachers and/or professors don't realize that students take other classes.

On a related note, I remember my high school had a policy where teachers were only allowed to give tests on certain days depending on the subject they taught - i.e. Science teachers can only give tests on Mondays, English teachers only on Tuesdays, etc., something like that. In theory it was a great system, because it would spread out the workload and studying us students would've done. In reality, teachers just found a loophole where they'll give "quizes" that in theory didn't take up the entire class period... but was close to it. That said though it probably did alleviate the students' workload a bit at least, so what not.

 

[Commodore]

Giving a short quiz at the end of a lesson is a great way to check for initial understanding, but it's very rare that a lesson can be planned to give enough practice to master a concept in one shot. I think there is real value in having practice a few hours *after* the concept has been introduced, to check for memory and retention.

Well I always operate on the concept that lessons are supposed to build on each other, i.e. using what you learned yesterday to help you understand what you are learning today. I think that would help with long-term mastery of subjects.

Or you could give end of the week tests on Friday that cover every lesson for the week to test long-term retention. If a student fails that, they get weekend homework.