= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Liron comments on Just Try It: Quantity Trumps Quality - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (82)
Wow, what a cool experiment.
I'm surprised he was allowed to do it; I don't think many institutions will let professors apply inconsistent grading criteria like that.
Seems so surprising I would guess that it was apocryphal, not knowing the context.
I did a further search online; the quote appears verbatim in many places, but I can't find any additional information which would single out a school or teacher, so I would err on the side of assuming it's fictional.
Now I feel dirty.
Apparently it comes from this book. Unfortunately artists don't seem to do anything like peer review, so if it really did happen I wouldn't expect it to be shown any more verifiably than this. On the other hand, I don't particularly trust artists not to make up a story and call it an experiment.
One really shouldn't give probably apocryphal evidence like this in support of a theory.
Actually I think the next step is to run the experiment. It's a perfectly good experiment - even though I'd expect it not to happen inside a real school, because the students would complain they weren't being graded fairly.
Concept is still important enough that I promoted it immediately.
I would expect it not to happen inside a real school because the school would be uninterested in improving their teaching via the experimental method. Of course I hope I'm wrong! (Anyone know of particularly enlightened schools?)
If I'm right it would seem a much harder problem to solve than the being-graded-fairly one.
Someone could just book a ceramics studio and advertise free lessons/use in exchange for participating in an experiment.
Then split the people there into two groups, and tell one group that they get money (or other arbitrary desirable) based on how many pots they make, and the other on how good their pots are.
My wife intends to start teaching sculpture in a year or so... I'll make sure to bring this up to her. The tricky part will be objectively grading quality (an outside judge and blindness should be sufficient).
Maybe it could be done across different schools, different classes or different years. For example, in year 1 teach subject focusing on quality and subject 2 focusing on quantity. Then in year 2 reverse the roles. But then you also need to be careful with the order of the subjects.
Just splitting the students into two groups would be better though, aside from the complaints. This is a problem with A/B testing in general: people want to be treated fairly. Are there good ways to reduce (the risk of) such complaints?
To me, the simplest solution that comes to mind is to grade on a curve at the end of the course, based on the quality of the work (or some other subjective measure - I'm not familiar with university art courses, but I assume there's some kind of widely-accepted grading methodology). That is to say - tell the students before the course they will be graded on quality or quantity depending on the group, but grade each student on a curve relative to their own section for their permanent grade once the course has finished. This would obviously still require lying to the students (at the very least by omission, arguably), however.