November 2014 Monthly Bragging Thread

elharo

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

One problem with this is that the amount of effort you can spend on a set of problems of this sort is nearly unbounded. If the problems are simple enough that a decent understanding of the subject leads you to get them all correct, you will only have to spend as much time as it takes to finish the assignment, and then you're done. If a decent understanding of the subject only leads you to get 50% correct, then you'll probably be in a position where you can spend another hour and raise that to 55%, and another hour for 57%, etc. You don't know (until after the fact) how much you need to get correct to actually get a good grade, so you're stuck not knowing how much effort is reasonable.

Furthermore, if it's graded on a curve, this will result in a race to the bottom where everyone spends an extra two hours for that 7% advantage over everyone else and since everyone's spent it, the overall effect is just that everyone spent an extra two hours for little benefit.

And woe be it if you have two such assignments at the same time. Not only do you have to worry about spending unlimited time because you don't know when you're done, it's going to be very difficult to work on the assignments in order without shifting between one and the other constantly so you don't spend all your effort on increasing one by 5% when that same effort could have increased the other one by 10%.

the overall effect is just that everyone spent an extra two hours for little benefit.

Woah! I sure hope not! The two or three times I had challenging assignments in school (my school encouraged undergraduates to take graduate classes if interested) they were tremendously valuable. If thinking about difficult problems and solving them has no marginal benefit, I can't imagine what part of schooling does! (perhaps the diploma mill would be ideal in that scenario? I'm having a hard time simulating this hypothetical student).

3Nornagest12y

Yeah, you don't want this sort of thing graded on a curve -- though the "race to the bottom" issue isn't substantially worse here than it would be with a more conventional problem set. Curves are generally set by the amount of effort the average student is willing to spend rather than the amount of effort an arbitrarily ambitious student is willing to, meaning that if you're in a position to be making decisions about how to allocate your limited study time you probably don't need to be doing so. The teacher in my example didn't grade on a curve, he assigned grade boundaries based on his idea of an acceptable level of effort and understanding. He also included estimates of each problem's difficulty, which was helpful for time management.