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hawkice comments on November 2014 Monthly Bragging Thread - Less Wrong
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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%.
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).
It's not that it has no marginal benefit, it's that it has diminishing marginal benefit for the effort spent. At some point, you're better off working on another class's assignment instead. At some point you're better off taking leisure time, or even sleeping. If even people with a good understanding are only expected to get 50% correct, how are you supposed to know when you're better off going to sleep, only knowing that you've completed 50% and not knowing whether the extra 5% from sacrificing some sleep is worth it?
The returns diminish when it comes to impact on your grade, yes, and I certainly enjoyed transparency about how the grades I got would be impacted by my work.
The distribution of value for learning, though, goes up with difficulty until it drops to zero (the point at which you cannot solve the puzzle at all). My only point is that we should strongly prefer systems that allow us to soak up all that high-intensity high-value work -- modern universities aren't that for many students, though, but independently reading textbooks could/should be.