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?

Yeah, bearing in mind that the mapping from percentage scores to letter grades or the equivalent is pretty much arbitrary, I much prefer systems where some of the problems presented are really hard and the grade boundaries placed correspondingly lower. It allows for more ambition and more flexibility, and perhaps more importantly it's just more interesting than a system where you get a perfect score if you don't screw up each of twenty virtually identical basic exercises. I still have fond memories of a high-school physics class where I once earned an A on a test with a score of 57%. (The median was somewhere in the 30s.)

That presumes it's real difficulty rather than busywork or pointless procedural stuff, though, which is harder to design and in some fields harder to grade: in mathematics you can grade only on the final answer (with partial credit if you e.g. obviously lost a sign somewhere), but that's not true for something like e.g. physics lab notebooks.

As it happens, Art of Problem Solving questions actually fit the bill of being really difficult. Most chapters have about 15 or so "challenge" problems, of which 5 or so are really hard.

The scoring system I used was to (a) give myself double points for answering the really hard challenge problems, and (b) only require a total score of 10 for all the challenge problems combined. So if I got all the regular problems correct + 10 points on the challenge problems (1 point per "standard" challenge problem and 2 points per "hard" ch... (read more)

7Jiro12y

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%.