Over at Dot Physics, Rhett wonders about the role of homework in a world that includes cramster:
Then what is the problem? The problem is with my jobs. Yes, jobs. I have two jobs. My first job is to help students learn. I am a learning-faciliator if you like. I do this in many different ways. One way is to assign homework. Oh, my other job is to evaluate how well students understand the material. I have to give them some grade at the end of the semester. One obvious way to do this is with an exam or feats of strength.
Here is the question: Do you grade homework? Oh, I know what everyone says. If you don’t give a grade for the homework, they won’t do it. But I think if it is worth a grade, they will try to get a grade, and not try to learn. Clearly, it is easy to get solutions off the internets. Yes, I know there are other strategies to prevent them from cheating. But I say, why? Why prevent them from helping themselves?
The obvious way to settle this is with an online poll:
A follow-up poll, and my take on the matter, below the fold:
Personally, I tend to think that homework needs to be graded to get people to do it, but it shouldn’t count very heavily in the final grade. And every effort should be made to help students get through the problems.
My usual homework policy is to have homework and quizzes together count for 20-30% of the grade. I assign ungraded homework nightly, but use those problems as a source for quiz questions (which I tell the students in advance). I also assign a handful (3-6) of homework problems on a weekly basis that I collect and grade in detail. After grading the homework, I post the solutions, and allow students to re-write their assignments for half the credit they lost (so a student who got an 80/100 can re-write the assignment and gain 10 points). This gives them an incentive to re-visit the assignment and see what they did wrong, and hopefully learn from that mistake.
This past spring, I used WebAssign for the nightly homeworks, and did away with the quizzes. I kept the weekly assignments, though, for feedback purposes– I think it’s important for students to get at least some problems that are graded in detail, to give them an idea of how I apportion partial credit, and that sort of thing. That way, they know what to expect when they take exams.
Also, while WebAssign provides a nice overview of the big picture of who’s doing the assignments and so on, it’s a little tricky to extract detailed information about widespread sources of confusion. Especially with mutliple attempts allowed, as students can try to guess their way to the right answer. Annoying as it is to grade homework, I find it gives a better sense of the class’s level of understanding. If the vast majority of students are making the exact same mistake on a constant-acceleration problem, for example, then I know I need to go over that more in class.
That’s what seems to work for me. What do you think?