Corridors of Time is still sublime. After I heard that song I had to figure out the notes. Turns out there's this random tool that turns game music rips into midi, so I was able to figure out the chords in that song. I still play it from time to time.
Yasunori Mitsuda's music has had a lasting impression on me. From Chrono to Xenogears and beyond, I had some strong feels associated with his music. Thanks for sharing that link :D
Online exams are a pointless waste of time and invasion of privacy, designed to make money without measuring anything. It encourages good people to cheat. If you don't have in-person proctored exams, you are wasting your time.
Nothing and no one forces you to cheat, it's a choice; an admittedly common choice, but then so are a lot of immoral acts like lying and stealing. I'm not saying that online tests are a good idea because we have to live with the sort of people who cheat, but lets not pretend that this turns "good people bad".
Good people don't need excuses to be good, and don't respond to excuses to be bad... if you want to simplify to that extent.
The closest I ever saw this working was a site called OhYay. It really felt like spaces you could move around in. It wasn't the same as IRL, but it was about as close as I think you could get. Sadly, the company shut down before they could become profitable.
Sounds like 50/50 for the distribution? That means you are okay with a student getting a 40% across all your quizzes and then passing the class with a C-?
My experience is that no students get a C- except for students who blow the first part of the class and try to work back. I usually work a deal out with them anyway.
Some of the permissions problems related to window.showDirectoryPicker have been frustrating. I'm developing a client-side Python web framework, and during development I need to mount the library locally; I hand off the directory to Pyodide using this API. But that doesn't work in VSCode's internal browser, apparently because the API just simply isn't able to be approved.
I'm at a public southeastern R2. Not selective. Mostly regional catchment. Most of our students have to learn how to be good students their first year or two.
We're making major changes in course structure as a result, so if things go well we won't have enough data to measure any kind of meaningful trend
The fact that you are talking about Dan Garcia, a huge figure in computing education research and an excellent teacher, and the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum makes this hilarious. You should look up some details about both.
You'd be amazed at how many students we know are obviously cheating because the logs reveal that they copy pasted a long, complete answer within seconds of opening a problem for the first time, full of sophisticated code constructs that we didn't teach them, and lot's of nicely formatted comments. Sometimes they even copy/paste the entire GPT output and then format it down.
This has been my wife’s experience as a college math professor. Instead of code it’s extremely formal problems with way more steps than the student normally performs using notation never taught in class.
It’s not that students didn’t cheat before, LLMs have just lowered the bar so far many can’t complete a live test in a class that requires effort.
Public schools around me have done more than just turn a blind-eye to cheating. During COVID, one of our kids cheated in every subject, we showed the proof to the school and only one of the teachers had any consequence at all, and that was to give her a failing grade for the test we could prove she cheated on (quizzes and HW were ignored).
It was trivial to show she had plagiarized every single essay she wrote (just put any unusual sounding sentence in google with double quotes around it), and her English teacher said roughly: "Yeah, lots of kids are doing that these days, nothing we can do about it"
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