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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   34003 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating) and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution, just how universities used to work not that long ago. But obviously this would fail 90%+ of the current university students and likely destroy the entire industry as vast majority of the students providing their income stream are not nearly smart or conscientious enough to pass then.

It would also be a problem because of scale. Back in the day when they had a lot of oral exams they didn't also have 100 person 101 weed out lectures either, and while you can certainly have the in class exams be the entire grade with those you certainly are not doing oral exams. Without large classes its not just that 90% would fail its also that the would either have to hire a lot more professors or cut class sizes (not to mention path dependent legacy issues such as having built a bunch of large lecture halls and fewer 20 person class rooms.

Isn't there a massive oversupply of TA's and PhD students? Get them to do it for pennies. Hell, they already do that. It's not like professors at large like teaching anyway, much less grading.

There is only a massive oversupply because we allow essentially unlimited numbers of foreign grad students in, so they could easily go away

And the reason we do that is because there was massive undersupply in the 80s and 90s because universities still wanted them to be paid peanuts. Everything about is labor cost arbitrage.

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