I think if you talk to anyone in teaching (except at an elite university or setting) will tell you that students don't do optional. Students do problems because they will get a number for it. They won't do problems (by and large) if there is no grade for it.
Would Stackoverflow.com have the participation it has if it didn't have badges, numbers, and karma? I think your perspective ignores a great deal of research on games and human behavior.
>Students do problems because they will get a number for it.
And that's exactly the problem with the entire system. We need other ways to give incentives and motivation. The point is that plain numbered grades suck at giving motivation, they suck at actually judging the performance and/or understanding of a student and they suck at being anything but a completely arbitrary method of weeding out people who are unable to conform to the contrived requirements of an artificial testing environments, whether they are actually intelligent or not (and being a slow learner doesn't mean someone is dumb, another thing this system sucks at).
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I think if you talk to anyone in teaching (except at an elite university or setting) will tell you that students don't do optional. Students do problems because they will get a number for it. They won't do problems (by and large) if there is no grade for it.
Would Stackoverflow.com have the participation it has if it didn't have badges, numbers, and karma? I think your perspective ignores a great deal of research on games and human behavior.
>Students do problems because they will get a number for it.
And that's exactly the problem with the entire system. We need other ways to give incentives and motivation. The point is that plain numbered grades suck at giving motivation, they suck at actually judging the performance and/or understanding of a student and they suck at being anything but a completely arbitrary method of weeding out people who are unable to conform to the contrived requirements of an artificial testing environments, whether they are actually intelligent or not (and being a slow learner doesn't mean someone is dumb, another thing this system sucks at).