126
In general, yes, a teacher should know how to do any assignment and, in some cases, should have actually done it. In teaching programming, for example, it is usually a mistake to assign a problem that the instructor hasn't essentially done themselves.
The reason is that one of the tasks in making assignments is to estimate the effort and time required to do ...
96
Your proposed system reduces to the case where all assignments have their deadlines effectively at the end of the course. Courses with such a system do exist, but I am not aware how common this is.
One reason I can think of as to why early deadlines may help is the ability to give feedback. Providing feedback for each assignment before the next allows the ...
51
1: You can't give out model answers or detailed corrections until the deadline has passed.
After all, it'd be pretty unfair if Student A submitted on time without having seen model answers, and Student B submitted late and had model answers (or a friend's work with the academic's corrections) to copy from.
And if you delay giving out corrections or grades ...
25
Way back in prehistory (i.e. 25 years ago), I experimented with flexible deadlines, staggered deadlines, or no deadlines for papers and problem sets in math courses in several institutions. (Yes, I had students write papers in a math course.) It was a mixed success.
There is rationale for timed work and firm deadlines, some stronger and some weaker, from ...
22
I think your perspective on this is a bit skewed. Other answers have touched on why your assessment probably needs tweaking, but I'd like to address your general view on your students and what you see as their obligations to you.
First, it's important to be clear about your grading rubric at the very beginning of the course. It's okay to announce extra ...
22
In general the teacher must be capable of achieving what is they want their students to achieve by undertaking the assignment, but that might not be coming up with a solution.
In the modern world where all knowledge is at our finger tips all the time, the job of an educator is much less to impart knowledge, and much more to guide and mentor students, help ...
17
In engineering, when students are asked to solve real world open ended problems,sometimes it works out that there is no solution. Figuring that out is an important outcome.
16
From the beginning, the majority of the class was ill-mannered. They would make noise by opening microphones, opening cameras, removing other students, muting my mic.
This seems like a technical problem; I really can't believe any modern software wouldn't have a way to disallow this behavior. I would start by investigating this.
When I threatened to ...
15
I grew up in Canada and was a PhD student and lecturer in England, before moving to Japan from 2013-2016. Before 2013, like most Westerners I did not wear a mask during flu season, and couldn't imagine wearing one while teaching. When I arrived in Japan in 2013, there was no COVID-19 or SARS-2003 going on, but people everywhere were wearing masks: On day 1 ...
14
Marking papers is about more than just the grades; students can learn from their mistakes and improve, and teachers can reinforce concepts and topics in areas of weakness
Regular assessment throughout a course not only helps stabilise grades at the end of a course, it is also a key part of the teaching process. By marking promptly and giving students ...
14
the issue of students suddenly hitting the end of the semester with massive amounts of work piled up and all the cramming and health issues and stress with that, so it is really for their benefit to impose hard deadlines to avoid that. Paternalism in this aside....
I think this is a key factor. Students are rational and will make choices based on what (they ...
13
I like to discuss coursework in classes, giving general advice on how students tackled the problem, common mistakes, and advice on how to tackle this type of problem in future.
I cannot do that when some students could still submit in future, as it would be telling them the answers.
12
Many excellent answers here covering most of the points, but one more I have not seen: it depends on precise rubric and grading practice, but it can be easier to grade consistently when you grade all the material in the same block of time, and to go back and change or correct grading in early assignments before releasing grades, rather than having to ...
11
I think that the third option is widely accepted. Students will complain about the other two, though different students and for different reasons.
The book is an outline and is a fallback for students. If it has good exercises, then they can get practice. But you will still want your own exercises to supplement in many cases, and certainly for exams. But I ...
11
My short answer to the question is: yes.
Long answer is as follows:
Professors/ teachers should definitely have the knowledge that must be passed onto the students. I find it hard to think of an instructor who attempts to teach a topic that they themselves do not understand. However, again, you must be aware that there are different levels to understanding ...
9
I have always felt obligated to solve every problem out myself before handing it to a student. I put myself in the student's shoes to see if an assignment is of good quality. This comes at a price in the way lessons could be developed further, I could cover something else, etc.
However, this teacher is ABSOLUTELY NOT unfit to teach! I have never been very ...
8
One point I haven't seen specifically addressed in the other good answers: Grading takes time. I set strict homework deadlines to be fair to the course staff who are doing the actual grading.
I teach large upper-division computer science courses where almost nothing can be graded automatically. Each of the homework problems I assign (typically three per ...
5
I would say it is generally allowed and that exceptions would be rare. But a policy forbidding it would need to be spelled out.
At one level, universities are in competition with others, but this isn't normally at the level of instruction. At a more important level, universities are cooperative and encourage their faculty to also be cooperative.
I've never ...
5
In my experience, the only way to get students to do coursework activities or contribute to forums is to allocate some of the marks to those activities, and to make a minimum pass grade.
e.g. coursework 40%, exam 40%, forum contributions 20%, and a minimum score of 60% for each of the three components in order to pass, so 24/40 for coursework, 24/40 for ...
4
If assignments are about "knowledge," it might seem that a teacher who does not know the answer to the assignments is unfit to teach. Knowledge, however, is not the end of many (most?) lessons. In many cases, assignments are about skills more than knowledge, and a teacher does not necessarily need to be able to complete all the assignments themself ...
4
If you hire a group of fruit pickers, and tell them you'll pay them to pick strawberries, but it'd be nice to get some apples. Would you be surprised that nobody picked apples?
You either need the assignments to form part of the mark, or you need to ensure that it's clear that the assignments will cover ideas that will be in the exam, which will not be ...
4
Giving students an assignment which a lecturer can't solve generally should not happen. Sometimes it can be justified (e.g. students involved in a real-life research project, where a problem can have many solutions or none at all), but it has to be made clear to students.
However, one mistake does not make anyone unfit for teaching. Just as students, ...
4
It depends on the details of the course and subject, and the impact on others and on learning, of late assignments.
In some courses, those impacts may be very significant. In others, they may be negligible. So you just need to consider the specifics.
I do not think there is a universal need to have deadlines at all. All of the history and literature courses ...
4
Assignments can build on each other.
Simply put, giving deadlines allows you to give assignments that build on each other. For instance, when I was doing my Introduction to Research unit last year, we had three assignments: a literature review where we analyzed the literature in a given area to identify gaps where further research could be pursues, a problem ...
3
For depression, seek professional help.
Otherwise,
Few things look alarming to me. The whole of the issue also seems like a conflict and we are only presented with your side which does not include factual statements rather your interpretation of events. (i.e. they are being disrespectful)
Some alarming things on your side:
After the chairman spoke to me, I ...
3
Even for most graduate courses, I find having a textbook useful. Part of the reason for this is that I think it benefits students to get multiple perspectives on the same material. From my personal experience as a student, I know that sometimes having an instructor follow a text too closely can be a problem, since if a student has trouble grasping the ...
3
Advising on what I think is a key point here.
So I made some rules, threatening to mark students absent if this
continued. The whole class then requested a meeting and asked me to
discard these rules. I agreed.
This is the kiss of death. It's a common mistake for first-time teachers. I made the same mistake in my first semester.
You need to signal that ...
3
I don't think, particularly for extension problems, that it is vital the teacher has solved the problem unaided. However it is certainly desirable, just because they will have a better idea of the difficulty if they have done so.
However, what is important IMO is that the teacher has seen and verified the solution, since otherwise how can they be sure that ...
2
People say that you only understand something properly when you can explain it to others. So, if we say that the teacher has set the students to complete a Sudoku logic puzzle, then as long as the teacher understands and can clearly explain the work, it is no big deal if they can't solve the Sudoku themselves.
However, it is doubtless infuriating when a ...
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