🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <22...@unix.cis.pitt.edu> dt...@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate) writes:
>In article <15...@haddock.ima.isc.com> br...@ima.isc.com writes:
>>Is there any excuse for maintaining the sanctity of individual work 
>>at the college level?
>
>Yes.  [ ... talking about commuters etc. ... ] 

  I really think that *both* individual and group work is important at
the college level (assuming that a lot of students come in without
having had reasonable pre-college courses).

  For introductory courses, it makes a lot of sense to have projects
be entirely individual; in fact, even a lot of higher-level courses
have small projects (for instance, an OS course which starts by
having students write a parallel merge sort).

  However, it's really important for students to learn to work in
groups for the real world--it's a different set of skills.  Until all
schools have software engineering courses, it's especially important
to have a few large group projects in upper-level classes.

>Also, not all groups are as "self-policing" as yours seemed to be.

  The larger the group, the better it seems to work, in my experience.
A 4-person group (quite reasonable for project courses) generally
seems to do pretty well at "self-policing".  The one time I was in a
20-person group (or so), we managed quite well.

>The idea of expecting higher quality from larger groups is a good one, but in
>practice it could be a nightmare trying to compare essentially incomparable
>projects, and assign an equitable grade to each.

  It's hard, but the same can be said for large individual projects.
I think giving students the experience of working in groups is more
important.

		Anton (still a student :-)
   
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| Anton Rang (grad student) | ra...@cs.wisc.edu | UW--Madison |
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