Tag: higher education

Ajay Shah and Nitin Pai on Higher Education in India

Ashish5 Comments

The IIT JEE (Indian Institute of Technology joint entrance exam) is revered as the arbiter of merit. With industrialised coaching classes, it is less clear how the JEE selects the right people to attend an IIT. Simplistic measurement of marks in an exam is not how the entry barriers into most sensible institutions work. The high-powered incentive — attending an IIT — is damaging the learning process. We propose a two-part mechanism: A broad exam that filters for sound capability, and then randomised allocation. The overall impact of such a mechanism would be positive. Test preparation has corroded Indian education. Across India, children no longer attend just high school. They are enrolled in coaching classes. Here, it is not necessary to study the subject and understand concepts. All they need to learn is the finite list of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that are likely to be asked in entrance examinations.

https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/doing-better-than-a-competitive-exam-123082000552_1.html

Two of my favorite columnists writing about a topic that I am most passionate about – the conduct of examinations in India. What’s not to like, and how can I possibly not write about it?

  1. As Nitin and Ajay mention, “test prep is not education”. Indeed. Test prep is just that: test prep. You can get very good at test prep, but that doesn’t mean that you will be educated.
  2. They have their own definition of education, and while I don’t disagree with it one bit, I have a shorter one.
    Education is about learning to ask (and then answer) really good questions.
    My problem with our education system, and with exam test prep, is that we simply don’t teach our students the art of asking really good questions.
  3. “The tendrils of curiosity, dissent, imagination, creativity, and risk-taking are likely to be crushed in these years. We are creating followers, not leaders.”
    If I nodded any harder, I could probably power a wind turbine all by myself.
  4. “Upgrading high-school syllabi and implementing the National Education Policy 2020 are sometimes proposed as the answer. This is insufficient because they do not fundamentally change students’ and their parents’ incentives. Real change will come only if a seat in an elite academic institution is no longer seen as the sole objective of going to school.”
    Two first-pass responses to this issue would be to either increase supply or reduce demand. That is, increase the supply of high quality education seats (easier said than done), or reduce the demand for them (not gonna happen). Therefore their solution: lottery system.
    “The price of an IIT lottery ticket can be reduced to zero. Seats can be randomly allocated to applicants who meet basic requirements. Specifically, we could envision a first-level exam, which is not about the things that Google knows. Out of that the top 200,000 ranks are shortlisted. At the second stage, a random list of 20,000 would be chosen to attend the IITs. Such an approach, we contend, outperforms the current method on several important dimensions.”
  5. It takes away the incentive of the mad entrance test world that we live in, sure. But I worry that “universities and engineering colleges around the country will feel customer pressure to upgrade their standards because they will now encounter candidates with higher expectations and ambitions” won’t necessarily work out in practice. Students enrolled in an institute have *massive* switching costs, and colleges know this all too well. Trust me on this one: they don’t feel no customer pressure.
  6. My biggest problem with their solution isn’t with their solution per se, but with the fact that it ultimately boils down to whether we can scale up the supply of high quality higher education in our country quickly enough. I happen to think the answer is no, and I hope to god I’m wrong.

A chat with Pi about blended learning in Indian higher education

Ashish1 Comment

Arnold Kling:

I tried Personal Intelligence (Pi) from Inflection AI. As a chatbot companion, it charms you by offering encouraging reactions to what you tell it. After commenting on what you have to say, it always asks an interesting question. Think of it as a very skillful and probing interviewer. Yes, it’s only software playing a game with you, but it plays it well.
To get an idea of where a conversation with Pi can go, see part of my chat with Pi. The excerpt I posted starts with its message after I’d told it about my Marginal Revolution is Dead post. I predict that you’ll be impressed by it.

https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/gptllm-links-dfa

I did go and see Arnold’s chat with Pi, and yup, I was impressed.

Impressed enough to have a conversation with Pi myself. What topic would you guess I chose? The one closest to my heart in a professional context, of course:

I am convinced that classroom education in higher education in India is inefficient, takes too much time, leads to sub-optimal learning and rote memorization for examinations. This is because of a lot of different factors, most of which are interlinked with each other in many different ways. But long story short, young people in India, even in the very best universities, do not learn as well as they could. And since best practices trickle down to other universities, we end up creating a culture of learnng that is sub-optimal at all levels.

https://pi.ai/s/Z3QUR9V69aAmNgc2ek1rS

If you, like me, are convinced that classroom learning is overrated, please do go and read my conversation with Pi. If you, unlike me, are not convinced that classroom learning is overrated, definitely go and read my conversation with Pi, and please do tell me where I’m wrong.

Three points that I would like to highlight:

  1. Far too much of student’s time is spent in passive listening (and that for hours on end). Reduce it dramatically, and even the bit that remains should be online. If your choice is between packing a hundred and fifty students into a classroom like sardines or allowing students to learn online, go online. Is online bad? Well it’s not perfect, sure. But relative to what alternative? If the alternative is the sardines-in-a-can approach, then why not?
  2. To me, the job of a professor in higher education is to mentor, not to teach. This is not a binary variable, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but more mentoring than classroom teaching, that much is for sure. So if anything, the workload for a professor will go up in my proposal, not down. But more personalized teaching/mentoring. Leave the large scale classroom to online education. What else is it for?
  3. AI in education is coming. You may not like it, you may resist it and you may say (as a professor) “but what are we here for then?”. But read the rest of Arnold’s post and ask yourself if the median professor in your university is better or worse than AI tutoring. Then ask yourself how many students this professor can mentor/tutor. Again, AI in education is coming. But the answer to the question “but what are we here for?” lies in learning to think of ourselves as complements to AI. Ask what AI can’t yet provide, and provide that. What the “that” will be changes based on a variety of factors, but in my specific case, I would think it is working on projects with students. And that is what I am focussing on this year.

I sent my conversation with Pi to two friends of mine, who gave me extremely thoughtful responses.

Samrudha Surana highlighted the fact that I should also be thinking about the question “what is college for?”. Different students want different things from the same course. Some may wish to become professors, while many more may wish to join the corporate world. This is as it should be: higher education is not a replication machine, whose sole job is to produce more professors over time. But we need both (future professors and future employees in the corporate world), and people trained in many other professions besides. Blended learning, and AI’s introduction allows for more customization, and that is a good thing.

He also pointed out that we should carefully think through how the online courses will be chosen by the students, and to what end. What he means by this is how much of a say a student should have in choosing their course(s), and how much of it should be the decision of the professor. Not just the choice of the courses, but also the choice of the project/assignment/paper for which the course is being taken. He favors more autonomy for the student, and while I’m inclined to agree, the magnitude will be tricky to set as a rule. In general, a higher degree of autonomy in later semesters, I would think.

Much more discussions are needed in our classrooms. Much, much more. We professors need to be challenged in class, our assumptions and claims scrutinized, our premises questioned and our conclusions critiqued. Learning is best achieved through Socratic discourse (in my opinion). But our classrooms are more about proclamations by the professor rather than any of the above. Smaller class sizes will help, as will more seminars, discussion groups and workshops. That matters, and is rendered more probable under such an arrangement.

Undergraduate courses, finally, might involve much more of classroom learning in the initial semesters. Although under the new four year undergraduate programme (and the likelihood of them more or less replacing Masters programmes altogether), even here you would want to shift to more of blended learning towards the end of the degree.

We need to teach students in higher education better, of that I am convinced. What I have suggested here is worth further discussion, I’m fairly sure. Whether you agree with me or otherwise (and I hope it is otherwise), please tell me why 🙂

Put Me Out of a Job – 2

Ashish1 Comment

Let’s begin with the second class today. Your outline mentions the topic “Time Management and Opportunity Cost”. Before we begin the class, outline a definition of both terms, and explain their importance to my life. When you focus on the importance of time management to my life, make sure that you remember I am an eighteen year old. Why should I bother with managing my time? I have my entire life ahead of me – time isn’t a constraint, surely? When then do I need to manage it?
Once you explain your answer to these questions, proceed with the outline as discussed, as per the format I have asked for.

You might think this (time management and opportunity cost) to be a weird topic for a second class in a course called “Principles of Economics”. You would certainly think it to be unconventional. Not the latter half of the topic – opportunity costs – but the first one. What does time management have to do with economics? Well, think of it this way – if you are an Indian student who has learnt economics, you have almost certainly come across Lionel Robbins’ definition, and have most likely memorized it back then.

Here it is: the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

What is more scarce than time? We all have a limited amount of time, and we all have ends to achieve. The ends we would like to achieve in our lives are much more than the time that is afforded to us, and so we must choose which of these ends to pursue, and which to sacrifice. That’s a pretty good, and if you ask me, useful way to understand opportunity costs. The weirdness, or the unconventional choice (to some) of the topic, is a direct consequence of my request to ChatGPT from yesterday’s post:

Optimize for helping me understand the principles and their applicability to various aspects of my life (professional, personal etc), and it is fine if the outline doesn’t match what is usually taught in introductory economics textbooks. Given this, would you like to change your outline in any way? If yes, please show me the new outline. If no, please begin with the first class.

I am seeking to learn economics not to write an examination at the end of the semester in a college or university with this course. I am seeking, instead, to learn economics in order to apply it to various aspects of my life. Of course, as a student enrolled in a university, you may seek to optimize your learning geared towards doing well in a examination at the end of the semester, and that’s fine. Just let ChatGPT know accordingly, that’s all:

A minor tangent before we get back to our course. What if I asked you to change your course outline for these thirty classes to help me write an examination in an Indian undergraduate course? What would the new outline look like? In your answer, show me both outlines together, per lecture. That is, the first line in the description of lecture 1 (out of 30) should be your original lecture, and the second line should be the course tweaked for doing well in an examination, rather than applicability to various aspects of my life. Ditto for the second course, and so on and so forth for all thirty.

I won’t show you the whole output, but simply how the second lecture’s outline has changed:

Here’s a revised outline for the thirty lectures, with the original lectures designed for applicability to various aspects of life (Lecture A) and the modified lectures tailored to help you succeed in an Indian undergraduate economics course (Lecture B):
Lecture A: Time Management and Opportunity Cost
Lecture B: Opportunity Cost: Definition, Types, and Examples

ChatGPT-4’s Output (in part)

I know which one I prefer, and why. The good news, as a student, is that you can do both! Learn in order to score well in an examination, and also learn in order to figure out how to apply economics better in the case of your own life. Why should the two be different? Ah, some questions you should reflect upon, rather than ask ChatGPT.

Anyway, back to our lecture du jour. I asked ChatGPT to explain why it chose time management, and I do not think I would have asked that question as an eighteen year old. The older you get, the more aware you are of how limited your time is. And at least in my own case, the converse is also true. I count this as a mark in my favor – that while a good prompt may get a student going, said student will still need help and advice on an ongoing basis.

So far, at any rate.

Further proof of that fact that I’m not out of a job, just yet, is below. The context is that I read the answer, and felt it to be incomplete. So I prodded it a bit, and then just a little bit more:

I’ve often read the phrase “all costs are opportunity costs”. Please explain what this means. Remember that I know no economics, and as usual, give me one example from the Mahabharata, and one from a real-life situation

My professor wondered why the word “TINSTAAFL” hasn’t come up in your answers yet. I didn’t even know this was a word! Is he joking, or is this word relevant to what you’re telling me right now?

To be clear, it isn’t so much about the phrase TINSTAAFL, as it was about the fact that I felt its explanation to be incomplete. This prompted me (no pun intended) to ask it to be more thorough:

I have an ongoing request. I’m looking to make my professors job as easy as possible, or even make him, in some sense, redundant. Optimize your answer for thoroughness, and if you think you can’t fit all of what you want to say in a single output, end with a line that says, “I can tell you more, please let me know if you’re interested to know even more” This will always be applicable in our conversations.
Now, back to the second lecture’s outline. Expand upon the three sub-points from the broad contours. I am particularly interested in the third one, so give more details, explanations and background in the case of “recognizing and evaluating opportunity costs in decision making”

This is an important lesson in and of itself. Feel free to tell ChatGPT to give more (or less) detail, or ask it to modify how it gives you the answer (more examples | simpler language | write like person X | show your output as a debate between person X and person Y). Get your “teacher” to be the kind of teacher that you like to learn from!

With regard to your explanation of “Recognizing and evaluating opportunity costs in decision-making”, I’m confused about how to think about short term and long term factors while making my choices, and the short term and long term consequences of my choices. How should I think about this, what framework should I use, and is there an underlying principle at work here that I should know about?

I count this as a pretty important miss on ChatGPT’s part. My personal opinion is that you haven’t fully explained opportunity costs without talking about the importance of how your evaluation of opportunity costs changes given different time horizons. Time matters! ChatGPT actually agrees with me (see below), but only after prodding. And this after making explicit the fact that I was interested in learning about time horizons! And so I asked it again:

Is it useful to think of time preference as a separate principle of economics? More broadly speaking, how should a student of economics think about time preferences? Give me answers from a theoretical perspective, but also from an application perspective.

I’m two days in, where I’m the “student” and ChatGPT my teacher. Today’s class wasn’t great. I don’t think ChatGPT’s output was good enough to stand on its own, and it needed additional prompts to deliver what I would consider to be a good introduction to the concept of opportunity costs, its many nuances and its many applications. It wasn’t bad, but it was far from being good, in my opinion.

Should I take this as a sign that I need to get better at writing prompts, or should I take this as a sign that AI isn’t good enough to replace me yet? How should I change my mental model about whether the average student in a typical college can learn better from AI?

If you are a regular reader of EFE, you know what’s coming next: the truth always lies somewhere in the middle.I need to get better at writing prompts, yes, but also AI isn’t good enough to replace me yet. Both of these things will change over time, of course, but for the moment, less than ten percent into the course, I am inclined to think that I am not out of a job, just yet.

And even better, the complements over substitutes argument just got stronger – I’ll be a much better teacher of a course such as this the next time I get to teach it. Tomorrow we tackle “Supply and Demand: Basics and Market Equilibrium”.

I’ll see you in class tomorrow!

Put Me Out of a Job – 1

Ashish2 Comments

Let’s say you’re a student who is going to start learning economics in the coming semester (starting July 2023). Let’s assume that you’ve never learnt economics in a classroom before, save for a brief introduction to it in high school. If you chose to learn from an LLM instead, how should you go about it?

Leave aside for the moment the question of whether you should be doing so or not. The question I seek to answer over many blog posts is whether you can do so or not. Whether or not this is a good idea for you depends in part on my abilities to add to the value that an LLM generates for you from such a course. And once these thirty (yes, thirty) blog posts are written out, I’ll write about my thoughts about whether a student still needs me in a classroom or not.

My current thinking is that I would still be needed. How much of this is hope, and how much dispassionate analysis is difficult to say right now. For that reason, I would like to tackle this problem at the end of this exercise. For the moment, I want to focus on helping you learn economics by teaching you how to learn it yourself, without the need for a human teacher (online or offline).

In each post, I’ll give you a series of prompts for that particular class. I will not always give you the output of these prompts – feel free to run them as they are, word for word, or tweak them as per your likes, fancies and hobbies.

My motivation in this series is twofold. One, to find out for myself just how much better ChatGPT is than me at teaching you principles of economics. Second, to help all of you realize that you ought to hold all your professors (myself included!) to a higher standard in the coming year. We have to do a better job than AI alone can, along all dimensions – let’s find out if we can.

Buckle up, here we go.

Here’s my first prompt:

Remember, LLM’s work best when you give really detailed prompts. Note the following:

  1. I began by giving some information about myself – my limitations as regards economics, where in the world I come from, and what my interests/hobbies/passions are.
  2. I specified what I’m looking to learn from the LLM.
  3. I specified the quantum of output required (thirty classes).
  4. I specified how broad the output should be.
  5. I specified how I would like the answer to be customized for me
    • I would like to learn about economics by relating it to what I like to read about in any case (use examples from the Mahabharata)
    • I would like to learn about economics by relating it to real life situations.
    • It is amazing to me, regardless of how many times I experience it, that it “gets” what I really mean in spite of having phrased my question using really bad grammar.
    • The specific examples aren’t the point, the idea is the point. Learn calculus by relating it to mandala art, for example. Learn history by relating it to dance forms. Learn geography by relating it to food from different parts of the world. A teacher in a classroom cannot possibly do this for all the students, because of the size of the class, and because a teacher cannot possibly know your hobby in as much detail as you can. Make good use of AI!
  6. Should the examples from the Mahabharata be chosen for how prominent the examples were in the text, or should they be chosen for their relevance to economics? My preference is for the latter, and I made sure the LLM knows this. Ditto for the real life examples.
  7. I ended with a meta-prompt, that will stay true for the next thirty (or more questions) – ask if I need to learn more, and only then proceed with the next class.

Should you copy this prompt, word for word? Of course not! For one, you may not want to learn economics, but rather a different subject. The underlying principles still holds. You may not like to read about the Mahabharata, for another. You may want only ten lectures, not thirty. Or you may want two hundred! Feel free to tweak the prompt to suit your requirements, but it helps to “get” how to go about thinking about the structure of the prompts. That’s the point.

I took a look at the outline of the thirty course lecture series it prepared for me, and it was not bad at all. But I had a follow-up request:

Now, you might think that you need to know economics in order to judge the output, and tweak your request. And sure, you’re right that it will help. But regardless, even if you cannot judge the quality of the output, surely you know enough about what and how you want to learn. My apologies for going all meta on you, but if you don’t know enough about the supply side of the market, surely you know what you would like as a consumer – at least in part. So feel free to help the LLM become a better teacher by telling it more about you.

It went ahead and gave me the refined output, and also the broad contours of the first class. Here are the broad contours of the first class:

Again, note that I am quite excited about how this class is shaping up, because if economics is, indeed, the study of how to get the most out of life, Arjuna’s choice to fight in the Kurukshetra war is an awesome way to get some really thought-provoking questions in for discussion. But this may not be your cup of tea – so feel free to brew your own cuppa of econ, by customizing it to what you like the most (Avengers? Cricket? RRR? Bharatnatyam? Junk food? Anime? Go for it!)

I did have follow-up questions:

And based upon its answer to this prompt, I had yet another clarificatory question:

Note that your conversation will be (I would go so far as to say should be) different. You will have different questions, different prompts, different things that make you curious. And that’s not just fine, that is the whole point. Depending on how carefully you read its output, and depending on how probing and detailed your questions are, you can keep just this first class going for a long, long time. How long? That’s up to you!

Here are two examples:

You can, of course, ask it to answer any (or all) of these five questions. Ask it to create ten (or twenty, or a hundred) instead – and as a student, assume that this is how us professors might well be “coming up” with questions for your tests, assignments and exams.

Here are more, and note how they get wilder (more random?) with each passing question:

In each of these cases, you don’t have to have trust in, or agree with, the answer given by the LLM. Treat the output as a way to get you to think more deeply, to challenge what has been said, to verify that the answers are correct, and to have further discussions with your peers and with your (human) teachers, whoever they may be.

Note to myself (and to other teachers of an introductory course about the principles of economics):

  1. How can we do a better job than this in the classroom…
    • Without using AI (we’re substitutes)?
    • By using AI (we’re complements)?
  2. What is missing from the LLM’s output (this is assuming you’ve tried these prompts or their variants)?
  3. What stops us from recommending that students do this in class on their own devices, and we observe, nudge and discuss some of the more interesting output with everybody? That is, how does teaching change in the coming semester?

Feedback is always welcome, but in the case of the next thirty posts, I think it is especially important. So please, do let me know what you think!

The End of the College Submission (Thank God)

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This blog post is a riff on Seth’s post from the other day, titled “The End of the High School Essay“:

New York City schools are trying to ban GPT3 because it’s so good at writing superficial essays that it undermines the command structure of the essay as a sorting tool. An easy thing to assign (and a hard thing to grade) just became an easy task to hack.
High school essays had a huge range of problems, and banning the greatest essay device since Danny Dunn and his Homework Machine is not the answer. In fact, it’s a great opportunity to find a better way forward.
The first challenge of the essay was the asymmetrical difficulty in giving useful feedback. 30 essays, 5 minutes each, do the math. It doesn’t scale, and five minutes isn’t even close to enough time to honor the two hours you asked a student to put into the work.

https://seths.blog/2023/01/the-end-of-the-high-school-essay/

Exams in almost all of the colleges and universities I have taught at don’t mean a thing. The students know this, the faculty knows this, the examination department knows this, but we all keep up the charade that Meaningful Work Is Being Done through the conduct of examinations.

Newsflash: there is no meaningful work being done. It is a complete farce.

Some universities choose to not pay faculty members for correcting papers at the end of the semester. Let’s assume a college is paying a visiting faculty member two thousand rupees per hour to teach a class. They might slip in a line towards the end: this also includes examination duties. In English, this means that if you teach a thirty hour course, you will be paid sixty thousand rupees for those thirty hours. So far, so good. But “also includes examination duties” means that for a batch of (say) a hundred and twenty students, you are also expected to design question papers (a set of two, usually) and correct a hundred and twenty answer sheets.

Even if you assume that one is able to correct paper after paper without taking a break, with five minutes being the time taken per paper, that still means that at least ten hours worth of work. Which means, of course, that you are not being paid two thousand rupees per hour, but rather fifteen hundred. Accounting is a subject that may well be taught at universities – that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is practised at universities.

Some other universities offer to pay forty rupees per answer sheet corrected. Which is better than zero, admittedly, but we then run into the problem of incentives. If you’re paid two thousand rupees to teach, and forty rupees per paper to correct answer sheets, how many answer sheets should you correct in an hour to “make” the same wage? And if fifty answer sheets being corrected in an hour is clearly far too many, how do you expect this incentive to work? Or do we teach our students that incentives matter, but ignore this point ourselves?

Students know the farcical nature of examinations all too well. The pandemic took away that last remaining fig leaf of dignity that surrounds examinations, and the ostrich-in-the-sand approach that most universities have adopted post-pandemic is that of closed-book, no-internet-access examinations. Quite how this pen-and-paper examination is supposed to prepare students for what they will do in the real world is a question nobody wants to raise, let alone answer.

And so students quite reasonably ask for “the pattern of the paper”, or the “important questions” or the “important topics” before an examination. They are, in other words, seeking to minimize efforts in order to maximize marks scored in an examination. The tragedy lies in the fact that academia is supposed to be about maximizing learning. But on and on we go, in our mad headlong rush to maximize NAAC scores, difficult and uncomfortable questions about examinations be damned.

But all that these pen-and-paper examinations do is to train students to produce mediocre output that AI can already produce – and of a much better quality than these scribbled answers in answer sheets will ever produce. That’s not a knock against students; it is praise for how good AI has already gotten.

Think about it, for this is a point that bears repetition. Our examination system is geared towards training students to do a worse job than AI, by definition. And for this, we take money from students and their families, and we call it “an education”. Pah.

Now, I’m well aware of the fact that this is not applicable in all cases. There are some subjects/courses in the social sciences where these kind of examinations are entirely justified. And medical and engineering fields is a whole separate story. But I’m not arguing for an extreme solution – I’m saying that the pendulum has swung far too much over into Luddite territory when it comes to examinations and submissions. We need to wake up and smell the AI, and adjust accordingly.

But how? Well, the easy thing to do is to say that’s a difficult answer to give in a blogpost, but here’s Seth Godin again:

The answer is simple but difficult: Switch to the Sal Khan model. Lectures at home, classes are for homework.

When we’re on our own, our job is to watch the best lecture on the topic, on YouTube or at Khan Academy. And in the magic of the live classroom, we do our homework together.

In a school that’s privileged enough to have decent class sizes and devices in the classroom, challenge the students to actually discuss what they’ve read or learned. In real-time, teach them to not only create arguments but to get confident enough to refute them. Not only can the teacher ask a student questions, but groups of students can ask each other questions. Sure, they can use GPT or other tools to formulate where they begin, but the actual work is in figuring out something better than that.
At first, this is harder work for the teacher, but in fact, it’s what teachers actually signed up to do when they become teachers.

This is far less cohesive and controllable than the industrial model of straight rows and boring lectures. It will be a difficult transition indeed. But it’s simple to think about: If we want to train people to take initiative, to question the arguments of others, to do the reading and to create, perhaps the best way to do that is to have them do that.

We’ll never again need to hire someone to write a pretty good press release, a pretty good medical report or a pretty good investor deck. Those are instant, free and the base level of mediocre. The opportunity going forward remains the same: Bringing insight and guts to interesting problems.

https://seths.blog/2023/01/the-end-of-the-high-school-essay/

Kill our current mode of examinations, and help build a world in which we have passionate teachers who help students create. Not a world in which we minimize soul, and maximize those stupid, accursed “marks”.

But on and on we go. Pah.

Will Classroom Teaching Change This Semester Onwards?

Ashish1 Comment

The new semester is underway in some colleges and universities, and others will begin soon enough. Across the country, a new bunch of students will be attending their first semesters in undergrad or postgrad courses.

This is both old news and news at the same time. There’s is nothing new in this if you take the long view, but given that this is the first semester post the end (?) of the pandemic, it is very new and very different.

Why different? Because we’ll be teaching students who have spent two years learning at/from home, and the way they have learnt is very different from the way they will learn in this semester.

  • Physical attendance will be required. Not by me, to be clear, but colleges and universities will require it (of course).
  • Usage of internet enabled devices might be frowned upon. Again, not by me, to be clear, but there will be a fair few number of colleges, universities and professors who will require complete attention, and that will mean no phones, tablets and laptops allowed.
    Let me be clear: I personally don’t mind usage of these devices in classes, but don’t hold very strong views on the subject, and am well aware of the fact that there are a large number of professors who hold very strong anti-device views. How this will play out is something I am very interested in seeing this semester.
  • Discussions, debates, arguments will be centre-stage once again in a classroom, and this time with many more people involved, whether they like it or not. Have we lost the skill? Will there be new norms given the last two years? Will it be more difficult to get discussions going, or will it be easier than ever before?
  • Every single professor I have spoken to has bemoaned the lack of eye-contact and visual cues while teaching. How will we adapt to having these advantages with us once again?
  • How screwed up are attention spans post pandemic? Not just because of ‘taking’ classes from home, but because of the pandemic itself – and how will these affect both teaching and learning?
  • Have students learnt to think of material available online as definitely being a substitute for an in-class experience, as opposed to a complement? And if so, are they likely to take less kindly to some of the teaching they will experience offline? And if so, how will colleges and universities respond? As my favorite blogger says, solve for the equilibrium.
  • Do pen and paper exams make sense anymore? If yes, why? If not, how are we thinking about substituting for them? Are these discussions taking place in higher-ed institutions across the country?
  • How should our pedagogy change? More videos shown in class? More interactive content? More discussions?
  • Will all classes be recorded and shared with students? Should they? If not, why not?
  • What percentage of subjects/courses offered in a semester will be offered ‘remotely’?
    • This is not just about habit formation. The one lesson that all course coordinators learnt during the pandemic (including yours truly) was that we need no longer be restricted by geography when it comes to hiring really good profs. But now that all classes are offline, should we just give up on profs we know are good, simply because they are not located in the same city/town as your campus? If the truth is to lie somewhere in the middle, how do we decide?
  • How will students solve what I’ve taken to calling the 2x problem? Imagine listening to the prof speak at 1x – how quaint (and quite possibly frustrating) it might seem to post-pandemic cohorts of students!

I don’t know the answers to even one of these questions. But in the semester that is coming up, I hope to spend a lot of time talking to folks who are in the higher-ed business to understand how classroom teaching will evolve from here on in. It promises to be a fascinating five months!

Here is an old blog post in which I predict that classroom teaching will decline from here on in, and wither away in the long run. And here is one in which I try to force myself to take the opposite position.

Thoughts, opinions and feedback is always welcome, but in the case of this blog post, especially so. If you are teaching a course in this semester and wish to chat, please drop me a line at ashish at econforeverybody dot com.

Make Examinations Relevant Again

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Alice Evans (and if you are unfamiliar with her work, here’s a great way to begin learning more about it) recently tweeted about a topic that is close to my heart:

And one of the replies was fascinating:

I’ve asked students to create podcasts in the past for assignments, but not yet for final or semester end examinations, because I am constrained by the rules of whichever university I’m teaching in. There are some that allow for experimentation and off-the-beaten-path formats, but the vast majority are still in “Answer the following” mode.

But ever since I came across that tweet, I’ve been thinking about how we could make examinations in this country better, more relevant, and design them in such a way that we test skills that are applicable to the world we live in today, rather than the world of a 100 years ago.

To me, the ideal examination would include the following:

  • The ability to do fast-paced research on a collaborative basis
  • The ability to work as a team to be able to come up with output on the basis of this research
  • The ability to write (cogently and concisely) about how you as an individual think about the work that your team came up with

What might such an examination look like? Well, it could take many forms, but here’s one particular form that I have been thinking about.

Imagine an examination for a subject like, say, macroeconomics. Here’s a question I would love to ask students to think about for such an examination today. “Do you and your team find yourself on Team Transitory or Team Persistent when it comes to inflation today? The answer, in whatever format, should make sense to a person almost entirely unacquainted with economics.”

This would be a three hour long examination. Say the exam is for a cohort of 120 students. I’d split the class up into 10 groups of 12 each, and ask each group to spend one hour thinking about this question, and doing the research necessary to come up with an answer. They can discuss the question, split the work up (refer to textbooks, refer to material online, watch YouTube videos, discuss with each other, appoint a leader – whatever it is that they need to do) and come up with an outline of what their answer is.

The next hour would be coming up with the answer itself: write a blogpost about it, or record audio, or record video. The format is up to them, as is the length. The only requirement is that the output must answer the question, and must include reasons for their choice. Whether the background information that is required to make sense is to be given (or referenced, or skipped altogether) is entirely up to the students.

And the final hour must be spent on a short write-up where each individual student submits their view about their team’s submission. Given that the second hour’s output was collaborative, does the student as an individual agree with the work done? Why? Or why not? What would the student have liked to have done differently? This part must be written, for the ability to write well is (to me) non-negotiable.

To me, this examination will encompass research (which can only be done in an hour if the students are familiar enough with the subject at hand, so they need to have done their homework), collaboration and the ability to think critically about the work that they were a part of. Grading could be split equally on a fifty-fifty basis: half for the work done collaboratively, and half for the individual essay submission.

Sure, there would be some problems. Students might object to the groups that have been formed or students might end up quarreling so much in the first two hours that they’re not left with much time. Or something else altogether, which is impossible to foresee right now.

But I would argue that such examinations are more reflective of the work that the students will actually do in the world outside. More reflective than “Answer the following” type questions, that is.

The point isn’t to defend this particular format. The point is to ask if the current format needs to change (yes!) and if so how (this being only one suggestion).

Right now, examinations provide a 19th century solution to very real 21st century problems, and their irrelevance becomes ever more glaring by the day.

We need to talk about examinations, and we aren’t.

Why, exactly, might mandatory offline attendance be better?

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I’d ended yesterday’s post by asking two questions: why is mandatory offline attendance in classrooms a good thing, and why are offline examinations better than online ones. I’ll try and list out arguments for mandatory offline attendance in today’s post.

A quick note before we begin: I don’t think mandatory offline attendance is better. I think a hybrid system is here to stay, no matter how reluctant universities and college are about it. But it is precisely for this reason that I want to write out this post – I want to force myself to “write for the other side”. Doing so helps me understand that point of view better, and two things are likely to happen as a consequence. I can sharpen my own arguments as a consequence of understanding theirs better. Second, maybe I’ll end up modifying my views by better understanding theirs.

  • Conversations are much more likely to take place in a classroom than in an online setting. Being physically present in a classroom along with others and with the professor dramatically increases the chance that a conversation is initiated and sustained. I can personally attest to this, and I am fairly confident that most people involved in academia (students and teachers) will do so as well. To the extent that you think conversations about whatever is being taught is a good thing (and I most certainly do), offline classes are definitively better.
  • Peer pressure to attend a class, and to listen once you are in class is much higher in an offline setting.
  • A classroom is conducive to learning. Your bedroom or living room, no matter how comfortable, is not. To the extent that you think priming is a real phenomenon with tangible, measurable outcomes, offline classes are likely to be better.
  • There are positive externalities (spillovers) to attending offline classes. Serendipitous conversations in corridors with people from other classes or professors, being able to walk into a professor’s office for a chat after class, the continuation of discussions of what happened in class over a cup of chai at the canteen are all much much more likely after having attended an offline class.
  • The over-the-shoulder effect tends to be underrated by folks in favor online classes. A student peering over your shoulder at your work can in a glance offer a quick correction or tip, and it is still much easier for a professor to walk through a physical classroom to take in the level of understanding of the students. VR, AR and metaverses may well be on their way, but we aren’t quite there just yet.
  • There is a performative aspect to offline classes that is all but impossible to recreate online. Watching a physics professor teach about pendulums by climbing onto one requires a physically present, and obviously involved audience. It will not have the same impact if conducted online. And my hunch is that the class is likely to be recalled much more effectively if you were physically present in class.
  • Retention based on visual cues works better than most other memory techniques, and visual cues are much more likely in a social setting than the cozy comfort of your home. See this as an example of what I am trying to get at (and please don’t hesitate to correct me if I’m wrong!)
  • What else?

Is Online Education Transitory?

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Students are finally making their way back into colleges across the country. Omicron, and whatever variant follows next will make the road bumpy, and there remains a significant chance that there will be some U-turns along the way. But we’re finally limping back towards something approaching normalcy. Or so one hopes.

But the transition isn’t smooth, and cultural adjustments are going to be tricky. What sort of cultural adjustments? Here goes:

  • Lockdowns and restrictions have been in place long enough for a culture of online learning to have emerged. In the context of this blog post, I define the word culture to mean social behaviors and norms that have emerged among students during the past eighteen (or so) months. There is more to culture than that, I am well aware, but it is this specific aspect of the word that I am focusing on.
  • Students across India have gotten used to the following aspects of this culture:
    • Listening to a lecture that is being delivered need not be a community based event. You can listen to a lecture alone, anywhere, as opposed to along with your classmates in a classroom.
    • Listening to a lecture need not by a synchronous event. That is, you don’t need to listen when the professor is speaking. One can listen later, as per one’s own convenience.
    • Listening to a lecture need not be a 1x event. Amit Varma’s point about being able to listen to somebody else speaking at even 3x applies to lectures as much as it does to podcasts. Students who find a particular professor boring may even argue that the point applies with even greater force to lectures than it does to podcasts!
    • Students feel much more comfortable calling out online examinations for the farce that they are. And let me be clear about this: online examinations are a farce. If you are a part of any university’s administration in this country, I urge you to speak to students, their parents, and recruiters about this issue. I repeat, online examinations are a farce. This is important, and it needs to be called out. We’re very much in Emperor’s New Clothes territory in this regard, and that is where the cultural aspect comes in.
  • At the moment, most colleges (if not all) are not making classroom attendance mandatory, at least for the students. Students may be on campus, but not necessarily in the classroom. Most students I have spoken to (in a completely unscientific fashion, I should add, so this is strictly anecdotal) think this to be the best of all worlds. They are not at home, they are with friends, and they are not in a classroom. It doesn’t get better than this, as far as they are concerned.

So now, assuming you find yourself in even limited agreement with what I have written above, think about the scenario I am about to outline. Imagine that you are a university administrator with the power to mandate offline attendance in classrooms and offline examinations for your students. And at some date in the foreseeable future, you decree that this must happen.

And some students come along and ask an entirely reasonable (to them, at any rate) question: why?

Why are offline attendance and offline examinations better than what we have right now?

What would your answers be?

How to Escape Education’s Death Valley by the Great Sir Ken Robinson

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I’m not one for celebrating “days”, but I’ll happily admit being thankful that this video is scheduled for the 5th of September!