They Just Want The Answer
Early in my teaching career I got frustrated with my students. At this point I decided that I would make them sweat. I was tired of holding office hours and just writing the solution on the whiteboard over and over just so a bunch of procrastinators could submit their homework assignment. The worst part was that I knew the same thing would happen the following week.
A common misconception that many people have before going into teaching is that all their students would be eager to learn. This is just not the case. Sure there are communities with a high density of self motivated students, but at the end of the day when you assign a grade weight to an assignment there are going to be people who will do it for the sake of their grade and not for the thrill of learning. This was initially devastating to me, because I thought a lot of my students would love learning and couldn’t care less about their grades. An example of this desire to learn is a person I met when I was growing up. I asked them “Why do you learn?”. I was curious if the people around me had similar motives for learning. That person responded with a question “Why do you eat?”. I think that one question very succinctly encapsulates the desire to learn that I have seen in my brightest students. They don’t learn because of some external force, but simply because they are not satisfied without it; they are hungry for knowledge.
However most your students will not have a desire to learn. If you are lucky they will have a desire for success. But most likely they will just want the answer, so that they can get a better grade. I was at a breaking point in my teaching career when I realized this. I seriously considered quitting right there. It was beyond disheartening to realize this (I will admit that it was naïve of me to not realize this earlier). I talked about this with one of teaching role models and they explained to me that they are simply taking the path of least resistance.
Because It Has Always Worked
Why is it that students just want the answer? I am not saying they are bad people for doing this. In fact it is human nature for them to behave this way. Without a loss of generality people are always trying to maximize benefits while minimizing costs. They are constantly running their shortest path algorithms to get to their end goal. Some people only care about getting a degree from their university, which means that cheating on assignments, memorizing for exams, and going to office hours at the last minute is a perfectly reasonable path. In fact it is the minimal cost path. Others view cheating as immoral and the cost is losing part of their humanity (an infinite cost path). Others value personal growth above all else and this means that shortcuts by definition incur a penalty. But at the end of the day, students that just want the answer have learned that answers are what get you a higher grade in academia and to obtain these answers they are going to take the path of least resistance.
The reason students keep taking this path is because it is a well defined path has always worked for them. The path of least resistance has always rewarded them with high grades and external validation. And for the most part it will never fail them. Most assignments can be cheated on. Most tests can be gamed. However the path of least resistance only explains why students behave the way they do. This by no means explains why the path of least resistance is a phenomenon.
The Instructor Weights Edges
The path of least resistance exists simply because the instructor allows it to exist; it is a “you” problem. Yes, I am blaming individual instructors and not the education system. Every instructor has the opportunity to foster growth in their students. In fact it is their job to do so. I think anyone who says that the job of an instructor is to simply teach and assign grades would make a horrible teacher.
I am not saying that it is the responsibility of an instructor to make sure that each and everyone of their students gets an A in their class. In most classes there is bound to be one kid that fails. This is systemic. This student probably didn’t care about the course. This student probably had other things on their plate. This student probably wasn’t given the opportunity to succeed. All these factors are caused by societal inequalities that are systemic and not quite inside the control of an individual instructor. However, what is in the control of an individual instructor is to make the path of least resistance more costly for their students if not nonexistent. Not only is it in your control to make the path of least resistance not work, but it is your duty. When you let your students take the path of least resistance are teaching your students to be helpless. The rest of this post is about a few ways you can add resistance to the path of least resistance. But I want you to keep in mind that this is a recurring theme as an educator and it does not stop with the few examples I give.
Mass Cheating
Cheating has and probably always will exist in academia, because it is part of the path of least resistance, but mass cheating should not. As an instructor you are in the position of power to make cheating a sub optimal route; you can add resistance to the path. I think students view cheating as an expected benefits versus expected costs problem. More formally a student will pretty much always cheat if “the expected benefits of cheating exceed the expected cost of cheating”. Mathematically this is “(Benefits of Cheating) (1-Probability of Cheating Hurting You) vs. (Costs of Cheating) (Probability of Cheating Hurting You)”. Luckily as an instructor you control all three variables. You can reduce the benefits of cheating by making assignments worth less points. You can increase the probability of cheating hurting students by looking harder for it and making the experience gained from your assignments critical to succeeding in your course. You can increase the cost of cheating by adding policies to your syllabus like “Cheating will cost you a zero on the assignment and an automatic letter grade deduction”. Obviously tinkering with these three variables has it’s pros and cons. For example lowering the weight of an assignment means students are less likely to do them in the first place. I leave the balancing act as an exercise to my readers ;).
Deadline Office Hours
A trend that I have noticed a lot is that courses tend to staff their resources in accordance to how close the deadline is. It’s just a well known observation that a student’s desire to work on their assignments is proportional to how close it is due. This means that the demand for office hours is highest on the day of the deadline. So the pragmatic solution is to staff more of your resources where the demand is highest. However I want to point out that you are pandering to procrastinators with this approach; you are rewarding this negative behavior. I once had an instructor who would not respond to any emails during the day of the deadline, however they were known for getting back to you within 2 minutes every other day. As a student I hated this, since from my perspective it meant that I had one less day to work on my assignment if I wanted my instructor’s help. As an instructor, I commend that action because they choose the hard right over the easy wrong.
Hashtable Exams
A term that I have coined among my coworkers is the term “hashtable exam”. A hashtable exam is one that essentially tests the student’s ability to memorize factoids and regurgitate them back. This is similar to how an actual hashtable is known for its ability to take a key-value pair and return the value given the key. Studying for these exams is essentially trying to hash as many key-value pairs where the key-value pair is a factoid. The key is the question type and the value is the multiple choice answer.
My favorite example of this is my AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism exam. I didn’t know anything about Electricity OR Magnetism (It was only years later that I heard that the two are actually related). But I really wanted to get a 5 on the AP, since then I wouldn’t have to take it in college. I ended up taking every released AP Phys C: E&M exam in the past 30 years. I learned absolutely nothing. But when I got to the AP I saw that a lot of the multiple choice exams were recycled and the some of that constants looked familiar, so I picked those :). I got even luckier on the free response. I only worked out 3 practice questions and I memorized, which formulas to use. Those were the three that showed up on my actual exam. I eventually got the 5 and learned nothing, but that was only possible, since the exam was poorly made. As an instructor you have the ability to not give those type of exams. Giving exams that test understanding over knowledge is what keeps your students accountable for not taking the path of least resistance.
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Email: bschong2@illinois.edu