the overall effect is just that everyone spent an extra two hours for little benefit.
Woah! I sure hope not! The two or three times I had challenging assignments in school (my school encouraged undergraduates to take graduate classes if interested) they were tremendously valuable. If thinking about difficult problems and solving them has no marginal benefit, I can’t imagine what part of schooling does! (perhaps the diploma mill would be ideal in that scenario? I’m having a hard time simulating this hypothetical student).
It’s not that it has no marginal benefit, it’s that it has diminishing marginal benefit for the effort spent. At some point, you’re better off working on another class’s assignment instead. At some point you’re better off taking leisure time, or even sleeping. If even people with a good understanding are only expected to get 50% correct, how are you supposed to know when you’re better off going to sleep, only knowing that you’ve completed 50% and not knowing whether the extra 5% from sacrificing some sleep is worth it?
The returns diminish when it comes to impact on your grade, yes, and I certainly enjoyed transparency about how the grades I got would be impacted by my work.
The distribution of value for learning, though, goes up with difficulty until it drops to zero (the point at which you cannot solve the puzzle at all). My only point is that we should strongly prefer systems that allow us to soak up all that high-intensity high-value work—modern universities aren’t that for many students, though, but independently reading textbooks could/should be.
Woah! I sure hope not! The two or three times I had challenging assignments in school (my school encouraged undergraduates to take graduate classes if interested) they were tremendously valuable. If thinking about difficult problems and solving them has no marginal benefit, I can’t imagine what part of schooling does! (perhaps the diploma mill would be ideal in that scenario? I’m having a hard time simulating this hypothetical student).
It’s not that it has no marginal benefit, it’s that it has diminishing marginal benefit for the effort spent. At some point, you’re better off working on another class’s assignment instead. At some point you’re better off taking leisure time, or even sleeping. If even people with a good understanding are only expected to get 50% correct, how are you supposed to know when you’re better off going to sleep, only knowing that you’ve completed 50% and not knowing whether the extra 5% from sacrificing some sleep is worth it?
The returns diminish when it comes to impact on your grade, yes, and I certainly enjoyed transparency about how the grades I got would be impacted by my work.
The distribution of value for learning, though, goes up with difficulty until it drops to zero (the point at which you cannot solve the puzzle at all). My only point is that we should strongly prefer systems that allow us to soak up all that high-intensity high-value work—modern universities aren’t that for many students, though, but independently reading textbooks could/should be.