RZ1234
🟧
In Australia and America, assignments and trivial garbage like homework heavily constitute your final grade in a subject. In the united kingdom, their A Level final exams (their HSCs) are worth 100% of the A Level grade. Same goes for their universities, where their final exam is often weighted 100% (not just oxford, the top 20 british universities all employ this exam weighting).
A single final examination is more chill, and leads to better absorbtion of course content as you aren't busy with completing assignments and attending university for the sake of attendance/participation marks
After covid, most aussie unis now impose a 60% cap on finals, but because of this, most people aren't incentivised to connect with the course content deeply, especially STEM subjects. For humanities, sure finals shouldn't determine the entire mark. But STEM is different in that the whole subject is supposed to be theoretical, and understanding of theory is verified by examinations (especially in the age of AI , which can do the university math assignment for you) in person invigilated exams have always solved this issue). Uni of Melbourne surprisingly still weighs first year final math exams 80%.
What I dislike is that most Australian universities base any amount of marks in first year subjects based on trivial garbage like attendance, genuinely useless homework (like fill in the blank worksheets) , and participation. This is clearly influenced by American colleges. Meanwhile a random russel group university in UK almost always have a final examination worth 80-100%.
Same can be said about the HSC. Basing the final HSC marks also on assignment is stupid, as the whole point of the HSC paper is for standardisation. This system is more unequitable as it supports tutoring companies in helping people willing to pay to get ahead of the rest of the class by exposure to content earlier, thus higher internal scores, thus providing an unfair advantage.
If not for 100% finals, mid term and final is another good system where marks aren't given for useless crap like an assignment and online quiz (seriously why do these have to be graded when its basically just a fill in the blank worksheet where I can just use AI). At this point I'm spending more time doing a useless as shit quiz, rather than learning anything.
Your counter argyment might be "but continous assignments and free marks makes the course easier to pass and more accessible"... scaling can take care of that, just reduce the grade cutoff even more so the average is still a Credit (C).
tldr: graded assignments and hands-on learning worksheets (that make us fill in the blank) only serve a purpose to waste our time. It does not seperate people's understanding, nor does it improve retention/comprehension of the subject.
A single final examination is more chill, and leads to better absorbtion of course content as you aren't busy with completing assignments and attending university for the sake of attendance/participation marks
After covid, most aussie unis now impose a 60% cap on finals, but because of this, most people aren't incentivised to connect with the course content deeply, especially STEM subjects. For humanities, sure finals shouldn't determine the entire mark. But STEM is different in that the whole subject is supposed to be theoretical, and understanding of theory is verified by examinations (especially in the age of AI , which can do the university math assignment for you) in person invigilated exams have always solved this issue). Uni of Melbourne surprisingly still weighs first year final math exams 80%.
What I dislike is that most Australian universities base any amount of marks in first year subjects based on trivial garbage like attendance, genuinely useless homework (like fill in the blank worksheets) , and participation. This is clearly influenced by American colleges. Meanwhile a random russel group university in UK almost always have a final examination worth 80-100%.
Same can be said about the HSC. Basing the final HSC marks also on assignment is stupid, as the whole point of the HSC paper is for standardisation. This system is more unequitable as it supports tutoring companies in helping people willing to pay to get ahead of the rest of the class by exposure to content earlier, thus higher internal scores, thus providing an unfair advantage.
If not for 100% finals, mid term and final is another good system where marks aren't given for useless crap like an assignment and online quiz (seriously why do these have to be graded when its basically just a fill in the blank worksheet where I can just use AI). At this point I'm spending more time doing a useless as shit quiz, rather than learning anything.
Your counter argyment might be "but continous assignments and free marks makes the course easier to pass and more accessible"... scaling can take care of that, just reduce the grade cutoff even more so the average is still a Credit (C).
tldr: graded assignments and hands-on learning worksheets (that make us fill in the blank) only serve a purpose to waste our time. It does not seperate people's understanding, nor does it improve retention/comprehension of the subject.
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