Re: Solving Homework in Pairs

Hi Nadav!

On Wednesday 23 May 2007, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Wed, May 23, 2007, Shlomi Fish wrote about "[hackers-il] Solving Homework 
in Pairs":
> > I later compiled my reasons as presented in that email here -
> > http://xrl.us/woh3 . I'd love to hear what you think about it.
>
> Ok, here's my retort ;-)
>
> First, before we can discuss what's *wrong* with this "pair programming" as
> you call it 

"pair programming"? I'm sorry, but I didn't call it "pair programming". I 
called it "Working in Pairs", "Solving in Pairs", or "Pair-Wise Assignments". 
Sometimes I worked on many things that were strictly not programming, 
e.g: "dry" (i.e: not-"wet" and not computer-based exercises).

I believe pair programming as advocated by XP and others is very different 
than the solving in pairs in the Technion. But this is out of the scope of 
this email. I'm advocating both XP-like pair programming and "Handing 
assignments in pairs", but from different reasons.

> (I call it "hagasha bezugot" - namely the hagasha, not the 
> programming, is done in pairs), we need to understand what's the heck is so
> good about it that you want it to stay.

Fair enough let's call it "Handing in pairs".

>
> According to you, the good sides of this hagahsa bezugot is that "When two
> partners ... sit down to solve it there can be wonderful synergy", and that
> "it's more fun than solving it all alone". 

It's only one of the seven reasons I've given, but let me defend it.

> I fully agree with you that if 
> this is the case, then hagasha-bezugot can be great. The question is, in
> how many course that you took, was it like that, and in how many other
> courses it was something completely different, in ways I already described
> (e.g., one of you slacked, or you divided the exercises between you and
> each one was responsible for one week's exercises)?

I feel that in most of the courses I took and had to hand over the assignments 
in pairs we:

1. Sat on it together.

2. Solved together.

3. It took us less time.

4. We learned a lot from each other.

There were a few instances of exception:

1. In the "Intro to CS in C" course, my partner did not know programming, but 
has a lot of free time. When we set over at the Fisbach farm to prepare the 
exercise (using Borland Turbo C++ - %-)), he always had an idea on how to 
solve it, but I kept telling him how to do it better (being more experienced 
and a better programmer). He was the one who wrote it on the computer. 
Eventually, I got over 90 in that course, and I learned that he got a good 
passing grade.

I feel that he learned a lot from me in this case, and yet I learned a lot by 
teaching him.

2. I took "Intro to Systems' Programming" ("Mamath" - the EE equivalent of the 
CS "Matam") which I wanted for the academic credit, not because I didn't know 
the material. Now my partner was practically unreachable and unresponsive, so 
I ended up solving everything on my own. He didn't mind too much. I don't 
know how well he did on the exam, but it's his fault not mine.

3. In the course "Analog Communications", my partner was married, had a baby, 
had a work, and took some projects, and as a result, had little time to meet 
with me and was always very tired. The exercises we were given were very 
hard, and we didn't know how to prepare them. We ended up copying them from 
different people who were more knowledgable.

I ended up failing the course on both tests (which I did not cheat on), and 
kept the course out of my final diploma, because I didn't feel like I knew it 
well.

----------------------

However, as a general rule we both set on the exercises together, both got a 
passing grade, and both knew the material very well.

>
> I don't think it's (just) that I'm anti-social. In fact, when I was
> studying I had a friend with whom I often discussed the most difficult
> exercises. But we made a point of it never to discuss an exercies before we
> each try to solve it on our own, and because we admired each other's
> intelligence, we made sure we only gave one another "hints", rather than
> entire written solutions to copy. Perhaps we were too idealistic, perhaps
> we had too much times on our hands, I don't know. But we studied the way we
> did, and both got very good grades, so I guess it worked (or at least
> didn't hurt ;-)).
>

I prefer to discuss things with a friend. I indeed often looked at the 
exercises before that, and thought about them, but actually meeting my 
partner and having a face to face contact with him, really helps.

> On the other hand, I took once a CS course with this same guy. We were
> asked to hand in the exercies in pairs, and naturally we chose each other.
> We ended up deciding that he will do one week's exercise, and I will do the
> next. We never discussed any of those exercises, because we both trusted
> each other to do them well. We were never worried that not doing some of
> the exercises will hurt us in the test, because we both understood the
> material well, and we knew that the exercises (involving handing in a
> computer program) had very little to do with what a test would look like
> (done on paper, of course).

OK. I never alternated in handing such assignments. And you're generalising 
based on one instance, and in that case - you. You realise this is heavily 
anti-scientific.[1]

When my friend and partner for many courses took the Mathematics department 
Set Theory course, we realised that the scope of the exercise was too big for 
both of us. So we ended up solving it together (in a synergical way) and my 
friend wrote the solution (because he had a better hand-writing) and we 
handed it together. It was less work than handing two identical solutions him 
with his hand-writing, and mine with my crappy hand-writing. But we each got 
only half the credit.

My hand writing is another thing I'm frustrated about. When I came to the 
Technion my hand-writing was pretty bad, and it only deteriorated. Part of it 
was probably that I became more and more used to keying things on the 
computer, and part of it was probably because of my 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder . 

When I talked about it to the Student's councellor she told me I need to go to 
6 hours long (!!) tests at "Makhon Ya'el" headed by a certain Psychology 
professor from Haifa University, which will test if my bad hand writing is 
caused by a certain mental problem of mine. Between losing a productive and 
happy day, which could potentially mean I won't be better, and getting some 
crappier grades - I chose the latter.

As it turned out, I could have given them a letter from my psychiatrist that I 
am Bipolar or pseudo-Bipolar and it could have been sufficient to grant me 
some benefits. (But not all like meeting face to face to the lecturer to 
explain what I wrote.)

>
> So, to summarize, in my experience, there is not much correlation between
> hagasha bezugot (two people handing in an exercise together) and pair
> programming (two people working together to solve an exercise). This makes
> most of the arguments you present in favor of pair programming irrelevant
> to hagasha bezugot.

Which, I might add, you haven't addressed yet. ;-)

>
> During my wife's studies in HaifaU, I saw even more absurd examples of
> hagasha bekvutsot. At one time she was forced (not presented an option, but
> forced) to hand in a work in group of 6. Since there were no "natural"
> groups so large, they had to group in ad-hoc groups. Her group basically
> had only 2 people doing the whole work, and 4 professional slackers. The
> two doing the work (my wife and a friend) didn't bother to do anything to
> change the situation, because they knew that the other 4 would only hurt
> their grade if they actually contributed anything to the work ;-)

A 6-members group is an absurd. In English one says that "one is alone, two is 
company, and three is a crowd" so six is probably already an army. I don't 
encourage working in groups of six, but I still think pairs or triplets are a 
good idea.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

[1] - let's prove that all non-even numbers above 1 are prime just because 3 
and 5 (or even just 3) are.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif-ik1l9ssToec+JF/[email protected]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
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    -- An Israeli Linuxer


 
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