Paired Assessment - What do you think?

[Data10]

@theloniusmonk

“At the college I attended, students were usually encouraged to do engineering problem sets in groups”

That may be true for Stanford but not for most other engineering majors. I was reading an article a few years back and it made a good point on the two flaws of engineering education in the US - 1. every problem has a cut and dried answer with only one or two ways to solve it and 2. you can only solve that problem by yourself. I think it’s improving esp in the upper level courses but typically freshman calculus is a weed out course and you’re not getting graded as a group in that class.

Note that I was referring to “problem set” homework type assignments, rather than in-class exams. Engineering professors at many other colleges besides just Stanford often encourage students to do problem sets in groups. For example, MIT’s admission website at https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/what-we-look-for/ states:

“Many of the problem sets (our affectionate term for homework) at MIT are designed to be worked on in groups”