MIT教授对作业、学习小组及考试的看法

刚看了一小部分MIT公开课“算法导论”第一讲,看来MIT的学生也真“不好过”,教授关于作业、学习小组的看法让我很有感触,比较完满地解答了一直存在自己心头的问题。我觉得这是很值得看的一段视频,也决定把这段讲话抄下来分享,供备忘回味。

原话及翻译(申明: 资料均取自网易公开课视频)
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Collaboration policy.This is extremely important so everybody pay attention. If you are asleep now wake up. Like that's going to wake anybody up, right?
 The goal of homework, Professor Demaine and my philosophy is that the goal of hemework is to help you learn the material. And one way of helping to learn is not to just be stuck and unable to solve something, because then you're in no better shape when the exam roles around, which is where we're actually evaluating you. So, you're encouraged to collaborate.

 But there are some commonsense things about collaboration. If you go and you collaborate to the extent that all you're doing is getting the information from somebody else, you're not learning the material and you're not going to do well on the exams. In our experience, students who collaborate generally do better than students who works alone. But you owe it to yourself, if you're going to work in a study group, to be prepared for your study group meeting. And specifically you should spend a half an hour to 45 minutes on each problem before you go to group so you're up to speed and you've tried out your ideas. And you may have solutions to some, you may be stuck on some other ones, but at least you applied yourself to it. After 30 to 45 minutes, if you cannot get the problem, just sitting there and banging your head against it makes no sense. It's not a productive use of your time. And I know most fo you have issues with having time on your hands, right? So, don;t go banging your head against problems that are too hard or  where you don't understand what's going on or whatever. That's when the study group can help out. And, as I mentioned, we'll have homework labs which will give you an opportunity to go and do that and coordinate with other students rather than necessarily having to form your own group. And the TAs will be there. If your group is unable to solve the problem, then talk to other groups or ask your recitation instructor. And, that's how you go about solving them.
 Writing up the problem sets, however, is your individual responsibility and should be done alone. You don't write up your problem solutions with other students, you write up on your own. And you should on your problem sets, because this is an academic place, we understand that the source of academic information is very important, if you collaborated on solutions you should write a list of the collaborators. Say I worked with so an so on this solution. It does not afect your grade. It's just a question of being scholarly. it is a violation of this policy to submit a problem solution that you cannot orally explain to a member of the course staff. You say oh, well, my wrte-up is similar to that other person's, I didn't copy them. We may ask you to orally explain your solution. If you are unable, according to this policy, the presumptions is that you cheated. So do not write up stuff that you don't understand. You should be able to write up the stuff that you understand. Understand why you're putting down what you're putting down. If it's not obvious, no collaboration whatsoever is permitted in exams...

合作原则:这是非常重要的所以每个人都要注意,如果你在打瞌睡,现在醒醒,这样的事会让任何人清醒过来,对吧?
课后作业的目的,Demaine教授和我的观点是,家庭作业的目标是帮你学习这些知识。促进学习的一个办法是不要卡在一道题目上,因为这对你考试的时候没有任何帮助,考试才是检验你真枪实弹水平的地方。所以在做作业时你大可以和别人合作。
但是有一些关于合作的常识问题,如果你合作到所有的信息你都从别人哪里获得的地步,你就什么都学不到你就不能在考试中取得好成绩,依我们的经验,通常合作的学生比单独一个人学习的表现会更好。但是如果要参加学习小组合作学习,你必须保证,你在小组讨论时是做了准备的。讨论之前,每个问题你应该花半小时到45分钟思考,这样你能进步得更快, 而且你已经尝试过了你的想法,你可能解决了一些问题,可能还有一些把你卡住了,但是至少应该让自己有所准备,30到45分钟之后,如果你还是不能解决问题,那你就不要在这个问题上浪费时间了,这是在做无用功,我想大家可以利用这个时间,可以去做点别的什么,对吧?这样的话,就不要在思考难题上浪费时间了,就算完全弄不懂也没有什么关系,此时学习小组可以帮助解决问题,就像我说的那样,我们会有课外实验室,这里可以和其他同学合作来找出答案,不一定非得成立你自己的学习小组,也可以向助教请教,如果你的小组不能解决你遇到的问题,去其他小组尝试下,或请教你的辅导老师。这些都是可以解决问题的方法。
不过,写作业则是你必须独立完成的过程,这是你的责任。你写答案的时候,不能与其他人讨论,你必须独立作出解答。而且在作业上,因为这里是做学术的地方,我们知道学术信息来源是非常重要的,如果是通过合作而得到的解决方案,你应该列出合作者名单,说明合作情况,这不会影响你的评分,这是学术研究的态度问题。如果你不能对授课工作人员完整口述你的问题解决方案,这是明令禁止的。你可能说,好吧,我所写的作业知识和其他人的类似,我没有抄袭别人。我们会要求你口述你的解决方案,如果你不能完成,根据规定,你将被视为作弊,因此,不要写下你不懂的东西。按部就班去完成你所弄懂的,总结解决问题的方法和方式。显然,考试没有合作一说…