Labor and Lies

A few weeks ago, I had an amazing session of CS222. When I got to my office, I wrote down three key phrases on my whiteboard with the intention of writing a blog post about the class. When two weeks or so had passed and I made time to write the story, I could not reconstruct the event from those phrases. Drat! Now, instead of sharing a story of an amazing CS222 class, I'm instead going to share with you one of the great frustrations of last week: the first iteration of the Game Programming (CS315) Final Projects.

First I need to back up a little. I am teaching three different courses this semester, and each one has a similar structure: the first half of the class introduces concepts, and the second half of the class is a deep dive into a project that manifests these concepts. As I have written about before, I am exploring ideas of labor logs, that students earn credit simply by spending time on their work. In CS222 Advanced Programming, students are maintaining project labor logs, where they summarize each week what they did and how many hours they invested. In CS215 Game Design, students are independently maintaining project design logs and submitting weekly labor statements. These labor statements are inclusive of all course effort, including research, attending class, and helping each other, in addition of course to active labor on the final project. One of the reasons for the different policies is that CS222 involves group projects, and their labor logs are kept in a group document; my hope here is that this would give positive peer pressure and accountability. In CS215, students are working on their own projects, so I'm just asking them to tell me how many hours they spent on the class, in hopes that they will reflect on how this impacts their commitment and experience.

As we started the final project in CS315 Game Programming, I had not made any solid decisions about how to ask these students to track or report their hours. This class has a mix of individual and group projects. In fact, I had written on my planner to engage the whole class in a discussion of how they wanted to track hours, but I kept forgetting to check my planner, so we didn't have that discussion until about halfway through the first iteration. 

I showed the Game Programming students how I was managing the other two courses, and I explained my rationale. I was particularly clear about my disappointment with last year's game programming class, when in the final iteration, so many promising projects failed because teams put off their work until the day before the deadline. That is, I tried to impress on them the difference between constant forward progress in an iterative process and submitting work by a deadline. 

I let them huddle up and talk for ten minutes or so with the charge of coming up with a fair process for us. The responses were interesting. Very few—maybe none—were in favor of following the practice I set up for the other classes. This was not surprising, and their rationale was a mixture of explicitly not wanting to have to track hours and, unless I'm mistaken, implicitly not wanting to commit or be held accountable to commitments. Several students brought up techniques that they are using in their capstone courses. For example, one group was in favor of following the path of a particular capstone instructor, who has students keep meeting minutes in the repository. I pointed out that this was interesting but didn't solve the same problem, which they acknowledged. Another group responded that they did not want to follow what they had seen in the capstone because they did not see it as being necessary for the task at hand.

One response resonated most with me: a group pointed out that our environment was significantly different than last Fall's asynchronous online class. Because we are meeting together and having in-person showcases of our progress, we can simply use positive peer pressure to ensure that each group is meeting their commitments: no logging, no reports, simply relying on the human success mode of being proud of accomplishments and being good citizens. I decided to take this approach, at least for the first iteration.

Well, was I disappointed when I graded their submissions late last week. Looking at the git commit histories, about half of the teams made no or essentially no progress until the day before the deadline. Keep in mind that this is my course in which we use checklist-based specifications grading, so in theory, students can know the grade of their work at the time they submit it. Indeed, everyone (or practically everyone) who started work the day before the deadline filled out the checklist and claimed to earn an A. My response to them was that they had failed to maintain the contract of the course, so they were ineligible for checklist-based grading and had to be graded ad hoc instead. I still feel badly about the disconnection between checklist-based grading and this ad hoc management, but it seems like it was the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, my disappointment does not stop here. I also required the students to complete self- and peer-evaluations, following the same format I use in CS222. Indeed, I gave the same policy statement as well, that a student's iteration grade would be capped by the sum of the means of their self- and peer-evaluations. I was shocked when I sat down to my spreadsheet and ran the pivot tables to find these sums of medians: practically everyone had full credit. There were maybe two students with a few percent less than full points, but not enough to be meaningful—and not enough to account for the stories that at least one team told me about the communication problems they had among members. Putting this together with the previous disappointment is a double whammy: not only did half the teams not start working until the day before the deadline, they also claimed that each of them was perfectly fulfilling their obligations for the previous three weeks. 

They lied. There is no other way to put it.

I know that sometimes, under pressure and facing temptation, anybody can make a mistake of judgement. This, however, was a systemic misrepresentation of truth, and now I need to decide what to do about it. I will need to talk to them about it on Tuesday, though I'm still not entirely sure how I want to approach it. What difference will a chastisement from an authority figure make if one does not show them the respect of telling the truth? Or is Dad Mode really what these students need?

I also need to decide if I want to change the policy for Iteration 2. If they do not learn from their mistakes, then the whole enterprise is a failure. Would making them actually track their hours force them to face their deceit or delusion? Or would it only push them toward digging themselves deeper graves?

There is a positive story that came out of this, however. A few hours after I posted grades, I got an email from a student, and the email opened with a statement that they were not looking to change their grade. Instead, the student humbly acknowledged that they had screwed up, that they got the grade they deserved, and that they would not repeat this error. This acknowledgement was, in a way, an attempt to show gratitude for holding them accountable to standards. Keep holding on to hope, friends.