[wodenokoto]

It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field.

Some students will inevitably have access to tutors or parents who can give them the full answer. With wolfram|Alpha all students have access to this.

What this really show is that homework isn't the best tool for gauging student prowess.

[throwawayjava]

> It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field.

This is not even remotely true. I think you seriously under-estimate the value of parents/tutors.

Students with tutors/parents will not just get the right answer. They will also be led to the right answer, over and over, and told what they need to practice in order to improve. Explanations will be tailored to their learning style. So they get direct help on assignments, but they also get regular indications about how to improve their performance in scenarios where they don't have that help.

Wolfram Alpha just gives the answer.

If homework in 90% of the grade, maybe it levels the playing field for letter grades in the course course... until a few years down the road when the student who didn't actually learn the material is screwed and has no way of catching up.

If homework is a more reasonable 20-50% of the grade, then the reckoning comes at midterm/final time.

> What this really show is that homework isn't the best tool for gauging student prowess

Well, that's certainly true.

[rflrob]

While W|A doesn't come close to making the field level, I think there's an argument to be made that it makes the field more level than it was. The perfect being the enemy of the good...

[throwawayjava]

That's true. Especially the answers that tell you the process for deriving the solution instead of just giving the solution. Then you can see where you got stuck/went astray.

[fullshark]

Homework's largely supposed to be about reinforcing the lesson for math courses. For other courses it's largely about reading which shouldn't be done in class. Tests/essays are for assessment.

[adamnemecek]

Other countries don't put as much emphasis on hw and seem to do just fine. In some of them hw isn't even graded, it's for you to practice. My high school for example gave out a book with the problem solutions. For some of them, it was only the final result, for some of them it was the whole process. Hw didn't affect your grade at all and it was up to you to decide if you want to do the hw or not.

The amount of hw students get in the us is astounding. It's not always productive either (more often that not it's not). And it seems like there's no pushback against it.

[xenihn]

Then why should homework be factored into grades at all?

[throwawayjava]

1. Homework should absolutely be graded to provide students with feedback, assess learning progress, and tailor instruction to strengths/weaknesses of students in the current iteration of the course. Once all the work goes into grading, it's hard for teachers to throw out that data when assigning grades.

2. It mimics the real world where sitting your butt in a chair and turning in useless reports is valued -- perhaps not as much as actual outcomes, but still valued. Perhaps that's stupid, but in most jobs it's a reality. IMO this isn't a great motivator, but it's one a lot of teachers cite.

3. Helps pad the grades of students who are terrible test takers / have anxiety issues.

4. Students are... students. They don't always know what's best for themselves. Making homework worth a portion of the grade communicates to students that they need to practice. Patronizing? Maybe. But also a reality.

5. It's the easiest way to inflate grades without explicitly lowering standards.

[treehau5]

Incentive to do it.

[an27]

And propping up the grades of compliant students.

[umanwizard]

It shouldn't be, and isn't in many countries.

[oatmealsnap]

I remember letting wolfram|Alpha solve some problems, then reading the steps it took to get there. They weren't always the most "human" approaches, but there was something to learn from it as well.

Poor-man's (student) tutor.

[neutralid]

If you know how to formulate the problem well (which is typically half the problem anyway), Mathematica is great for providing closed-form solutions, if there is one. In CS graduate school, it would provide general closed-form solutions that I'd never have thought of. Most everyone else brute-forced a solution numerically or simplified the problem to specific cases, which is fine but you get so much more insight from the general analytical solution, if one exists.

[wil421]

Tutors can explain in very clear terms if you don't understand the problem. Or they can provide an analogy if the explanation is not understood. I know of at least 3 schools in my state who provide dedicated math sessions in the libraries with student tutors.

A machine usually doesn't help if you don't understand the concepts. If your stuck on a problem and one step along the way was off I can see how Wolfram alpha can help.

I would bet the vast majority of students are using Wolfram Alpha to complete homework.