[luchak]

Perhaps other people are different, but I rarely learn important things or acquire deep understanding without doing a certain amount of "busy work".

It took me a semester of physics homework to actually understand vector calculus. I had to write philosophy papers in order to see the beautiful arguments in my head fall apart on the page. I tried to learn a language by immersion alone -- but that left gaps it took hours and hours with a textbook to fix.

Even points aren't a terrible idea: I'm very good at overestimating the depth of my understanding, and I often have to do a certain amount of grinding to uncover the deficiencies in my knowledge. During my undergraduate career, points (when properly applied) were very good at getting me to realize how important some of the pointless-seeming work was.

Good professors will probably give you some "busy work". Whether they're assigning the right work, and providing the right incentives, is another question.

[Groxx]

I think that part of the problem is that each professor believes their classes to be the most important, and students have wildly varying workloads.

Personally, my favorite setup is what one of my math professors does: recommended homework, which can be submitted to get feedback, and which 1/2 of the test questions are pulled from. If you do it all, it's a lot, but you're not required to do any. Predictably, most people do little, but the people who need it / actually care still get the benefit of homework, and the flexibility of a lack of deadlines.

[andrewce]

I had a calc teacher in high school who did the "recommended homework" thing.

It was amazing, as I could devote however much time I needed in order to be able to identify and then efficiently and effectively solve a given problem type.

This was still at the level where it was a lot closer to arithmetic than actual math (even the most complicated problems rested on just one or two methods which we already knew, and all had an objective, known solution), but the flexibility that it offered me was very useful, given the busy-ness of my schedule that year.

[luchak]

I like the sound of that policy -- for some courses, it would work fine. For other, there might be problem:

* Some courses are hard enough, and many undergraduates are undisciplined enough, that a lot of students would end up failing. Of course, when this happens, the professor gets a whole bunch of reviews back telling him that he taught badly.

* Sometimes exams aren't the best setting for evaluation.

[Groxx]

1) I dislike the current organization for college+ level schools. That's an entirely different issue. And, given that this approach is a bit... liberal in its views of students, it's less likely to be taken by anyone without tenure. In which case they're nearly immune to feedback like that if they can demonstrate their system. At least, in my experience.

2) Yeah, but then you're in an entirely different style of class, and it probably doesn't have a lot of busy-work homework like objectively-testable (if there is such a thing) classes can generate. Though please, point some out to me if you've had any, I'm quite interested in how education is handled :)