Little By Little Means A Lot

These are turbulent times, and by a look of things, Khan Academy has been a safe anchor point for more students than usual.

In mid-July, Pamela let us know that there had been, on an average, 70% more traffic to the computer programming section than last year at that time!

Predictably, the queue of projects needing evaluations rose. Also predictably, many of these students were using the CS section without the benefit of a teacher close by, and often entirely on their own. The fail rate among the delivered projects rose, which meant more work for the evaluators per project.

During all of July, more than a 100 different peer evaluators have been busy every day delivering project evaluations. This has brought the queue down from 9973 to 5894 projects, a difference of 4080. We'd like to thank everyone who contributed, no matter if it was but one or by the hundreds.

However, we'd like to give special thanks to a team of students who helped deliver 4121 of them (more than the net reduction) while learning evaluation and some programming skills. High quality evaluations mean more than correctly identifying pass or fail. The students should also learn what's good, as well as be told of non-fail errors.

For this,

AD Baker, Admiral Betasin, Allison, and Jonathan Bagwell participated as instructors, giving feedback on evaluations.

Element118, Fresh Baked Pizza, HopperIsMe, Janet van Dijk, Kartik S, Light Runner, Loyalty, Phoenix, Raymond Heil, SP, Theskyrider, TJ, William Wang (KING) participated as ordinary students delivering evaluations.

All the instructors and some of the students also helped identify faulty evaluations, inappropriate projects or evaluations, and plagiarism.

• Plagiarism: 126
• Inappropriate: 4
• Faulty evals: 126

At times it seemed the queue was stuck for days, but eventually perseverance paid off! Thank you for your willingness and good humor during some hectic weeks. We know that several of the participants had hoped to do more, and some were entirely prevented. Fortunately the reasons given were all good news, and especially in times like this: new jobs.

We're sure that there will be new chances in the future, and meanwhile we hope you'll keep practicing what you've learned, at least occasionally 😀

On behalf of DGPE,

Evan Lewis, Inger Hohler, and Janice Holz