[HN Gopher] AI breakthrough ChatGPT raises alarm over student ch...
___________________________________________________________________
AI breakthrough ChatGPT raises alarm over student cheating
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-12-18 23:39 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| spike021 wrote:
| I mentioned this on twitter a week or two ago, but in a lot of
| ways ChatGPT really reminds me of being in college about 10-15
| years ago and using Wolfram Alpha a lot. It wasn't difficult back
| then to put in some challenging math problems or historical
| questions and get back results I could reference in notes for
| things.
|
| It's a concern but I feel like it's also just inevitable. There
| will always be resources that can be used for cheating.
|
| Hopefully students just learn to use these things as a resource
| rather than a shortcut.
| [deleted]
| kypro wrote:
| I guess I have a fairly cynical take on this. I think this just
| exposes that AI is fundamentally going to undermine the value of
| education in certain fields. The fact some tests can be "cheated"
| by AI really just suggests that some skills have little to no
| value in our future AI-prevalent world. Stopping people cheating
| is going to change that.
|
| In the same way that in the past being able to do fast, accurate
| calculations in your head or on paper might have landed you job
| as a "computer", today technology makes the idea of hiring
| someone to be a computer absurd. And therefore any tests that
| test someone's ability to multiply and divide large numbers is
| basically a worthless test in today's world.
|
| Fields where there's value humans can add won't be cheatable by
| AI (at least today's generations). Tests in these fields will
| hold value. In some cases it will mean the education and tests
| will evolve to educate and test areas where humans can still add
| value - arguably this has already happened in maths. But many
| fields could be replaced entirely.
|
| I don't mean to sound unsympathetic to those who's jobs and
| professions will replaced by AI in the coming years and decades.
| It makes me sad that someone could spend years obtaining and
| perfecting skills which might soon become redundant, but for
| better or worse AI systems like ChatGPT will fundamentally change
| the value of some skills and educational fields. The sooner we
| accept this the better we can adapt society for it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The fact some tests can be "cheated" by AI really just
| suggests that some skills have little to no value in our future
| AI-prevalent world.
|
| That's like saying 'speech has no value'. It doesn't have value
| on its own, but if you can't speak then suddenly there is a
| whole pile of stuff you can no longer do. The ability to put
| your thoughts down in writing and to organize them into a
| hopefully coherent form is an act that has implications far
| beyond the writing itself. Besides the fact that it can help
| you to organize your thoughts in the process. Plenty of times
| when I write a longer piece I find out halfway that one or more
| of my assumptions were wrong and then I get to fix that and re-
| evaluate my position. It isn't rare at all to go through
| several such iterations for a single text and at the end of it
| I have a much better insight into the material that I thought I
| already knew well enough to write about.
|
| Don't underestimate the value of these foundational skills.
| visarga wrote:
| I give you another anti-cheating solution: test all exams on
| chatGPT, by giving it first the tasks, then the answers for
| self grading. If the model fails, use the problem, if not,
| change it until chatGPT fails. The task should always require
| human intervention to pass.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I think the purpose of exams is deeply misunderstood. They
| are supposed to be a feedback system for the teacher and the
| student so the student can improve. They're not a competition
| or an intelligence measuring stick. ChatGPT is kind of the
| perfect tool for that; if a student doesn't understand maybe
| AI can help then get to the right answer and give them
| personalized attention. Something that IMO teachers fail at
| due to the nature of large class sizes where teachers can't
| help tutor each student.
| pupppet wrote:
| But isn't there value in a student researching and putting
| their thoughts to (virtual) paper? A lot of this testing is
| more about the journey than destination, and students are
| losing these valuable skills by cheating.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I'm not sure I buy this argument. People still need to learn
| that 2+2=4, derivative of sine is cosine and similarly simple
| things in non-STEM fields. Sure these questions can be answered
| by ChatGPT trivially, but it doesn't mean they don't need to be
| taught.
| eagleinparadise wrote:
| That's not the way the system works. You spend a semester or
| a year going deep about Calculus, Geometry, AP Euro, or
| whatever. These are all things most people don't need to know
| unless they specialize..
|
| Perhaps instead, we should have a semester or year classes
| through 8-12 + college discuss the nature of manias, like
| analyzing the tulip bubble, crypto bubble, 2008 mortgage
| bubble, etc. These are all common things that happen over and
| over again. Lessons which can permanently (and frequently) be
| called upon.
|
| You can measure and grade people with these topics that
| aren't officially taught. We just decide to teach less
| important things
| kenjackson wrote:
| With schools though you often need to learn things along the
| way that can easily be cheated with an AI, but the end goal not
| so much.
|
| For example, writing a basic screenplay can be done with
| ChatGPT, but it can't write one that will likely be turned into
| a movie/show.
|
| And automation will continue to make some jobs obsolete and
| create new ones. For example in youth sports we don't get great
| coverage of youth/school events. I'm hopeful in the not too
| distant future we can get game summaries and stats for all
| games -- and editors will probably be needed to add commentary.
| That's something I'd love to see.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| >any tests that test someone's ability to multiply and divide
| large numbers is basically a worthless test
|
| Right now, teaching elementary school aged children to solve
| complex multiplication and division is considered an effective
| way to teach people critical thinking, persistence, and basic
| logical reasoning structure. Structured education typically
| relies on an ability to assess student improvement, so 3rd
| graders don't get a calculator when they take a multiplications
| table test, even though we'd all use one at our desk at work.
|
| I would surmise that likewise there is value to students
| learning to read, analyze, and report insight about a text, to
| attempt to identify symbolism and patterns, to communicate
| their ideas effectively, and to be assessed about that - even
| if by the time they're in the workforce they'll usually just
| ask an AI to do it.
| musicale wrote:
| Learning how to multiply and divide large numbers was one of
| my earliest exposures to numerical algorithms.
|
| I usually use a calculator or Python for large numerical
| computations, but the algorithmic understanding is something
| I use every day.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The problem is with areas like reading comprehension. The
| underlying skill is still human-value-added today - asking
| ChatGPT to produce a summary of your comment isn't anything
| like a replacement for reading it and understanding it myself.
| But educators can't read minds to determine if real
| comprehension is taking place, and the only way they currently
| know how to measure it is through tests which ChatGPT can
| cheat.
| teeray wrote:
| I think that the only solution may be for the essays to be
| written in controlled environments (school). If AI forces
| schools to do more school in school and less homework, I count
| that as a massive win. What I would give for the countless
| hours of my childhood and teenage years wasted on useless
| homework...
| comfypotato wrote:
| I think you meant "stopping people cheating _isn't_ going to
| change that".
|
| In my friendly/complementary rebuttal, the catch lies somewhere
| in the phase of learning foundational material. In the same way
| that traditional mathematics education emphasizes doing
| problems by hand that could be solved computer, there's
| something to be said for learning to parse the research
| material that ChatGPT has indexed when you're writing a term
| paper. It's worth noting here that math education may be moving
| away from the rote memorization and routine problem solving
| that today's math researchers state are essential.
|
| ChatGPT has made it much harder to detect cheating on untimed
| power tests. The biggest downside I see to this is that it
| makes an old problem worse. If a prof has no choice but to
| administer a non-computer (proctored) timed exam, students who
| take tests slowly or have anxiety disorders are going to
| suffer.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| At the end of the day though, it doesn't really matter. The
| person cheating is failing themselves if the foundational
| material you're talking about is so important. If they can
| somehow manage to pass enough courses while using an AI, and
| then get a degree out of it, or a 4.0 GPA, or whatever then
| the degree wasn't that valuable to begin with.
|
| This already mirrors the real world pretty well. Outside of
| your first job or two, nobody really cares what your GPA is
| or what college you graduated from. In the real world if you
| managed to cheat with an AI you'd probably get a nice
| promotion. I don't personally see a downside, other than the
| demise of certain flawed notions of academic success that
| deserve to die out anyway.
| Jensson wrote:
| Lets say we are training ChatGPT2, would you let it use
| ChatGPT for solving things? Do you think it would learn
| better if it had to learn itself without relying on
| ChatGPT?
|
| We learn by doing. Relying on smart tools puts you in a
| local optima, it is hard for you to improve over those
| tools, but people who don't rely on tools continue
| improving and then start using the tools later.
| comfypotato wrote:
| I was just trying to allude to the nature of the
| universities' business. (Being assessing that they've
| taught what they claim to teach.)
|
| My PhD mentor is actually leading a discussion about
| ChatGPT use by students, and the tone is mostly concern.
| But it's not all bad; it's an incredible tool for quickly
| diving into a subject at a surface level and getting your
| bearings regarding what's important. It saved my ass on
| one of my finals too when the rest of the questions were
| harder than I expected and ChatGPT helped me tear through
| the remaining T/F questions.
| [deleted]
| jelled wrote:
| You'll still be able to test writing, but going forward it will
| need to be done in a proctored setting. Similar how you would
| test grade school math given the existence of calculators.
| ceres wrote:
| Honest question: how valuable is the current mode of testing
| (based rote memorization) if much of that can be done by AI
| anyway? Maybe it's time for new testing methodologies?
| HEmanZ wrote:
| Where are people testing just rote memorization? At least
| 20 years ago when I was in lower school, most of what we
| did had only a very small memorization component. The SAT,
| ACT, SAT subject exams, etc only barely rely on
| memorization, and many questions have no memorization
| component at all. It's why 4th graders can get top-
| percentile scores on some of these.
|
| You need both memorization and applied reasoning to be
| taught in school. Without something to apply reasoning to
| you can't really reason about anything. And without applied
| reasoning, memorization is pretty useless.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Yeah, no. Training people doesn't work like that. Education is
| about training people, we don't utilize the output of the kids
| and reward them with grades that they can exchange for food and
| toys.
|
| The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical
| situations and grade their progress with purpose of being aware
| of their development so we can improve it. Another thing we do
| is selecting the particularly good ones for further advanced
| training.
|
| The problem with cheating is that it provides wrong data about
| their progress, you don't want to end up with a generation that
| cheated their way up without learning anything.
|
| The selection for further training is probably not that big of
| a problem, its mostly about supply and demand and ChatGPT won't
| change that.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Do you think Trump and Sam Bankman-Fried took your advice? I
| need a pool of people to flip burgers and take orders and
| those people better not take cookies from the jar. For
| everyone else, it's called creating shareholder value. Your
| advice makes for great burger flippers.
| raydiatian wrote:
| You're either a burger flipper or a con man? That's your
| binary state on mankind?
| yanderekko wrote:
| >The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical
| situations and grade their progress with purpose of being
| aware of their development so we can improve it. Another
| thing we do is selecting the particularly good ones for
| further advanced training.
|
| You're missing the point. Why are we making them achieve
| progress on something that is being trivialized by AI? Let
| them use AI as a complementary tool and test them on
| something that requires measurable human skill. If this is
| difficult it's a sign that perhaps you're not teaching
| anything valuable.
| rocketbop wrote:
| Respectfully, I think it's you who are missing the point.
| There is value in teaching humans to communicate and
| synthesize information. It's possible that in the future
| the best thinkers and philosophers and historians and
| political analysts will be AI, but 1/ we are very very far
| from that, and 2/ it's important for civilisation that we
| don't leave thinking to the machines.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Exactly, educations is not a vocational school where we
| teach people useful skills so they start doing whatever
| they learned. Machines have long been able to do things
| that we teach in the schools, the purpose of teaching is
| developing people. Once they are developed(that means
| they built understanding of how nature and society works
| and how to interact with) and its time to expect an
| output, only then we can talk about teaching useful
| skills.
|
| Vocational schools do exist and they are useful but
| that's not what we are concerned about. People who cheat
| not to learn useful skills simply spend their time and
| money.
| drdeca wrote:
| Curriculum learning. It is pedagogically useful to teach
| simpler and easier versions of something before teaching
| the harder versions.
|
| While you likely always have a calculator with you which
| can do division much more quickly than you can do long
| division, if you want to teach students more advanced math,
| it is nonetheless useful to have previously taught them
| long division of numbers, so that you can teach them long
| division of polynomials.
|
| If students haven't learned how to do long division of
| decimals, and how that works, it is harder to teach them to
| do long division of polynomials.
|
| Of course, nowadays there are computer programs which can
| do long division of polynomials more quickly than a person
| can, but this is just an example.
|
| Suppose there are a sequence of levels, where for each
| level n, it is much easier to teach someone level n+1 if
| they already have an understanding of level n. If computers
| can do levels up to level k faster than humans can, it may
| still be useful to start teaching someone at level 1 and
| then proceed to level 2, and so on, even though computers
| can already do those levels, until finally it is time to
| teach them level k+1 which we have not yet managed to teach
| computers to do.
| varajelle wrote:
| I think it's the same reason why we are teaching assembly
| even if there are compilers. Or teaching Latin even though
| it's a dead language
| blobbers wrote:
| This is an interesting point of view.
|
| I always viewed grades as a way of establishing intellectual
| hierarchy, which probably wasn't the most healthy way to look
| at them; a way of deciding where amongst my peers I stacked
| up. In University, we had class ranks.
|
| Those with the best grades and thus highest rank would be
| given the best opportunities for wage-slave class work.
| Eventually people hit University and split up according to
| passion, goals as well as grades. Of course, there were
| exceptions; entrepreneurs were the folks that buck the system
| and don't need grades to succeed. In a sense, the grades
| _were_ exchanged for food stamps and toys, only later in
| life. The winners drove the lambos and the losers are still
| living in their parents ' basements.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > Those with the best grades and thus highest rank would be
| given the best opportunities for wage-slave class work
|
| I don't believe that this observation is true. Those who
| got into tech, bitcoins etc. at the right time got the
| lambos - not the most brilliant ones. Tech is full people
| with inert brains who make much much more mone than some of
| the most brilliant scientists out there.
|
| It has been good time to be into plumbing instead of
| astrophysics if you are optimising for money BTW. Just like
| knowing ReactJS has provided better income opportunities
| than being rocket scientist.
| ospray wrote:
| Which means testing student under supervision and letting
| them us AI for assignments is probably going to work fine.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Sure, I also find AI and all other devices that we already
| had(calculators, programming languages, simulators etc)
| very useful for learning. Incorporating the latest and
| greatest tools into education works well.
| hosh wrote:
| Before ChatGPT, there has been criticism education as we know
| it today. The notion of "education" has not always been about
| training, and putting someone in a hypothetical situation and
| grading progress -- indeed, the measurement of progress
| itself -- is not present in all notions of education, or all
| methods of learning, or even all systems of determination of
| truth (epistemology). Behavioral conditioning with reward
| incentives are also not the only method in education.
|
| One of the interesting voices about this John Taylor Gatto.
| Mainstream methods of "training" as you described them, may
| indeed be the most common method today, but it is by no means
| the most effective, and Gatto goes into detail about it in
| his book, _The Underground History of American Education_.
|
| For example, an older notion of education is not so much to
| train people to mechanically repeat results (like you would
| train people in a factory), but rather, to develop informed
| and educated citizens that are able to reason, think
| critically, and participate meaningfully in a republic.
| There's little point in having a voting body of citizens
| unable to think for themselves, and are merely regurgitating
| ideas they hear.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Well that's a strawman argument right there. Obviously by
| training I don't mean perfecting repetitive tasks or
| anything of that sort. If that was the case, I would have
| advocating on training prompts or fast typing or something
| of that sort.
|
| You can check my other replies in this thread to understand
| better.
| aeternum wrote:
| Training people (or anything) using a flawed objective
| function is not useful.
|
| Writing essays, specifically expanding a list of well-
| reasoned bullet points into communicative written prose will
| be a worthless operation in the future, and likely already
| is.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Have you not noticed that when you write something down
| with the purpose of summarising it in a structured way you
| tend to understand it better?
|
| There's no market for kids essays, we never made them write
| these things with the purpose of being useful output. The
| market for essays for grown ups is also very small, making
| kids write things down was not with the purpose of covering
| the case of them becoming journalists or something. It's
| just that makes them learn to think and structure their
| thought process. That's why people take notes and write
| down things even if its not going to be graded or read by
| anyone else.
| hosh wrote:
| Agreed. Yet many students, parents, and even teachers
| lost sight of this purpose.
| lemmsjid wrote:
| There is a progression though.
|
| For students, the objective is to write what to an adult
| would be mediocre essays, because they are on a path to
| writing adult level essays.
|
| The AI can write mediocre essays, but not adult level
| essays.
|
| Assuming that a student must write a bunch of mediocre
| essays in order to progress past the AI to write adult
| level essays, then they need to be evaluated on writing a
| bunch of mediocre essays.
|
| If the teacher cannot distinguish between AI output and the
| student's output, and the result is that we give up on
| evaluating mediocre student essays, then the students are
| ultimately inhibited from progression to adult level
| essays, which, currently, are superior to the AI's output.
| wwweston wrote:
| Automatability _may_ make an output ubiquitous to the point
| where marginal value for any given output is small, but if
| it was really "worthless" no one would bother automating
| it in the first place.
|
| We automated a lot of arithmetic and then some higher math
| decades ago, but that hasn't meant that knowing how to do
| it is worthless.
|
| Effective communicative prose is an inherently high-value
| part of coordinating human activity. The number of roles
| exclusively dedicated to it _might_ shrink but it 's part
| of nearly every activity in a specialized society. What's
| most likely is that people will use it as a time-saving
| tool but everyone will be evaluating how good the output is
| and tweaking it. And that means until we're at a point
| where people trust AI to actually evaluate the value of AI
| output, many of these roles (and certainly anyone building
| AIs that do this) will need to know how to recognize good
| output -- and the training involved in that probably
| involves practice in personally doing it.
| darepublic wrote:
| > you don't want to end up with a generation that cheated
| their way up without learning anything.
|
| This sounds like kind of a good summary of what we are doing
| to ourselves as we speak. Case in point: the crypto scandal,
| the housing bubble etc. A ton of people made out like
| thieves.
| kube-system wrote:
| Someone who can use a calculator to solve a problem, still has
| to understand the concepts being used in order to know what
| buttons to press on the calculator. They will have learned what
| those calculations mean, and how they work.
|
| Using an AI to crap out an essay with no understanding of the
| topic is not the same thing. While an essay is the way we test
| students, it is a stand in for measuring _understanding_ ,
| which is the ultimate goal.
| jimbokun wrote:
| This is understating the problem.
|
| In months or years, it's not clear if any human will be able to
| provide economic value, relative to state of the art AI.
|
| I don't see where any fundamental barriers lie between current
| AI and surpassing humans across the board. What can humans do
| that is unachievable by AI in the foreseeable future, given the
| current rate of advancement?
| seppel wrote:
| > I guess I have a fairly cynical take on this. I think this
| just exposes that AI is fundamentally going to undermine the
| value of education in certain fields. The fact some tests can
| be "cheated" by AI really just suggests that some skills have
| little to no value in our future AI-prevalent world.
|
| If you think about it, most of the stuff you learn at school
| (beyond reading and writing) has not much value apart from
| certifying that you are not stupid and compliant to do stupid
| tasks.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I had to rearrange and equation at work yesterday. I let
| everyone know that 9th grade was not a waste.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Really what we need to do is take a good hard look at how
| education system works and whether or not it is aligned with
| our goals. Sadly, that's a pretty massive undertaking and no
| one can be arsed to support doing difficult things on a
| societal level any more.
| phonescreen_man wrote:
| My son came to me the other day asking about some properties of
| material question for his engineering BTEC, it just happened the
| night before I had been playing around with chatGPT for ffmpeg
| commands and stable diffusion prompts. I told him about it and he
| got right on it. It answered the question for him with plenty of
| extra info he had not considered. He tried to add it as a
| reference ,the instructor said it was not allowed. However the
| instructor who had never heard of chatGPT was so impressed he
| started using it on all the questions to see how good it is. Also
| so he can detect others using it.
|
| It's a game changer and a really great tool. If it helps people
| learn then surely that must be a positive.
| DeWilde wrote:
| If a technology can make an educational method obsolete maybe it
| is time to rethink the educational method?
|
| And if students can use a technology like ChatGPT to complete
| their education, are they not then prepared for real life tasks
| and situations that they can also complete using ChatGPT?
| hiidrew wrote:
| I successfully used a GPT-2 output identification tool to see
| whether something was generated using ChatGPT. I think it only
| works if the text has a minimum number of characters. I imagine
| it's only a matter of time until Turnitin integrates something
| like this, or some other start-up comes along in edtech. Either
| way, the continuous arms race on generative media /
| identification of it will be fascinating to watch as it unfolds!
| hiidrew wrote:
| I think this was the tool I tested it out-
| https://huggingface.co/openai-detector
| ivegotnoaccount wrote:
| Well, as explained in some of my other comments, it doesn't
| seem that effective. Most GPT-generated garbage will probably
| be GPT-3 based, which doesn't seem to too often trigger as
| "fake" (got more "human" results when I tested it with
| ChatGPT), while on the other hand, it says that several of my
| comments are fake with >99% certainty.
| hiidrew wrote:
| I see, that's obviously an issue. I only tested it with
| something I generated and someone's long form blog post.
| Julesman wrote:
| 100% not worried.
|
| There are some real short-term issues. Teachers who don't know
| anything about it. Students who think the teacher won't notice
| that their illiterate self got smart over the weekend.
| Legislators using it as a political football.
|
| But ultimately before long text AI will be good enough to fool
| anyone. And you will be able to feed it your style and it will
| spit out text appropriate for your grade level, just good enough
| for the A. And cheating will happen.
|
| Pandora's box is not going to be closed.
|
| Does that spell universal illiteracy and the end of higher
| learning? lol. Nah. Testing will certainly have to be creative.
|
| Just off the top of my head. Have every student write one
| paragraph during a whole period and make it as good as they can.
| That creates a baseline. And, you could actually use an AI (or
| not) to measure future results against it and map growth.
|
| We will figure this out and AI, at least for a time, will be a
| good thing. Quantum Computer AI that can predict the future...
| not quite as excited about that one. heh.
| knaik94 wrote:
| Arguing what should and shouldn't count as cheating misses the
| bigger picture. The question is how will school assessments adapt
| to effectively evaluate how well kids learn?
|
| I am not happy that ChatGPT and other LLMs are the catalyst, but
| I believe the education system is archaic relative to the
| technology we have. Even at high school+ levels, lines of code is
| not seen as an indicator of productivity but word count and pages
| written are.
|
| I genuinely see ChatGPT as being less useful than Wolfram Alpha
| for a lot of STEM applications. It will make regurgitating things
| like, fill in the blank questions, trivial but those questions
| already fail at ensuring kids pay attention or learn anything.
|
| On the other hand, ChatGPT makes a Literature/Writing teacher's
| life very difficult, since the main method of take home
| assessments become trivial to complete without knowing the
| underlying material. It was accurately able to answer "What does
| Big Brother symbolize in George Orwell's 1984 and how does it
| apply to modern day? Include 4 parallels in your answer, and try
| not to talk about obvious ones." I followed up with "Go into
| detail about the first bullet and include as many details as
| possible." and I will include just the first paragraph of the
| response, "Propaganda and manipulation of information is a key
| aspect of the society depicted in George Orwell's 1984. The
| government in the novel controls all forms of media and uses it
| to disseminate propaganda that promotes the ruling Party's
| ideology and demonizes its enemies. The Party's slogans, such as
| "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH," are
| repeated constantly in order to instill them into the minds of
| the population and reinforce the Party's control." I followed up
| for each bullet point and it was able to give reasonable quotes
| for each. I asked it to give a different quote, and it produced a
| reasonable alternate supporting quote.
|
| The only "issue" I've noticed is that it's a little redundant,
| but I don't know how different that is from high schoolers being
| overly verbose to meet a word count goal. The cyclical way of
| presenting ideas makes copy-paste responses easier to spot,
| because ChatGPT has a pattern of Restate Question, Give Quote,
| Explain in a few sentences, Restate Question. But I doubt I would
| be able to tell with more than 70% confidence when read out of
| context, and I think I would be fooled in 95% of cases if the
| words are changed and some ideas are expanded on.
|
| But essay writing and even college admission writing is going to
| be full of essays where ChatGPT helped. The only solution I see
| is pushing for all take home assessment to require a presentation
| portion. In class essay writing assessments will require
| everything to happen during class time. I don't really know how
| well schools can police access to ChatGPT when kids start getting
| cell phones in middle school. It would only take one shared login
| to create difficulty for teachers. Language models outside of
| ChatGPT already exist that will function like a smart writing
| assistant that can generate sentences for you, like OPT or GPT
| Neo.
|
| Covid already cause a large trend of current middle and high
| schoolers struggling to read at a level below their grade. There
| are studies supporting and disagreeing with this conclusion, and
| I imagine the effects will only be clear in hindsight. My
| experience while tutoring is that distance learning caused a lot
| more students to struggle but is only a small part of a larger
| trend. Kids have to grow in a much more difficult environment
| that's constantly trying to exploit their attention. Video Games
| are more addictive, social media is more readily available,
| friendships and gathering have shifted online, schooling has
| shifted online, Covid meant teachers struggled to identify
| lagging children, school incentives mean that kids don't really
| get held back a grade, and the most recent complication is
| ChatGPT being able to answer reading comprehension/essay
| questions at a high school level.
|
| The opposite, positive, thing is that ChatGPT makes information
| accessible to kids that come from underprivileged backgrounds. I
| trust ChatGPT will be able to answer middle school to early high
| school level STEM questions accurately, or a Math focused model
| will be released, similar to what the PubMedGPT LLM is attempting
| to do by being trained on pubmed biomed abstracts and portions of
| PILE. ChatGPT fails in terms of numbers, but that feels like a
| speedbump, especially considering the current capabilities of
| Wolfram Alpha.
|
| I plugged a generic college admissions essay prompt into it.
| There clearly are lots of tropes, but the framework of a good
| essay is there. I wonder how something like this will affect
| international student applicants who learned English as a second
| or third language and struggle with it. Standardized testing like
| SAT and GRE was becoming de-emphasized but I can see this causing
| the opposite effect.
|
| "Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent
| that is so meaningful they believe their application would be
| incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share
| your story. Respond like a graduating high school senior applying
| to Ivy League Colleges. As a graduating high school senior
| applying to Ivy League colleges, I feel that my background,
| identity, interests, and talents have all contributed to making
| me the person I am today and have shaped my aspirations for the
| future.
|
| Growing up in a low-income, immigrant household, I have faced
| many challenges and obstacles that have taught me resilience,
| determination, and the importance of hard work. These experiences
| have also given me a unique perspective on the world and a deep
| appreciation for diversity and inclusivity.
|
| My interests and passions have always centered around social
| justice and advocating for underrepresented communities. I have
| been actively involved in various community service and activist
| organizations, working to address issues such as racial
| inequality, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. I have also
| excelled academically, achieving high grades and participating in
| numerous research and leadership opportunities.
|
| As I look to the future, I am excited to continue pursuing my
| passions and making a positive impact on the world. I believe
| that an Ivy League education would not only provide me with the
| skills and knowledge necessary to succeed, but also give me the
| opportunity to be part of a community of like-minded individuals
| who are committed to making a difference. I am confident that my
| background, identity, interests, and talents will make me a
| valuable addition to any Ivy League college, and I am eager to
| share my story with you."
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| How is chatgpt, in particular, the breakthrough? Seems like you
| can get similar results in other models, right?
| amanj41 wrote:
| It's an accessible interface that has gone viral enough for
| non-technical students to catch wind of & use it.
| makestuff wrote:
| IMO searching on stack overflow/googling requires some level of
| technical understanding. Ex: You can't just paste your homework
| problem into google and get an answer. However, ChatGPT is just
| a better/high level of abstraction of google search. You can
| 100% paste in a full leetcode question and get an answer.
| Obviously it is wrong sometimes, but in the next few years it
| will become more accurate.
|
| This is no different than the people I was in CS with who would
| just copy other people's projects/homework though. If you want
| to use ChatGPT for 4 years in college and then are able to get
| a job and do the job somehow I don't really care. I would be
| surprised if you could do the job well, but I am sure some
| people will be able to.
| neatze wrote:
| Wonder if it is possible to use fiverr to cheat ?
|
| (seems like it, I would be very surprised if it is not used for
| many years, already)
| cptcobalt wrote:
| ChatGPT is just like a calculator. We should allow it, but you
| should be able to prove you still know the material. This is
| where things like written exams still win (but not everything has
| to be a written exam).
|
| My takeaway from this is: good riddance, just fix the way we
| teach students instead. The most painful part of school for me
| was the real awareness that not every question is valid, and most
| often the throwaway work given to you (vs. that of, say, exams)
| was most often the most junk & inane work you could do. (NB: I've
| got ADHD, and for me that worked out to always underperforming
| and missing homework but doing great on exams.)
|
| How can the state of education reinvent itself to embrace
| ChatGPT, computer science, and yes, even calculators--teachers
| need to stop plugging their ears and pretending these _good
| tools_ don 't exist.
| andrewallbright wrote:
| Something I've realized after using chatGPT since the preview
| released is that I am still responsible for knowing what the
| possibility space is for what I want to do.
|
| This helps in two ways. First, it helps me formulate my requests
| of ChatGPT. Second, it helps me discover incorrect output which I
| can then either fix myself or make a subsequent request of
| chatGPT.
|
| I consider ChatGPT an extremely eager junior dev who makes
| mistakes by moving too quick in this slice of time. (Im sure
| it'll get much better very, very soon).
| [deleted]
| jabthedang wrote:
| drdaeman wrote:
| https://archive.is/BesJA
| periheli0n wrote:
| Computer science, and academia in general, has always adapted to
| technical progress, although slowly.
|
| In the case of ChatGPT and similar LLMs, these should become part
| of the toolbox that students are being taught. I.e., how does it
| work, what can it do, what are its limits, how can it be used to
| help solve a problem or complete a task.
|
| An exam question could then be e.g. to ask ChatGPT for an essay
| on a topic, critically discuss its shortcomings, and improve the
| essay e.g. by adding references and deeper discussion, which will
| be graded.
|
| Alternatively, use ChatGPT to iteratively discuss and improve the
| essay. The whole chat transcript should be included and will be
| graded.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT to tell me of examples were more likely from a
| large language model or for a student. It failed miserably on the
| job. Like I asked it to write a short paragraph on Shakespeare
| and then asked it to determine if the paragraph came from it. It
| said that the paragraph (that it generated 3 prompts before) was
| written by a student!
| paulpauper wrote:
| It's always students who are blamed for cheating or laziness, but
| never the administrators, teachers, etc. for failing to create
| sufficiently engaging work or curriculum that students do not
| feel compelled to cheat in the first place. Yes, some cheating is
| always inevitable ,and it's unfair to kids who do not cheat, but
| why it the framing always one-way. It's like productivity,
| automation, and collaboration is valued in corporate America, but
| it's the opposite in school.
| knaik94 wrote:
| I don't know how many teachers or administrators will say it
| outright, but LLMs and ChatGPT assisted essays are a lot more
| difficult to detect. ChatGPT is accurate enough to answer many
| typical reading comprehension questions at a high school+
| level.
|
| Students will always feel some incentive to cheat, even if they
| wouldn't in isolation, they could feel pressured based on their
| peers. A strong curriculum isn't enough to encourage every
| single student not to take shortcuts. Despite all external
| circumstances, it's still an active choice to cheat. Cheating
| is framed one-way because it's generally discussed imagining
| the laziest and most adversarial student possible, similar to
| how you'd red team for security testing.
|
| I think the concern is things like ChatGPT will lead to a lot
| more students cheating. I think it's human nature to want to
| take shortcuts. I agree with you that the way in which cheating
| is demonized in a school environment is counterproductive in
| the long run. I think admin and teachers have hid behind
| students' fear of academic integrity violations being reported
| on a college application to not have to admit that most are
| terrible at catching cheaters. It's from the perspective of
| imagining ignorant teachers and adversarial students. Most
| minor cases of cheating aren't caught, even at a college level.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| If the students were studying loquaciousness then ChatGPT would
| give them an advantage, otherwise while the output is good is
| probably a 'C' grade rather than an 'A' grade.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| I've heard this concern a lot lately. It's understandable. But I
| think it's shortsighted.
|
| Does using a calculator make you a cheater at math? No, you still
| needed to understand the concepts.
|
| Does using ChatGPT make you a cheater at school? While ultimately
| that's up to the schools to decide, I would argue it shouldn't.
| Because you need to have enough understanding to ask the right
| question as well as to be able to spot what's wrong in the
| answer.
|
| For example, I was helping my kid out with their Java homework
| and we we're both stuck for a good hour. Finally I loaded the
| question into ChatGPT.
|
| The answer that came back helped us solve the problem. But we
| didn't just cut and paste. We looked at that solution and
| compared it to our own to find the problem.
|
| I don't consider that cheating. Others may feel differently.
|
| Ultimately, I think of this as augmented thinking. In the real
| world, we all use whatever tools we have at our disposal. If in
| the real world we have access to Google and calculators and now
| AI chatbots, why should we train and educate ourselves as if
| those don't exist?
|
| I'd rather my kids learn to use every tool at their disposal to
| be as fast, efficient, and effective as possible. And unlike
| paying someone to do your homework, this is something everyone
| can do, not just those with discretionary income. So I really
| have no problem with this at all.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| > this is something everyone can do, not just those with
| discretionary income
|
| For now. The site says it's currently free because it's in a
| limited research preview. I'm curious what you would think if
| this was a $20/month subscription instead?
| tedunangst wrote:
| Is it cheating to pay someone to take the test for me? Isn't
| hiring specialized labor just another kind of tool? In the real
| world, I certainly have access to all sorts of specialists.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yes, but the point of school is to train _you_ to be able on
| these things. If you fail to see value in that, then why are
| you going to school in the first place?
| jimbokun wrote:
| > For example, I was helping my kid out with their Java
| homework and we we're both stuck for a good hour. Finally I
| loaded the question into ChatGPT. > The answer that came back
| helped us solve the problem.
|
| But maybe the real lesson in ChatGPT, or a near future
| descendant, is replacing human programmers altogether?
| mort96 wrote:
| As much as I would love that, I have yet to see an AI system
| which tries to solve the actually hard problems of
| programming.
| a4isms wrote:
| I agree. This reminds me of the argument that being able to use
| web search during a "coding interview" is cheating.
|
| My stance is that if web search can render the difference
| between a competent and incompetent candidate undetectable, the
| problem is the interview task, not access to web search. (Not
| to mention problems with coding interviews in general.)
|
| I'll go out on a limb and say the same general principle
| applies here: If ChatGPT can pass a test, the test is measuring
| the wrong thing.
| musicale wrote:
| > if web search can render the difference between a competent
| and incompetent candidate undetectable, the problem is the
| interview task, not access to web search
|
| ;-)
|
| My take is that the problem of distinguishing between
| competent and incompetent candidates in 20 minutes is hard
| (if not impossible), and interviewers may not be able to do
| so reliably.
| a4isms wrote:
| Your take appears to be a generalization of my take in at
| least two axes:
|
| 1. Asserting that it's hard if not impossible to generate
| valuable signal, where I am speaking only to the case where
| access to web search makes it hard if not impossible to
| generate valuable signal, and;
|
| 2. I suspect you are also factoring in a very thorny
| problem, which is not just detecting candidates who are
| attempting the interview in good faith but are incompetent
| at the task given, but also detecting interviewers who are
| gaming the system by memorizing solutions to popular tasks.
|
| The latter is a very hard problem.
| eternalban wrote:
| > I don't consider that cheating. Others may feel differently.
|
| This is the wrong focus, imo. You can ask "is it cheating?" as
| you do. Alternatively you could ask "but is this learning? Is
| it helping my kids grasp the subject better?"
|
| Tools, "augmented thinking", etc. are all concerns regarding
| getting something done. But the goal for your kids is learning.
| verdenti wrote:
| Don't be silly. There's no way to do a writing course without
| extensively writing about a prompt.
|
| With chatGPT just plug it in and out pops your finished essay.
|
| You have learnt nothing besides some minor comprehension
| skills.
|
| Same with programming courses. It will answer all basic coding
| prompts. You cannot learn by just reading through a solved
| solution no matter how much you want to make the case for it.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| There are different definitions of cheating. You have to look
| at student handbooks or a teacher or professor's syllabus to
| find out what constitutes cheating. Although I think designing
| a test around the possibility of people having access to
| ChatGPT will have to be included in the future.
|
| But it absolutely could be the case that using ChatGPT is
| considered cheating like in a case where students are forbidden
| from using any other resources. OTOH, for tests that were
| previously "open internet" I assume ChatGPT is permitted.
|
| An interesting point of contention here could be if the teacher
| says you cannot collaborate with anyone else. Does ChatGPT
| count as a person here? I would think the intention here is to
| restrict use of ChatGPT but it is not considered a person
| traditionally.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > Does using a calculator make you a cheater at math?
|
| Yes, yes it does is you're testing basic arithmetic.
|
| The difference between a calculator and ChatGPT is the scope of
| problems it solves for you.
|
| If you could read your math problem aloud to your calculator
| and it could solve it showing each step along the way people
| would clearly see it as cheating. It can't it can only do
| simple arithmetic, so you still need to translate the
| requirements to to understanding, determine an algorithm and
| then perform it with the calc doing the lowest level
| operations.
|
| ChatGPT does the equivalent of this (ironically for non-math
| only). There is no "higher level" work for a person to do. It
| does it all. It's only limitation right now is that it's still
| under development.
|
| ChatGPT can't do math, but let's say it fixes it's math bug
| soon. You can't come up with a type of high school or undergrad
| math problem it can't do. I can generate python code, it will
| be able to generate a proof.
|
| And math is the hard one. Something like "write a few
| paragraphs discussing the initiating factors for World War I
| will be trivial.
|
| If someone is going to claim ChatGPT (v2 or v3) doesn't
| completely upend education, then give an example of a type of
| question that it will be inherently unable to solve for you
| that people will still need to do.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| > an example of a type of question that it will be inherently
| unable to solve for you that people will still need to do.
|
| Something like "tell me about your day so far" or "describe
| some important experiences in your life." Obviously, you can
| use ChatGPT to answer those questions, but they won't be true
| answers, since ChatGPT doesn't know you.
|
| Of course, there is the issue of _verifying_ those answers --
| probably the teacher won 't be calling the student's parents
| to make sure it's accurate (:
|
| As objective knowledge gets increasingly captured by external
| systems (search, maps, image generators, etc), subjective
| knowledge and personal experience remain out of its reach. I
| wonder if this could push us in a direction of valuing our
| personal life experiences more highly, as the other stuff
| becomes increasingly commoditized?
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| > If you could read your math problem aloud to your
| calculator and it could solve it showing each step along the
| way people would clearly see it as cheating.
|
| Such calculators exist - for example
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/.
|
| > If someone is going to claim ChatGPT (v2 or v3) doesn't
| completely upend education, then give an example of a type of
| question that it will be inherently unable to solve for you
| that people will still need to do.
|
| ChatGPT is fairly superficial. The challenge will be to
| transition education from superficial regurgiation to deeper
| understanding.
|
| Or to put it simply, writting an essay/code/etc isn't good
| enough, you know need to do it better than ChatGPT.
| 4bpp wrote:
| Can you gain deeper understanding without first gaining
| superficial understanding, though? And if not and our
| current method of imparting superficial knowledge breaks
| down, wouldn't there be a pipeline problem because much
| fewer students would get to the point where you can start
| teaching them deep understanding?
|
| (Imagine a scenario in which no assessment is possible in
| any mathematics course below the level of differential
| geometry. Would "we just have to switch to teaching
| students advanced math instead" be a solution?)
|
| Something along the lines of this is already a problem at
| US universities, as students chegg, stackexchange and
| collaborate their way through up-to-junior courses and then
| are so underprepared in senior-level ones that really 80%
| of a given class ought to be failed if this were
| politically feasible. At least though the current situation
| is more due to a lack of will than a lack of way to stop
| the cheating, so students are under some pressure to not
| make it too egriegious.
| jupp0r wrote:
| "I'd rather my kids learn to use every tool at their disposal
| to be as fast, efficient, and effective as possible."
|
| But that's not how (pre college) education works for the most
| part, unfortunately. It's lots of fact learning and essay
| busywork, not a lot of actual problem solving and critical
| thinking.
| sc2862 wrote:
| > lots of fact learning and essay busywork, not a lot of
| actual problem solving and critical thinking
|
| busywork and no problem solving/critical thinking? sounds
| like they're being groomed for middle management!
| lancesells wrote:
| In the US I think it actually comes from a factory work
| mindset where everyone does the same kind of thing and
| learns the same way. The system is at least 50 years behind
| but in my experience I think teachers are much more attuned
| to the present.
| comfypotato wrote:
| Speaking as someone who just took a take-home exam and used
| ChatGPT to complete it (documented, checked with the prof
| before, etc.) I may have some insight here. Also relevant: my
| PhD mentor is leading a synchronous/asynchronous discussion
| among the local academia folks regarding this specific concern.
|
| The short takeaway is that it's a huge problem when it comes to
| test taking. Untimed power tests are the gold standard for
| assessing student knowledge. The epitome of this kind of test
| (in any discipline) is a take home exam with extensive
| short/long answer questions. The test is open-internet, open
| notes, open everything, except for collaboration. It has been
| proven for a long time that this is the best way to assess
| whether or not a student has learned the material. The worst
| alternative is a stressful in-person exam that is closed-
| everything. This alternative produces _many_ false negatives.
| Anxiety, slow test taking, etc. cause students who know the
| material to perform poorly.
|
| The issue is detecting cheating. It's very easy for teachers to
| administer said worst alternative. An untimed power test, on
| the other hand, is extremely labor-intensive to produce/mark.
| Also, cheating is detected by comparing answers between
| students. This adds another level of complexity compared to
| multiple choice or the simpler short-answer questions that are
| delivered during a timed exam.
|
| ChatGPT introduces a layer when it comes to detecting cheating
| that is currently looking like it's going to hurt students. On
| its current track, it's going to make untimed power tests much
| harder to produce and administer. They're already so difficult
| to create that most professors just opt for the simpler timed
| exam.
|
| In an entry-level research-oriented graduate class, the point
| is to learn the foundational material so that you can progress
| to more abstract levels. ChatGPT is making it much harder to
| assess these classes. As far as testing whether someone can
| solve a more technically-oriented problem that would be seen in
| industry, I'm with your interpretation.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Also, math changed after calculators became ubiquitous and
| questions became more about the concepts (which calculators
| don't help) rather than the arithmetic. ChatGPT seems to be
| good at reciting facts (that is, when it doesn't get them
| hilariously confused on occasion), but not so much at making
| the sorts of synthesis that a good essay entails.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| This, in my opinion, is a very good thing. Learning _should_
| be more about synthesis than about fact memorization anyways,
| it's recognized as one of the highest forms of learning under
| Bloom's Taxonomy.
|
| While yes, it means that our education system will need to
| adapt, I hope it also means we'll be teaching our students
| better because they'll be encouraged to learn at a deeper
| level.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I think the comparison to a calculator isn't fair because a
| calculator serves a very discrete purpose. Your brain can
| compartmentalize a calculators function.
|
| I have been using ChatGPT to code & write copy for a week and
| its abilities are so broad that my brain couldn't really slot
| it into a specific area. The result is my brain started
| reaching towards it every time it felt strained. I had a
| similar thing happen when I was googling a lot of info for work
| and then found myself considering searching for things like
| "when is my dads birthday?". My mind couldn't slot its function
| into a specific area like it can with a calculator.
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| > cheating
|
| Check this gallery out: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/zju817
|
| "Solve x = x ^ 2" and a lot of different answers, most of them
| looks valid (with explanation!) but not correct
| rlt wrote:
| Between the COVID learning gap and this transitory period when
| education has to adapt to AI cheating, there's going to be a few
| rough years of kids falling behind.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The cheating cycle in academics is kind of interesting. A few
| years ago when getting into programming I took an assembly
| language course, basically a feeder program at a community
| college for students transferring to 4-year CS programs. The
| final project was some ridiculously complicated program written
| in MIPS assembly with lots of functions and custom system calls,
| that you were supposed to debug and add to. Hand-editing saved
| registers on the stack and so on.
|
| I didn't care at all about the grade, as I was just there to
| learn the material (and was irritated about learning MIPS instead
| of something useful like RISC-V), but I tried working through it
| for a while, an incredibly tedious exercise. Then I talked to a
| few other students, and literally every single one got the code
| off some online site. It was auto-graded via online submission,
| so they got their good grade and moved on.
|
| Imagine a few iterations of this: the teachers are thinking "yup,
| the students all get it, we can even make the problems harder to
| get a better distribution of grades", and the students keep
| finding better ways to avoid having to spend 20 hours working
| through a complicated tangled mess of code.
|
| Are the students learning anything of value? Sure, they're
| learning how to play the system for their own benefit. They're
| learning that the appearance of being intelligent and successful
| is more important than the reality (see Sam Bankman-Fried, for
| example) when you're stuck inside a corrupt system.
|
| This of course explains the coding interview in the software
| industry: everyone knows this is how the current educational
| system works, so looking at grades, recommendations, accolades
| etc. is a waste of time. Instead they say, "Here's a problem,
| solve it in real-time using just the skills you've actually
| learned and the knowledge you've actually memorized."
|
| ChatGPT might make it a little worse than it already is, when it
| comes to ranking students from excellent to mediocre - but it's
| just a cheaper version of the private tutors that so many
| students utilize. It might even level the playing field somewhat,
| as tutors are expensive.
|
| Ultimately, the only real solution, assuming grading is
| important, is to proctor the students during real-time tests,
| with all their devices locked away. This makes work much harder
| for the teachers, particularly with large class sizes, as auto-
| grading based on online submission of work is so much easier.
| ddmma wrote:
| I could post my assignments in 5 minutes solving my math homework
| but I didn't so is always a choice. If you could learn the way
| you can solve it might be an asset then it's dependent on the
| final exam and also your understanding of the problems. Sorry but
| you will not be able to compensate the personal critical thinking
| with external knowledge systems whatsoever
| easylogin wrote:
| My take is that it's another tool such as a search engine.
| Usually we have things such as citations pointing to where data
| came from as data sourcing is part of the activities included in
| homework.
|
| Additionally, we often test "offline" with constraints such as no
| calculator, open book, or closed book with notes, etc. So more
| regular knowledge checks seem to be a must if we're looking to
| verify foundational understandings.
| gptadmirer wrote:
| The more you practice, the less you bleed in battle. The more you
| prepare for interview and study, the less you compete in the job
| market. People who study Leetcode have virtually eliminated a lot
| of competition in the interview market alone. Now what's left is
| the competition between Leetcode practicioners.
|
| Leetcode is the best investment I've made in my career so far.
| I've outearned most of my peers (and people more senior than me),
| easily. Just by doing Leetcode I can eliminate 90% of the
| competition? Sign me up!
|
| Why not just let the problems sort itself out?
|
| If the students want to cheat, let them cheat. The students who
| really want to learn will learn. This makes the competition
| between them better. The bottom of the barrel will continue to be
| the bottom of the barrel, and the successful ones still become
| successful.
|
| We really should stop ascribing to "no child left behind"
| thinking, and instead encouraging competition between them.
|
| Who's gonna work the low paying dirty jobs after all if everyone
| is smart and capable? It is called "economic ladder" for a
| reason.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Who's gonna work the low paying dirty jobs after all if
| everyone is smart and capable?
|
| Not the son of Jeff Bezos, I can guarantee you that. Your idea
| would only work if we could completely and clearly separate
| what we like to call "merit" from "daddy's money".
| Unfortunately, there are no bulletproof ways of doing so 100%
| (yet), so we work a little harder to give people with not so
| much wealth a better shot at life with "no child left behind".
| gptadmirer wrote:
| Jeff Bezos is an anomaly. For every Jeff Bezos, there are
| millions of impoverished
| Indian/Chinese/Ukrainian/Brazilian/Philliphino children that
| managed to transform their life by studying programming
| and/or engineering, medicine, etc really hard.
|
| Some children really should be left behind. If they don't
| want to study hard, they should be left behind. The earlier
| they realized this in life, the better.
| fma wrote:
| Was talking to my wife (an educator) about this...simple answer
| is periodic tests that have essay components and weighs heavily
| on your grade.
|
| As the grifters get poor scores they'll easily learn that
| there's a time and a place to use these tools and however they
| decide to use it they still need to learn. I think the perfect
| example is when babelfish came online and I'd use it to get an
| idea for my Spanish essays but not use it copy and paste. There
| were some kids who copied and pasted blindly and got caught
| with phrases like "falling in love".
|
| I'm sure translation tools are better now, but leveraging tools
| for homework is nothing new.
|
| Also, the SATs now have an essay portion, but many schools
| don't require scores anymore (tbh I feel that's to let legacy
| students in but that's another story). So those who practice
| writing would score higher there as well.
| gptadmirer wrote:
| Yeah, the good students will learn how to use ChatGPT to
| their advantage without necessarily hampering their learning
| process. The bad students, well, just leave them to their own
| ways.
| nynx wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure what point you're making. Is leatcode not
| akin to cheating in this context? If doing it pushes you to the
| top, how would this sort out correctly?
| gptadmirer wrote:
| Yes, Leetcode pushes you to the top. SWE often divided into
| two camps, those who really refuse to do leetcode and those
| who do it because they know it will give them advantage.
|
| Leetcode actually does make you a better engineer, provided
| you study deeply for it. Ofc it has diminishing returns, but
| you are already ahead of the game 99% of the time if you are
| doing Leetcode.
|
| ChatGPT will make some students lazier, and will make some
| students better. Those students who can use ChatGPT
| correctly, by taking and observing the output and
| synthesizing it with their own understanding, will be ahead
| of the game. Students who are lazy and just copy pasting
| ChatGPT answers won't, but McDonald's employment is still
| open for them.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| > Leetcode actually does make you a better engineer,
| provided you study deeply for it
|
| No... it won't. Unless all you do are coding puzzles.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| Idea: Not exactly sure how it would be implemented, but some sort
| of virtual proctoring for writing essays that prevents usage of
| chatgpt or similar tools?
| jupp0r wrote:
| What happened to preparing kids for life?
| jrumbut wrote:
| You're always preparing kids for life, the question is what
| kind of life are you preparing them for.
| jupp0r wrote:
| A life where they have to work under surveillance to ensure
| they can't use tools that everybody else uses to improve
| the quality of their work?
| TchoBeer wrote:
| seems about right actually.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| Things like this already exist, like Lockdown browser. This
| doesn't mean they're good for students or effectively measuring
| learning.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I think the model to handle this is similar to how Computer
| Algebra Systems have been handled.
|
| Or one could write a good ChatGPT detector.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| But then you could train ChatGPT on the detector
| jupp0r wrote:
| Then students will become proficient in training AI models.
| Disaster!
| jhbadger wrote:
| Or that could be how they learn. It reminds me of
| professors that let you create a exam "cheat sheet" (a
| single page in which you were allowed to include any facts
| or equations you thought might help you on the exam). So we
| spent hours scouring the textbook and assignments for good
| stuff to put on the cheat sheet. When it came time for the
| test, we often found out we rarely had to consult our sheet
| -- the act of creating it made us absorb the material.
| danuker wrote:
| Reminds me of stories where people get fired for automating
| their job away
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| Make the word problems problematic so ChatGPT refuses to answer
| them. Bing-bong simple.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| But chatGPT can't connect to the internet, it said so itself.
| Sorry, couldn't resist pointing out this garden path title.
| throwaway23597 wrote:
| These tools aren't going away. And I still think ChatGPT is
| incapable of writing a full essay with parenthetical citations
| and such that schools require. Perhaps the best solution would be
| to teach students to use ChatGPT to help improve their sentence
| structures and grammar, which I think would raise essay and
| writing quality across the board without explicitly crossing the
| line into blatant cheating.
| fab13n wrote:
| if your test can't tell a smart student apart from a dumb
| algorithm, the broken part is your test.
| beej71 wrote:
| I've always felt the real trick was to make students not want to
| cheat. Or, put another way, convince them to want to learn. You
| can't convince them all, but the honest students _HATE_ the
| heavy-handed anti-cheating mechanisms schools are putting in
| place. They interfere with learning.
|
| Cater to the honest ones, and try, though various means, to
| convince everyone to not want to cheat. That $80,000 piece of
| paper isn't worth jack if you can't pass an interview.
|
| There are plenty of ways to cheat your way through school--and
| being able to get answers off the Internet is nothing new.
| Frankly, preventing plagiarism in CS has been pretty much a lost
| battle for years.
| jabthedang wrote:
| knaik94 wrote:
| Having to push the entire class to learn instead of just the
| self motivated is a bureaucratic decision. Everyone is paying
| 80,000$ to be there, it would be problematic for many reasons
| to ignore those that seem uninterested. For pre-college
| education, minimum student performance is usually the strongest
| metric tied to funding. I don't think the current schooling
| system is set to let everyone find things they will care about
| learning and not cheating in. It's not realistic to expect no
| one to want to cheat. Even the brightest student can feel
| insecure enough in their ability, feel pressured to cheat if
| they believe those around them will cheat, or just want to get
| that little bit more ahead of the competition. Cheating is not
| strictly tied to honesty.
| bearjaws wrote:
| I had to "AI" proof my technical screening questions for
| engineers. I was alarmed that about 1/3rd of my questions were
| easily answered by ChatGPT. Thankfully I've always made about 1/3
| my questions from their resume so hopefully they can answer that
| without GPT...
|
| Most of the ones that it did not answer you could tweak the
| question into ChatGPT to get a correct answer, but would lead to
| a pretty noticeable delay in answering.
| localhost wrote:
| After reading your reply here, I did the same with a question
| that I've calibrated over 100s of in-person interviews with
| college candidates at Microsoft. This is for both intern and
| full-time candidates. The goal of the question was to probe for
| technical competence (my role in the loop). The assumption was
| that anyone who can remember their data structures and
| algorithms class can make it through maybe 50% of the question.
| The question got progressively more challenging so that I could
| see what happens when the candidate reaches the edges of their
| knowledge.
|
| It starts very fizz-buzzy and if the candidate makes it to the
| end, there's a deeper discussion of caching impacts on
| performance and optimizing algorithms. ChatGPT nailed it. Even
| when I said things like:
|
| "can you optimize this program further to maximize the
| utilization of L2 caches in modern CPUs?"
|
| And it did it in <10 minutes. The best candidate I ever saw
| took 25 minutes and the rest of the candidates took the full
| allotment of time 45 minutes and none of them got to the
| discussion of L2 cache optimization. These are candidates from
| the best schools in the country.
|
| This was really impressive.
| periheli0n wrote:
| The bottom line being, you don't need to hire engineers
| anymore, just ChatGPT operators?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| We are fucked way sooner than we anticipate. Either
| transformers level out somewhere right around here to give
| humans a few years (really a decade would be nice) to
| prepare, or we are going to slam into an event horizon that's
| impossible to see the other side of. It's unknowable how
| humanity will react to be pounced on by commoditized
| intelligence.
|
| ChatGPT feels like something that is ahead of schedule. Years
| ahead of schedule.
| imdsm wrote:
| The problem is education, not ChatGPT. Education needs to evolve,
| and so far, ChatGPT has been fantastic as an educational device.
| Compare to my experience studying for a year at Open University
| where the tutors were unresponsive, unhelpful, and often,
| unavailable, ChatGPT will (and should) replace them.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-19 23:01 UTC)