[HN Gopher] Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine
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Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine
Author : notarobot123
Score : 417 points
Date : 2025-05-26 19:20 UTC (1 days ago)
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| TimorousBestie wrote:
| I predict that asking students to hand-write assignments is not
| going to go well. Unfortunately, universities built on the
| consumer model (author teaches at Arizona State) are incentivized
| to listen to student feedback over the professor's good
| intentions.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| The bigger problem is that kids can just hand write an essay
| that an AI gave them.
|
| I teach at a university and I just scale my homework
| assignments until they reach or exceed sightly the amount of
| work I expect a student to be able to do _with_ AI. Before I
| would give them a problem set. Next semester homeworks will be
| more like entire projects.
| hollow-moe wrote:
| then you're discriminating against students not using AI. I
| for sure know I really would be depressed to be asked for a
| huge pile of work I'll do myself when other will just cheat
| and have free time to do something else work on interesting
| projects or see friends whatever.
| zeta0134 wrote:
| Would the solution not be to pivot to more in-person
| demonstrations of skill and knowledge? Say the tests and
| exams become hand written, or taken in a controlled lab or
| whatever, so you need to eventually pick up the skill. But
| _how_ you pick up the skill is irrelevant.
|
| Maybe the issue is, somewhat, the concept of graded
| homework in the first place. It's meant to be practice
| material, but is only actually useful as practice material
| if students put in that work. A lot of students come to
| resent the mountains of at-home work as the busywork that
| it feels like in the moment, and I feel like this whole set
| of emotions underpins the argument but isn't really called
| out for what it is all that often. Teachers understand the
| value of actually doing that practice, but the grading
| system rewards, instead, rushing through the busywork as
| quickly as possible. Are we not testing for the right
| things?
| sho_hn wrote:
| > Would the solution not be to pivot to more in-person
| demonstrations of skill and knowledge?
|
| Yeah, this seems like the obvious conclusion.
| ghaff wrote:
| It probably is. But it's probably also more expensive and
| doesn't necessarily apply across all domains--certainly
| not all the time.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I don't consider the use of AI cheating. I think of it as a
| reasonable skill to be applied to work.
|
| To be frank, a lot of programming _is_ busywork,
| boilerplate, looking up information. Now that an AI can do
| that for my students I expect them to spend the time made
| up on developing higher level skills.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > I just scale my homework assignments until they reach or
| exceed sightly the amount of work I expect a student to be
| able to do with AI.
|
| 1. Absurd. The measurement should be learning not "work". My
| students move rocks with a forklift... so I give them more
| rocks to move?
|
| 2. From the university I'm looking for intellectual
| leadership. Professors thinking critically about what
| learning means and how to discuss it with students. The
| potential is there, but let's not walk like zombies
| unthinking into a future where the disappearance of ChatGPT
| 8.5 renders thousands of people unable to meet the basic
| requirements of their jobs. Or its appearance renders them
| unemployed.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| The goal isn't work - its simply that I acknowledge that AI
| can perform a lot of labor that students previously had to
| spend a lot of time on. Because they have more time, my
| ambitions for what they can accomplish are higher.
|
| I teach data science, which involves a lot of relatively
| unimportant glueing together of libraries. Yes, I want the
| students to know how to program, but the key skills are
| actually coming to grips with data, applying methods
| correctly, etc. The AI can make writing out the actual code
| substantially more efficient for them and I expect them to
| use that saved time to understand higher level skills.
| catigula wrote:
| I understand your intentions but I'm skeptical even this
| solves the problem.
|
| Realistically I think we're just moving away from knowledge-
| work and efforts to resuscitate it are just varying levels of
| triage for a bleeding limb.
|
| In the actual workplace with people making hundreds of
| thousands a year (the top echelon of what your class is
| trying to prepare students for) I'm not seeing output
| increase with AI tools so clearly effort is just decreasing
| for the same amount of output.
|
| Perhaps your class is just supposed to be easier now and
| that's okay.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| What do you view as coming after knowledge work? Do you
| think we'll see a resurgence of physical, in-person work?
|
| Not rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious and could see that
| being a real scenario.
| catigula wrote:
| Serfdom, possibly WALL-E but that's an optimistic
| scenario. WALL-E people actually live a somewhat
| dignified existence compared to other possibilities.
| rjsw wrote:
| With an ageing population, I don't think we are going to
| run out of the need for basic healthcare workers.
| __loam wrote:
| Digging people out of the codebases they're going to shit
| out with this technology.
| hkpack wrote:
| Do you expect someone to do the same for you? I mean to
| increase your workload until you cannot do it even with the
| AI help?
| nkrisc wrote:
| Sounds like an optimization for the students not interested
| in learning at the expense of the students who are.
| TheFreim wrote:
| Punishing honest students by ensuring that they will fail
| unless they cheat is an absurd solution. In school I went to
| great lengths to do my work well and on my own. It was
| disheartening to see other students openly cheat and do well,
| but at least I knew that I was performing well on my own
| merits.
|
| Under your system, I would have been actively punished for
| not cheating. What's the point of developing a cure that's
| worse than the disease?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| It isn't a punishment if the AI is doing the work. The goal
| is to make students utilize the skills they will need now
| that AI can supplement their abilities.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| But are AIs now _required_? If you're tailoring the class
| to allow growth potential for students using AI, what
| happens to the students who cannot use it (for whatever
| reason)?
|
| It's a bit similar to making a class harder because some
| students are getting extra help via private tutoring.
| ghurtado wrote:
| You sound like everything that is wrong with the US education
| system concentrated on one single person.
|
| What made you get into teaching?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| This claim is absurd and the comment is unserious.
|
| Would the teacher then grade the massive workload with AI
| also? There isn't really a limit to how much output an AI can
| generate and the more someone demands, the less likely it is
| that the final result will be looked at in any depth by a
| human.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| The point is that I will expect more high level thinking
| and less rote coding.
| mythrwy wrote:
| As long as you are upfront that you expect AI will be used,
| this seems like a solid and practical approach to me.
| the_snooze wrote:
| The consumer model isn't all bad. But it can lead to wildly
| different outcomes based on self-selection and incentives.
|
| Take gyms, for example. You have your cheap commodity
| convenience gyms like Planet Fitness, where a lot of people
| sign up (especially at the beginning of the year) but few
| actually stick to it to get any real gains. But you also have
| pricy fitness clubs with mandatory beginner classes, where the
| member base tends to be smaller but very committed to it.
|
| I feel like students that are OK with just phoning it in with
| AI fall into the Planet Fitness mindset. If you're serious
| about gains (physically or intellectually), you'll listen to
| the instructors and persist through uncomfortable challenges.
| mullingitover wrote:
| So don't accredit universities that want to turn into degree
| mills.
|
| Beat this game of prisoner's dilemma with a club at the
| accreditation level. Students can complain all they want, but
| if they want a diploma which certifies that they are able to
| perform the skills they learned, they will have to actually
| perform those skills.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > So don't accredit universities that want to turn into
| degree mills.
|
| This is way outside the scope of something that a faculty
| member who is, as the article says, trying to teach has any
| hope of implementing within a reasonable time frame. Of
| course the ideal is that faculty, as major stakeholders in
| the educational institution, should ideally be active in all
| levels of university governance, but I think it is important
| to realize how much of a prerequisite there is for an
| individual professor even to get their voice heard by an
| accrediting body, let alone to change its accrediting
| procedures.
|
| That's setting aside the fact that, even if faculty really
| mobilized to make such changes, in the absolute best case the
| changes would be slow to implement, and the effects would be
| slow to manifest, as universities are on multi-year
| accreditation cycles and there would need to be at least a
| few reputable universities that were disaccredited before
| others started taking the guidance seriously. Even if I were
| willing to throw everything into the politics of university
| governance, which would make my teaching suffer immensely,
| I'm not willing to say that we'll just have to wait a decade
| to see the effects.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| I think a better approach might be to get students to use AI as
| a writing coach. Get them to commit to a short handwritten
| essay during class, then use AI give them feedback on the
| essay. Their interaction with the AI and how they respond to
| the feedback becomes the assessment material. That's not
| compatible with the authors "Butlerian Jihad" ideology, though.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| "Butlerian Jihad" ideology is definitely overselling it.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| How about Habakkuk chapter 2, or Daniel chapter XIV?
|
| https://bible.usccb.org/bible/habakkuk/2?18
|
| https://bible.usccb.org/bible/daniel/14?23
| noitpmeder wrote:
| This is insane to me. Why not title the class "how to use
| AI?" Why not make this the title of every class?
|
| I see no future in education other than making homework
| completely ungraded, and putting 100% of the grade into
| airgapped exams. Sure, the pen and paper CS exam isn't
| reflective of a real world situation, but the universities
| need some way to objectively measure understanding once the
| pupil has been disconnected from his oracle.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| apologies, _their_ oracle, trying to improve pronoun
| usages...
| nkrisc wrote:
| If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will
| be completely worthless.
|
| If students using AI to cheat on homework are graduating with a
| degree, then it has lost all value as a certificate that the
| holder has completed some minimum level of education and
| learning. Institutions that award such degrees will be no
| different than degree mills of the past.
|
| I'm just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for
| what it's worth.
| ai-christianson wrote:
| Aren't the jobs they'll get be expecting them to use AI?
| nkrisc wrote:
| If you're hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans?
| Either AI will replace them or employers will realize that
| they prefer employees who can think. In either case, being a
| human who specializes in regurgitating AI output seems like a
| dead end.
| ai-christianson wrote:
| Employers are employees too
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| "Prompt Engineer" as a serious job title is very strange to
| me. I don't have an explanation as to why it would be a
| learnable skill--there's a little, but not a lot of insight
| into why an LLM does what it does.
| Aerroon wrote:
| It's an experience thing. It's not about knowing what
| LLMs/diffusion models specifically do, but rather about
| knowing the pitfalls that the models you use have.
|
| It's a bit like an audio engineer setting up your
| compressors and other filters. It's not difficult to
| fiddle with the settings, but knowing what numbers to
| input is not trivial.
|
| I think it's a kind of skill that we don't really know
| how to measure yet.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| When an audio engineer tweaks the pass band of a filter,
| there's a direct casual relationship between inputs and
| outputs. I can imagine an audio engineer learning what
| different filters and effects sound like. Almost all of
| them are linear systems, so composing effects is easy to
| understand.
|
| None of this is true of an LLM. I believe there's a
| little skill involved, but it's nothing like tuning the
| pass band of a filter. LLMs are chaotic systems (they
| kinda have to be to mimic humans); that's one of their
| benefits, but it's also one of their curses.
|
| Now, what a human can definitely do is convince
| themselves that they can control somewhat the outputs of
| a chaotic system. Rain prognostication is perhaps a
| better model of the prompt engineer than the audio mixer.
| jonfw wrote:
| > there's a little, but not a lot of insight into why an
| LLM does what it does.
|
| That's a "black box" problem, and I think they are some
| of the most interesting problems the world has.
|
| Outside of technology- the most interesting jobs in the
| world operate on a "black box". Sales people,
| psychologists are trying to work on the human mind.
| Politicians and market makers are trying to predict the
| behavior of large populations. Doctors are operating on
| the human body.
|
| Technology has been getting more complicated- and I think
| that distributed systems and high level frameworks are
| starting to resemble a "black box" problem. LLMs even
| more so!
|
| I agree that "prompt engineer" is a silly job title- but
| not because it's not a learnable skill. It's just not
| accurate to call yourself an engineer when consuming an
| LLM.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > If you're hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire
| humans
|
| You hire humans to help train AI and when done you fire
| humans.
| __loam wrote:
| Would you rather be the guy using AI as a crutch or the guy
| who actually knows how to do things without it?
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Even if you just use AI, you need to know the right prompts
| to ask.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And how to verify the output and think through it. I hear
| time after time that someone asked something from AI. It
| came up with something and then when corrected apologized
| and printed out it was wrong...
|
| But how do you correct it if you do not know what is right
| or wrong...
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > how do you correct it if you do not know what is right
| or wrong...
|
| You keep human employees and require them to use LLM so
| that it gets corrected all the time from their input.
| Then you fire them.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| The credentials were never about having become learned.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Maybe schools and universities need to stop considering
| homework to be evidence of subject matter mastery. Grading
| homework never made sense to me. What are you measuring,
| really, and how confident are you of that measurement?
|
| You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Universities
| need to accept that AI exists, and adjust their operations
| accordingly.
| __loam wrote:
| How do you suggest we measure whether the students have
| actually learned the stuff then?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Tests, both oral and written.
| __loam wrote:
| Yes that's how we do it lol
| pona-a wrote:
| In person, pen and paper exams? They are closer to how most
| certifications are conducted.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Also, They don't need to be literally pen and paper
| exams, they just need to be run on computers without
| network connectivity, administered by the university.
|
| You could sit down at a workstation with all the tools
| you might need to test your skills. :)
| downboots wrote:
| Captcha, of course. \s
| bee_rider wrote:
| Grading homework has two reasonable objectives:
|
| Provide an incentive for students to do the thing they should
| be doing anyway.
|
| Give an opportunity to provide feedback on the assignment.
|
| It is totally useless as an evaluation mechanic, because of
| course the students that want to can just cheat. It's usually
| pretty small, right? IIRC when I did tutoring we only gave
| like 10-20% for the aggregate homework grade.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The annoyance with 10-20% means that in order to be an "A"
| student you have to do all the homework instead of just ace
| the exams which is obnoxious if you actually know the
| material. Edge case, I know, but that last 20% is a ton of
| extra work.
| el-berg wrote:
| I wish it was only 10-20%. I'm a non-trad student at a
| small state school and IMO they try to inflate grades via
| homework. This semester I aced my exams, but only had
| time/energy to complete ~60% of my homework. Since it was
| 30% (on average) of my final grade I ended up with a 3.0
| for the semester.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You're there to pass and get your diploma. If you want to
| excel, there are other real venues for that ambition.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| What if you want to get into grad school?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The course could offer nonlinear grading where you get
| the maximum of [exam grade, 0.8 exam + 0.2 hw]
| HighGoldstein wrote:
| A lot of my university professors would use this kind of
| strategy where your final grading structure depends on
| various grades you got throughout the semester, so all
| students could get good grades whether they ace the exam
| or they are terrible at exams but excel at project based
| learning/labs.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is an edge case... I mean, if people are required to
| take classes where they already know all the material,
| somehow a failure has occurred earlier in the process
| (unfortunately it is a very common failure mode to not be
| allowed to try and test out of a class).
|
| Realistically I think the more common case is to _think_
| you know the material, skip studying, and then faceplant
| on the test. Homework should help self-correct.
|
| But yeah, I could it being annoying if you really do
| already know the material.
| kenjackson wrote:
| In most of my classes the HW was far more valuable of a
| measure of ability -- assuming cheating didn't occur. For
| example, my compilers HW assignments much more greatly
| captured my learning. I just feel like a semester writing
| an optimizing compiler is just going to be better than the
| 90-120 minute final exam.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'd probably label something that size a project rather
| than a homework, although I admit my definition is
| entirely arbitrary.
|
| IMO the ideal class would be 4 or so students working
| together on a bespoke project, with weekly check-ins with
| some grad student teaching assistant. The goal would be
| to do something interesting and new. Of course nobody
| ever has enough teaching staff for that kind of thing.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I can say that making my homework part of my grade is a
| great way to actually get me to do it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Something I didn't love about mandatory homework was that
| it provided an implied "you are done" point, when really
| it is the bare minimum (or maybe less than the bare
| minimum--there's a pretty strong downward pressure if the
| instructor actually wants to provide thoughtful
| feedback).
|
| Before college, when I was a kid, I just had the
| textbooks, so I read the chapters and did the
| assignments... it was much better than sitting and
| listening in lectures, then doing some small assigned
| subset of the problems...
| tylerflick wrote:
| TBF this problem doesn't seem that new to me. I was forced to
| do my lab work in Vim and C via SSH because the faculty felt
| that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to
| learning.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were
| doing a disservice to learning
|
| Sounds laughably naive now, doesn't it?
| lolinder wrote:
| All of the best professors I had either did not grade homework
| or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-it-at-all
| basis and did not grade attendance at all. They provided
| lectures and assignments as a means to learn the material and
| then graded you based on your performance in proctored exams
| taken either in class or at the university testing center.
|
| For most subjects at the university level graded homework (and
| graded attendance) has always struck me as somewhat
| condescending and coddling. Either it serves to pad out grades
| for students who aren't truly learning the material or it
| serves to force adult students to follow specific learning
| strategies that the professor thinks are best rather than
| giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults.
|
| Give students the flexibility to learn however they think is
| best and then find ways to measure what they've actually
| learned in environments where cheating is impossible. Cracking
| down on cheating at homework assignments is just patching over
| a teaching strategy that has outgrown its usefulness.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I don't disagree, but in most cases degrees are handed out
| based on grades which in turn are based on homework.
|
| I agree that something will have to change to avert the
| current trend.
| __loam wrote:
| Most of the college courses I took had the bulk of the
| grade be based on exams or projects. Homework was usually a
| small proportion to give students a little buffer and to
| actually prepare them for the exams. AI might have helped
| on coding projects but a lot of my grades were based on
| exams using pencil and paper in a room of 30-200 other
| people. It also just seems like a waste of your own time
| and money to avoid the act of learning by skipping all the
| hard parts with a corporate token generator.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as
| grown adults
|
| I have had so many very frustrating conversations with full
| grown adults in charge of teaching CS. I have no faith at all
| that students would be able to choose an appropriate method
| of study.
|
| My issue with the instruction is the very narrow belief in
| the importance of certain measurable skills. VERY narrow. I
| won't go into details, for my own sanity.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but just like
| junior employees, I think university students should clock
| in at 9am and finish working at 5pm.
|
| I think they would really benefit learning how to work a
| full day and develop some work life balance.
| _-_-__-_-_- wrote:
| I actually like this idea in theory. Except, it wouldn't
| allow for students to find flexible part-time work.
|
| As an example, I was a university student in Canada ~15
| years ago. I lived with my parents, driving 30 minutes
| each way to attend classes. I had car insurance, gas, a
| cell phone, tuition, parking and books to pay. Tuition
| was costing 6000$ a year over 5 years. Being in
| humanities, I chose my own course schedule. I would often
| have classes 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday. I
| would work nights and weekends 25-33.5 hours most
| weeks..Most part-time employment worked around student
| hours and allowed some flexibility. Once I graduated and
| had a full-time salary position, I had much more free
| time and struggled to not feel lonely in filling up that
| time.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > I have no faith at all that students would be able to
| choose an appropriate method of study.
|
| That is their problem, not your problem. You're not their
| nanny.
| lolinder wrote:
| Exactly. Turning tertiary education into a _third_ tier
| of babysitting just screws over the adults who actually
| grew up during secondary school. Tell them how to succeed
| in your class and then let them fail if they won 't
| listen to you! It's high time _someone_ let these kids
| grow up.
| RobinL wrote:
| When hiring, I would very much like to hire people who have
| figured out how to learn things for themselves using
| whatever techniques work for them, and don't need nannying.
|
| So I'm perfectly happy with a system of higher education
| that strongly rewards this behaviour
| gilbetron wrote:
| > All of the best professors I had either did not grade
| homework or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-
| it-at-all basis and did not grade attendance at all. They
| provided lectures and assignments as a means to learn the
| material and then graded you based on your performance in
| proctored exams taken either in class or at the university
| testing center.
|
| I have the opposite experience - the best professors focused
| on homework and projects and exams were minimal to non-
| existent. People learn different ways, though, so you might
| function better having the threat/challenge of an exam,
| whereas I hated having to put everything together for an hour
| of stress and anxiety. Exams are artificial and unlike the
| real world - the point is to solve problems, not to solve
| problems in weirdly constrained situations.
| echelon wrote:
| > I'm just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it,
| for what it's worth.
|
| College students still cram and purge. Nobody forced to sit
| through OChem remembers their Diels-Alder reaction except the
| organic chemists.
|
| College degrees probably don't have as much value as we've
| historically ascribed to them. There's a lot of nostalgia and
| tradition pent up in them.
|
| The students who do the best typically fill their schedule with
| extra-curricular projects and learning that isn't dictated by
| professors and grading curves.
| busyant wrote:
| > If students using AI to cheat on homework
|
| This is not related to "AI", but I have an amusing story about
| online cheating.
|
| * I have a nephew who was switched into online college classes
| at the beginning of the pandemic.
|
| * As soon as they switched to online, the class average on the
| exams shot up, but my nephew initially refused to cheat.
|
| * Eventually he relented (because everyone else was doing it)
| and he pasted a multitude of sticky notes on the wall at the
| periphery of his computer monitor.
|
| * His father walks into his room, looks at all the sticky notes
| and declares, "You can't do this!!! It'll ruin the wallpaper!"
| andoando wrote:
| Good, colleges have staryed far from their purpose
| Aerroon wrote:
| At the same time though: if AI based cheating is so effective
| then is college itself useful?
| Aurornis wrote:
| If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself
| useful?
|
| It's the same old story with a new set of technology.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > If calculators are so good at math, is learning math
| itself useful?
|
| What's your answer? Surely it was proven to be "not
| useful"? I don't think I ever met a person who benefitted
| from knowing math now that everyone has a calculator in
| pocket. Other than maybe playing some games where if you do
| calculation on the fly you win
| seb1204 wrote:
| Well, if you don't know math because the calculator does
| it you would also have no understanding of the concepts
| e.g. addition, subtraction, whole numbers or fraction
| etc. so you would not know how to in use or what to do
| with a calculator. It's a tool that is useful to do
| something you know how it works faster.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| But that's very different with LLMs and that stuff. You
| don't need to know how to write an essay or write a song.
| That's kind of the point.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > Surely it was proven to be "not useful"?
|
| I don't think we're living in the same world. I have met
| plenty of people who, despite having a calculator, can't
| solve their own problems because they don't know what to
| do with it in order to solve their problem.
| neom wrote:
| https://innovationlabs.harvard.edu/events/your-network-is-
| yo...
|
| ^ Why many go to Harvard. Very nice club.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Thinking of that. We have build these expensive machines with
| massive investments to be able to output what we expect
| college students to output... Wouldn't that tell us that well
| maybe that output has some value, intent or use? Or we would
| not have spend those resources...
|
| Just because machine can do things, doesn't mean humans
| should be able to do it too. Say reading a text aloud.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It was (to some degree), and could still be. The status quo
| was more effective, relatively speaking, before the AI boom.
| The status quo appears to be trending towards ineffective,
| post-AI boom.
|
| So in order to remain useful, the status quo of higher
| education will probably have to change in order to adapt to
| the ubiquity of AI, and LLMs currently.
|
| Just because you _can_ cheat at something doesn 't mean doing
| it legitimately isn't useful.
| neom wrote:
| I've been hiring people for the better part for 15 years and I
| never considered them to be valuable outside of the fact that
| it appears you're able to do one project for a sustained period
| of time. My impressions was unless your degree confers
| something such that you are in a job that human risk can be
| involved, most degrees are worth very little and most serious
| people know that.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| It doesn't matter if your boss's policy is to require a
| degree.
| nkrisc wrote:
| To be clear, I think that most college degrees were generally
| low value (even my own), but still had _some_ value. The
| current trend will be towards zero value unless something
| changes.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees
| will be completely worthless.
|
| I suspect the opposite: Known-good college degrees will become
| more valuable. The best colleges will institute practices that
| confirm the material was learned, such as emphasizing in-person
| testing over at-home assignments.
|
| Cheating has actually been rampant at the university level for
| a long time, well before LLMs. One of the key differentiators
| of the better institutions is that they are harder to cheat to
| completion.
|
| At my local state university (where I have friends on staff)
| it's apparently well known among the students that if they pick
| the right professors and classes they can mostly skate to
| graduation with enough cheating opportunity to make it an easy
| ride. The professors who are sticklers about cheating are often
| avoided or even become the targets of ratings-bombing campaigns
| ravenstine wrote:
| Had I known that college degrees from before the 2020s would
| increase in value, I'd have gotten one. Damn it!
| barrenko wrote:
| I've tried re-enrolling in a STEM major last year, after a
| higher education "pause" of 16-ish years. 85% of the class used
| GPTs to solve homework, and it was quite obvious most of them
| haven't even read the assignment.
|
| The immediate effect was the distrust of the professors towards
| most everyone and lots classes felt like some kind of
| babysitting scheme, which I did not appreciate.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| I mean this seems a solved problem: hand-and-paper written
| onsite exams + blackboard-and-chalk oral onsite exams. If this
| is too costly (is it? many countries manage), make students
| take them less often.
| esafak wrote:
| Let students use AI as they will when learning, but verify
| without allowing them to use it -- in class -- otherwise you have
| no way of knowing what they know. Job interviewers face the same
| problem.
| grogenaut wrote:
| We're highly considering going back to onsite interviews, the
| big liniter is scheduling the interviewers.
| CompoundEyes wrote:
| I agree. An essay written on the spot in class with no
| electronics nearby seems like the counter.
| solresol wrote:
| I have been wrestling with this too. I only see two options: no
| tech university or AI wrangling university.
|
| https://solresol.substack.com/p/you-can-no-longer-set-an-und...
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Not sure I agree with either/or. In person assessments are
| still pretty robust. I think an ideal university will teach
| both with a clear division between them (e.g. whether a
| particular assessment or module allows AI). What I'm currently
| struggling with is how to design an assessment in which the
| student is allowed to use AI - how do I actually assess it?
| Where should the bar actually be? Can it be relative to peers?
| Does this reward students willing to pay for more advanced AI?
| math_dandy wrote:
| I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have
| also gone "back to the earth", to pen-and-paper, proctored and
| exams.
|
| Students don't seem to mind this reversion. The administration,
| however, doesn't like this trend. They want all evaluation to be
| remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same
| evaluations can be given to students learning in person or
| enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge cash cow, and
| fattening it up is a very high priority. In-person, pen-and-paper
| assessment threatens their revenue growth model. Anyways, if we
| have seven sections of Calculus I, and one of these sections is
| offered online/remote, then none of the seven are allowed any in
| person assessment. For "fairness". Seriously.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Yeah, the thing AI cheating is it seems inherent not in
| teaching but what mechanical, bureaucratic, for-profit teaching
| and universities have become.
| valiant55 wrote:
| Capitalism and the constant thirst for growth is killing
| society. Since when did universities care almost solely about
| renevnue and growth?
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| With the us government now going after their funding they may
| have to start caring even more
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > Since when did universities care almost solely about
| renevnue and growth?
|
| Since endowments got huge.
| wwweston wrote:
| That's a magnifier but it shouldn't be the cause; for that
| you need a shift in management culture from optimizing for
| academic missions to optimizing for careers/influence of
| management and trustees.
| Jensson wrote:
| Large endowments causes that unless you have very strict
| rules around it like the Nobel prize endowment. You can
| see how every large charity starts to focus on growing
| larger rather than its mission, Mozilla is a good example
| of that.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Could you explain this more? At first glace, a large
| endowment should either free you from worrying about
| revenue or move your focus to managing an endowment with a
| school as a side hustle.
| Jensson wrote:
| > a large endowment should either free you
|
| A large endowment attracts greedy people who then want to
| make it larger, that is true regardless where you go.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| When it was generally accepted by our society that the goal
| of all work is victory, not success. Capitalism frames
| everything as a competition, even when collaboration is
| obviously superior. Copyright makes this an explicit rule.
| paulorlando wrote:
| Business models rule us all. Have you tested what kind of
| pushback you'll receive if you happen to flout the remote rule?
| math_dandy wrote:
| Centralization and IT-ification has made flouting difficult.
| There's one common course site on the institution's learning
| management system for all sections where assignments are
| distributed and collected via upload dropbox, where grades
| are tabulated and communicated.
|
| So far, it's still possible to opt out of this coordinated
| model, and I have been. But I suspect the ability to opt out
| will soon come under attack (the pretext will be 'uniformity
| == fairness'). I never used to be an academic freedom
| maximalists who viewed the notion in the widest sense, but
| I'm beginning to see my error.
| paulorlando wrote:
| Sorry to hear this. And thanks for sharing this warning to
| other educators. I hope you find a way through.
| jofla_net wrote:
| Thank you for not giving in. The slide downhill is so ravenous
| and will consume so much of our future until the wise
| intervene.
| aaplok wrote:
| > Students don't seem to mind this reversion.
|
| Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice
| they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which
| they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert
| they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who
| do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open
| tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but
| still.
|
| They don't have a solution. As the main victims they are just
| frustrated by the situation, and at the "solutions" thrown at
| it by folks who aren't personally affected.
| math_dandy wrote:
| We have an Accessible Testing Center that will administer and
| proctor exams under very flexible conditions (more time,
| breaks, quiet/privacy, ...) to help students with various
| forms of neurodivergence. They're very good and offer a
| valuable service without placing any significant additional
| burden on the instructor. Seems to work well, but I don't
| have first hand knowledge about how these forms of
| accommodations are viewed by the neurodivergent student
| community. They certainly don't address the problem of
| allowing << explorer >> students to demonstrate their
| abilities.
| aaplok wrote:
| Yes I think the issue is as much that open tasks make
| learning interesting and meaningful in a way that exams
| hardly can do.
|
| This is the core of the issue really. If we are in the
| business of teaching, as in making people learn, exams are
| a pretty blunt and ineffective instrument. However since
| our business is also assessing, proctoring is the best if
| not only trustworthy approach and exams are cheap in time,
| effort and money to do that.
|
| My take is that we should just (properly) assess students
| at the end of their degree. Spend time (say, a full day)
| with them but do it only once in the degree (at the end),
| so you can properly evaluate their skills. Make it hard so
| that the ones who graduate all deserve it.
|
| Then the rest of their time at university should be about
| learning what they will need.
| const_cast wrote:
| Exams aren't for learning, they're for measuring.
| Projects and lecture are for learning.
|
| The problem with this "end of university exam" structure
| is that you have the same problems as before but now that
| exam is weighted like 10,000% that of a normal exam.
| Aeolun wrote:
| You can't expect all students to learn without being
| forced to, no matter how much that's literally the point
| of them being there.
|
| They're kids, and they should be treated as such, in both
| good and bad ways. You might want to make exceptions for
| the good ones, but absolutely not for the average or bad
| ones.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| How many people would work their current job if money
| wasn't a thing?
|
| People of all ages seek rewards -- and assessments gate
| the payoffs. Like a boss fight in a video game gates the
| progress from your skill growth.
| djoldman wrote:
| > If we are in the business of teaching, as in making
| people learn, exams are a pretty blunt and ineffective
| instrument.
|
| I'm curious: what is fulfilling in your job as a math
| teacher? When students learn? When they're assigned
| grades that accurately reflect their performance? When
| they learn something with minimal as opposed to
| significant effort? Some combination?
|
| I always thought teacher motivations were interesting.
| I'm sure there are fantastic professors who couldn't care
| less as to what grades they gave out at the end.
| aaplok wrote:
| > what is fulfilling in your job as a math teacher?
|
| Many things. The most fulfilling for me is taking a
| student from hating maths to enjoying it. Or when they
| realise that in fact they're not bad at maths. Students
| changing their opinions about themselves or about maths
| is such a fulfilling experience that it's my main
| motivation.
|
| Then working with students who likes and are good at
| maths and challenging them a bit to expand their horizon
| is a lot of fun.
|
| > When students learn?
|
| At a high level yes (that maths can be fun, enjoyable,
| doable). Them learning "stuff" not so much, it's part of
| the job.
|
| > When they're assigned grades that accurately reflect
| their performance?
|
| Yes but not through a system based on counting how many
| mistakes they make, like exams do. If I can design a task
| that enables a student to showcase competency accurately
| it's great. A task that enables the best ones to extend
| themselves (and achieve higher marks) is great.
|
| > When they learn something with minimal as opposed to
| significant effort?
|
| Not at all. If there is no effort I don't believe much
| learning is happening. I like to give an opportunity for
| all students to work hard and learn something in the
| process no matter where they start from.
|
| I only care about the grade as feedback to students. It
| is a way for me to tell them how far they've come.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I've had access to that at my school and it's night and
| day. Not being as stressed about time and being in a room
| alone bumps me up by a grade letter at least.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam
| conditions
|
| Isn't this part of life? Learning to excel anyway?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Life doesn't tend to take place under exam conditions,
| either.
| Aeolun wrote:
| The important parts of life (like interviews) do.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > The important parts of life (like interviews)
|
| Interviews shouldn't be "exam conditions" either. See the
| ten thousand different articles that regularly show up
| here about why not to do the "invert a binary tree on a
| whiteboard" style of interview.
|
| There are much better ways to figure out people's skills.
| And much better things to be using in-person interview
| time on.
| ecb_penguin wrote:
| You're confusing the way things are with the way things
| ought to be.
|
| The reality is life is full of time boxed challenges.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Other than a subset of interviews, what do you have in
| mind that has a structure similar to an exam? Because I'd
| agree with the comment at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44106325 .
| ecb_penguin wrote:
| > what do you have in mind that has a structure similar
| to an exam?
|
| All of life! An exam is a time boxed challenge. Sometimes
| it's open notes, sometimes it's not. I've had exams where
| I have to write an essay, and I've had exams where I've
| had to solve math problems. All things I've had to do in
| high pressure situations in my job.
|
| Solving problems with no help and a clock ticking happens
| a million times per day.
|
| We even assign grades in life, like "meets expectations"
| and "does not meet expectations".
|
| Even still, you missed the point of my comment. You keep
| focusing on how interviews should be done, not how
| they're conducted in reality.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I understood the point of your comment; I disagreed with
| it. I think there's a meaningful distinction between
| high-pressure situations at work and exams in school,
| sufficiently so that the latter is poor preparation for
| the former. More to the point, everyone is subjected to
| the latter, while "thrives under pressure" is not a
| universal quality everyone is expected to have or use.
| It's a useful skill, and it's more useful to have than to
| not have, but the same can be said of a thousand skills,
| and many of them are things I'd prioritize higher in a
| colleague or employee, given the choice.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| It's really just interviews, and even those are nothing
| like any exam I've ever taken. They're closest, in terms
| of the kind of stress and the skills required to look
| good, to some kind of solo public speaking performance.
|
| ... which most people come out of 17+ years of school
| having done very little of, with basically a phobia of
| it, and being awful at it.
|
| They are probably something like oral exams that a few
| universities use heavily, or the teaching practices of
| many elite prep schools.
|
| [edit] oh and interviews in most industries _aren't_ like
| that. Tech is especially grueling in the interview phase.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I believe parent is making a more general point, and as
| someone who would also be considered "neurodivergent" I
| would agree with that point. There were plenty of times
| growing up where special consideration would have been a
| huge help for me, but I'm deeply grateful that I learned
| in a world where "sometimes life is unfair" was
| considered a valuable lesson.
|
| In my adult life I had a coworker who constantly demanded
| that she be given special consideration in the work
| environment: more time to complete tasks, not working
| with coworkers who moved too quickly, etc. She _was_
| capable but refused to recognize that even if you have to
| do things in a way that don 't work for you, sometimes
| you either have to succeed that way or find something
| else to do.
|
| Today she's homeless living out of her car, but still
| demands to that be hired she needs to be allowed to work
| as slowly as she needs and that she will need special
| consideration to help her complete daily tasks etc.
|
| We recently lived through an age of incredible
| prosperity, but that age is wrapping up and competition
| is heating up everywhere. When things are great, there is
| enough for everyone, but right now I know top performers
| that don't need special consideration when doing their
| job struggling to find work. In this world if you learned
| to always get by with some extra help, you are going to
| be in for a very rude awakening.
|
| Had I grown up in the world as it has been the last
| decade I would have a _much easier_ adolescence and a
| _much harder_ adult life. I 've learned to find ways to
| maximize my strengths as well as suck it up and just do
| it when I'm faced with challenges that target my
| weaknesses and areas I struggle. Life _isn 't_ fair, but
| I don't think the best way to prepare people for this is
| to try to make life more fair.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I really like your take on this, but disagree with your
| conclusion. I do think that trying to "make life more
| fair" is essentially the main goal of civilization,
| codified as early (and probably much earlier) as The Code
| of Hammurabi.
|
| My take is that we need to tread a thin line such that we
| teach young people to accept that life is _inherently_
| unfair, while at the same time doing what we can as a
| society to make it more fair.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > My take is that we need to tread a thin line such that
| we teach young people to accept that life is inherently
| unfair, while at the same time doing what we can as a
| society to make it more fair.
|
| Agreed. Teaching that life is unfair ( _and_ how to
| succeed despite that) is an important lesson. But there
| 's an object-meta distinction that's important to make
| there. Don't teach people that life is unfair _by being
| unfair to them in their education and making them figure
| it out themselves_. Teach a class on the topic and what
| they 're likely to encounter in society, a couple times
| over the course of their education.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| On the other hand, I look at it in a more "a rising tide
| raises all boats" situation. Learning how to accommodate
| people who fall outside the norm not only helps them, but
| helps everyone, much like the famous sidewalk "curb cuts"
| for wheelchairs ended up helping everyone with luggage,
| strollers, bikes, etc.
|
| We as a society have a lot of proxies for evaluating real
| world value. Testing is a proxy for school knowledge.
| Interviews are a proxy for job performance. Trying to
| understand and decouple actual value from the specific
| proxies we default to can unlock additional value. You
| said yourself that you do have strengths, so if there are
| ways society can maximize those and minimize proxies you
| aren't strong in, that is a win win.
|
| Your coworker sounds like they have an issue with
| laziness and entitlement more than an issue with
| neurodivergence. Anyone can be lazy and entitled. Even if
| someone has a weakness with quick turn production but
| excels in more complex or abstract long-term projects
| could be a value added for a company. Shifting workloads
| so that employees do more tasks they are suited towards,
| rather than a more ridged system, could end up helping
| all employees maximize productivity by reducing cognitive
| load they were wasting on tasks they were not as suited
| for, but did just because that was the way it was always
| done and they never struggled enough for it to become an
| actual "issue".
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It's more about the meta-skill of learning to adapt.
| Learning to be uncomfortable sometimes.
| aaplok wrote:
| I don't think so? I teach maths, not survival or social
| pressure. If a student in my class is a competent
| mathematician why should they not be acknowledged to be
| that?
| baq wrote:
| real life first, math second. taking tests is a skill
| that must be learned, especially now with AI faking quite
| literally everything that can be shown on a screen.
| (unless your students are learning purely for the joy of
| it and not for having a chance to get hired anywhere.)
| LunaSea wrote:
| > taking tests is a skill that must be learned
|
| Why? It's a useless skill that you will literally never
| have to use after your schooling.
| baq wrote:
| and job interviews.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Depends on the type of interview I guess.
|
| If the company asks leet code problems, I guess they are
| making the same mistake as schools do.
| razakel wrote:
| >taking tests is a skill that must be learned
|
| "I had to suffer so you must too."
| baq wrote:
| "I'm hiring and want to see if his resume checks out"
| DaSHacka wrote:
| A one-on-one interview is completely different from a
| paper-and-pencil exam though.
| ecb_penguin wrote:
| You understand the world actually has difficult problems,
| right? Like life and death challenges, without video game
| restarts. You don't get to pause things when it gets
| hard.
|
| Yes, working under pressure is a skill that should be
| learned. It's best to learn it on a history exam when
| nobody is at risk.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I think having one huge exam at the end is the problem. An
| exam and assessment every week would be best.
|
| Less stress at the end of the term, and the student can't
| leave everything to the last minute, they need to do a little
| work every week.
| tbihl wrote:
| Too much proctoring and grading, not enough holding
| students' hands for stuff they should have learned from
| reading the textbook.
| godelski wrote:
| I don't think I understand, as a terrible test taker myself.
|
| The solution I use when teaching is to let evaluation
| primarily depend on some larger demonstration of knowledge.
| Most often it is CS classes (e.g. Machine Learning), so I
| don't really give much care for homeworks and tests and
| instead be project driven. I don't care if they use GPT or
| not. The learning happens by them doing things.
|
| This is definitely harder in other courses. In my undergrad
| (physics) our professors frequently gave takehome exams. Open
| book, open notes, open anything but your friends and
| classmates. This did require trust, but it was usually pretty
| obvious when people worked together. They cared more about
| trying to evaluate and push us if we cared than if we
| cheated. They required multiple days worth of work and you
| can bet every student was coming to office hours (we had much
| more access during that time too). The trust and
| understanding that effort mattered actually resulted in very
| little cheating. We felt respected, there was a mutual
| understanding, and tbh, it created healthy competition among
| us.
|
| Students cheat because they know they need the grade and that
| at the end of the day they won't won't actually be evaluated
| on what they learned, but rather on what arbitrary score they
| got. Fundamentally, this requires a restructuring, but that's
| been a long time coming. The cheating literally happens
| because we just treated Goodhart's Law as a feature instead
| of a bug. AI is forcing us to contend with metric hacking, it
| didn't create it.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >Many of them are neurodivergent
|
| if "many" are "divergent" then... are they really divergent?
| or are they the new typical?
| aaplok wrote:
| Many of the students I talk to. I don't claim they form a
| representative sample of the student cohort, on the
| contrary. I guess that the typical student is typical but I
| have not gone to check that.
| aketchum wrote:
| It is always interesting to me when people say they are "bad
| test takers". You mean you are bad at the part where we find
| out how much you know? Maybe you just don't know the material
| well enough.
|
| caveat emptor - I am not ND so maybe this is a real concern
| for some, but in my experience the people who said this did
| not know the material. And the accommodations for tests are
| abused by rich kids more than they are utilized by those that
| need them.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| As a self proclaimed bad test taker, it's not that I don't
| know the information. It's that I am capable of second
| guessing myself in a particular way in which I can build a
| logical framework to suggest another direction or answer.
|
| This presents itself as a bad test taker, I rarely ever got
| above a B+ on any difficult test material. But you put me
| in a lab, and that same skillset becomes a major advantage.
|
| Minds come in a variety of configurations, id suggest
| considering that before taking your own experience as the
| definitive.
| eutropia wrote:
| datum: I'm ND, but I'm a good test-taker. There were plenty
| of tests for subjects where I didn't need to study because
| I was adept at reading the question and correctly assuming
| what the test-creator wanted answered, and using deduction
| to reduce possibilities down enough that I could be certain
| of an answer - or by using meta-knowledge of where the
| material from the recent lectures was to narrow things
| down, again, not because I knew the material all that well
| but because I could read the question. Effectively, I had a
| decent grasp of the "game" of test-taking, which is rather
| orthogonal to the actual knowledge of the class material.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Tests are just a proxy for understanding and/or application
| of a concept. Being good at the proxy doesn't necessarily
| mean you understand the concept, just like not being good
| at the proxy doesn't mean you don't. Finding other proxies
| we can use allows for decoupling knowledge from a specific
| proxy metric.
|
| If I was evaluating the health of various companies, I
| wouldn't use one metric for all of them, as company health
| is kind of an abstract concept and any specific metric
| would not give me a very good overall picture and there are
| multiple ways for a company to be healthy/successful. Same
| with people.
|
| There are lots of different ways to utilize knowledge in
| real world scenarios, so someone could be bad at testing
| and bad at some types of related jobs but good at other
| types of related jobs. So unless "test taking" as a skill
| is what is being evaluated, it isn't necessary to be the
| primary evaluation tool.
| qwertycrackers wrote:
| I think the reverse exists as well. I think I am a much
| better test taker than average, and this has very clearly
| given me some advantages that come from the structure of
| exam-focused education. Exam taking is a skill and it's
| possible to be good at it, independent of the underlying
| knowledge. Of course knowing the material is still
| required.
|
| However you are correct in noticing that there are an
| anomalously high number of "bad test takers" in the world.
| Many students are probably using this as a flimsy excuse
| for poor performance. Overall I think the phenomenon does
| exist.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| IMO exams should be on the easier side and not require much
| computing (mainly knowledge, and not unnecessary
| memorization). They should be a baseline, not a challenge for
| students who understand the material.
|
| Students are more accurately measured via long, take-home
| projects, which are complicated enough that they can't be
| entirely done by AI.
|
| Unless the class is something that requires quick thinking on
| the job, in which case there should be "exams" that are live
| simulations. Ultimately, a student's GPA should reflect their
| competence in the career (or possible careers) they're in
| college for.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam
| conditions
|
| I mean, for every neurodivergent person who does miserably in
| exam conditions you have one that does miserably in homework
| essays because of absence of clear time boundaries.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Autism vs. ADHD
| ecb_penguin wrote:
| There is nothing to suggest that it is autism or ADHD.
| sien wrote:
| In Australia Universities that have remote study have places
| where people can do proctored exams in large cities. The course
| is done remotely but the exam, which is often 50%+ of the final
| grade, is done in a place that has proctored exams as a
| service.
|
| Can't this be done in the US as well ?
| fn-mote wrote:
| Variations in this system are in active use in the US as
| well.
|
| Do you feel it is effective?
|
| It seems to me that there is a massive asymmetry in the war
| here: proctoring services have tiny incentives to catch
| cheaters. Cheaters have massive incentives to cheat.
|
| I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of the
| cheating that occurs.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of
| the cheating that occurs.
|
| It'll depend a lot on who/where/how is doing the screening
| and what tools (if any) are permitted.
|
| Remember that bogus program for TI8{3,4} series calculators
| that would clear the screen and print "MEMORY CLEAR"? If
| the proctor was just looking for that string and not
| actually jumping through the hoops to _actually_ clear the
| memory then it was trivial to keep notes / solvers ... etc
| on the calculator.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| Was I at university in a small window in time when a
| TI-89 and TI-92 was allowed?
|
| In the years since, I've only ever heard mention of older
| models, not newer ones which makes me wonder if this is a
| special case and situation where technology is frozen in
| time intentionally to foster learning.
| jmb99 wrote:
| I wasn't allowed anything more complex than a Casio
| FX-300ES. Even my 991ES wasn't allowed, let alone
| something like a TI83/4. This (from what I've heard) is
| pretty standard in Canadian universities for calc 1-3,
| linear algebra, discrete, etc.
| neepi wrote:
| Supposed to be the same thing in the UK but no one cares.
| In fact most of our students (undergrad mathematics)
| appear to have HP Prime now which has a full CAS built
| in. The questions are designed to break the CAS
| sometimes. Try expanding (a-2b)^1000 on a calculator to
| get a coefficient out. It gets stuck and hoses the whole
| calculator.
| vintermann wrote:
| I was in such a window. TI-89 was allowed by mistake, we
| were allowed to keep using it since it was expensive.
| Next year they were back on TI-83s.
|
| Oh yes, they're frozen in time, but since the people who
| pay for them are not the same people who demand they must
| be used, they're _not_ frozen in price. It 's the most
| expensive kilobytes you'll ever buy.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| They are not "older models" just lower end. TI-92 came
| out in 1995 and discontinued in in 1998. TI-83 was
| introduced in 1996 and discontinued in 2004. TI-89 came
| out in 1998 and was discontinued in 2004.
|
| At my high school we were allowed to have TI-83s but not
| TI-89s, because 89s had built in CAS (computer algebra
| system) and could do your algebra homework for you. When
| I went to college I already had an 83 so I didn't feel
| the need to upgrade.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Or just have two calculators and swap them
| Dwedit wrote:
| It's actually somewhat of a challenge to display "Mem
| cleared" without access to the lowercase font. You have
| access to any uppercase character, spaces, and BASIC
| functions. With stat vars, you also get lowercase "a" "b"
| "c" "d" "e" and "r". And you can display text at a
| specific row and column.
|
| I ended up displaying "M" "e" "min(" "c" "log(" "e" "a"
| "r" "e" "d". Then covered up the "in(" with spaces.
|
| Then you lower your contrast for the full effect.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > proctoring services have tiny incentives to catch
| cheaters. Cheaters have massive incentives to cheat.
|
| If they don't catch them they don't have a business model.
| They have one job. The University of London, Open
| University and British Council all have 50+ years
| experience on proctoring university exams for distance
| learning students and it's not like Thomson Prometric
| haven't thought about how to do it either, even if they
| (mostly?) do computerised exams.
| ghaff wrote:
| And I daresay most of the corporate certs from companies
| like Microsoft and Red Hat are probably have pretty well-
| proctored exams too. To what degree their processes are
| applicable to a University environment I don't know.
| masfuerte wrote:
| I took one last year. Microsoft offer a choice of remote
| proctoring or in-person at a Pearson VUE test centre. I
| chose the latter.
|
| You put your stuff in a locker. They compare your face to
| some official photo ID and take your photo. You sit the
| test. They print out your results along with your
| mugshot. That's it. It was very painless.
| foolswisdom wrote:
| The problem is that the business model is that when you
| outsource _compliance_ (in this case that might be
| catching cheaters), the important thing is to be able to
| say that everyone did their best, and you don 't
| necessarily need to do your best to say that.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Teachers typically also have years, sometimes decades, of
| experience running exams. Yet I've never seen a teacher
| that is any good at stopping cheating. And that's in
| person for the class that they are teaching.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Teachers typically also have years, sometimes decades,
| of experience running exams. Yet I've never seen a
| teacher that is any good at stopping cheating. And that's
| in person for the class that they are teaching.
|
| The difference is running exams is a small part of a
| teacher's job, and almost certainly not the part they're
| passionate about.
|
| Also proctors demand things I've seen no teacher at any
| level demand (or be able to demand).
| vintermann wrote:
| Well, if they don't catch _someone_. They don 't have
| much incentive to avoid false positives. Catching someone
| who did not cheat but failed to follow all the draconian
| rules, is probably a lot easier than to catch an actual
| cheater.
| sien wrote:
| From what I've seen it works.
|
| There is definitely a war between cheaters and people
| catching them. But a lot of people can't be bothered and if
| learning the material can be made easier than cheating then
| it will work.
|
| You can imagine proctoring halls of the future being
| Faraday cages with a camera watching people do their test.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Local LLMs are almost here, no Internet needed!
| mystraline wrote:
| Almost?
|
| I've been running a programming LLM locally, with a 200k
| context length with using system ram.
|
| Its also an abliterated model, so I get none of the
| moralizing or forced ethics either. I ask, and it
| answers.
|
| I even have it hooked up to my HomeAssistant, and can
| trigger complex actions from there.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Way back like 25 years ago in what we call high school in
| the US, my statistics teacher tried her damndest to make
| final exams fair. I said next to someone I had a huge crush
| on, and offered to take their exam for them. I needed a 'c'
| to ace the class, and she needed an 'a' to pass. 3
| different tests and sets of questions/scantrons. I got her
| the grade she needed, she did not get me the grade I
| needed.
|
| So to your point, it's easy to cheat even if the proctor
| tries to prevent it.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I am confused by your pronouns and other plot holes.
|
| You _wanted_ to "ace the class", which is an "A" on your
| final report card? But your crush's exam tanked your
| grade? You passed the class anyway, right?
|
| Did you swap Scantrons, then, and your crush sat next to
| you, writing answers on the dgfitz forms?
|
| She wouldn't pass without an "A" on the exams, so her
| running point total was circling the drain, and your
| effort gave her a "C-" or something?
|
| In what ways did your teacher make the exams "fair"? What
| percentage of the grade did they comprise?
|
| Were the 3 tests administered on 3 separate occasions, so
| nobody caught you repeatedly cheating the same way?
| vkou wrote:
| > Were the 3 tests administered on 3 separate occasions,
| so nobody caught you repeatedly cheating the same way?
|
| I imagine that it would be utterly trivial for two people
| to nearly-undetectably cheat in this way, by both of them
| simply writing the _other_ person 's name on their exam.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| My impression was that in high school, girls and boys had
| pretty distinct handwriting.
|
| Not sure if that impression is accurate though, or if
| it's true of mathematical writing.
| directevolve wrote:
| > I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of
| the cheating that occurs.
|
| The main kind of cheating we need them to prevent is
| _effective_ cheating - the kind that can meaningfully
| improve the cheater 's score.
|
| Requiring cheaters to put their belongings in a locker,
| using proctor-provided resources, and being monitored in a
| proctor-provided room puts substantial limits on effective
| cheating. That's pretty much the minimum that any proctor
| does.
|
| It may not stop 100% of effective cheating 100% of the
| time, but it would make a tremendous impact in eliminating
| LLM-based cheating.
|
| If you're worried about corrupt proctors, that's another
| matter. National brands that are both self- and externally-
| policed and depend on a good reputation to drive business
| from universities would help.
|
| With this system, I expect that it would not take much to
| avoid almost all the important cheating that now occurs.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Remote proctoring programs at least are pretty rough
| these days. Their environment conditions are pretty
| exacting and then they expect you to just stare at the
| screen and think for basically the whole exam. Minor
| normal webcam problems can invalidate the entire exam
| through no fault of the examee or if you look around or
| fidget a lot it can trigger their cheat detection as
| well. I'm glad I finished my test taking time before it
| became the norm.
| dataflow wrote:
| What do they do if you don't have a webcam? Or if your
| webcam is broken? Or if you don't feel comfortable
| sharing your video?
| kortilla wrote:
| They tell you to come back when you're ready to take the
| test. This can't be surprising...
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Webcam is broken is now pretty universally interpreted as
| I don't want to be on video.
| rtkwe wrote:
| You get a working web cam. It's a requirement for many
| remote proctoring services and if you don't have access
| to one you're screwed.
|
| I get why they use it, without it there's no way to know
| you're not on your phone or another device cheating since
| they can only really see what's on the device you've
| installed the proctor software/rootkit on.
|
| Sadly Linus Tech Tips video of him taking the CompTIA A+
| exam has been taken down after threatening letters from
| CompTIA but they demanded a basically baren room, 360
| photos and spotless web cams.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| I had to retake a multi-hour proctored test (and only got
| to do so after a _ridiculous_ amount of back and forth
| with the school) because my cat jumped up on my computer
| table while I was taking it, and I looked over at her and
| gave her a few pets before looking back at the screen.
| Not joking in the least. It was maddening.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| But it also only catches cheating on exams. For
| homework/projects, you can't really have that be in
| person.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| My take:
|
| - Make "homework" ungraded. Many college classes already
| do this, and it has been easy to cheat on it way before
| AI by sharing solutions. Knowledge is better measured in
| exams and competence in projects. My understanding is
| that homework is essentially just practice for exams, and
| it's only graded so students don't skip it then fail the
| exams; but presumably now students cheat on it then fail
| exams, and for students who don't need as much practice
| it's busywork.
|
| - Make take-home projects complex and creative enough
| that they can't be done by AI. Assign one large project
| with milestones throughout the semester. For example, in
| a web development class, have students build a website,
| importantly that is non-trivial and theoretically useful.
| If students can accomplish this in good quality with AI,
| then they can build professional websites so it doesn't
| matter (the non-AI method is obsolete, like building a
| website without an IDE or in jQuery). Classes where a
| beyond-AI-quality project can't be expected in reasonable
| time from students (e.g. in an intro course, students
| probably can't make anything that AI couldn't), don't
| assign any take-home project.
|
| - If exams (and maybe one large project) aren't enough,
| make in-class assignments and projects, and put the
| lectures online to be watched outside class instead.
| There should be enough class time, since graded
| assignments are only to measure knowledge and competence;
| professors can still assign extra ungraded assignments
| and projects to help students learn.
|
| In summary: undergraduate college's purpose is to educate
| and measure knowledge and competence. Students' knowledge
| and competence should be measured via in-class
| assignments/exams and, in later courses, advanced take-
| home projects. Students can be educated via ungraded out-
| of-class assignments/projects, as well as lectures, study
| sessions, tutoring, etc.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > My understanding is that homework is essentially just
| practice for exams
|
| There are a LOT of people that don't take exams well.
| When you combine that with the fact that the real world
| doesn't work like exams in 90% of cases, it makes a lot
| of sense for grades to _not_ based on exams (as much as
| possible). Going the other direction (based on nothing
| _but_ exams) is going to be very painful to a lot of
| people; people that do learn the material but don't test
| well.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I made another comment on this thread about that. Exams
| should be test important knowledge (not computation or
| trick questions) so they should be easy for students who
| learned the material, even those who traditionally have
| trouble with exams. Most of the grade should be frequent
| in-class assignments or long take-home projects, which
| test almost if not the same skills students would use
| professionally (e.g. debug a simulated server failure in-
| class; develop a small filesystem with a novel feature at
| home).
|
| The in-class assignments should also be easier than the
| take-home projects (although not as easy as the exams).
| In-class assignments and exams would be more common in
| earlier classes, and long projects would be more common
| in later classes.
| wisty wrote:
| You can't stop people hiring someone who looks similar from
| sitting the exam, or messages in morse code via Bluetooth.
| It's hard to stop a palm card.
|
| But it stops a casual cheater from having ChatGTP on a
| second device.
| grogenaut wrote:
| You can.
|
| I did a remote proctored exam for the NREMT last year.
| They had me walk the camera around the room, under the
| desk, etc. All devices had to be in my backpack. No
| earbuds. They made me unplug the conference tv on the
| wall, lift picture frames etc. I had to keep my hands
| above the table the whole time, I couldn't look down if I
| was scratching an itch. They installed rootkit software
| and closed down all of the apps other than the browser
| running the test. They killed a daemon I run on my own
| pcs that is custom. They are recording from the webcam
| the whole time and have it angled so they can see. They
| record audio the whole time. I accidentally alt tabbed
| once and muted the mic with a wrong keyboard, those were
| first and second warning within 5 seconds.
|
| When you take the test in a proctored testing center
| location they lock all of your stuff in a locker, check
| your hands, pockets, etc. They give you earplugs. You use
| their computer. They record you the whole time. They
| check your drivers license and take a fingerprint.
|
| Those methods would stop a large % of your attack
| vectors.
|
| As do the repercussions:
|
| A candidate who violates National Registry policies, or
| the test center's regulations or rules, or engages in
| irregular behavior, misconduct and/or does not follow the
| test administrator's warning to discontinue inappropriate
| behavior may be dismissed from the test center. Exam fees
| for candidates dismissed from a test center will not be
| refunded. Additionally, your exam results may be withheld
| or canceled. The National Registry of EMTs may take other
| disciplinary action such as denial of National EMS
| Certification and/or disqualification from future
| National Registry exams.
|
| At a minimum you're paying the $150 fee again, waiting
| another month to get scheduled and taking another 3 hours
| out of your day.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I took 3 CompTIA certification tests at a community
| college testing center. This was the procedure, more or
| less.
|
| > When you take the test in a proctored testing center
| location they lock all of your stuff in a locker, check
| your hands, pockets, etc. They give you earplugs. You use
| their computer. They record you the whole time. They
| check your drivers license and take a fingerprint.
|
| While attending there, I also took a virtual Calculus
| class. The instructor was based in the satellite campus,
| several miles away. The virtual class required a TI
| graphing calculator, used Pearson textbook & video
| lectures, and all the tests and quizzes were in Canvas. I
| worked from home or the main campus, where there was a
| tutoring center, full of students and tutors making the
| rounds to explain everything. I received tutoring every
| other week.
|
| But then our instructor posted the details on our final
| exams. We were expected to arrive in-person, for the
| first time of the semester, on that satellite campus at
| specified times.
|
| I protested, because everything I'd ever done was on the
| main campus, and I rode public transit, and the distance
| and unfamiliarity would be a hardship. So the disability
| services center accommodated me.
|
| They shut me into in a dimly lit one-person room with a
| desk, paper, and pencil, and I believe there was a
| camera, and no calculator required. The instructor had
| granted an extended period to complete the exam, and I
| finished at the last possible moment. I was so thankful
| to be done and have good results, because I had really
| struggled to understand Calculus.
| userbinator wrote:
| I'd rather go take the test in person than subject myself
| to such extreme surveillance of my own premises.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I'd agree, but I did it at work in a conference room. And
| I was able to schedule a day out virtually instead of a
| month out for in person, and I didn't want them taking my
| fingerprint.
|
| I used a spare laptop I wipe.
| userbinator wrote:
| Making them surveil your employer instead is not a bad
| idea either.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I'd pit my megacorp's security against theirs any day of
| the week, but as I said I just used and wiped a laptop
| just for the test.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| wow, that's intense. i wonder how much actual cheating
| they must have caught to arrive at such a draconian
| model. it would be interesting if they published their
| statistics to make it clear whether all these things are
| truly necessary.
| harvey9 wrote:
| What stats would convince you? A woman was jailed in the
| UK last week for taking in person tests on behalf of
| others. She wore a variety of wigs to fool test centre
| staff. Where there's demand there's people who will try
| to supply it.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| i guess i would expect them to publish some rates of
| disciplinary actions per sitting and the type of
| attempted behavior.
|
| ex "1% of test takers were disciplined for attempting to
| contact someone for help using a disallowed electronic
| device surreptitiously"
|
| minimally as deterrance
| josephcsible wrote:
| The remote proctored exam is a major invasion of privacy,
| but nevertheless, there's at least a dozen ways you could
| cheat despite all of that.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I fear that remote-proctoring can be liable to more false
| positives, if they are going to flag actions that "might"
| indicate a cheating sort of behavior, but they can't
| reach in and unveil your secret cheat sheet or identify
| your accomplice. I don't know the whole process after the
| remote proctor flags something, but it would seem more
| difficult for the student to defend innocence.
| josephcsible wrote:
| It's quite unfair of them to basically say "we're not
| competent enough as proctors to come up with evidence of
| guilt, so we'll use a guilty-until-proven-innocent system
| instead."
| Gigachad wrote:
| Both of those are so hard and so expensive that usually
| just learning the material is more practical.
|
| LLMs and remote exams changed the equation so now
| cheating is incredibly easy and super effective compared
| to trying to morse code someone with a button in your
| shoe.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| If you've been to one of these testing centers, you'd
| realize it's not easy to cheat, and the companies that run
| them take cheating seriously. The audacity of someone to
| cheat in that environment would be exceptionally high, and
| just from security theater alone I suspect almost no actual
| cheating takes place.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I did a proctored exam for Harvard Extension at the British
| Council in Madrid. The staff is proctoring exams year-round
| for their in-house stuff so their motivation
| notwithstanding they know what they're doing.
| math_dandy wrote:
| Proctoring services done well could be valuable, but it's
| smaller rural and remote communities that would benefit most.
| Maybe these services could be offered by local schools,
| libraries, etc.
| mac-mc wrote:
| It does feel like easy side money for local schools and
| teachers that will have empty classrooms after 5pm.
| postalrat wrote:
| Depends on how many students would use the service. If
| its just a 1 or 2 at a time then its going to be quite
| expensive for those students.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Not even just large cities. Decent sized towns have them too,
| usually with local high school teachers or the like acting as
| proctors.
| globalnode wrote:
| Where I'm studying its proctored-online. They have a custom
| browser and take over your computer while you're doing the
| exam. Creepy AF but saves travelling 1,300 km to sit an exam.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Wouldn't spending $300 on a laptop to cheat on an exam for
| a class you're paying thousands for make sense? It would
| probably improve your grade more than the text book.
| seb1204 wrote:
| You have to install an app that is a Bowser that at the
| same time locks the entire computer. Only this browser
| works. Install it, give it the needed admin permission
| and participate in your test or don't. This is also used
| in Australian schools for NAPLAN
| https://www.nap.edu.au/naplan/understanding-online-
| assessmen...
| baq wrote:
| nope. too much impact on profit.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Can you tell us: Is "remote study" a relatively recent phenom
| in AU -- COVID era, or much older? I am curious to learn
| more. And, what is the history behind it? Was it
| created/supported because AU is so vast and many people a
| state might not live near the campus?
|
| Also: I think your suggestion is excellent. We may see this
| happen in the US if AI cheating gets out of control (which it
| well).
| stevage wrote:
| It definitely existed before, particularly as a revenue
| stream for some of the smaller universities such as USQ. I
| think for the big ones it was a bit beneath them, then
| suddenly COVID came and we had lockdown for a long time in
| Melbourne. Now it's an expectation that students can access
| everything from home, but the flipside is everyone
| complains about how much campus life has declined. Students
| are paying more for a lower quality education and less
| amenity.
| dirkc wrote:
| The same thing exists in South Africa, the university is
| called UNISA [1]. It has existed for a long time - my
| parents time. Lots of people that can't afford to go to
| university (as in, needs to earn an income) studies with
| them.
|
| [1] - https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/corporate/default
| wrp wrote:
| The Open University in the UK started in 1969. Their staff
| have a reputation for good interaction with students, and I
| have seen very high quality teaching materials produced
| there. I believe they have always operated on the basis of
| remote teaching but on-site evaluation. The Open University
| sounds like an all-round success story and I'm surprised it
| isn't mentioned more in discussions of remote education.
| EGreg wrote:
| So just have test centers, and flip the classroom.
| math_dandy wrote:
| I think this is a good approach.
| cebert wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this anecdote. It's easy to forget the
| revenue / business side of education and that universities are
| in a hard spot here.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I attended Purdue. Since I graduated, it launched its "Purdue
| Global" online education. Rankings don't suggest it's happened
| yet, but I'm worried it will cheapen the brand and devalue my
| degree.
| nsagent wrote:
| I remember sitting with the faculty in charge of offering
| online courses when I visited as an alum back in 2014. They
| seemed to look at it as a cash cow in their presentation.
| They were eager to be at the forefront of online CS degrees
| at the time.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| is it ok for students to submit images of hand-written
| solutions remotely?
|
| seriously it reminds me of my high school days when a teacher
| told me i shouldn't type up my essays because then they
| couldn't be sure i actually wrote them.
|
| maybe we will find our way back to live oral exams before
| long...
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I see that pressure as well. I find that a lot of the problems
| we have with AI are in fact AI exposing problems in other
| aspects of our society. In this case, one problem is that the
| people who do the teaching and know what needs to be learned
| are the faculty, but the decisions about how to teach are made
| by administrators. And another problem is that colleges are
| treating "make money" as a goal. These problems existed before
| AI, but AI is exacerbating them (and there are many, many more
| such cases).
|
| I think things are going to have to get a lot worse before they
| get better. If we're lucky, things will get so bad that we
| finally fix some shaky foundations that our society has been
| trying to ignore for decades (or even centuries). If we're not
| lucky, things will still get that bad but we won't fix them.
| Brybry wrote:
| Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter
| experts but many are not required to have a teaching
| certification or education-related degree.
|
| So they know _what_ students should be taught but I don 't
| know that they necessarily know _how_ any better than the
| administrators.
|
| I've always found it weird that you need teaching
| certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but
| not to teach calculus to adults.
| Super_Jambo wrote:
| Once you're an adult some of the best lessons come from
| having bad teachers.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| Adult here! No.
| vacuity wrote:
| Adult here; there are lessons everywhere, but people
| learn very differently.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Just watch out for who is certifying how things _should_ be
| taught. It's honestly one reason education is so bad and so
| slow to change.
|
| Edit: and why perfectly capable professionals can't be
| teachers without years of certification
| BrenBarn wrote:
| The instructors may not know the absolute best way to
| teach, but I think they do know more than the
| administrators. All my interaction with teacher training
| suggests to me that a large proportion of it is basically
| vacuous. On dimensions like the ones under discussion here
| (e.g., "should we use AI", "can we do this class online"),
| there is not really anything to "know": it's not like
| anyone is somehow a super expert on AI teaching. Teacher
| training in such cases is mostly just fads with little
| substantive basis.
|
| Moreover, the same issues arise even outside a classroom
| setting. A person learning on their own from a book vs. a
| chatbot faces many of the same problems. People have to
| deal with the problem of AI slop in office emails and
| restaurant menus. The problem isn't really about teaching,
| it's about the difficulty of using AI to do anything
| involving substantive knowledge and the ease of using AI to
| do things involving superficial tasks.
| hoseja wrote:
| Nobody knows "how" things should be taught. Pedagogy is
| utter disaster.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I am pretty sure that early childhood education (until
| fifth grade) is a very active area of research in all
| highly developed nations. Almost, by definition, it you
| want to (a) become or (b) stay a highly developed nation,
| you need to have a high quality public education system.
|
| My mother was a first grade teacher for 30+ years. In her
| school system, first grade is the year that students
| learn to read. Each year, she was also required to take
| professional training classes for a certain number of
| days. She told me that, in her career, there were many
| changes and improvements and new techniques developed to
| help children learn how to read. One thing that changed a
| lot: The techniques are way more inclusive, so non-normie
| kids can learn to read better at an earlier age.
| orwin wrote:
| A lot of research is made. Are the discoveries applied
| properly? Not always.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Instructors and professors are required to be subject
| matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching
| certification or education-related degree.
|
| I attended two universities to get my computer science
| degree. The first was somewhat famous/prestigious, and I
| found most of the professors very unapproachable and cared
| little about "teaching well". The second was a no-name
| second tier public uni, but I found the professors much
| more approachable, and they made more effort to teach well.
| I am still very conflicted about that experience. Sadly,
| the students were way smarter at the first uni, so the
| intellectual rigor of discussions was much higher than my
| second uni. My final thoughts: "You win some; you lose
| some."
| falcor84 wrote:
| That's been my experience too, and I think it actually
| makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective - if
| the students are smart enough to learn well regardless of
| the level of the instruction, then the professors don't
| face any pressure to improve.
|
| Taking this to the extreme, I think that a top-tier
| university could do very well for itself by only
| providing a highly selective admission system, good
| facilities and a rigorous assessment process, while
| leaving the actual learning to the students.
| lukan wrote:
| I rather think it is a elitist concept of "I am a highly
| respected professor at a elite uni, how dare you bother
| me with your profane questions!"
|
| I was at a Uni aiming for and then gaining "Elite" status
| in germany and I did not liked the concept and the
| changes.
|
| I like high profile debates. As high as possible. But I
| don't like snobism. We all started as newbs.
| infecto wrote:
| Sounds more like the unfortunate differences between
| teaching professors and research professors.
| Unfortunately some research schools force professors to
| teach N credits per semester even if that is not their
| speciality.
|
| Your approach sounds too elitist for myself. I think you
| simply figure out the core skills of your professors.
| Maybe some teach undergrad well, others only advanced
| degrees. Maybe some should just be left to research with
| minimal classrooms etc.
| keiferski wrote:
| Universities don't pick professors because they are good
| teachers, they pick them for their research publications.
| The fact that some professors end up being good teachers
| is almost coincidental.
| bsenftner wrote:
| For the most part, most universities, that is true. I was
| dissatisfied with the quality of my undergrad college
| education, and had the resources to try other
| universities. After two state schools, I figured out that
| Boston is The University City with 700,000 college
| students in the larger Boston area when I attended Boston
| University, MIT and Harvard. I found Boston's over sized
| undergraduate population created a credit sharing system
| for all the Boston area colleges, and if one wanted they
| could just walk onto anther campus and take their same
| class at your university. So, of course, I took at the
| classes I could at Harvard. I was formally an engineering
| student at BU, but as far as the professors at Harvard
| and MIT knew I was a student at their school. What I
| found was that at Harvard, and about 75% of the time at
| MIT, the professors are incredibly good, they are the
| educational best self actualizing as teachers. Every
| single Harvard professor took a personal interest in my
| learning their subject. I saw that no where else.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah at that level you're basically optimizing for all
| around excellence, and it's hard to be a leader in your
| field without also being deeply interested in it at all
| levels -- and being reasonably charismatic.
|
| I've only taken classes at state schools, and my
| experience was that I'd often get a professor that was
| clearly brilliant at publishing but lacked even the most
| rudimentary teaching skills. Which is insightful in its
| own way...just not optimal for teaching.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This is true for research universities. There are many
| excellent teaching colleges where professors are hired to
| teach, and don't do research.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| This is universal. I've had largely the same experience.
| There's several reasons for this.
|
| 1. Stupider people are better teachers. Smart people are
| too smart to have any empathic experience on what it's
| like to not get something. They assume the world is smart
| like them so they glaze over topics they found trivial
| but most people found confusing.
|
| 2. They don't need to teach. If the student body is so
| smart then the students themselves can learn without
| teaching.
|
| 3. Since students learn so well there's no way to
| differentiate. So institutions make the material harder.
| They do this to differentiate students and give rankings.
| Inevitably this makes education worse.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| I did once have a Physics lecturer say " When I took
| Quantum Mechanics back in my undergrad, I got an A but
| didn't actually understand anything" and then in the same
| lecture 20 minutes later: "What part of this do you not
| understand?" when the entire class was just blankly
| looking at the whiteboard.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Seriously, what so non-understandable in first 20 minutes
| of QM?
| brookst wrote:
| Probably depends on how it's explained, no?
|
| I could make arithmetic incomprehensible, let alone QM.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| They never implied it was the first 20 minutes of the
| entire course
| SoftTalker wrote:
| At least at the undergrad level, it's not impossible to
| get an "A" without actually learning anything. Especially
| Freshman/Sophomore level classes. You just cram for the
| exams and regurgitate what you memorized. Within a few
| months time it's mostly gone.
| lamename wrote:
| It's simpler than that. "Prestigious" universities
| emphasize research prestige over all else on faculty.
| Faculty optimize for it and some even delight in being
| "hard" (bad) teachers because they see it as beneath
| them.
|
| Less "prestigious" universities apply less of that
| pressure.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| It can also be different within the same university, by
| department. I graduated from a university with a highly
| ranked and research oriented engineering department. I
| started in computer engineering which was in the college
| of engineering but ended up switching to computer science
| which was in the college of arts and sciences. The
| difference in the teachers and classroom experience was
| remarkable. It definitely seemed like the professors in
| the CS department actually wanted to teach and actually
| enjoyed teaching as compared to the engineering
| professors who treated it like it was wasting their time
| and expected you to learn everything from the book and
| their half-assed bullet point one way lectures.
| Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your view, it
| also meant having to take more traditional liberal arts
| type electives in order to graduate.
| stevage wrote:
| This is very different in France. Studying to be a teacher
| at university level is a big deal.
| orwin wrote:
| Since the reform on University administration circa 2011,
| a big push was done towards 'evaluation continue'
| (basically regular tests), which now last until your
| third year in some Uni, to make public universities more
| like private schools, and against 'partiels' (two big
| batteries of standardized tests in person, with thousands
| in the same area, with only pen and papers, one early
| January, second in may, every year, over a week).
|
| That push was accelerated because of COVID, but with the
| 'AI homework', it gave teachers a possibility to argue
| against that move and the trend seemed stopped last year
| (I don't now yet if it has reverted). In any case, I hope
| this AI trend will give more freedom to teachers, and
| maybe new ways of teaching.
|
| And I'm not a big Llm fan in general, but in my country,
| in superior education, it seems good overall.
| stevage wrote:
| Ah, that's interesting, thanks. I lived in France in
| 2001-2 and was friends with someone who was studying for
| his partiels to become a chemistry teacher.
| fastasucan wrote:
| >I've always found it weird that you need teaching
| certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but
| not to teach calculus to adults.
|
| There is a lot more on the plate when you are kindergarten
| teacher - as the kids needs a lot of supervision and
| teaching outside the "subject" matters, basic life skills,
| learning to socialize.
|
| Conversely, at a university the students should generally
| handle their life without your supervision, you can trust
| that all of them are able to communicate and to understand
| most of what you communicate to them.
|
| So the subject matter expertise in kidnergartens is how to
| teach stuff to kids. Its not about holding a fork, or to
| not pull someones hair. Just as the subject matter
| expertise in an university can be maths. You rarely have
| both, and I don't understand how you suggest people get
| both a phd in maths, do enough research to get to be a
| professor and at the same time get a degree in education?
| 542354234235 wrote:
| I was an instructor for a college credit eligible
| certification course. While I think that education degree
| is more than you need, providing _effective and engaging_
| instruction is a skill and is part of actual teaching at
| any level. Concepts like asking a few related open ended,
| no right answer questions at the beginning of a new topic
| to prime students' thinking about that topic. Asking
| specific students "knowledge check" or "summarize
| /restate this topic" questions throughout keeps students
| from checking out. Alternating instruction with
| application type exercises help solidify concepts. Lesson
| plans/exercises/projects that build on each other and
| reincorporate previous topics. Consideration of how to
| assess students between testing and projects, for example
| a final vs a capstone project.
|
| If you are just providing materials and testing, you
| aren't actually teaching. Of course there are a ton of
| additional skills that go into childhood development, but
| just saying adults should figure it out and regurgitating
| material counts as "teaching" is BS.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| A PhD was historically a teaching degree: that's what the D
| stands for.
| raverbashing wrote:
| No?
|
| PhD - Philosophy Doctor
| treis wrote:
| Doctor is latin for teacher
| valleyer wrote:
| Doctor is Latin for teacher; cf. "doctrine", "docent".
| raverbashing wrote:
| Fair enough. I had looked into it but missed the "Doctor"
| part.
| rtkwe wrote:
| > I've always found it weird that you need teaching
| certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but
| not to teach calculus to adults.
|
| I think this is partially due to the age of the students,
| by the time you hit college the expectation is you can do a
| lot of the learning yourself outside of the classroom and
| will seek out additional assistance through office hours,
| self study, or tutors/classmates if you aren't able to
| understand from the lecture alone.
|
| It's also down to cost cutting, instead of having entirely
| distinct teaching and research faculty universities require
| all professors to teach at least one class a semester.
| Usually though the large freshman and sophomore classes do
| get taught by quasi dedicated 'teaching' professors instead
| of a researcher ticking a box.
| hollandheese wrote:
| >don't know that they necessarily know how any better than
| the administrators.
|
| If someone is doing something day in and day out, they do
| gain knowledge on what works and doesn't work. So just by
| doing that the professors typically know much more about
| how people should be taught than the administrators.
| Further, the administrators' incentives are not aligned
| towards insuring proper instruction. They are aligned with
| increasing student enrollment and then cashing out whenever
| they personally can.
| california-og wrote:
| I totally agree. I think the neo-liberal university model is
| the real culprit. Where I live, Universities get money for
| each student who graduates. This is up to 100k euros for a
| new doctorate. This means that the University and its admin
| want as many students to graduate as possible. The (BA&MA)
| students also want to graduate in target time: if they do,
| they get a huge part of their student loans forgiven.
|
| What has AI done? I teach a BA thesis seminar. Last year,
| when AI wasn't used as much, around 30% of the students
| failed to turn in their BA thesises. 30% drop-out rate was
| normal. This year: only 5% dropped out, while the amount of
| ChatGPT generated text has skyrocketed. I think there is a
| correlation: ChatGPT helps students write their thesises, so
| they're not as likely to drop out.
|
| The University and the admins are probably very happy that so
| many students are graduating. But also, some colleagues are
| seeing an upside to this: if more graduate, the University
| gets more money, which means less cuts to teaching budgets,
| which means that the teachers can actually do their job and
| improve their courses, for those students who are actually
| there to learn. But personally, as a teacher, I'm at loss of
| what to do. Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had
| AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring.
| But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal
| University should be? Nobody else seems to care. Or should I
| pass them, let them graduate, and reserve my energy to teach
| those who are motivated and are willing to engage?
| avhception wrote:
| I think one of the outcomes might be a devaluation of the
| certifications offered in the public job marketplace.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I can say from some working experience in the United
| States that way too many jobs require a university
| degree. I remember being an intern or my first job after
| uni (which I struggled a great deal to complete), looking
| around and thinking: "There is no way that all of these
| people need a uni degree to do their jobs." I couldn't
| believe how easy work was compared to my uni studies (it
| was hell). I felt like I was playing at life with a cheat
| code (infinite lives, or whatever). I don't write that to
| brag; I am sure many people here feel the same. So many
| jobs at mega corps require little more than common sense:
| Come to work on time, dress well, say your pleases and
| thank yous, be compliant, do what is asked, etc. Repeat
| and you will have a reasonable middle class life.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Then there's Europe, where making it easy to get a
| master's degree just let to jobs requiring people to
| waste time getting yet another unneeded degree.
| intended wrote:
| This entire situation is something that is predictable,
| and I have personally called it out years ago - not
| because of some unique ability, but because this is what
| happened in India and China decades upon decades ago.
|
| There's only so many jobs which have you a good salary.
|
| So everyone had to become a doctor lawyer or engineer.
| Business degrees were seen as washouts.
|
| Even for the job of a peon, you had to be educated.
|
| So people followed incentives and got degrees - in any
| way or form they could.
|
| This meant that degrees became a measure, and they were
| then ruthlessly optimized for, till they stopped having
| any ability to indicate that people were actually
| engineers.
|
| So people then needed more degrees and so on - to
| distinguish their fitness amongst other candidates.
|
| Education is what liberal arts colleges were meant to
| provide - but this worked only in an economy that could
| still provide employment for all the people who never
| wanted to be engineers, lawyers or doctors.
|
| This mess will continue constantly, because we simply
| cannot match/sort humans, geographies, skills, and jobs
| well enough - and verifiably.
|
| Not everyone is meant to be a startup founder. Or a
| doctor. Or a plumber, or a historian or an architect or
| an archaeologist.
|
| It's a jobs market problem, and has been this way ever
| since the American economy wasn't able to match people
| with money for their skills.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Yep, it's a job market problem. Only degrees that are
| somehow limited in their supply will continue to hold
| value, the rest approach worthlessness. Neither the state
| nor universities have any interest to limit the supply.
|
| In my country doctors earn huge salaries and have 100%
| job security, because their powerful interest groups have
| successfully lobbied to limit the number of grads below
| job market's demand. Other degrees don't come even close.
| mcherm wrote:
| You seem to be missing the first step: get hired for the
| job in the first place.
| xsmasher wrote:
| This is why you need the degree. HR has a stack of
| resumes a mile high, if they can throw out all the non-
| degrees to narrow the field then their job is easier.
| halgir wrote:
| > Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop
| blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But
| should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal
| University should be?
|
| No, you should fail them for turning in bad theses, just
| like you would before AI.
| california-og wrote:
| That's probably what should happen, but it's not what
| happens in reality. In grading I have to follow a very
| detailed grading matrix (made by some higher-ups) and the
| requirements for passing and getting the lowest grade are
| so incredibly low that it's almost impossible to fail, if
| the text even somewhat resembles a thesis. The only way I
| could fail a student, is if they cheated, plagiarised or
| fabricated stuff.
|
| The person who used the AI slop blog for sources, we
| asked them to just remove them and resubmit. The person
| who hallucinated sources is however getting investigated
| for fabrication. But this is an incredibly long process
| to go through, which takes away time and energy from
| actual teaching / research / course prep. Most of the
| faculty is already overworked and on the verge of burnout
| (or are recovering post-burnout), so everybody tries to
| avoid it if they can. Besides, playing a cop is not what
| anybody wants to do, and its not what teaching should be
| about, as the original blog post mentioned. IF the
| University as an institution had some standards and
| actually valued education, it could be different. But
| it's not. The University only cares about some imaginary
| metrics, like international rankings and money. A few
| years ago they built a multi-million datacenter just for
| gathering data from everything that happens in the
| University, so they could make more convincing
| presentations for the ministry of education -- to get
| more money and to "prove" that the money had a measurable
| impact. The University is a student-factory (this is a
| direct quote by a previous principal).
| halgir wrote:
| That sounds horrible. Thanks for the insight.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > The person who used the AI slop blog for sources
|
| That phrase is so utterly dystopian. I am laughing, but
| not in a good way.
| jorvi wrote:
| > The University is a student-factory
|
| In The Netherlands, we have a three-tier tertiary system:
| MBO (practical job education / trades), HBO (college job
| education / applied college) and WO (scientific education
| / university).
|
| A lot of the fancy jobs require WO. But in my opinion, WO
| is much too broad a program, because it tries to both
| create future high tier workers as well as researchers.
| The former would be served much better by a reduced,
| focused programme, which would leave more bandwidth for
| future researchers to get the 'true' university education
| they need.
| intended wrote:
| Yeah, our information and training systems are kinda
| failing at dealing with the reality of our actual
| information environment.
|
| Take law for example and free speech - a central tenet to
| a functional democracy is effective ways to trade ideas.
|
| A core response in our structure to falsehoods and
| rhetoric is counter speech.
|
| But I can show you that counter speech fails. We have
| realms upon realms of data inside tech firms and online
| communities that shows us the mechanics of how our
| information economies actually work, and counter speech
| does diddly squat.
|
| Education is also stuck in a bind. People need degrees to
| be employable today, but the idea of education is tied up
| with the idea of being a good educated thinking human
| being.
|
| Meaning you are someone who is engaged with the ideas and
| concepts of your field, and have a mental model in your
| head, that takes calories, training and effort to use to
| do complex reasoning about the world.
|
| This is often overkill for many jobs - the issue isn't
| doing high level stats in a day science role, it's doing
| boring data munging and actually getting the data in the
| first place. (Just an example).
|
| High quality work is hard, and demanding, and in a market
| with unclear signals, people game the few systems that
| used to be signals.
|
| Which eventually deteriorated signal till you get this
| mess.
|
| We need jobs that give a living wage, or provide a
| pathway to achieving mastery while working, so that the
| pressure on the education lever can be reduced and spread
| elsewhere.
| freezePeach2958 wrote:
| > A core response in our structure to falsehoods and
| rhetoric is counter speech.
|
| > But I can show you that counter speech fails
|
| Could you show me that? What's your definition of
| failure?
| intended wrote:
| I get the feeling that you aren't asking for the short
| version, because most people wouldn't latch onto that
| point and create an account for it.
|
| Hmmm.
|
| An example - the inefficacy of Fact checking efforts.
| Fact checking is quintessentially counter speech, and we
| know that it has failed to stop the uptake and popularity
| of falsehoods. And I say this after speaking to people
| who work at fact checking orgs.
|
| However, this is in itself too simple an example.
|
| The mechanics of online forums are more interesting to
| illustrate the point - Truth is too expensive to compete
| with cheaper content.
|
| Complex articles can be shared on a community, which
| debunk certain points, but the community doesn't read it.
| They do engage heavily on emotional content, which ends
| up supporting their priors.
|
| I struggle to make this point nicely, but The accuracy of
| your content is secondary to its value as an emotional
| and narrative utility for the audience.
|
| People are not coming online to be scientists. They are
| coming online to be engaged. Counter speech solves the
| issue of inaccuracy, and is only valuable if inaccuracy
| is a negative force.
|
| It is too expensive a good to produce, vs alternatives.
| People will coalesce around wounds and lacunae in their
| lives, and actively reject information that counters
| their beliefs. Cognitive dissonance results in mental
| strife and will result in people simply rejecting
| information rather than altering their priors.
|
| Do note - this is a point about the efficacy of this
| intervention in upholding the effectiveness of the market
| where we exchange ideas. There will be many individual
| exchanges where counter speech does change minds.
|
| But at a market level, it is ineffective as a guardian
| and tonic against the competitive advantage of falsehoods
| against facts.
|
| ----
|
| Do forgive the disjointed quality in the response. It's
| late here, and I wish I could have just linked you to a
| bunch of papers, but I dont think that would have been
| the response you are looking for.
| california-og wrote:
| I think this 3-part essay might be relevant to your
| argument:
| https://www.e-flux.com/journal/147/623330/society-of-the-
| psy...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I've talked with professors at a major US research
| university. For Master's students, they are all paying a
| lot of money to get a credential. That's the transaction.
| They don't really care about cheating as long as they go
| through the motions of completing the assigned work. It's
| just a given, and like you say it takes more time than
| they have to go through the acacdemic dishonesty process
| for all the students who are getting outside help or
| (now) using AI.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Fail them. Only let the ai generated text that has been
| verified and edited to be true to pass.
|
| If they want to use AI make them use it right.
| intended wrote:
| You should fail them.
|
| The larger work that the intellectual and academic forces
| of a liberal democracy is that of "verification".
|
| Part of the core part of the output, is showing that the
| output is actually what it claims to be.
|
| The reproducibility crisis is a problem Precisely because a
| standard was missed.
|
| In a larger perspective, we have mispriced facts and
| verification processes.
|
| They are treated as public goods, when they are hard to
| produce and uphold.
|
| Yet they compete with entertainment and "good enough"
| output, that is cheaper to produce.
|
| The choice to fail or pass someone doesn't address the
| mispricing of the output. We need new ways to address that
| issue.
|
| Yet a major part of the job you do. is to hold up the
| result to a standard.
|
| You and the institutions we depend on will continue to be
| crushed by these forces. Dealing with that is a separate
| discussion from the pass or fail discussion.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Hand written essays are inherently ableist. I would be at a
| massive disadvantage. I grew up during the 60's, but
| handwriting was alway slow and error prone for me. As soon as I
| could use a word processor I blossomed.
|
| It's probably not as bad for mathematical derivations. I still
| do those by hand since they are more like drawing than
| expression.
| baq wrote:
| > Hand written essays are inherently ableist.
|
| yes.
|
| > I would be at a massive disadvantage.
|
| yes.
|
| ...but.
|
| how would you propose to filter out able cheaters instead?
| there's also in person one on one verbal exam, but economics
| and logistics of that are insanely unfavorable (see also -
| job interviews.)
| jedimastert wrote:
| Handwriting essays doesn't filter out cheaters though? It
| didn't even filter out cheaters before ChatGPT, before it
| was just a person writing the essay for you that you would
| copy
| AllegedAlec wrote:
| > Hand written essays are inherently ableist
|
| So is testing; people who don't have the skills don't do
| well. Hell, the entire concept of education is ableist
| towards learning impaired kids. Let's do away with it
| entirely.
| lionkor wrote:
| Would you hire someone as a writer who is completely
| illiterate? Of course that's an extreme edge case, but at
| some point equality stops and the ability to do the work is
| actually important.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Most people would be happy to hire a writer with no
| consideration of how good their handwriting was.
| wrp wrote:
| I was a slow handwriter, too. I always did badly on in-class
| essay exams because I didn't have time to write all that I
| knew needed to be said. What saved my grade in those classes
| was good term papers.
|
| Having had much occasion to consider this issue, I would
| suggest moving away from the essay format. Most of the
| typical essay is fluff that serves to provide narrative
| cohesion. If knowledge of facts and manipulation of
| principles are what is being evaluated, presentation by
| bullet points should be sufficient.
| ecb_penguin wrote:
| > Hand written essays are inherently ableist
|
| Doing anything is inherently based on your ability to do it.
| Running is inherently ableist. Swimming is ableist. Typing is
| inherently ableist.
|
| Pointing this out is just a thought terminating cliche. Ok,
| it's ableist. So?
|
| > As soon as I could use a word processor I blossomed.
|
| You understand this is inherently ableist to people that
| can't type?
|
| > I still do those by hand since they are more like drawing
| than expression.
|
| Way to do ableist math.
| remarkEon wrote:
| In my undergraduate experience, the location of which shall
| remain nameless, we had amble access to technology but the
| professors were fairly hostile to it and insisted on pencil and
| paper for all technical classes. There were some English or
| History classes here and there that allowed a laptop for
| writing essays during an "exam" that was a 3 hour experience
| with the professor walking around the whole time. Anyway, when
| I was younger I thought the pencil and paper thing to be silly.
| Why would we eschew brand new technology that can make us
| faster! And now that I'm an adult, I'm so thankful they did
| that. I have such a firm grasp of the underlying theory and the
| math precisely because I had to write it down, on my own, from
| memory. I see what these kids do today and they have been so
| woefully failed.
|
| Teachers and professors: you can say "no". Your students will
| thank you in the future.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I'm not a teacher, but I came here to say the same thing. Pen
| and paper.
| thih9 wrote:
| Higher ups say yes to remote learning and no to remote work.
| Interesting to see this side by side like this.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Remote learning also opens up a lot of opportunities to people
| that would not otherwise be able to take advantage of them. So
| it's not _just_ the cash cow that benefits from it.
| seethishat wrote:
| Some US universities do this remotely via proctoring software.
| They require pencil and paper to be used with a laptop that has
| a camera. Some do mirror scans, room scans, hand scans, etc.
| The Georgia Tech OMS CS program used to do this for the math
| proofs course and algorithms (leet code). It was effective and
| scalable. However, the proctoring seems overly Orwellian, but I
| can understand the need due to cheating as well as maintaining
| high standards for accreditation.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > seems overly Orwellian
|
| Wow.
|
| Maybe we should consider the possibility that this isn't a
| good idea? Just a bit? No? Just ignore how obviously
| comparable this is to the most famous dystopian fiction in
| literary history?
|
| Just wow. If you're willing to do that, I don't know what to
| tell you.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I have a Software Engineering degree from Harvard Extension and
| I had to take quite a few exams in physically proctored
| environments. I could very easily manage in Madrid and London.
| It is not too hard for either the institution or the student.
|
| I am now doing an Online MSc in CompSci at Georgia Tech. The
| online evaluation and proctoring is fine. I've taken one rather
| math-heavy course (Simulation) and it worked. I see the program
| however is struggling with the online evaluation of certain
| subjects (like Graduate Algorithms).
|
| I see your point that a professor might prefer to have physical
| evaluation processes. I personally wouldn't begrudge the
| institution as long as they gave me options for proctoring (at
| my own expense even) or the course selection was large enough
| to pick alternatives.
| mountainb wrote:
| Professional proctored testing centers exist in many
| locations around the world now. It's not that complicated to
| have a couple people at the front, a method for physically
| screening test-takers, providing lockers for personal
| possessions, providing computers for test administration, and
| protocols for checking multiple points of identity for each
| test taker.
|
| This hybrid model is vastly preferable to "true" remote test
| taking in which they try to do remote proctoring to the
| student's home using a camera and other tools.
| aerhardt wrote:
| That's what I did at HES and it was fine. Reasonable and
| not particularly stressful.
| Balgair wrote:
| I think you've identified the main issue here:
|
| LLMs aren't destroying the University or the essay.
|
| LLMs are destroying the _cheap_ University or essay.
|
| Cheap can mean a lot of things, like money or time or distance.
| But, if Universities want to maintain a standard, then they are
| going to have to work for it again.
|
| No more 300+ person freshman lectures (where everyone cheated
| anyways). No more take-home zoom exams. No more professors
| checked out. No more grad students doing the real teaching.
|
| I guess, I'm advocating for the Oxbridge/St. John's approach
| with under 10 class sizes where the proctor actually knows you
| and if you've done the work. And I know, that is _not_ a cheap
| way to churn out degrees.
| nothercastle wrote:
| All degrees are basically the same though and of 95% of the
| value is signaling nobody really cares about the education
| part
| username223 wrote:
| Believe it or not, 300-person freshman lectures can be done
| well. They just need a talented instructor who's willing to
| put in the prep, and good TAs leading sections. And if the
| university fosters the right culture, the students mostly
| won't cheat.
|
| But yeah, if the professor is clearly checked out and only
| interested in his research, and the students are being told
| that the only purpose of their education is to get a piece of
| paper to show to potential employers, you'll get a cynical
| death-spiral.
|
| (I've been on both sides of this, though back when copy-
| pasting from Wikipedia was the way to cheat.)
| mathgeek wrote:
| > though back when copy-pasting from Wikipedia was the way
| to cheat
|
| Back when I was teaching part time, I had a lot of fun
| looking at the confused looks on my students' faces when I
| said "you cannot use Wikipedia, but you'll find a lot of
| useful links at the bottom of any article there..."
| tgv wrote:
| 10 is a small number. There's a middle ground. When I
| studied, we had lectures for all students, and a similar
| amount of time in "work groups," as they were called. That
| resembled secondary education: one teacher, around 30
| students, but those classes were mainly focused on applying
| the newly acquired knowledge, making exercises, asking
| questions, checking homework, etc. Later, I taught such
| classes for programming 101, and it was perfectly doable.
| Work group teachers were also responsible for reviewing their
| students' tests.
|
| But that commercially oriented boards are ruining education,
| that's a given. That they would stoop to this level is a bit
| surprising.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Very common. Large lecture with a professor, and small
| "discussion sections" with a grad student for Q/A, homework
| help, exam review.
| jacobolus wrote:
| There are excellent 1000-student lecture courses and shitty
| 15-student lecture courses. There are excellent take-home
| exams and shitty in-class exams. There are excellent grad
| student teaching assistants and shitty tenured credentialed
| professors. You can't boil quality down to a checklist.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| No but you can observe and react to trends. Remote courses
| for me have me sitting directly at the Distraction 9000 (my
| computer) and rely entirely on "self discipline" in order
| for me to get anything out of it. This is fine for annual
| training that's utterly braindead and requires nothing from
| me but completing a basic quiz I get unlimited attempts for
| so my employer can tell whatever government agency I did
| the thing. If I want to actually get trained however, I
| always do in-person, both because my employer covers those
| expenses and who in the world turns down free travel, and
| because I retain _nothing_ from remote learning. Full stop.
|
| Of course that's only my experience and I can't speak for
| all of humanity. I'm sure people exist who can engage in
| and utilize remote learning to it's full potential. That
| said I think it's extremely tempting to lean on it to get
| out of providing classrooms, providing equipment, and
| colleges have been letting the education part of their
| school rot for decades now in favor of sports and
| administrative bloat, so forgive me if I'm not entirely
| trusting them to make the "right" call here.
|
| Edit: Also on further consideration, remote anything but
| teaching very much included also requires a level of tech
| literacy that, at least in my experience, is still
| extremely optimistic. The number of times we have to walk
| people through configuring a microphone, aiming a webcam,
| sharing to the meeting, or the number of missed
| participants because Teams logged them out, or Zoom bugged
| out on their machine, or whatever. It just adds a ton of
| frustration.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| On the edit: maybe two-way remote. One-way (read:
| remoting into conferences, music festivals, etc.) has
| been a revelation, and no more difficult to access than
| any other streaming service. I'm going to be sad to see
| YouTube's coverage of Coachella go away in a few years;
| losing SXSW was already quite painful.
|
| I gather that that's not necessarily what you were
| referring to, but with the way that people tend to lump
| all remote experiences in the "inferior" basket together,
| I just wanted to point out that, in many cases, that kind
| of accessibility is better than the actual alternative:
| missing out.
| fakeBeerDrinker wrote:
| After a short stint as a faculty member at a McU institution,
| I agree with much of this.
|
| Provide machine problems and homework as exercises for
| students to learn, but assign a very low weight to these as
| part of an overall grade. Butt in seat assessments should be
| the majority of a course assessment for many courses.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| >I guess, I'm advocating for the Oxbridge/St. John's approach
| with under 10 class sizes where the proctor actually knows
| you and if you've done the work. And I know, that is not a
| cheap way to churn out degrees.
|
| I could understand US tuition if that were the case. These
| days with overworked adjuncts make it McDonalds at Michelin
| star prices.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Funnily enough I only had 10-person-classes when I paid
| $125 for summer courses in a community college between
| expensive uni semesters.
| kesslern wrote:
| This matches my experience. I attended the local
| community college, which works closely and matches
| curriculum with Ohio State University. The same classes,
| with the same content, were taught at both schools.
|
| The biggest difference between them is the community
| college offering class sizes of about 20 people, while
| the university equivalent was taught in a lecture hall
| with hundreds of students, and cost significantly more.
| ijk wrote:
| Given that the adjuncts often aren't paid all that much
| better than the McDonalds workers...
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Over here in Finland, higher education is state funded, and
| the funding is allocated to universities mostly based on how
| many degrees they churn out yearly. Whether the grads
| actually find employment or know anything is irrelevant.
|
| So, it's pretty hard for universities over here to maintain
| standards in this GenAI world, when the paying customer only
| cares about quantity, and not quality. I'm feeling bad for
| the students, not so much for foolish politicians.
| Balgair wrote:
| Gosh, I'm so myopic here. I'm mostly talking about US based
| systems.
|
| But, of course, LLMs are affecting the whole world.
|
| Yeah, I'd love to hear more about how other countries are
| affected by this tool. For Finland, I'd imagine that the
| feedback loop is the voters, but that's a bit too long and
| the incentives and desires of the voting public get a bit
| too condensed into a few choice to matter [0].
|
| What are you seeing out there as to how students feel about
| LLMs?
|
| [0] funnily enough, like how the nodes in the neural net of
| an LLM get too saturated if they don't have enough
| parameters.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Cheap "universities" are fine for accreditation. Exams can be
| administered via in-person proctoring services, which test
| the bare minimum. The real test would be when students are
| hired, in the probationary period. While entry-level hires
| may be unreliable, and even in the best case not help the
| company much, this is already a problem (perhaps it can be
| solved by the government or some other outside organization
| paying the new hire instead of the company, although I
| haven't thought about it much).
|
| Students can learn for free via online resources, forums, and
| LLM tutors (the less-trustworthy forums and LLMs should
| primarily be used to assist understanding the more-
| trustworthy online resources). EDIT: students can get hands-
| on-experience via an internship, possibly unpaid.
|
| Real universities should continue to exist for their cutting-
| edge research and tutoring from very talented people, because
| that can't be commodified. At least until/if AI reaches
| expert competence (in not just knowledge but application),
| but then we don't need jobs either.
| Balgair wrote:
| > Real universities should continue to exist for their
| cutting-edge research and tutoring from very talented
| people, because that can't be commodified. At least
| until/if AI reaches expert competence (in not just
| knowledge but application), but then we don't need jobs
| either.
|
| Okay, woah, I hadn't thought of that. I'm sitting here
| thinking that education for it's own sake is one of the
| reasons that we're trying to get rid of labor and make
| LLMs. Like, I enjoy learning and think my job gets in the
| way of that.
|
| I hand't thought that people would want to just not do
| education of any sort anymore.
|
| That's a little mind blowing.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Some people go to college to learn, some go just to get a
| job. I think colleges should still exist for the former,
| but the latter should be able to instead use online
| resources then get accredited (which they'd do if it gave
| them the same job prospects).
|
| That would also let professors devote more time towards
| teaching the former, and less time grading and handling
| grade complaints (from either group, since the former can
| also be graded by the accreditation and, if they get a
| non-academic job, in their probationary period).
| theyinwhy wrote:
| > I enjoy learning and think my job gets in the way of
| that
|
| Spot on, this gave me ideas, thank you for that!
| msgodel wrote:
| I'm an autodidact. I've found leaked copies of university
| degree plans, pirated and read textbooks on all kinds of
| subjects, talk to experts for fun when I can etc.
|
| American universities mostly get in the way of doing this
| sort of thing. You need a degree to be credentialed so
| you can get your "3 years of experience" that lets you
| apply for jobs. That's pretty much all its for these
| days.
| blibble wrote:
| Oxbridge supervisinons/tutorials are typically two students,
| and at a push three (rarely)
|
| certainly not anywhere close to ten!
| storus wrote:
| Stanford requires pen & paper exams for their remote students;
| the students first need to nominate an exam monitor (a person)
| who in turn receives and prints the assignments, meets the
| student at an agreed upon place, the monitor gives them the
| printed exams and leaves, then collects the exam after allotted
| time, scans it and sends it back to Stanford.
| amelius wrote:
| Can't we use AI to monitor the students?
| blitzar wrote:
| How did we solve this when calculators came along and ruined
| peoples ability to do mental arithmetic and use slide rulers?
| yapyap wrote:
| It sounds like you're implying LLMs are to everything what
| calculators were to math, if so you are sorely mistaken
| squigz wrote:
| He's implying, rightfully so, that we've repeatedly adapted
| to various technologies that fundamentally threatened the
| then status quo of education. We'll do it again.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| The impact LLMs have on education is arguably orders of
| magnitude higher than calculators
| protocolture wrote:
| Not really, its just calculators for all the other classes.
|
| And tbh, lots of people historically would have loved a
| calculator that could write an essay about shakespeare or
| help code a simple game.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| It's how you approach it.
|
| You tell it to act as a tutor, it'll act as one. Tell it to
| solve your homework in the form of a poem, it'll do that.
|
| That's not just a calculator, even though it's just
| calculating, just as much as a computer isn't just a
| voltage switcher, even thought it's just switching
| voltages.
| protocolture wrote:
| Sure but even if a graphics calculator could recite
| poetry, its application to the maths class is to crunch
| numbers.
|
| You can ask chat gpt to pretend to be Julius Caesar, it
| still probably shouldnt be in an english exam.
| baconmania wrote:
| Outsourcing a specific task to a deterministic tool you own is
| clearly not the same thing as outsourcing all of your cognition
| to a probabilistic tool owned by people with ongoing political
| and revenue motives that don't align with your own.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I was allowed to use calculators during my A-level
| Math/Physics/Chem exams, but knowing what to punch in was half
| the battle. Hell, they even give you most of the formulae on
| the very first page of the exam sheet, but again, application
| of that knowledge is the hard part.
|
| Point being, the fundamentals matter. I can't do mental
| arithmetic very well these days because it's been years since
| I've practiced, but I know how it works in the first place and
| can do it if need be. How is a kid learning geometry or
| calculus supposed to get by and learn to spot the patterns that
| make sense and the ones that don't without first knowing the
| fundamentals underlaying the more complex concepts?
| lurking_swe wrote:
| the difference is using my calculator in real life works ALL
| the time and is cheap. I can depend on it. And i still need to
| think about the broader problem even if i have a calculator.
| The calculator only removes the mindless rote memorization of
| the steps needed to do arithmetic, etc.
|
| My calculator doesn't depend on a fancy AI model in the cloud.
| It's not randomly rate limited during peak times due to
| capacity constraints. It's not expensive to use, whereas the
| good LLM models are.
|
| Did i mention calculators are actually deterministic? In other,
| always reliable. It's difficult to compare the two. One gives a
| false sense of accomplishment because it's say 80% reliable,
| and the other is always 100% reliable.
| raincole wrote:
| We banned it.
|
| Yes, that's what we did and are still doing. Most grade schools
| don't allow calculators on basic arithmetic classes. Colleges
| don't integrate WolframAlpha into Calculus 101 exams. etc.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Which is extremely stupid.
|
| I want my math graduates to be skilled at using CAS systems.
| Yes, even in Calculus 1.
|
| The lack of computer access for teaching math which
| objectively is supercharged by computation is a massive
| disservice to millions of individuals who could have used
| those CAS systems.
|
| I don't want my engineers solving equations by hand. I
| especially don't want anyone who claims to be a
| "statistician" to not be skilled in Python (or historically,
| R)
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| We didn't, people who aren't good at doing math in their head
| are numerically illiterate and make bad decisions with money
| etc.
|
| When it's general thinking we've trained people not to have to
| do anymore, it's going to be dire.
| floren wrote:
| When I took multivariable calculus in tyool 2007, we were
| forbidden from using our calculators. "You can use a slide rule
| or an abacus" and I did indeed bring the former to one exam,
| but of course the problems were written in such a way that you
| didn't actually need it.
| fallinditch wrote:
| > I want my students to write unassisted because I don't want to
| live in a society where people can't compose a coherent sentence
| without a bot in the mix.
|
| Kicking against the pricks.
|
| It is understandable that professional educators are struggling
| with the AI paradigm shift, because it really is disrupting their
| profession.
|
| But this new reality is also an opportunity to rethink and
| improve the practice of education.
|
| Take the author comment above: you can't disagree with the
| sentiment but a more nuanced take is that AI tools can also help
| people to be better communicators, speakers, writers. (I don't
| think we've seen the killer apps for this yet but I'm sure we
| will soon).
|
| If you want students to be good at spelling and grammar then do a
| quick spelling test at the start of each lesson and practice
| essay writing during school time with no access to computers.
| (Also, bring back Dictation?)
|
| Long term: yes I believe we're going to see an effect on people's
| cognition abilities as AI becomes increasingly integrated into
| our lives. This is something we as a society should grapple with
| and develop new enlightened policies and teaching methods.
|
| You can't put the genie back in the bottle, so adapt, use AI
| tools wisely, think deeply about ways to improve education in
| this new era.
| overgard wrote:
| I think as a culture we've fetishized formal schooling way past
| its value. I mean, how much of what you "learned" in school do
| you actually use or remember? I'm not against _education_ ,
| education is very important, but I'm not sure that _schooling_ is
| really the optimal route to being educated. They 're related, but
| they're not the same.
|
| The reality is, if someone _wants_ to learn something then there
| 's very little need to cheat, and if they don't want to learn the
| thing but they're required to, the cheating sort of doesn't
| matter in the end because they won't retain or use it.
|
| Or to put it simpler, you can lead a horse to water but..
| lispisok wrote:
| The fetishizing enabled the massive explosion in what's
| basically a university industrial complex financed off the
| backs of student loans. To keep growing the industry needed
| more suckers...I mean students to extract student loans from.
| This meant watering down the material even in technical degrees
| like engineering, passing kids who should have failed, and
| lowering admission standards (masked by grade inflation). Many
| programs are really really bad now like what should be high
| school freshman level material. Criticizing the university
| system gets you called anti-intellectual and a redneck.
|
| A lot of debate around the idea of student loan forgiveness but
| nobody is trying to address how the student loan problem got so
| bad in the first place.
| Aeolun wrote:
| All primary schooling is designed to teach people about
| everything they _can_ learn. If we don't, many of them will end
| up in the coal mines because it's the only thing they know.
| protocolture wrote:
| >I think as a culture we've fetishized formal schooling way
| past its value. I mean, how much of what you "learned" in
| school do you actually use or remember? I'm not against
| education, education is very important, but I'm not sure that
| schooling is really the optimal route to being educated.
| They're related, but they're not the same.
|
| Yeah its absolutely bonkers. I spent 9 months out of school
| traveling, and the provided homework actually set me ahead of
| my peers when I had returned.
|
| No ones stopped and considered "What is a school for".
|
| For some people it seems to be mandatory state sponsored
| childcare. For others its about food? Some people tell me it
| sucks but its the best way to get kids to socialise?
|
| I feel like if it was an engineering project there would be a
| formal requirements study, but because its a social program
| what we get instead is just a big bucket of feelings and no
| defined scope.
|
| During my time I have come to view schooling as an adversary. I
| am considering whether it might be prudent to instruct my now
| toddler that school is _designed_ to break him, and that his
| role is actually to achieve in spite of it, and that some of
| his education will come in opposition to the institution.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I'm all in for blue book style exams, in person and in a
| classroom. There are just too much rampant cheating with or
| without LLM.
| jumploops wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but I think AI has the potential to supercharge
| learning for the students of the future.
|
| Similar to Montessori, LLMs can help students who wander off in
| various directions.
|
| I remember often being "stuck" on some concept (usually in
| biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave
| something as truth, this dismissing my request for further depth.
|
| Of course, LLMs in the current educational landscape (homework-
| heavy) only benefit the students who are truly curious...
|
| My hope is that, with new teaching methods/styles, we can unlock
| (or just maintain!) the curiosity inherent in every pupil.
|
| (If anyone knows of a tool like this, where an LLM stays on a
| high-level trajectory of e.g. teaching trigonometry, but allows
| off-shoots/adventures into other topical nodes, I'd love to know
| about it!)
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| The last thing I need when researching a hard problem is an
| interlocutor who might lie to me, make up convincing citations
| to nowhere, and tell me more or less what I want to hear.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Still better than the typical classroom experience. And you
| can always ask again, there's no need to avoid offending the
| person who has a lot of power over you.
| const_cast wrote:
| Typical classroom experience works and has worked for
| thousands of years.
|
| Edutech is pretty new and virtually all of it has been a
| disaster. Sitting in a lecture and taking notes on paper is
| tried, tested, and research backed. It works. Not for
| everyone, but for a lot of people.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Typical classroom experience works and has worked for
| thousands of years
|
| "Typical classroom experience" hasn't even meant the same
| thing for thousands of years.
|
| "lecture" used to be centered around reading the source
| book so that students could copy it verbatim. _The
| printing press_ was an important piece of "Edutech".
| Technology has been continuous, and much of it has been
| applied to impacted the experience of education, not just
| in the last few years, but over a long window of history.
| Yeah, what we currently think of as "edutech" is what has
| been around for only a short time, and hasn't yet been
| established as part of the consensus baseline -- but
| that's a moving target.
| ghaff wrote:
| And it still varies a lot. There are large lectures,
| small lectures, labs, seminars, largely project courses,
| etc. Varies by subject matter of course. You probably
| won't have labs in an English class but you may well have
| a big project of some sort.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| Talk is cheap; if you want to see what people really
| believe, ignore what they claim and look at what they
| actually do. And when you do that, you see that people
| generally don't find typical college classes to be worth
| it outside of the credentials they give. Almost no one
| with a CS degree goes back to college to take a college
| algorithm course when they want to get better at
| algorithms; they study on their own. You can look at
| plenty of the HN discussions about "how do I learn X" or
| "how do I get better at X"; almost none of the
| suggestions are "go to your local university and audit
| some classes."
|
| The issues with Edutech are mostly because they're
| bolting it on to the same broken system that people don't
| find value in. But the original comment wasn't about
| Edutech. When people want to learn new things, they
| largely do it without either typical college classrooms
| or Edutech, because the alternatives are so much better
| than anything coming out of the broken academic morass.
| const_cast wrote:
| Conversely, if we're noticing what people actually do,
| you'll realize close to zero people who want to pursue
| computer science are doing it on their own.
|
| And not due to a lack of information. The draw of
| education hasn't been access, not since the internet
| anyway. Structure, pacing, curriculum, schedule, and
| measurement cannot be recreated.
|
| I've had many people tell me they're going to learn to
| program online. Almost all of them fail.
|
| At the end of the day, we go home and we don't crack open
| a textbook. We sit and watch TV. Maybe we go for a walk
| or go to the gym. The vast majority of people do not have
| the mindset required to be self-educated.
|
| We used to do the "everyone self-educate" thing. Most
| people couldn't read or write. Humans are unintuitive.
| You can't just give them access to things and expect
| results. They require accountability, they require
| structure. We're not machines, we're faulty fleshy
| creatures. Our reward feedback loops were never built for
| self-determination at this high of a level.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| > We used to do the "everyone self-educate" thing. Most
| people couldn't read or write.
|
| Do you regard that as intrinsically problematic? The
| people themselves weren't unhappy about their state, and
| society, too, could function well without mass literacy.
| There was a certain period where we thought training wage
| workers for their duties required them to be literate,
| but that might turn out to be unnecessary, if supplying
| an LLM is cheaper overall than mandatory school
| education.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| > Conversely, if we're noticing what people actually do,
| you'll realize close to zero people who want to pursue
| computer science are doing it on their own.
|
| That's not true though? Many people are trying to
| increase their CS skills through self-study. This topic
| even comes up a lot here, with people recommending the
| self-studying they've been doing in CS.
|
| > I've had many people tell me they're going to learn to
| program online. Almost all of them fail.
|
| Yet there are still a large number of self-taught
| programmers.
|
| Of course, more people will have an incentive to learn
| through the university system than through self-
| education, but that's because the current system says
| that you only get the highest level credentials if you go
| through a university education. Naturally, a system that
| explicitly biases a certain form of education to a large
| degree is going to cause more people to do that. But
| that's for the credential, not the education. When the
| credentials are taken out, we see people do better with
| other forms of education.
| intended wrote:
| Mooc completion rates hovered at single degree percents.
|
| The vast majority of people do not complete.
|
| The people who do complete are outliers. I suppose we can
| build for outliers, but then most people are just going
| to be ignored in this system, and if they have way to
| respond (vote), they won't be happy about it.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Most academic education is already built for outliers.
| Courses are designed around building up to the next
| generation of professors. Most knowledge that's taught in
| university is unused, basically wasted education for 99%
| of the "person-facts" that are picked up by the class.
| Dusseldorf wrote:
| Sure, but regardless of what the better way to learn is,
| a large part of the purpose of a degree is to demonstrate
| to potential employers that you have a certain
| proficiency in a field. Universities stake their
| reputation and accreditation on being able to measure
| that proficiency. We've spent thousands of years figuring
| out how to do that in various ways. Maybe some day it
| will be easy to do that for course loads that heavily
| utilize LLMs, but I don't think we're quite at that point
| yet. Certainly they have value in assisting with
| learning, but it's important to defend the old methods
| until we get there.
| sireat wrote:
| Actually, before
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Amos_Comenius in 17th
| century much of education was route memorization.
|
| Then it was corporal punishment if you did not learn
| quickly enough.
|
| Comenius idea was of pansophia - knowledge for all. Also
| his Latin textbook -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janua_Linguarum_Reserata
| was quite revolutionary - in using relations to real
| world knowledge to learn a new language.
|
| Even more ground breaking was his picture book for
| children - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbis_Pictus .
| We take hybrid approach to learning for granted these
| days.
|
| Even then Comenius was mostly forgotten in the
| enlightenment of 18th century - probably ideas of Jean-
| Jacques Rousseau took over - with insufficient backing.
| obscurette wrote:
| Education is bound to culture and life in general. We
| just can't imagine nowadays how fatalistic and submissive
| to god and authority people's world view was before
| protestants in medieval Europe. An education bound to
| memorization and pretty violent culture helped to mould
| the people society needed at the time. But it wasn't
| always like that. There were quite different views to
| learning in ancient Greek, during golden age of islam
| etc.
| Tryk wrote:
| The problem is that many students come to university unequipped
| with the discipline it takes to actually study. Teaching
| students how to effectively learn is a side-effect of
| university education.
| jumploops wrote:
| Yes, I think curiosity dies well before university for most
| students.
|
| The specific examples I recall most vividly were from 4th
| grade and 7th grade.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| The longer I go without seeing cases of ai supercharging
| learning, the more suspicious I get that it just won't. And no,
| self reports that it makes internet denizens feel super
| educated, don't count.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| Wasn't this the promise of MOOCs in the 2010s?
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> Of course, LLMs in the current educational landscape
| (homework-heavy) only benefit the students who are truly
| curious
|
| I think you hit on a major issue: _Homework-heavy_. What I
| think would benefit the truly curious is _spare time_. These
| things are at odds with one another. Present-day busy work
| could easily be replaced by occupying kids ' attention with
| continual lessons that require a large quantity of low-quality
| engagement with the LLM. Or an addictive dopamine reward system
| that also rewards shallow engagement -- like social media.
|
| I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was
| that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I
| could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play
| music, read, and learn electronics.
|
| And there's something else I think might be missing, which is
| effort. For me, music and electronics were not easy. There was
| no exam, but I could measure my own progress -- either the
| circuit worked or it didn't. Without some kind of "external
| reference" I'm not sure that in-depth research through LLMs
| will result in any true understanding. I'm a physicist, and
| I've known a lot of people who believe that they understand
| physics because they read a bunch of popular books about it. "I
| finally understand quantum mechanics."
| alexchantavy wrote:
| > I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid
| was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that
| I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like
| play music, read, and learn electronics.
|
| I see both sides of this. When I was a teenager, I went to a
| pretty bad middle school where there were fights everyday,
| and I wasn't learning anything from the easy homework. On the
| upside, I had tons of free time to teach myself how to make
| websites and get into all kinds of trouble botting my
| favorite online games.
|
| My learning always hit a wall though because I wasn't able to
| learn programming on my own. I eventually asked my parents to
| send me to a school that had a lot more structure (and a lot
| more homework), and then I properly learned math and logic
| and programming from first principles. The upside: I could
| code. The downside: there was no free time to apply this
| knowledge to anything fun
| protocolture wrote:
| >I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid
| was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that
| I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like
| play music, read, and learn electronics.
|
| Yeah I feel like teachers are going to try and use LLMs as an
| excuse to push more of the burden of schooling to their
| pupils homelife somehow. Like, increasing homework burdens to
| compensate.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Spare time, haha, most people nowadays have a hard time
| having some dead time. The habitual checking of socials or
| feeds has killed the mind wandering time. People feel
| uncomfortable or consiser life boring with the device induced
| dopamine fix. Corporations got us by the balls.
| mcdeltat wrote:
| > I remember often being "stuck" on some concept (usually in
| biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave
| something as truth, this dismissing my request for further
| depth.
|
| This resonates with me a lot. I used to dismiss AI as useless
| hogwash, but have recently done a near total 180 as I realised
| it's quite useful for exploratory learning.
|
| Not sure about others but a lot of my learning comes from
| comparison of a concept with other related concepts. Reading
| definitions off a page usually doesn't do it for me. I really
| need to dig to the heart of my understanding and challenge my
| assumptions, which is easiest done talking to someone. (You
| can't usually google "why does X do Y and not Z when ABC" and
| then spin off from that onto the next train of reasoning).
|
| Hence ChatGPT is surprisingly useful. Even if it's wrong some
| of the time. With a combination of my baseline knowledge,
| logic, cross referencing, and experimentation, it becomes
| useful enough to advance my understanding. I'm not asking
| ChatGPT to solve my problem, more like I'm getting it to bounce
| off my thoughts until I discover a direction where I can solve
| my problem.
| epiecs wrote:
| Indeed. I never really used AI until recently but now I use
| it sometimes as a smarter search engine that can give me
| abstracts.
|
| Eg. it's easy to ask copilot: can you give me a list of free,
| open source mqtt brokers and give me some statistics in the
| form of a table
|
| And copilot (or any other ai) does this quite nicely. This is
| not something that you can ask a traditional search engine.
|
| Offcourse you do need to know enough of the underlying
| material and double check what output you get for when the AI
| is hallucinating.
| brilee wrote:
| I am building such an AI tutoring experience, focusing on a
| Socratic style with product support for forking conversations
| onto tangents. Happy to add you to the waitlist, will probably
| publish an MVP in a few weeks.
| ericmcer wrote:
| yeah this is a good point, just adjust coursework from multiple
| choice tests and fill in the blank homework to larger scale
| projects.
|
| Putting together a project using the AI help will be a very
| close mimicry of what real work will be like and if the teacher
| is good they will learn way more than being able to spout
| information from memory.
| johnea wrote:
| One of the most offensive words in the anthropomophization of
| LLMs is: hallucinate.
|
| It's not only an anthropomorphism, it's also a euphemism.
|
| A correct interpretation of the word would imply that the LLM has
| some fantastical vision that it mistakes for reality. What utter
| bullsh1t.
|
| Let's just use the correct word for this type of output: wrong.
|
| When the LLM generates a sequence of words, that may or may not
| be grammatically correct, but infers a state or conclusion that
| is not factually correct; lets state what actually happened: the
| LLM generated text was WRONG.
|
| It didn't take a trip down Alice's rabbit hole, it just put words
| together into a stream that inferred a piece of information that
| was incorrect, it was just WRONG.
|
| The euphemistic aspect of using this word is a greater offense
| than the anthropomorphism, because it's painting some cutesy
| picture of what happened, instead of accurately acknowledging
| that the s/w generated an incorrect result. It's covering up for
| the inherent short comings of the tech.
| lotu wrote:
| Thank fuck for saying this
| yeyeyeyeyeyeyee wrote:
| s/fuck/you/
| pugio wrote:
| When a person hallucinates a dragon coming for them, they are
| wrong, but we still use a different word to more precisely
| indicate the class of error.
|
| Not all llm errors are hallucinations - if an llm tells me that
| 3 + 5 is 7, It's just wrong. If it tells me that the source for
| 3 + 5 being 7 is a seminal paper entitled "On the relative
| accuracy of summing numbers to a region +-1 from the fourth
| prime", we would call that a hallucination. In modern parlance
| " hallucination" has become a term of art to represent a
| particular class of error that llms are prone to. (Others have
| argued that "confabulation" would be more accurate, but it
| hasn't really caught on.)
|
| It's perfectly normal to repurpose terms and
| anthropomorphizations to represent aspects of the world or
| systems that we create. You're welcome to try to introduce
| other terms that don't include any anthropomorphization, but
| saying it's "just wrong" conveys less information and isn't as
| useful.
| johnea wrote:
| I think your defense of reusing terms for new phenomenon is
| fair.
|
| But in this specific case, I would say the reuse of this
| particular word, to apply to this particular error, is still
| incorrect.
|
| A person hallucinating is based on a many leveled experience
| of consciousness.
|
| The LLM has nothing of the sort.
|
| It doesn't have a hierarchy of knowledge which it is sorting
| to determine what is correct and what is not. It doesn't have
| a "world view" based on a lifetime of that knowledge sorting.
|
| In fact, it doesn't have any representation of knowledge at
| all. Much less a concept of whether that knowledge is correct
| or not.
|
| What it has is a model of what words came in what order, in
| the training set on which it was "trained" (another, and
| somewhat more accurate, anthropomorphism).
|
| So without anything resembling conscious thought, it's not
| possible for an LLM to do anything even slightly resembling
| human hallucination.
|
| As such, when the text generated by an LLM is not factually
| correct, it's not an hallucination, it's just wrong.
| johnea wrote:
| To cite integrative-psych:
|
| https://www.integrative-psych.org/resources/confabulation-
| no...
|
| "...this usage is misleading, as it suggests a perceptual
| process that LLMs, which lack sensory input, do not
| possess."
|
| They prefer the word "confabulation", but I would also
| differ with that.
|
| They define confabulation: "the brain creates plausible but
| incorrect memories to fill gaps".
|
| Since, as with the lack of perceptions, LLMs are not
| retaining anything like a memory, I would also argue this
| term is inappropriate.
|
| In terms of differentiating error categories, it's
| straightforward to specify, math error, spelling error,
| grammatical error, when those occur.
|
| In the case of syntactically correct, but factually
| incorrect output, the word "wrong" describes this specific
| error category much more accurately than "hallucinate",
| which carries a host of inaccurate psychological
| implications.
|
| This also speaks to a main point of my original post, that
| the use of "hallucinate" is euphemistic.
|
| When we use a s/w tool for the input of human language
| questions, with the objective of receiving correct human
| language answers, just having a syntactically correct
| answer is not sufficient.
|
| It needs to be emphasized that answers in this category are
| "wrong", they are not factually correct.
|
| Using the word "hallucinate" is making an excuse for, and
| thus obfuscating, this factual error generated by the s/w
| tool.
| jaza wrote:
| Back in my day, we also called it Garbage In Garbage Out.
| wpm wrote:
| I teach an "advanced" shell scripting course with an exam.
|
| I mark "hallucinations" as "LLM Slop" in my grading sheets,
| when someone gives me a 100-character sed filter that just
| doesn't work that there is no way we discussed in class/in
| examples/in materials, or a made up API endpoint, or non-
| nonsensical file paths that reference non-existent commands.
|
| Slop is an overused term these days, but it sums it up for me.
| Slop, from a trough, thrown out by an uncaring overseer, to be
| greedily eaten up by the piggies, who don't care if its full of
| shit.
| bosuanzi wrote:
| Different times have different teaching tasks, which is the sign
| of human progress.
|
| Just like after the invention of computers, those methods of how
| to do manual calculations faster can be eliminated from teaching
| tasks. Education shifted towards teaching students how to use
| computational tools effectively. This allowed students to solve
| more complex problems and work on higher-level concepts that
| manual calculations couldn't easily address.
|
| In the era of AI, what teachers need to think about is not to
| punitively prohibit students from using AI, but to adjust the
| teaching content to better help students master related subjects
| faster and better through AI.
| jobigoud wrote:
| On one hand I tend to agree because these students will also be
| able to use AI when they actually hit the workplace, but on the
| other hand it has never happened that the tools we use are
| better than us at so many tasks.
|
| How long before a centaur team of human + AI is less effective
| than the AI alone?
| sshine wrote:
| I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a
| good AI policy is.
|
| On the one hand, I use AI extensively for my own learning, and
| it's helping me a lot.
|
| On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly.
|
| Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to
| overcome as effortlessly as possible. Once they're past this
| hurdle, they can mind their own business again. To them, AI is
| not a tutor, but a homework solver.
|
| I can't ask them to not use computers.
|
| I can't ask them to write in a language I made the compiler for
| that doesn't exist anywhere, since I teach at a (pre-university)
| level where that kind of skill transfer doesn't reliably occur.
|
| So far we do project work and oral exams: Project work because it
| relies on cooperation and the assignment and evaluation is open-
| ended: There's no singular task description that can be plotted
| into an LLM. Oral exams because it becomes obvious how skilled
| they are, how deep their knowledge is.
|
| But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to
| exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them
| and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so far
| without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of life
| and won't lead them to a meaningful existence as a professional
| programmer.
|
| Teaching Linux basics doesn't suffer the same because the exam-
| preparing exercise is typing things into a terminal, and LLMs
| still don't generally have API access to terminals.
|
| Maybe providing the IDE online and observing copy-paste is a way
| forward. I just don't like the tendency that students can't run
| software on their own computers.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Oral exams because it becomes obvious how skilled they are,
| how deep their knowledge is.
|
| Assuming you have access to a computer lab, have you considered
| requiring in-class programming exercises, regularly? Those
| could be a good way of checking actual skills.
|
| > Maybe providing the IDE online and observing copy-paste is a
| way forward. I just don't like the tendency that students can't
| run software on their own computers.
|
| And you'll frustrate the handful of students who know what
| they're doing and want to use a programmer's editor. I know
| that I wouldn't have wanted to type a large pile of code into a
| web anything.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > I know that I wouldn't have wanted to type a large pile of
| code into a web anything.
|
| I might not have liked that, but I sure would have liked to
| see my useless classmates being _forced_ to learn without
| cheating.
| mac-mc wrote:
| You can provide vscode, vim and emacs all in some web
| interface, and those are plenty good enough for those use
| cases. Choosing the plugin list for each would also be a good
| bikeshedding exercise for the department.
|
| Even IntelliJ has gateway
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > Even IntelliJ has gateway
|
| By IntelliJ's own (on-machine) standards, Gateway is crap.
| I use the vi emulation mode (using ideavim) and the damn
| thing gets out of sync unless you type at like 20wpm or
| something. Then it tries to rollback whatever you type
| until you restart it and retry. I can't believe it is made
| by the same Jetbrains known for their excellent software.
| Aeolun wrote:
| You can get one of those card punching machines and have them
| hand in stacks of cards?
| sas224dbm wrote:
| Grandpa can help with that too
| downboots wrote:
| And don't forget to get on their case with accusations of
| technology use that equate to the Turing test
| EGreg wrote:
| There you go. Actually that would be a great service, wouldn't
| it? Having them explain to an LLM what they are doing, out
| loud, while doing it, online. On a site that you trust to host
| it.
| timr wrote:
| I'm not _that_ old, and yet my university CS courses evaluated
| people with group projects, and in-person paper exams. We weren
| 't allowed to bring computers or calculators into the exam room
| (or at least, not any calculators with programming or memory).
| It was fine.
|
| I don't see why this is so hard, other than the usual
| intergenerational whining / a heaping pile of student
| entitlement.
|
| If anything, the classes that required extensive paper-writing
| for evaluation are the ones that seem to be in trouble to me. I
| guess we're back to oral exams and blue books for those, but
| again...worked fine for prior generations.
| eru wrote:
| > I don't see why this is so hard, other than the usual
| intergenerational whining / a heaping pile of student
| entitlement.
|
| You know that grading paper exams is a lot more hassle _for
| the teachers_?
|
| Your overall point might or might not still stand. I'm just
| responding to your 'I don't see why this is so hard'. Show
| some imagination for why other people hold their positions.
|
| (I'm sure there's lots of other factors that come into play
| that I am not thinking of here.)
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Why can't the teachers use LLMs to grade?
| eru wrote:
| Might be interesting. You can at least use modern AI to
| turn scans of hand-scrawled-on paper into something
| readable.
| obscurette wrote:
| In general - why I'd put my effort into visiting (and
| paying for) a school and learning in such case? That's
| not what schools are for. I can get any amount of grades
| I want from LLM myself.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Grading is already mechanical, it's just a human does it.
| I'm not sure what you're objecting to here.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Ah, the eternal dream of offloading all human labor to
| machines. Why can't teachers just let an LLM grade?
| Because, of course, nothing says "educational integrity"
| like a glorified autocomplete deciding whether little
| Timmy's essay on Shakespeare adequately captures the
| existential dread of Hamlet. Sure, let's trust a model
| that hallucinates citations. But fine, if we're really
| committed to stripping all nuance from education, why
| stop there? Let's just plug students into Anki's FSRS
| algorithm and call it a day. Just assign grades based on
| how fast their retention decays, because nothing says
| "holistic assessment" like reducing a human being to a
| set of coefficients in a spaced repetition formula. Never
| mind that actual learning involves things like critical
| thinking or, heaven forbid, creativity. No, no, we'll
| just reduce the entire process to a forgetting curve.
| Because nothing inspires a love of knowledge like
| treating human minds as poorly optimized flashcard decks,
| mechanically processed and discarded the moment their
| retention scores dip below acceptable thresholds.
| timr wrote:
| ...and yet, somehow we managed?
|
| > Show some imagination for why other people hold their
| positions.
|
| I say that as someone who has also graded piles of paper
| exams in graduate school (also not that long ago!)
|
| I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if
| the primary objection _really is_ that teachers have to
| _grade_ , then no, I don't have any sympathy.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It sorta depends on the material... I always thought
| paper programming tests were dumb: when I was taking them
| and when I was proctoring/grading them. It is not that
| similar to writing a program in an IDE where it will tell
| you if you make a little mistake, and often help you work
| your way through it.
|
| We made it. But, that's survivorship bias, right? We
| can't really know how much potential has wasted.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Hear, hear!
|
| Doing programming on paper seems to me like assessing
| someone's skills in acrobatics by watching them do the
| motions in a zero-gravity environment. Without the
| affordances given by the computer, it's just not the same
| activity.
| timr wrote:
| Computer science, the academic discipline, is to
| programming as mechanics is to bowling.
|
| You can very easily test CS concepts on paper, and
| programming is demonstrated via group projects.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Absolutely. It makes good sense to describe algorithms on
| paper via pseudo-code and diagrams, but they shouldn't be
| expected to write working code on paper.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I kinda had this sentiment until I actually started
| working - quite often an issue only manifests at an
| obscure customer system or is a race condition that it
| too rare to catch reliably, yet happens often enough so
| you can't just ignore it.
|
| To solve those in a reasonable amount of time, you need
| to form a mental model of what is going on & how to fix
| it. Having access to a computer by itself won't really
| help for those.
|
| In that context paper exams for computer science make
| much more sense to me now - they want you to understand
| the problem and provide a solution, with pen and paper
| being the output format.
| eru wrote:
| > ...and yet, somehow we managed?
|
| People in the past put up with all kinds of struggles.
| They had to.
|
| > I don't believe the argument you are making is true,
| but if the primary objection really is that teachers have
| to grade, then no, I don't have any sympathy.
|
| I have no clue what the primary objection really is. I
| was responding to "I don't see why this is so hard",
| which just shows a lack of imagination.
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| You're making it seem those guys worked the fields 14
| hours straight. It's just some paperwork..
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > and in-person paper exams.
|
| Yup. ~25 years ago competitions / NOI / leet_coding as they
| call it now were in a proctored room, computers with no
| internet access, just plain old borland c, a few problems and
| 3h of typing. All the uni exams were pen & paper. C++ OOP on
| paper was fun, but iirc the scoring was pretty lax (i.e.
| minor typos were usually ignored).
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I'm not too old either and in my university, CS was my major,
| we did group projects and in person paper exams as well.
|
| We wrote c++ on paper for some questions and were graded on
| it. Ofcourse the tutors were lenient on the syntax they cared
| about the algorithm and the data structures not so much for
| the code. They did test syntax knowledge as well but more in
| code reasoning segments, i.e questions like what's the value
| of a after these two statements or after this loop is run.
|
| We also had exams in the lab with computers disconnected from
| the internet. I don't remember the details of the grading but
| essentially the teaching team was in the room and pretty much
| scored us then and there.
| intended wrote:
| Thing is, this hits the scaling problem in education and
| fucking hard.
|
| There's such a shortfall of teachers globally, and the role
| is a public good, so it's constantly underpaid.
|
| And if you are good - why would you teach ? You'd get paid to
| just take advantage of your skills.
|
| And now we have a tool that makes it impossible to know if
| you have taught anyone because they can pass your exams.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me
| a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly.
|
| > small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without
| having connected two dots, and I have to fail them ... won't
| lead them to a meaningful existence
|
| I don't see a problem, the system is working.
|
| The same group of people that are going to loose their job to
| an LLM arent getting smarter because of how they are using
| LLM's.
| presentation wrote:
| Ideally the system would encourage those dum-dums to realize
| they need to change their ways before they're screwed. Unless
| the system working is that people get screwed and cause
| problems for the rest of society.
| eru wrote:
| I want to agree with your point, but also: someone who's
| middle-class enough to make it to uni in the first place
| won't cause much trouble for society.
|
| Paternalism in the sense of 'we know what's better for you
| than you do' is perhaps justified for those people who
| really don't know better. But I don't think we should
| overextend that notion.
| presentation wrote:
| Well given that the article is about young people in
| schools, a little paternalism isn't a bad thing.
| eru wrote:
| Well, they also have actual parents.
|
| I have to apologise, I was under this impression this
| thread was about university students, who should be old
| enough to fend for themselves (and enjoy respectively
| suffer from the consequences of their own actions). But I
| don't think anyone actually mentioned that age in the
| thread. I mixed it up with another one.
| sshine wrote:
| The students I teach are pre-university. It's called
| business school, and if a BSc is level 7, MSc is level 8
| and PhD is level 9, then this is level 5. So they can
| become good programmers, but there's no math in the whole
| study programme.
| sshine wrote:
| > _The same group of people that are going to loose their job
| to an LLM arent getting smarter because of how they are using
| LLM 's._
|
| Students who use LLMs and professional programmers who use
| LLMs: I wouldn't say it's necessarily the same group of
| people.
|
| Sure, their incentives are the same, and they're equally
| unlikely to maintain jobs in the future.
|
| But students can be told that their approach to become AI
| secretaries isn't going to pan out. They're not actively
| sacrificing a career because they're out of options. They can
| still learn valuable skills, because what they were taught
| has not been made redundant yet, unlike mediocre programmers
| who can only just compete with LLM gunk.
| frelupin_ wrote:
| > it gets work done quickly and poorly
|
| This is only temporary. It will be able to code like anyone in
| time. The only way around this will be coding in-person, but
| only in elementary courses. Everyone in business will be using
| AI to code, so that will be the way in most university courses
| as well.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It already can. Im flabbergasted how people haven't still
| figured out how good gemini 2.5 is.
| frelupin_ wrote:
| Claude 3.7 and 4 are better for me than Gemini 2.5 for
| vibing with legacy code. Gemini 2.5 has some great
| solutions if you handhold it, but tends to make too many
| assumptions about what would be better which can tear
| things up as an agent, imo. In other words, Gemini is
| smarter, but less practical when working with existing
| code, from what I've experienced. To each their own,
| though.
| eru wrote:
| The Claudes are a lot worse at even mildly challenging
| algorithmic problems than Gemini 2.5 Pro.
|
| However, most legacy code is fairly primitive on that
| level, so my observation is in no way contradicting
| yours.
| karn97 wrote:
| Comments like this are just delusional shit can't even do
| uni homework lmao
| viccis wrote:
| IMO no amount of AI should be used during an undergrad
| education, but I can see how people would react more strongly
| to its use in these intro to programming courses. I don't
| think there's as much of an issue with using it to churn out
| some C for an operating systems course or whatever. The main
| issue with it in programming education is when learning
| rudiments of programming IS the point of the course. Same
| with using to it crank out essays for freshman English
| courses. These courses are designed to introduce fundamental
| raw skills that everything else builds on. Someone's ability
| to write good code isn't as big a deal for classes in OS,
| algs, compilers, ML, etc., as the main concepts of those
| courses are.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they
| have to overcome as effortlessly as possible.
|
| It has been interesting to see this idea propagate throughout
| online spaces like Hacker News, too. Even before LLMs, the
| topic of cheating always drew a strangely large number of pro-
| cheating comments from people arguing that college is useless,
| a degree is just a piece of paper, knowledge learned in classes
| is worthless, and therefore cheating is a rational decision.
|
| Meanwhile, whenever I've done hiring or internships screens for
| college students it's trivial to see which students are
| actually learning the material and which ones treat every stage
| of their academic and career as a game they need to talk their
| way through while avoiding the hard questions.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| > But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the
| way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to
| fail them and tell them that the three semesters they have
| wasted so far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a
| waste of life
|
| Wow.
| paulluuk wrote:
| Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a
| "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're
| dumb", so motivational.
|
| I guess this "tough love" attitude helps for some people? But
| I think mostly it's just that people think it works for
| _other_ people, but rarely people think that this works when
| applied to themselves.
|
| Like, imagine the school administration walking up to this
| teacher and saying "hey dum dum, you're failing too many
| students and the time you've spent teaching them is a waste
| of life."
|
| Many teachers seem to think that students go to
| school/university because they're genuinely interested in
| motivated. But more often then not, they're there because of
| societal pressure, because they know they need a degree to
| have any kind of decent living standard, and because their
| parents told them to. Yeah you can call them names, call them
| lazy or whatever, but that's kinda like pointing at poor
| people and saying they should invest more.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that
| you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and
| "you're dumb", so motivational.
|
| I'm sure GP isn't calling them dum-dum to their face. If
| they can't even do basic stuff, which seems to be their
| criteria here for the name calling, maybe a politely given
| reality-check isn't that bad. Some will wake up to the
| gravity of their situation and put in the hard work and
| surprise their teacher.
|
| > Yeah you can call them names, call them lazy or whatever,
| but that's kinda like pointing at poor people and saying
| they should invest more.
|
| They _should_ invest more because in this case, the
| "investment' is something that the curriculum simply
| demands - dedication and effort. I mean unless one is a
| genius, since when that demand is unreasonable? You want to
| work with people who got their degree without knowing their
| shit? (not saying that everyone who doesn't have a degree
| isn't knowledgeable - I've worked with very smart self-
| taught people).
| sshine wrote:
| > _I 'm sure GP isn't calling them dum-dum to their face.
| If they can't even do basic stuff, which seems to be
| their criteria here for the name calling, maybe a
| politely given reality-check isn't that bad. Some will
| wake up to the gravity of their situation and put in the
| hard work and surprise their teacher._
|
| I certainly am not out to hurt anyone. I have a great
| deal of sympathy for someone who spent 18 months learning
| absolutely nothing, hiding behind their study group,
| making the LLM do the work, and apathetic teachers on
| prior semesters who could have caught this behavior.
|
| But I will be blunt with them and say: "You have a very
| limited time before your studies end, and you have so far
| not learned basic programming. This means you will not be
| able to use your certificate for anything."
|
| And then I will send an email to them, the teacher they
| will have on the next semester, and the study councillor,
| and say that this person urgently needs a better group
| and extra help. And I'll personally follow up after some
| weeks to see if they're actually preparing for their re-
| exam in a constructive way.
|
| It usually came this far because giving a poor student
| the lowest grade rather than failing them resolves the
| teacher of paperwork and re-exams, which means they might
| get a day off.
|
| Being blunt is being kind.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| You are misrepresenting what the original poster said. He
| did not say that he actually called kids "dum-dums" or that
| the kids were, themselves, a waste of life. He said that
| using AI to blast through assignments without learning
| anything from them was a waste of life.
|
| Frankly I applaud that approach. Classes are to convey
| knowledge, even if the student only gives a shit about the
| diploma at the end of the road. At least someone cares
| enough to tell these students the truth about where that
| approach is going to take them in life.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I have a hard time sympathizing with a student who cheated
| for 3 semesters then hit a brick wall when they finally
| can't cheat. A student struggling with the material is one
| thing but a student finally getting caught after cheating
| through three semesters is another. "Dum dum" is being kind
| IMO.
| sshine wrote:
| I'm not using the word dum-dum to their face.
|
| And when you see them several times a week for a
| semester, the sympathy grows on me at least. The people
| who don't show up before the exam and fail miserably,
| they're a little harder to sympathise with.
| protocolture wrote:
| When I was studying games programming we used an in house
| framework developed by the lecturers for OGRE.
|
| At the time it was optional, but I get the feeling that if they
| still use that framework, it just became mandatory, because it
| has no internet facing documentation.
|
| That said, I imagine they might have chucked it in for Unity
| before AI hit, in which case they are largely out of luck.
|
| >But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the way
| to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail
| them and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so
| far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of
| life and won't lead them to a meaningful existence as a
| professional programmer.
|
| This happened to me with my 3d maths class, and I was able to
| power through a second run. But I am not sure I learned
| anything super meaningful, other than I should have been
| cramming better.
| stevage wrote:
| > Teaching Linux basics doesn't suffer the same because the
| exam-preparing exercise is typing things into a terminal, and
| LLMs still don't generally have API access to terminals.
|
| Huh, fighting my way through a Linux CLI is exactly the kind of
| thing I use Chatgpt for professionally.
|
| I did study it in compsci, but those commands are inherently
| not memorable.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Yes, LLMs have had API access to terminals for quite a while
| now. I've been using Windsurf and Claude Code to type
| terminal commands for me for a long while (and `gh copilot
| suggest` before that) and couldn't be happier. I still
| manually review most of them before approving, but I've seen
| that the chances of the AI getting an advanced incantation
| right on the first try are much higher than mine, and I
| haven't yet once had it make a disastrous one, while that's
| happened to me quite a few times with commands I typed on my
| own.
| stevage wrote:
| Oh, I just copy paste back and forth.
|
| Often I just paste an error with some scroll back but no
| instructions and it works out what I need.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| >and I haven't yet once had it make a disastrous one
|
| I've had it make some pretty bad ones. Not directly hooked
| in to my terminal, just copy and paste. A couple of git
| doozies that lost my work, but I've done those too. Others
| more subtle, one of note is a ZFS ZPOOL creation script it
| gave me used classic linux style /dev/sda style drive
| identifiers instead of proper /dev/by-id paths which led to
| the disks being marked as failed every time I rebooted.
| Sure, that's on me for not verifying, but I was a little
| out of my depth with ZFS on Linux and thought that ZFS' own
| internal uuid scheme was handling it.
| thresher wrote:
| I teach computer science / programming, and I know what a good
| AI policy is: No AI.
|
| (Dramatic. AI is fine for upper-division courses, maybe.
| Absolutely no use for it in introductory courses.)
|
| Our school converted a computer lab to a programming lab.
| Computers in the lab have editors/compilers/interpreters, and
| whitelist documentation, plus an internal server for grading
| and submission. No internet access otherwise. We've used it for
| one course so far with good results, and and extending it to
| more courses in the fall.
|
| An upside: our exams are now auto-graded (professors are happy)
| and students get to compile/run/test code on exams (students
| are happy).
|
| >Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have
| to overcome as effortlessly as possible.
|
| This is the real demon to vanquish. We're approaching course
| design differently now (a work in progress) to tie coding exams
| in the lab to the homework, so that solving the homework (worth
| a pittance of the grade) is direct preparation for the exam
| (the lion's share of the grade).
| nprateem wrote:
| Is it in a Faraday cage too or do you just confiscate their
| phones. Or do you naively believe they aren't just using AI
| on their phones?
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I don't know what they do, but when we did it back in the
| 2000's there was a no phone policy and the exams were
| proctored.
|
| People could try to cheat, but it would be pretty stupid to
| think they would not catch you.
| intended wrote:
| You should look at the cheating stories that come out of
| India, China, South Korea and other places that have been
| dealing with this dynamic for decades upon decades.
|
| I know of a time where america didn't have this problem and
| I could see it ramping up, because of my experience in
| India.
|
| People will spend incredible efforts to cheat.
|
| Like stories of parents or conspirators scaling buildings
| to whisper answers to students from windows.
| timemct wrote:
| >Our school converted a computer lab to a programming lab.
| Computers in the lab have editors/compilers/interpreters, and
| whitelist documentation, plus an internal server for grading
| and submission. No internet access otherwise. We've used it
| for one course so far with good results, and extending it to
| more courses in the fall.
|
| As an higher education (university) IT admin who is
| responsible for the CS program's computer labs and is also
| enrolled in this CS program, I would love to hear more about
| this setup, please & thank you. As recently as last semester,
| CS professors have been doing pen'n paper exams and group
| projects. This setup sounds great!
| gchallen wrote:
| We've been doing this at Illinois for 10 years now. Here's
| the website with a description of the facility:
| https://cbtf.illinois.edu/. My colleagues have also
| published multiple papers on the testing center--
| operations, policies, results, and so on.
|
| It's a complete game changer for assessment--anything,
| really, but basic programming skills in particular. At this
| point I wouldn't teach without it.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Isn't auto-grading cheating by the instructors? Isn't part of
| their job providing their expert feedback by actually reading
| the code the students have generating and providing feedback
| and suggestions for improvement even at for exams? A good
| educational program treats exams as learning opportunities,
| not just evaluations.
|
| So if the professors can cheat and they're happy about having
| to do less teaching work, thereby giving the students a
| lower-quality educational experience, why shouldn't the
| students just get an LLM to write code that passes the auto-
| grader's checks? Then everyone's happy - the administration
| is getting the tuition, the professors don't have to grade or
| give feedback individually, and the students can finish their
| assignments in half an hour instead of having to stay up all
| night. Win win win!
| gchallen wrote:
| Immediate feedback from a good autograder provides a much
| more interactive learning experience for students. They are
| able to face and correct their mistakes in real time until
| they arrive at a correct solution. That's a real learning
| opportunity.
|
| The value of educational feedback drops rapidly as time
| passes. If a student receives immediate feedback and the
| opportunity to try again, they are much more likely to
| continue attempting to solve the problem. Autograders can
| support both; humans, neither. It typically takes hours or
| days to manually grade code just once. By that point
| students are unlikely to pay much attention to the
| feedback, and the considerable expense of human grading
| makes it unlikely that they are able to try again. That's
| just evaluation.
|
| And the idea that instructors of computer science courses
| are in a position to provide "expert feedback" is very
| questionable. Most CS faculty don't create or maintain
| software. Grading is usually done by either research-
| focused Ph.D. students or undergraduates with barely more
| experience than the students they are evaluating.
| sshine wrote:
| > _Isn 't auto-grading cheating by the instructors?_
|
| Certainly not. There's a misconception at play here.
|
| Once you have graded a few thousand assignments, you
| realize that people make the same mistakes. You think "I
| could do a really good write-up for the next student to
| make this mistake," and so you do and you save it as a
| snippet, and soon enough, 90% of your feedback are
| elaborate snippets. Once in a while you realize someone
| makes a new mistake, and it deserves another elaborate
| snippet. Some snippets don't generalise. That's called
| personal feedback. Other snippets generalise insanely.
| That's called being efficient.
|
| Students don't care if their neighbors got the same
| feedback if the feedback applies well and is excellent. The
| difficult part is making that feedback apply well. A human
| robot will make that job better. And building a bot that
| gives the right feedback based on patterns is... actually a
| lot of work, even compared to copy-pasting snippets
| thousands of times.
|
| But if you repeat an exercise enough times, it may be worth
| it.
|
| Students are incentivised to put in the work in order to
| learn. Students cannot learn by copy-pasting from LLMs.
|
| Instructors are incentivised to put in the work in order to
| provide authentic, valuable feedback. Instructors can
| provide that by repeating their best feedback when
| applicable. If instructors fed assignments to an LLM and
| said "give feedback", that'd be in the category of bullshit
| behavior we're criticising students for.
| sshine wrote:
| > _Our school converted a computer lab to a programming lab.
| Computers in the lab have editors /compilers/interpreters,
| and whitelist documentation, plus an internal server for
| grading and submission. No internet access otherwise. We've
| used it for one course so far with good results, and and
| extending it to more courses in the fall._
|
| Excellent approach. It requires a big buy-in from the school.
|
| Thanks for suggesting it.
|
| I'm doing something for one kind of assignment inspired by
| the game "bashcrawl" where you have to learn Linux commands
| through an adventure-style game. I'm bundling it in a
| container and letting you submit your progress via curl
| commands, so that you pass after having run a certain set of
| commands. Trying to make the levels unskippable by using
| tarballs. Essentially, if you can break the game instead of
| beating it honestly, you get a passing grade, too.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| If there is another course where students design their own
| programming language, maybe you could use the best of the
| previous year's. That way LLMs are unlikely to be able to
| (easily) produce correct syntax. Just a thought from someone
| who teaches in a totally different neck of the
| mathematical/computational woods.
| jmmcd wrote:
| Modern LLMs can one-shot code in a totally new language, if
| you provide the language manual. And you have to provide the
| language manual, because otherwise how can the students learn
| the language.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > their bullshit is a waste of life and won't lead them to a
| meaningful existence as a professional programmer
|
| That's where you're wrong. Being a professional programmer is
| 10% programming, 40% office politics, and 50% project
| management. If your student managed to get halfway through
| college without any actual programming skills, they're perfect
| candidate, because they clearly own the 90% of skills needed to
| be a professional programmer.
| bearjaws wrote:
| > Being a professional programmer is 10% programming, 40%
| office politics, and 50% project management.
|
| I'd say that really depends on your job.
|
| At smaller companies, your job will likely be 60% programming
| at a minimum.
|
| Only at ~100 employees do companies fall into lots of
| meetings and politics.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Hence my personal policy of never working for a company
| with more than ~100-150 people.
| sshine wrote:
| In my experience, it's 70% programming, 20% office politics,
| and 10% project management. People who realize late they're
| no good at programming, or don't enjoy it, will pivot towards
| other kinds of work, like project management. But people who
| think they'll have luck managing people without having any
| grasp of the skill set of the people they manage, they either
| need really good people skills, or they're obnoxiously
| incompetent in both humans and computers.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Do you find that thinking of your students as dum-dums makes
| you a better teacher?
| sshine wrote:
| Neither better nor worse.
|
| Some of my students are naturally talented.
|
| Others achieve great results through hard work.
|
| Some half-assedly make it.
|
| And some don't even try.
|
| Those are the dum-dums.
|
| They just play games and think everything is going to work
| out without effort.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Programming with AI is the job now. That's what you need to be
| teaching if you want your graduates to get a job programming.
|
| What's changed is that "some working code" is no longer proof
| that a student understands the material.
|
| You're going to need a new way to identify students that
| understand the material.
| sshine wrote:
| There really are two opposite policies at play:
| - Just say no to AI - Just embrace AI
|
| I ran one semester embracing AI, and... I don't know, I don't
| have enough to compare with, but clearly it leaves a lot of
| holes in people's understanding. They generate stuff that
| they don't understand. Maybe it's fine. But they're certainly
| worse programmers than I was after having spent the same time
| without LLMs.
| kenjackson wrote:
| The idea with calculators was that as a tool there are higher
| level questions that calculators would help you answer. A simple
| example is that calculators don't solve word problems, but you
| can use them to do the intermediate computations.
|
| What are the higher level questions that LLMs will help with, but
| for which humans are absolutely necessary? The concern I have is
| that this line doesn't exist -- and at the very best it is very
| fuzzy.
|
| Ironically, this higher level task for humans might be ensuring
| that the AIs aren't trying to get us (whatever that means,
| genocide, slavery, etc...).
| lotu wrote:
| Those higher level questions are likely outside the scope of
| the class. Like write a novel or something like that.
| andoando wrote:
| Perhaps we should reconsider the purpose of teaching. If one does
| not want to learn, why are we teaching them?
| lotu wrote:
| Because it is necessary, think about toilet training a toddler.
| squigz wrote:
| > Perhaps we should reconsider the purpose of teaching. If one
| does not want to learn, why are we teaching them?
|
| Certainly there's something to be said for reconsidering much
| of the purpose (and mechanisms) of post-secondary education,
| but we often 'force' children and young adults to do things
| they don't want to do for their own good. I think it's better
| we teach our children the importance of learning - the lack of
| which is what results in, as another commenter puts it,
| students viewing homework as "something they have to overcome"
| Aeolun wrote:
| To avoid November 6, 2024?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Those protestors mostly went to government schools, and were
| likely radicalized because of their time in them. Being in
| school doesn't make the hate in your heart go away. It forces
| you to rub shoulders with the exact kind of people you
| believe are subhuman - and even gives more ammunition for
| them to use in their mind when arguments against racism are
| made to them.
|
| There's a reason why conservatives are so obsessed with
| school choice, LGBT book bans, etc.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| For the vast majority that enroll higher education: Because
| they want a job. They need a job.
|
| The degree is the key that unlocks the door to a job. Not the
| knowledge itself, but the actual physical diploma.
|
| And it REALLY, REALLY doesn't help that there are so many jobs
| out there that could be done just fine with a HS diploma. But
| because reasons, you now need a college degree for that job.
|
| The problem isn't new. For decades people have bought fake
| degrees, hired people to do their work, even hired people the
| impersonate themselves.
| suyash wrote:
| That's a silly argument, onus is on the teacher to make the
| subject interesting for students.
| andoando wrote:
| I don't see how AI is making it harder to make the subject
| more interesting. Homework certainly isn't what gets people
| interested.
|
| But regardless I don't buy that, especially in college where
| you pick your own set of classes.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| As an engineering undergrad, I don't think any online work should
| count toward the student's grade, unless you're allowed to use
| the Internet however you want to complete it. There simply isn't
| any other way of structuring the course that doesn't punish the
| honest students.
| djoldman wrote:
| Basically it comes to this: a sufficiently large proportion of a
| student's grade must come from work impossible to generate with
| AI, e.g. in-person testing.
|
| Unfortunately, 18-year-olds generally can't be trusted to go a
| whole semester without succumbing to the siren call of easy GenAI
| A's. So even if you tell them that the final will be in-person,
| some significant chunk of them will still ChatGPT their way
| through and bomb the final.
|
| Therefore, professors will probably have to have more frequent
| in-person tests so that students get immediate feedback that
| they're gonna fail if they don't actually learn it.
| EGreg wrote:
| Literally this. The education system is lazy and tests people
| only every 30 days, with a test or midterm. This is the
| system's fault. Quiz every day. Catch where people are
| struggling, early. The quiz can be on their phones and let you
| know when they switch apps. Just have them close their laptops,
| take out their phones, scan QR codes from the screen in front,
| or pasted on a wall, and then 5 min quiz on their phones.
| That's what I did.
| pkoird wrote:
| So they bomb their test. And? Isn't that the entire point of an
| exam? If you fail, you fail and presumably have to re-learn the
| contents.
| protocolture wrote:
| >Unfortunately, 18-year-olds generally can't be trusted to go a
| whole semester without succumbing to the siren call of easy
| GenAI A's. So even if you tell them that the final will be in-
| person, some significant chunk of them will still ChatGPT their
| way through and bomb the final.
|
| I really think we need these policies to be developed by the
| opposite of misanthropists.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder if culture has gone wrong where children or students
| simply cannot be failed anymore. Or sometimes even given less
| than perfect grades...
|
| Maybe we should go back to times where failing students was
| seen more so fault of the student than the system. At least
| when majority of students pass and there is no proven fault by
| faculty.
| jamesgill wrote:
| The fundamental question that AI raises for me, but nobody seems
| to answer:
|
| In our competitive, profit-driven world--what is the value of a
| human being and having human experiences?
|
| AI is neither inevitable nor necessary--but it seems like the
| next inevitable step in reducing the value of a human life to its
| 'outputs'.
| nicbou wrote:
| Someone needs to experience the real world and translate it
| into LLM training data.
|
| ChatGPT can't know if the cafe around the corner has banana
| bread, or how it feels to lose a friend to cancer. It can't
| tell you anything unless a human being has experienced it and
| written it down.
|
| It reminds me of that scene from Good Will Hunting:
| https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0119217/quotes/?item=qt04081...
| turtletontine wrote:
| I'm similarly worried about businesses all making "rational"
| decisions to replace their employees with "AI", wherever they
| think they can get away with it. (Note that's not the same
| thing as wherever "AI" can do the job well!)
|
| But I think one place where this hits a wall is liability and
| accountability. Lots of low stakes things will be enshittified
| by "AI" replacements for actual human work. But for things like
| airline pilots, cancer diagnoses, heart surgery - the cost of
| mistakes is so large, that humans in the loop are absolutely
| necessary. If nothing else, at least as an accountability
| shield. A company that makes a tumor-detector black box wants
| to be an _assistive tool_ to improve doctor's "efficiency", not
| the actual front line medical care. If the tool makes a
| mistake, they want no liability. They want all the blame on the
| doctor for trusting their tool and not double checking its
| opinion. I hear that's why a lot of "AI" tools in medicine are
| actually reducing productivity: double checking an "AI's"
| opinion is more work than just thinking and evaluating with
| your own brain.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The funny thing is my first thought was "maybe reduced
| nominal productivity by increased throughness is exactly what
| we need when evaluating potential tumors". Keeping doctors
| off autopilot and not so focused that radiologists fail to
| see hidden gorillas in x-rays. And yes that was a real study.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| No, we already have autonomous cars driving around even
| though they've already killed people.
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| This is a poor take. They are objectively safer drives then
| their human counterpart. Yes, with those unfortunate deaths
| included.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| You should determine your own value if you don't want to be
| controlled by anyone else.
|
| If you don't want to determine your own value, you're probably
| no worse off letting an AI do that than anything else. Religion
| is probably more comfortable, but I'm sure AI and religion will
| mix before too long.
| jaza wrote:
| The "value of a human" - same in this age as it has always been
| - is our ability to be truly original and to think outside the
| box. (That's also what makes us actually quite smart, and what
| makes current cutting-edge "AI" actually quite dumb).
|
| AI is incapable of producing anything that's not basically a
| statistical average of its inputs. You'll never get an AI Da
| Vinci, Einstein, Kant, Pythagoras, Tolstoy, Kubrick, Mozart,
| Gaudi, Buddha, nor (most ironically?) Turing. Just to name a
| few historical humans whose respective contributions to the
| world are greater than the sum of the world's respective
| contributions to them.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Have you tried image generation? It can easily apply high
| level concepts from one area to another area and produce
| something that hasn't been done before.
|
| Unless you loosen the meaning of statistical average so much
| that it ends up including human creativity. At the end of the
| day it's basically the same process of applying an idea from
| one field to another.
|
| Most humans are not Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, etc. Does that
| make them not valuable as humans?
| jaza wrote:
| Yes, I've tried AI image generation, and while it's
| impressive, it's also - at the end of the day - just as
| bland and unoriginal a mashup of existing material as AI
| text generation is.
|
| All humans (I believe!) have the potential to be that
| amazing. And all humans come up with amazing ideas and
| produce amazing works in their life, just that 99% of us
| aren't appreciated as much as the famous 1% are. We're all
| valuable.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| IMO you're coming at it from the wrong angle.
|
| Capitalism barely concerns itself with humans and whether human
| experiences exist or not is largely irrelevant for the field.
| As far as capitalism knows, humans are nothing but a noisy set
| of knobs that regulate how much profit one can make out of a
| situation. While tongue-in-cheek, this SMBC comic [1] about the
| Ultimatum game is an example of the type of paradoxes one gets
| when looking at life exclusively from an economics perspective.
|
| The question is not "what's the value of a human under
| capitalism?" but rather "how do we avoid reducing humans to
| their economic output?". Or in different terms: it is not the
| blender's job to care about the pain of whatever it's blending,
| and if you find yourself asking "what's the value of pain in a
| blender-driven world?" then you are solving the wrong problem.
|
| [1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3507
| foxglacier wrote:
| Schools need to re-think what the purpose of essays was in the
| first place and re-invent homework to suit the existance of LLMs.
|
| If it's to understand the material, then skip the essay writing
| part and have them do a traditional test. If it's to be able to
| write, they probably don't need that skill anymore so skip the
| essay writing. If it's to get used to researching on their own,
| find a way to have them do that which doesn't work with LLMs.
| Maybe very high accuracy is required (a weak point for LLMs), or
| the output is not an LLM-friendly form, or it's actually
| difficult to do so the students have to be better than LLMs.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _If it 's to be able to write, they probably don't need
| that skill anymore..._"
|
| Any person who can't write coherently and in a well organized
| way isn't going to be able to prompt a LLM effectively either.
| Writing skills become _more_ important in the age of LLMs, not
| less.
| patrickmay wrote:
| "Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your
| thinking is." -- Leslie Lamport
|
| Writing is an essential skill.
| datahack wrote:
| There is a tremendous lack of understandings between the genx and
| millennial teachers and the way they see and use AI, and how
| younger people are using it.
|
| Kids use AI like an operating system, seamlessly integrated into
| their workflows, their thinking, their lives. It's not a tool
| they pick up and put down; it's the environment they navigate, as
| natural as air. To them, AI isn't cheating--it's just how you get
| things done in a world that's always been wired, always been
| instant. They do not make major life decisions without consulting
| their systems. They use them like therapists. It's is far more
| than a Google replacement or a writing tool already.
|
| This author's fixation on "desirable difficulty" feels like a
| sermon from a bygone era, steeped in romanticized notions of
| struggle as the only path to growth. It's yet another "you can't
| use a calculator because you won't always have one" -- the same
| tired dogma that once insisted pen-and-paper arithmetic was the
| pinnacle of intellectual rigor (even after calculators arrived:
| they have in fact always been with us every day since).
|
| The Butlerian Jihad metaphor is clever but deeply misguided
| casting AI as some profane mimicry of the human mind ignores how
| it's already reshaping cognition, not replacing it.
|
| The author laments students bypassing the grind of traditional
| learning, but what if that grind isn't the sacred rite they think
| it is? What if "desirable difficulty" is just a fetishized relic
| of an agrarian education system designed to churn out obedient
| workers, not creative thinkers?
|
| The reality is, AI's not going away, and clutching pearls about
| its "grotesque" nature won't change that. Full stop.
|
| Students aren't "cheating" when they use it... they're adapting
| to a world where information is abundant and synthesis is king.
| The author's horror at AI-generated essays misses the point: the
| problem isn't the tech, it's the assignments (and maybe your
| entire approach).
|
| If a chatbot can ace your rhetorical analysis, maybe the task
| itself is outdated, testing rote skills instead of real
| creativity or critical thinking.
|
| Why are we still grading students on formulaic outputs when AI
| can do that faster?
|
| The classroom should be a lab for experimentation, not a shrine
| to 19th century pedagogy, which is most definitely is. I was
| recently lectured by a teacher about how he tries to make every
| one of his students a mathematician, and became enraged when I
| gently asked him how he's dealing with the disruption to
| mathematicians as a profession that AI systems are currently
| doing. There is an adversarial response underneath a lot of
| teacher's thin veneers of "dealing with the problem of AI" that
| is just _wrong_ and such a cope.
|
| That obvious projection leads directly to this "adversarial"
| grading dynamic. The author's chasing a ghost, trying to police
| AI use with Google Docs surveillance or handwritten assignments.
| That's not teaching. What it is standing in the way of
| civilization Al progress because it doesn't fit your ideas. I
| know there are a lot of passionate teachers out there, and some
| even get it, but most definitely do _not_.
|
| Kids will find workarounds, just like they always have, because
| they're not the problem; the system is. If students feel
| compelled to "cheat" with AI, it's because the stakes (GPAs,
| scholarships, future prospects) are _so punishingly high that
| efficiency becomes survival_.
|
| Instead of vilifying them, why not redesign assessments to reward
| originality, process, and collaboration over polished products?
| AI could be a partner in that, not an enemy.
|
| The author's call for a return to pen and paper feels like
| surrender dressed up as principle and it's _rediculously_ out of
| touch.
|
| It's not about fostering "humanity" in the classroom; it's about
| clinging to a nostalgic ideal of education that never served
| everyone equally anyway.
|
| Meanwhile, students are already living in the future, where AI is
| as foundational as electricity.
|
| The real challenge isn't banning the "likeness bots" but teaching
| kids how to wield them critically, ethically, and creatively.
|
| Change isn't coming. It is already here. Resisting it won't make
| us more human; it'll just leave us behind.
|
| Edit: sorry for so many edits. Many typos.
| TychoCelchuuu wrote:
| Decades of research into learning shows that "desirable
| difficulty" is not, as you put it, "just a fetishized relic of
| an agrarian education system designed to churn out obedient
| workers, not creative thinkers." Rather, difficulty means you
| are encountering things you do not already understand. If you
| are not facing difficulties then your time is being wasted. The
| issue is that AI allows people to avoid facing difficulties and
| thus allows them to waste their time.
|
| You think we will make progress by learning to use AI in
| certain ways, and that assignments can be crafted to inculcate
| this. But a moment's acquaintance with people who use AI will
| show you that there is a huge divide between some uses of AI
| and others, and that some people use AI in ways which is not
| creative and so on. Ideally this would prompt you to reflect on
| what characteristics of people incline them towards using AI in
| certain ways, and what we can do to promote the characteristics
| that incline people to use AI in productive and interesting
| ways, etc. The end result of such an inquiry will be something
| like what the author of this piece has arrived at,
| unfortunately. Any assignment you think is immune to lazy AI
| use is probably not. The only real solution is the adversarial
| approach the author adopts.
| fallinditch wrote:
| It's interesting to note that your comment and my comment ended
| up right at the end, having been downvoted, with no downvoters
| commenting on why they disagree with you, or my, points.
|
| I assume it's because many of the commenters of this post are
| skewed towards academia, and perhaps view the disruption by AI
| to the traditional methods of grading student work as a
| challenge to their profession.
|
| As we have seen many times throughout history, when disruptive
| forces of technical or demographic changes or a new set of
| market forces occurs, incumbents often struggle to adapt to the
| new situation.
|
| Established traditional education is a massive ship to turn
| around.
|
| Your comments contain much food for thought and deserve to be
| debated. I agree with you that educators should not be branding
| students as cheaters. Using AI in an educational context is a
| rational and natural thing to do, especially for younger
| students.
|
| > ... AI as some profane mimicry of the human mind ignores how
| it's already reshaping cognition, not replacing it.
|
| - Yes, this is such an important point and it's why we need
| enlightened policy making leading to meaningful education
| reform.
|
| I do disagree with you about incorporating more pen and paper
| activities - I think this would provide balance and some
| important key skills.
|
| No doubt AI is challenging to many areas of society, especially
| education. I'm not saying it's a wonderful thing that we don't
| need to worry about, but we do need to think deeply about its
| impacts and how we can harness its positive strengths and
| radically improve teaching and learning outcomes. It's not
| about locking students in exam rooms with high tech
| surveillance.
|
| With AI it's disappointing that the prevalent opinions of many
| educators are seemingly stuck and struggling to adapt.
|
| Meanwhile society will move on.
|
| Edit: good to see you got a response!
| goatlover wrote:
| ChatGPT is only 2.5 years old. How are kids using AI like it's
| always been around? I really hope they aren't making major life
| decisions consulting chatbots from big tech companies, instead
| of their relatives, teachers and friends. I'm old enough to
| recall when social media was viewed as this incredibly positive
| tech for humanity. How things have changed. One wonders how
| we'll view the impact AIs in a few years.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| How do you test "real creativity" and "critical thinking" in a
| way that is both scalable and reliably tells apart those who
| get it and those who don't?
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| No mention of Danny Dunn. Tsk.
|
| https://www.semicolonblog.com/?p=32946
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| As late as 1984, _Danny Dunn_ shared a place of honor on my
| bookshelves, along with _Encyclopedia Brown_.
|
| The long list of titles is interesting and almost leads us to a
| self-referential thought. These series were often known as
| "boiler-room novels" because they were basic and formulaic, and
| it was possible to command a team of entry-level writers to
| churn them out.
| czhu12 wrote:
| To offer a flip side of the coin, I can't imagine I would have
| the patience outside of school, to have learned Rust this past
| year without AI.
|
| Having a personal tutor who I can access at all hours of the day,
| and who can answer off hand questions I have after musing about
| something in the shower, is an incredible asset.
|
| At the same time, I can totally believe if I was teleported back
| to school, it would become a total crutch for me to lean on, if
| anything just so I don't fall behind the rest of my peers, who
| are acing all the assignments with AI. It's almost a game
| theoretic environment where, especially with bell curve scaling,
| everyone is forced into using AI.
| lacker wrote:
| Same here. AI is a great tool for learning, but a challenge for
| education.
| globalnode wrote:
| well worth the read just for the term "broligarch"
| Aziell wrote:
| AI definitely makes it easier for students to finish their
| assignments, but that's part of the problem. It's getting harder
| to tell whether they actually understand anything.What's more
| worrying is how fast they're losing the habit of thinking for
| themselves.
|
| And it's not just in school. I see the same thing at work. People
| rely on AI tools so much, they stop checking if they even
| understand what they're doing. It's subtle, but over time, that
| effort to think just starts to fade.
| downboots wrote:
| The issue is trust, AI is not the issue.
|
| Culture, not technology.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| It's not that hard to save remote education accreditation. You
| just need a test pod.
|
| Take one of those soundproofed office pods, something like what
| https://framery.com/en/ sells. Stick a computer in it, and a
| couple of cameras as well. The OS only lets you open what you
| want to open on it. Have the AI watch the student in real time,
| and flag any potential cheating behaviors, like how modern AI
| video baby monitors watch for unsafe behaviors in the crib.
|
| If a $2-3000 pod sounds too expensive for you over the course of
| your child's education, I'm sure remote schoolers can find ways
| to rent pods at much cheaper scale, like a gym subscription
| model. If the classes you take are primarily exam-based anyway
| you might be able to get away with visiting it once a week or
| less.
|
| I'm surprised nobody ever brings up this idea. It's obvious you
| have to fight fire with fire here, unless you want to 10x the
| workload of any teacher who honestly cares about cheating.
| rixed wrote:
| AI for classical education can be an issue, but AI for inverted
| classes is perfect.
|
| Going to school to listen to a teacher for hours and take notes,
| sitting in a group of peers to whom you are not allowed to speak,
| and then going home to do some homework on your own, this whole
| concept is stupid and deserves to die.
|
| Learning lessons is the activity you should do within the confort
| of your home, with the help of everything you can including
| books, AIs, youtube videos or anything that float your boat.
| Working and practice, on the other hand, are social activities
| that benefit a lot from interacting with teachers and other
| students, and deserves to be done collectively at school.
|
| For inverted classes, AI are no problem at all; at the contrary,
| they are very helpful.
| gilbetron wrote:
| AI is bad for academia and the educational industrial complex,
| but it is great for people that actually want to learn.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| My essay-writing process for my MBA was:
|
| - decide what I wanted to say about the subject, from the set of
| opinions I already possess
|
| - search for enough papers that could support that position.
| Don't read the papers, just scan the abstracts.
|
| - write the essay. Scan the reference papers for the specific bit
| of it that best supported the point I want to make.
|
| There was zero learning involved in this process. The production
| of the essay was more about developing journal search skills than
| absorbing any knowledge about the subject. There are always
| enough papers to support any given point of view, the trick was
| finding them.
|
| I don't see how making this process even more efficient by
| delegating the entire thing to an LLM is affecting any actual
| education here.
| protocolture wrote:
| I literally wrote a friends psychology paper when I had no idea
| of the subject and they got a HD for it.
|
| All I did was follow the process you outlined.
|
| My mother used to do it as a service for foreign language
| students. They would record their lectures, and she would write
| their papers for them.
| munksbeer wrote:
| Confession. I became disillusioned with a teacher of a
| subject in school, who I was certain had taken a disliking to
| me.
|
| I tested it by getting hold of a paper which had received an
| A from another school on the same subject, copying it
| verbatim and submitting it for my assignment. I received a
| low grade.
|
| Despite confirming what I suspected, it somehow still wasn't
| a good feeling.
| protocolture wrote:
| I attended a catholic high school for several years, and I
| noticed a pattern. If I submitted an assignment to certain
| teachers and the subject related to a non catholic
| religion, I would get a pass, at the lowest score possible,
| regardless of the quality of the content.
|
| So I just kept submitting assignments on the wrong
| religions. Write up about a saint? Pick a russian orthodox
| saint. Write up on marriage customs? Use islam. That way I
| could never fail.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| To be honest, that's a problem on your part. It is completely
| possible to write a paper on anything, using the scientific
| method as your framework.
|
| But the problem is that in many cases, the degrees (like MBA,
| which I too hold) are merely formalities to move up the
| corporate ladder, or pivot to something else. You don't get
| rewarded extra for actually doing science. And, yes, I've done
| the exact same thing you did, multiple times, in multiple
| different classes. Because I knew that if what I did just
| _looked and sounded_ proper enough, I 'd get my grade.
|
| To be fair, one of the first things I noticed when entering the
| "professional" workforce, was that the methodology was the
| same: Find proof / data that supports your assumptions. And if
| you can't find any, find something close enough and just
| interpret / present it in a way that supports your assumptions.
|
| No need for any fancy hypothesis testing, or having to conclude
| that your assumptions were wrong. Like it is not your opinion
| or assumption anyway, and you don't get rewarded for telling
| your boss or clients that they're wrong.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| > - search for enough papers that could support that position.
| Don't read the papers, just scan the abstracts.
|
| Wrote wrote those papers? How did they learn to write them? At
| some point, somebody along the chain had to, you know, produce
| an actual independent thought.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Interesting question. It seems to me that the entire business
| academia could be following the method I've outlined and no-
| one would notice. Or care.
|
| It's not like the hard sciences - no-one is able to refute
| anything, because you can't conduct experiments. You can
| always find some evidence for any given hypothesis, as the
| endless stream of self-help (and often contradictory)
| business books show.
|
| None of the academics I was reading had actually run a
| business or had any practical experience of business. They
| were all lifelong academics who were writing about it from an
| academic perspective, referencing other academics.
|
| Business is not short of actual independent thought.
| Verification is the thing it's missing. How does anyone know
| that the brilliant idea they just had is actually brilliant?
| The only way is to go and build a business around it and see
| if it works. Academics don't do that. How is this science
| then?
| intended wrote:
| I'm sorry for that.
|
| May I ask a different question, why didn't, or what stoped, you
| from engaging with the material itself ?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| To be honest, I found "the material" irrelevant, mostly.
| There's vast swathes of papers written about obscure and tiny
| parts of the overall subject. Any given paper is probably
| correct, but covering such a tiny part of the subject that
| spending the time reading all of them is inefficient (if not
| impossible).
|
| Also, given that the subject in question is "business", and
| the practice of business was being changed (as it is again
| now) by the application of new technology, so a lot of what I
| was reading was only borderline applicable any more.
|
| MBAs are weird. To qualify to do one you need to have years
| of practical experience managing in actual business. But then
| all of that knowledge and experience is disregarded, and
| you're expected to defer to papers written by people who have
| only ever worked in academia and have no practical experience
| of what they're studying. I know this is the scientific
| process, and I respect that. But how applicable is the
| scientific process to management? Is there even a "science"
| of management?
|
| So, like all my colleagues, I jumped through the hoops set in
| front of me as efficiently as possible in order to get the
| qualification.
|
| I'm not saying it was worthless. I did learn a lot. The class
| discussions, hearing about other people's experiences,
| talking about specific problems and situations, this was all
| good solid learning. But the essays were not.
| Animats wrote:
| The author is teaching a skill an LLM can do well enough to pass
| his exams. Is learning English composition in the literary sense
| now worth what it costs to learn it at a university? That's a
| very real question now.
| Gud wrote:
| What do you mean, "worth it"?
|
| What is the alternative, we carry on without people skilled in
| the English language?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Not sure this is the provocative question you think it is. Were
| you educated in a university? Do you like being able to write
| English well? Would you rather that neither be true about you?
| nwlotz wrote:
| I've found LLMs to often be a time-suck rather than supercharge
| my own learning. A huge part of thinking is reconsidering your
| initial assumptions when you start to struggle in research,
| mathematical problem solving, programming, whatever it may be. AI
| makes it really easy to go down a rabbit hole and spend hours
| filling in details to a question or topic that wasn't quite right
| to begin with.
|
| Basically analog thinking is still critical, and schools need to
| teach it. I have no issues with classrooms bringing back the blue
| exam books and evaluating learning quality that way.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > I think there is a good case to be made for trying to restrict
| AI use among young people the way we try to restrict smoking,
| alcohol, gambling, and sex.
|
| I would go further than that, along two axes: it's not just AI
| and it's not just young people.
|
| An increasing proportion of our economy is following a drug
| dealer playbook: give people a free intro, get them hooked, then
| attach your siphon and begin extracting their money. The
| subscription-model-ization of everything is an obvious example.
| Another is the "blitzscaling" model of offering unsustainably low
| prices to drive out competition and/or get people used to using
| something that they would never use if they had to pay the true
| cost. More generally, a lot of companies are more focused on
| hiding costs (environmental, psychological, privacy, etc.) from
| their customers than on actually improving their products.
|
| Alcohol, gambling, and sex, are things that we more or less trust
| adults to do sensibly and in moderation. Many people can handle
| that, and there are modest guardrails in place even so (e.g.,
| rules that prevent selling alcohol to drunk people, rules that
| limit gambling to certain places). I would put many social media
| and other tech offerings more in the category of dangerous
| chemicals or prescription drugs or opiates (like the laudanum the
| article mentions). This would restrict their use, yes, but the
| more important part is to restrict their _production_ and set
| high standards for the companies that engage in such businesses.
|
| Basically, you shouldn't be able to show someone --- child or
| adult --- an infinite scrolling video feed, or give them a GPT-
| style chatbot, or offer free same-day shipping, without getting
| some kind of permit. Those things are addictive and should be
| regulated like drugs.
|
| And the penalties for failing to do everything absolutely squeaky
| clean should be ruinous. The article mentions one of Facebook's
| AIs showing CSAM to kids. One misstep on something like that
| should be the end of the company, with multi-year jail terms for
| the executives and the venture capitalists who funded the
| operation. Every wealthy person investing in these kinds of
| things should live in constant fear that something will go wrong
| and they will wind up penniless in prison.
| enceladus06 wrote:
| LLMs is is here to stay and will change learning for the better
| (we will be full-scale disrupted 3-5yr from now in EDU), it is a
| self-guided tutor like never before and 100% Amazing, except for
| when it hallucinates.
|
| I use it [Copilot / GPT / Khanmingo] all the time to figure out
| new tools and prototype workflows, check code for errors, and
| learn new stuff including those classes at universities which
| cost way too much.
|
| If universities feel threatened by AI cry me a river.
|
| No professor or TA was *EVER* able to explain calculus and
| differential equations to me, but Khanmingo and ChatGPT can. So
| the educational establishment can deal with this.
| edvardas wrote:
| In your situation where LLMs can cover most material better
| than the university, what benefits does the university still
| provide you, if any?
| xrtatee wrote:
| Exactly. I can remember 2-3 teachers in my life that were good
| but most were absolutely terrible.
|
| I even remember taking a Philosophy of AI class in 1999,
| something that should have been as interesting and intellectual
| stimulating to any thinking student, and the professor managed
| to clear the lecture hall from 300 to 50 before I stopped going
| too with his constant self-aggrandizing bullshit.
|
| I had a history teacher in high school that didn't try to hide
| he was a teacher so he could travel in the summer and then made
| a large part of the class about his former and upcoming
| travels.
|
| Most weren't this bad but they just sucked at explaining
| concepts and ideas.
|
| The whole education system should obviously be rebuilt from the
| ground up but it will be decades before we bother with this.
| Someone above mentioned the Roman's teaching wrestling to
| students. We are those Romans and we are just going to keep
| teaching wrestling. I learned to wrestle, my father learned to
| wrestle so my kids are going to learn to wrestle because that
| is what defines an educated person!
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Back in the day, when I first tried college, I simply could not
| comprehend higher level math. We had one professor, and a
| couple of TAs - but it was impenetrable for me. They just said
| to me _Go to the library and try some different books "_, or _"
| Try to find some students and discuss the topics"_. Tried that,
| but to no avail.
|
| I was a poor math student in HS, but I loved electronics, so
| that's why I decided to pursue electrical engineering. Seeing
| that I simply could not handle the math, I dropped out after
| the first year, and started working as an electricians
| apprentice.
|
| Some years later YouTube had really taken off, and I decided to
| check out some of the math tutors there. Found Khan Academy,
| and over the course of a week, everything just fell into place.
| I stared from the absolute beginning, and binged/worked myself
| up to HS pre-calc math. His style of short-from teaching just
| worked, and he's a phenomenal educator on top.
|
| Spent the summer studying math, and enrolled college again in
| the fall. Got A's and B's in all my engineering math classes.
| If I ever got stuck, or couldn't grok something, I trawled
| youtube for math vids / tutors until I found someone that could
| explain it in a way I could understand.
|
| These days I use LLMs in the way you do, and I sort of view it
| as an extension of the the way I learned things before:
| infinite number of tutors.
|
| Of course, one problem is that one doesn't know what one
| doesn't know. Is the model lying to you? Well, luckily there
| are many different models, and you can compare to see what they
| say.
| sireat wrote:
| In my programming, algorithms and data structures courses the
| homework assignment completion has gone from roughly 50% before
| LLMs to 99% this year.
|
| Making assignments harder would be unfair to those few students
| who would actually try to solve the problem without LLMs.
|
| So what I do is require extensive comments and ahem - chain of
| thought reasoning in the comments - especially the WHY part.
|
| Then I require oral defense of the code.
|
| Sadly this is unfeasible for some of the large classes of 200,
| but works quite well when I have the luxury of teaching 20
| students.
| wiihack wrote:
| As others have already mentioned, I believe that it's mainly the
| curious and engaged students who will benefit greatly from AI.
| And for those who cheat or use AI to deceive and end up failing a
| written exam, well, maybe that's not such a bad thing after
| all...
| BrtByte wrote:
| I'm curious to see how the paper-and-pen pivot goes. There's
| something radical about going analog again in a world that's
| hurtling toward frictionless everything
| Sam6late wrote:
| In Roman times, teaching focused on wrestling to prepare young
| people for life. Now, in the AI age, what to teach, and why, have
| once again become major questions, especially when AI can pass
| the bar exams and a Ph.D. is no longer a significant achievement.
| Critical thinking, and life experiences could be the target but
| would they do it?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| I think we (as in, the whole species) need to reflect on what the
| purpose of education is and what it should be, because in theory
| there's no reason why anybody should pay for a college tuition
| and then undermine their own mastery of the subject. Obviously
| 90% of the student body sees it as a ticket to being taken
| seriously by prospective employers and the other 10% definitely
| does not deserve to be taken seriously because by prospective
| employers because they can't even admit an uncomfortable truth
| about themselves.
|
| Anyways this isn't actually useful advice because no one person
| can enact change on a societal scale but I do enjoy standing on
| this soapbox and telling at people.
|
| BTW academic success has never been a fair measure of anything,
| standards and curriculum vary widely between institutions. I
| spent four years STRUGGLING to get a 3.2 GPA in high school then
| when I got to undergrad we had to take this "math placement exam"
| that was just basic algebra and I only had difficulty with one or
| two problems but I knew several kids with >= 4.0 GPA who had to
| take remedial algebra because they failed.
|
| But somehow there's always massive pushback against standardized
| testing even when they let you take it over and over and over
| again until you get the grade you wanted (SAT).
| aerhardt wrote:
| You mean the 10% who _really_ want to learn should give up and
| embrace the degree mill merry-go-round game?
|
| I'm as cynical as they come, but even that's a bit too much for
| me.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| i was actually trying to accuse the 10% of lying to
| themselves on a subconscious level, because the portion of
| undergraduates who actually came there to learn and not just
| because it's a roadblock in the way of gainful employment is
| a rounding error.
|
| More to the point, the universities need to realize they're
| more like job certification centers and stop pretending their
| students aren't just there to take tests and get certified.
| Ideally they'd stop co-operating with employers that want to
| use them as a filter for their hiring process instead but
| even I'm not dumb enough to think that could ever happen,
| they'd be cutting off a massive source of revenue and putting
| themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
|
| Like I said I don't actually have a viable solution to any of
| this but as long we all lie to ourselves about education
| being some noble institution that it clearly isn't (i mean
| for undergrad and masters, it might actually still be that at
| the phd level) then nobody will ever solve anything.
| bugtodiffer wrote:
| Maybe just stop giving homework and instead give the kids some
| time to live. Fixed it for you.
| ookdatnog wrote:
| The author teaches a college-level writing class. Are you
| suggesting that, if you voluntarily take a writing class, it's
| unreasonable if the professor expects you to do some writing
| outside of class?
| sudoaptinstall wrote:
| Let me just say that I always like these types of conversation on
| here. Tech dorks and education are an interesting conversation.
| I'll throw in my 2 cents as a HS CS teacher.
|
| First off, I respect the author of the article for trying pen and
| paper, but that's just not an option at a lot of places. The
| learning management systems are often tied in through auto
| grading with google classroom or something similar. Often you'll
| need to create digital versions of everything to put in
| management systems like Atlas. There's also school policy to
| consider and that's a whole nother can of worms. All that aside
| though.
|
| The main thing that most people don't have in the forefront of
| their mind in this conversation is the fact that most students
| (or adults) don't want to learn. Most people don't want to
| change. Most students will do anything and everything in their
| power to avoid those two things. I've often thought about why,
| maybe to truly learn you need to ignore your ego and accept that
| there's something you don't know; maybe it's a biological thing
| and humans are averse to spending calories on mental processes
| that they don't see as a future benefit - who knows.
|
| This problem runs core to all of modern education (and probably
| has since the idea of mandatory mass education was called from
| the pits of hell a few hundred years ago). LLMs have really just
| brought us a society to a place where it can no longer be ignored
| because students no longer have the need to do what they see as
| busy work. Sadly, they don't inherently understand how writing
| essays on oppressed children hiding in attics more than half a
| century ago helps them in their modern tiktok filled lives.
|
| The other issue is that, for example, in the schools I've worked
| at, since the advent of LLMs, many teachers and most of the admin
| all take this bright and cheery approach to LLMs. They say things
| like, "The students need to be shown how to do it right," or
| "help the students learn from ChatGPT." The fact that the vast
| majority of students in high school just don't care escapes them.
| They feel like it's on the teachers to wield and to help the
| students wield this mighty new weapon in education. But in
| reality, It's just the same war we've always had between predator
| and prey (or guard and prisoner) but I fear in this one, only one
| side will win. The students will learn how to use chat better and
| the teachers will have nothing to defend against it, so they will
| all throw up their hand as start using chat to grade thing.
| Before you know it, the entire education system is just chat
| grading work submitted by chat under the guise of, "oh but the
| student turned it in so it's theirs."
|
| The only thing LLMs have done, and more than likely ever do, in
| education is to make it blatantly obvious that students are not
| empty vessels yearning for a drink from the fountain of knowledge
| that can only be provided to them by the high and mighty
| educational institution. Those students do exist and they will
| always find a way to learn. I also assume that many of us here
| fall into that, but those of us that do are not the majority.
|
| My students already complain about the garbage chat created
| assignments their teachers are giving them. Entire chunks of my
| current school are using chat to create tests, exams, curriculum,
| emails and all other forms of "teacher work". Several teachers,
| who are smart enough, are already using chat to grade thing. The
| CEO of the school is pushing for every grade (1-12) having 2 AI
| classes a week where they are taught how to "properly" use LLMs.
| It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
|
| The only way to maintain mandatory mass education is by accepting
| no one cares, finding a way to remove LLMs from the mix, or
| switch of Waldorf, homeschooling or some other better system than
| mandatory mass education. The wealthy will be able to, the rest
| will suffer.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| I teach on a small university. These are some of the measures we
| take:
|
| - Hand written midterms and exams.
|
| - The students should explain how they designed and how they
| coded their solutions to programming exercises (we have 15-20
| students per class, with more students it become more difficult).
|
| - Presentations of complex topics (after that the rest of the
| students should comment something, ask some question, anything
| related to the topic)
|
| - Presentation of a handwritten one page hand written notes,
| diagram, mindmap, etc., about the content discussed.
|
| - Last minute changes to more elaborated programming labs that
| should be resolved in-class (for example, "the client" changed
| its mind about some requirement or asked a new feature).
|
| The real problem is that it is a (lot) more work for the teachers
| and not everyone is willing to "think outside of the box".
|
| (edit: format)
| squigz wrote:
| I hope by 'handwritten' you don't literally mean pen and paper?
| xtracto wrote:
| Back when I was doing my BSc in Software Engineering, we had
| a teacher who did her Data Structure and Algorithms exams
| with pen and paper. On one of them, she basically wrote 4
| coding problems (which would be solved in 4 short ~30 LOC).
|
| We had to write the answer with pen and paper, writing the
| whole program in C. And the teacher would score it by
| transcribing the verbatim text in her computer, and if it had
| one single error (missed semicolon) or didn't compile for
| some reason, the whole thing was considered wrong (each
| question was 25% of the exam score)
|
| I remember I got 1 wrong (missed semicolon :( ) and got a 75%
| (1-100 pointing system). It's crazy how we were able to do
| that sort of thing in the old days.
|
| We definitely exercised our attention to detail and
| concentration muscles with that teacher.
| squigz wrote:
| Yeah, this is absurd. And if you have poor handwriting, the
| chances of "syntax errors" goes up.
|
| My above comment is getting downvoted, and it's honestly a
| bit baffling. I'd be furious if I were paying tens of
| thousands of dollars to receive a university-level
| education in software engineering in 2025... and I had to
| write programs with pen and paper. It is so far detached
| from the reality of, not only the industry, but the
| practice itself, so as to be utterly absurd.
| pacoWebConsult wrote:
| I graduated in 2018 from a university where writing exams
| by hand was standard practice. We weren't punished if
| syntax wasn't correct character-by-character, only if the
| ideas we were attempting to convey in the message were
| fundamentally incorrect.
|
| I have incredibly terrible handwriting and recall of
| specific syntax was difficult, but I wasn't punished
| terribly for either of those faults.
|
| Already in 2018, almost everyone was cheating on typed
| assignments, "helping" each other with homeworks, and a
| significant portion of kids were abusing stimulants to
| get by. Exams were typically 70-80% of your grade. Now,
| when I speak with current students at that university and
| as I observed first-hand in 2020, when they went remote
| and generally relaxed standards and processes, how the
| quality of the instruction and the quality of the
| resulting "educated" students has fallen off the face of
| a cliff.
|
| I'd be furious if I were paying tens of thousands of
| dollars to receive a university-level education in
| software engineering in 2025 and I had no educator
| willing to put their foot down and stop myself and my
| peers from faking the fact that we know anything
| indicating that we deserve the degree. What's a degree
| worth when nobody is willing to do the work required and
| lay down the tough love necessary to actually educate
| you?
| xandrius wrote:
| The professor is not actually compiling your code, the
| idea is to know whether you can pseudo code a solution,
| of course.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| No, you don't write code by hand. Maybe pseudo-code,
| analize some given code or you have to specify the
| general architecture for a system. But in other courses,
| for example operating systems, networks, distributed
| systems you have to answer questions like "when udp is
| the right choice over tcp?", "what kind of problems are
| associated with pagination?", "what are vector clocks?",
| etc., using pen and paper.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| Yes, pen and paper.
| TallonRain wrote:
| Yes, pen and paper. The approach is to pseudocode the
| solution, minor syntax errors aren't punished (and indeed are
| generally expected anyway). The point is to simply show that
| you understand and can work through the concepts involved,
| it's not being literally compiled.
|
| Writing a small algorithm with pen & paper on programming
| exams in universities of all sizes was still common when I
| was in uni in the 2010s and there's no reason to drop that
| practice now.
| motohagiography wrote:
| if I were teaching english today, i would ask students to write
| essays taking the positions that an AI is not allowed to.
| steelman something appalling. stand up in class and debate like
| your life or grade depends on it and fail anyone who doesn't, and
| if that excludes people, maybe they don't belong in a university.
|
| in everything young people actually like, they train, spar,
| practice, compete, jam, scrimmage, solve, build, etc. the
| pedagogy needs to adapt and reframing it in these terms will
| help. calling it homework is the source of a flawed mental model
| that problematizes the work instead of incentivising it, and now
| that people have a tool to solve the problem, they're applying
| their intelligence to the problem.
|
| arguably there's no there there for the assignments either,
| especially for a required english credit. the institution itself
| is a transaction that gets them a ticket to an administrative
| job. what's the homework assignment going to get them they value?
| well roundedness, polish, acculturation, insight, sensitivity,
| taste? these are not valuable or differentiating to kids in elite
| institutions who know they are competing globally for jobs that
| are 95% concrete political maneuvering, and most of them
| (especially in stem) probably think the class signifiers that
| english classes yield are essentially corrupt anyway.
|
| maybe it's schadenfreude and an old class chip on my part, but
| what are they going to do, engage in the discourse and become
| public intellectuals? argue about rimbaud and voltaire over
| coffee, cigarettes and jazz? Some of them have higher follower
| counts than there were readers of the novels or articles being
| taught in their classes. More people read their tweets every day
| than have ever read a book by Chiang. AI isn't the problem, it's
| a forcing function and a solution. Instructors should reflect on
| what their institutions have really become.
| ghusto wrote:
| I've always though that the education system was broken and next
| to worthless. I've never felt that teachers ever tried to _teach_
| me anything, certainly not how to think. In fact I saw most
| attempts at thought squashed because they didn't fit neatly into
| the syllabus (and so couldn't be graded).
|
| The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much
| your homework is worth. Teaching and learning are collaborative
| exercises.
| jmmcd wrote:
| > The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how
| much your homework is worth.
|
| A lot of people who say this kind of thing have, frankly, a
| very shallow view of what homework is. A lot of homework can be
| easily done by AI, or by a calculator, or by Wikipedia, or by
| looking up the textbook. That doesn't invalidate it as homework
| at all. We're trying to scaffold skills in your brain. It also
| didn't invalidate it as _assessment_ in the past, because (eg)
| small kids don 't have calculators, and (eg) kids who learn to
| look up the textbook are learning multiple skills in addition
| to the knowledge they're looking up. But things have changed
| now.
| camjw wrote:
| Completely agree - I always thought the framing of
| "exercises" is the right one, the point is that your brain
| grows by doing. It's been possible for a long time to e.g.
| google a similar algebra problem and find a very relevant
| math stackexchange post, doesn't mean the exercises were
| useless.
|
| "The fact that forklift truck can lift over 500kg should tell
| you how worthwhile it is for me to go to a gym and lift
| 100kg." - complete non-sequitur.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Yep, making time to sit down to do homework, forming an
| understanding of planning the doing part, forming good habits
| of doing them, knowing how to look up stuff, in a book index
| or on Wikipedia or by searching or asking AI. The expectation
| is still that some kind of text output needs to be found and
| then read, digested.
| criddell wrote:
| > A lot of homework can be easily done by AI
|
| Then maybe the homework assignment has been poorly chosen. I
| like how the article's author has decided to focus on the
| process and not the product and I think that's probably a
| good move.
|
| I remember one of my kids' math teachers talked about wanting
| to switch to in inverted classroom. The kids would be asked
| to read a some part of their textbook as homework and then
| they would work through exercise sheets in class. To me, that
| seemed like a better way to teach math.
|
| > But things have changed now.
|
| Yep. Students are using AIs to do their homework and teachers
| are using AIs to grade.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Homework isn't about doing the homework, it's teaching you to
| learn and evidence that you have and can learn. Yeah you can
| have an AI do it just as much as you can have someone else do
| it, but that doesn't teach you anything and if you earn the
| paper at the end of it, it's effectively worthless.
|
| Unis should adjust their testing practices so that their paper
| (and their name) doesn't become worthless. If AI becomes a
| skill, it should be tested, graded, and certified accordingly.
| That is, separate the computer science degree from the AI
| Assisted computer science degree.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how
| much your homework is worth.
|
| Homework is there to help you practise these things and have
| help you progress, find the areas where you're in need of help
| and more practise. It is collaborative, it's you, your fellow
| students and your teachers/professors.
|
| I'm sorry that you had bad teachers, or had needs that wasn't
| being meet by the education system. That is something that
| should be addressed. I just don't think it's reasonable to
| completely dismiss a system that works for the majority. Being
| mad at the education system isn't really a good reason for say
| "AI/computers can do all these things, so why bother practising
| them?"
|
| Schools should learn kids to think, but if the kids can't read
| or reasonably do basic math, then expecting them to have
| independent critical thinking seems a way of. I don't know
| about you, but one of the clear lessons in "problem math" in
| schools was to learn to reason about numbers and result, e.g.
| is it reasonable that a bridge span 43,000km? If not, you
| probably did something wrong in your calculations.
| Aurornis wrote:
| These conversations are always eye-opening for the number of
| people who don't understand homework. You're exactly right
| that it's practice. The test is the test (obviously) and the
| homework is practice with a feedback loop (the grade).
|
| Giving people credit for homework helps because it gives
| students a chance to earn points outside of high pressure
| test times and it also encourages people to do the homework.
| A lot of people need the latter.
|
| My friends who teach university classes have experimented
| with grading structures where homework is optional and only
| exam scores count. Inevitably, a lot of the class fails the
| exams because they didn't do any practice on their own. They
| come begging for opportunities to make it up. So then they
| circle back to making the homework required and graded as a
| way to get the students to practice.
|
| ChatGPT short circuits this once again. Students ChatGPT
| their homework then fail the first exam. This time there is
| little to do, other than let those students learn the
| consequences of their actions.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>You're exactly right that it's practice.
|
| Thinking is a incremental process, you make small changes
| to things, verify if they are logically consistent and work
| from there.
|
| What is to practice here? If you know something is true,
| practicing the mechanical aspects of it is text book
| definition of rote learning.
|
| This whole thing reads like the academic system thinks
| making new science(Math, Physics etc) is for special
| geniuses and the remainder has to be happy watching the
| whole thing like some one demonstrating a 'sleight of hand'
| of hand trick.
|
| Teach people how to discover new truths. Thats the point of
| thinking.
| wrs wrote:
| >Thinking is a incremental process, you make small
| changes to things, verify if they are logically
| consistent and work from there. >What is to practice
| here?
|
| You just described the homework for a college-level math
| class (which will consist largely of proofs). That's what
| you're practicing.
|
| Also, it's 2025, if you want to discover new truths in
| math and science you're going to need quite a lot of
| background material. We know a heck of a lot of old
| truths that you need to learn first.
| aerhardt wrote:
| Current AI can ace math and programming psets at elite
| institutions, and yet prior to GPT not only did I learn loads
| from the homework, I often thoroughly enjoyed it too. I don't
| see how you can make that logical leap.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Its a problem of incentives. For many courses the psets make
| up a large chunk of your grade. Grades determine your
| suitability for graduate school, internships, jobs, etc. So
| if your final goal is one of those then you are highly
| incentivized to get high grades, not necessarily to learn the
| material.
| tgv wrote:
| > The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how
| much
|
| you still have to learn. The goal of learning is not to do a
| job. It's to enrich you, broaden your mind, and it takes work
| on your part.
|
| In similar reasoning, you could argue that you can take a car
| to go anywhere, or let everything be delivered on your
| doorstep, so why should I my child learn to walk?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Let me rephrase their point, then:
|
| The fact that AI can replace the work that you are measured
| on should tell you something about the measurement itself.
|
| The goal of learning _should be_ to enrich the learner.
| Instead, the goal of learning is to pass measure. Success has
| been quietly replaced with victory. Now LLMs are here to call
| that bluff.
| tgv wrote:
| And learning does do that. It is an economic compromise,
| though. Most of us have average (or worse) teachers. I have
| the feeling that that's what your arguing against, not
| learning per se.
|
| > LLMs are here to call that bluff
|
| Students have been copying from e.g. encyclopedias for as
| long as anyone can remember. That doesn't mean that an
| encyclopedia removes the need to learn. Even rote
| memorization has its use. But it's difficult to make school
| click for everybody.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > Teaching and learning are collaborative exercises.
|
| That's precisely where we went wrong. Capitalism has redefined
| our entire education system as a competition; just like it does
| with everything else. The goal is not success, it's victory.
| keiferski wrote:
| The best class I took in college was a 3-hour long 5-person
| discussion group on Metaphysics. It's a shame that college costs
| continue to rise, because I still don't think anything beats
| small class sizes and active participation.
|
| Ironically I _have_ used ChatGPT in similar ways to have
| discussions, but it still isn't quite the same thing as having
| real people to bounce ideas off of.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| 1
| intended wrote:
| I am kinda shocked that the thing which would be shared on HN,
| unironically, is an essay of the attraction to the idea of the
| butlerian Jihad. Interesting times.
| lisenKaci wrote:
| Maybe switching it up could work. What if learning happened at
| home with the use of AI and "homework" happened in class under
| supervision?
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
|
| I wrote my master thesis about that.
|
| It's an old idea.
| ranger207 wrote:
| There's a few comments here about how AI will revolutionize
| learning because it's personalized or lets users explore or
| whatever. That's fundamentally missing the point. College
| students who are using AI aren't using it to learn better,
| they're using it to learn _less_. The point of writing an essay
| isn't the essay itself, it's the process of writing the essay:
| research, organization, writing, etc. The point of doing math
| problems isn't to get the answer, it's to _do the work_ to find
| the answer. If you let AI do that, you're not learning better,
| you're learning worse.
|
| Now, granted, AI can help with things students are passionate
| about. If you want to do gamedev you might be able to get an AI
| to walk you through making a game in Unity or Godot. But
| societally we've decided that school should be about instilling a
| wide variety of base knowledge that students may not care about:
| history, writing, calculus. The idea is that you don't know what
| you're going to need in your life, and it's best to have a broad
| foundation so that if you run into something that needs it you'll
| at least know where to start. 99% of the time developing CRUD
| apps you're not going to need to know that retrieving an item
| from an array is O(n), but when some sales manager goes in and
| adds 2 million items to the storefront and now loading a page
| takes 12 seconds and you can't remove all that junk because it's
| for an important sales meeting 30 minutes from now, it's helpful
| to know that you might be able to replace it with a hashmap
| that's O(1) instead. AI's fine for learning things you want to
| learn, but you _need_ to learn more than just what you _want_ to
| learn. If you passed your Data Structures and Algorithms class by
| copy/pasting all the homework questions into ChatGPT, are you
| going to remember what big-O notation even means in 5 years?
| tschumacher wrote:
| I'm kind of happy that I did my maths courses just about before
| LLMs did become available. The math homework was the only thing
| in my CS studies where I sat sometimes 6+ hours on the weekly
| exercises and I always allocated one day for them. I sometimes
| felt really tempted to look stuff up and also rarely found an
| answer on Metroid Mathplanet forums. But it's really hard to
| Google math exercises and if the teachers are motivated enough
| to write new slightly altered questions each year they are
| practically impossible to Google. With LLMs I'm sure that I
| would have looked up a lot more. In the end getting 90% of the
| points and really struggling for it was rewarding and taught me
| a lot - although I'll probably never need these skills.
| agrippanux wrote:
| I use AI to help my high-school age son with his AP Lang class.
| Crucially, I cleared _all_ of this with his teacher beforehand.
| The deal was that he would do all his own work, but he 'd be able
| to use AI the help him edit it.
|
| What we do is he first completes an essay by himself, then we put
| it into a Claude chat window, along with the grading rubric and
| supporting documents. We instruct Claude to not change his
| structure or tone but edit for repetitive sentences, word count,
| correct grammar, spelling, and make sure his thesis is sound and
| pulled throughout the piece. He then takes that output and
| compares it against his original essay paragraph-by-paragraph,
| and he looks to see what changes were made and why, and
| crucially, if he thinks its _better_ than what he originally had.
|
| This process is repeated until he arrives at an essay that he's
| happy with. He spends more time doing things this way than he did
| when he just rattled off essays and tried to edit on his own. As
| a result, he's become a much better writer, and it's helped him
| in his other classes as well. He took the AP test a few weeks ago
| and I think he's going to pass.
| joering2 wrote:
| The AI tools should be helping more than hurting. But take my
| example: I am in 3 year long litigation with soon to be ex-wife,
| she recently fired her attorneys and for 2 weeks used chatGPT to
| write very well worded, very strong and very logically appealing
| motions practically almost destroying my attorney on multiple
| occasions and he had to work overtime costing me extra $80,000 in
| litigation costs. And finally once we got in front of the judge,
| the ex could not combine two logical sentences together. The
| paper can defend itself on its face but it also turned out that
| not a single citation she cited had anything to do with the case
| at hand, which chatGPT is known for in legal circles. She admit
| using the tool and only got a verbal reprimand. The judge told
| majority of that "work" was legal and she cannot stop her from
| exercising her first amendment right, be it written by AI she had
| to form questions, edit responses, etc. And I wasn't able to
| recover a single dime since on its face her motions did make
| sense, although judge denied majority of her ridiculous
| pleadings.
|
| Its really frightening! Its like handling over the smartest brain
| possible to someone who is dumb, but also giving them very simple
| GUI that they actually can operate and ask good enough
| questions/prompts to get smart answers. Once the public at large
| figure this one out, I can only imagine courts being flooded with
| all kinds of absurd pleadings. Being the judge in the near future
| will most likely be the least wanted job.
| plantwallshoe wrote:
| I'm enrolled in an undergraduate CS program as an experienced (10
| year) dev. I find AI incredibly useful as a tutor.
|
| I usually ask it to grade my homework for me before I turn it in.
| I usually find I didn't really understand some topic and the AI
| highlights this and helps set my understanding straight. Without
| it I would have just continued on with an incorrect understanding
| of the topic for 2-3 weeks while I wait for the assignment to be
| graded. As an adult with a job and a family this is incredibly
| helpful as I do homework at 10pm and all the office hours slots
| are in the middle of my workday.
|
| I do admit though it is tough figuring out the right amount to
| struggle on my own before I hit the AI help button. Thankfully I
| have enough experience and maturity to understand that the
| struggle is the most important part and I try my best to embrace
| it. Myself at 18 would definitely not have been using AI
| responsibly.
| danielhep wrote:
| I'm wondering how the undergrad CS course is as an experienced
| dev and why you decided to do that? I have been a software
| developer for 5 years with an EE degree, and as I do more
| software engineering and less EE I feel like I am missing some
| CS concepts that my colleagues have. Is this your situation too
| or did you have another reason? And why not a masters?
| mathgeek wrote:
| > And why not a masters?
|
| Not GP, but in my experience most MSC programs will require
| that you have substantial undergrad CS coursework in order to
| be accepted. There are a few programs designed for those
| without that background.
| glial wrote:
| Shout out to the fantastic Georgia Tech online masters
| program in CS:
|
| https://pe.gatech.edu/degrees/computer-science
|
| (not affiliated, just a fan)
| plantwallshoe wrote:
| A mix of feeling I'm "missing" some CS concepts and just
| general intellectual curiosity.
|
| I am planning on doing a masters but I need some undergrad CS
| credits to be a qualified candidate. I don't think I'm going
| to do the whole undergrad.
|
| Overall my experience has been positive. I've really enjoyed
| Discrete Math and coming to understand how I've been using
| set theory without really understanding it for years. I'm
| really looking forward to my classes on assembly/computer
| architecture, operating systems, and networks. They did make
| me take CS 101-102 as prereqs which was a total waste of time
| and money, but I think those are the only two mandatory
| classes with no value to me.
| aryamaan wrote:
| as I am also thinking mildly about doing masters cause I
| want to break into ai research, I am curious what your
| motivations are, if you would be open to share those.
| davidcbc wrote:
| When I was in college if AI was available I would have abused
| it way too much and been much worse off for it.
|
| This is my biggest concert about GenAI in our field. As an
| experienced dev I've been around the block enough times to have
| a good feel of how things should be done and can catch when and
| LLM goes off on a tangent that is a complete rabbit hole, but
| if this had been available 20 years ago I would have never
| learned and become an experienced dev because I absolutely
| would have over relied on an LLM. I worry that 10 years from
| now getting mid career dev will be like trying to get a COBOL
| dev now, except COBOL is a lot easier to learn.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I have a friend who is self-medicating untreated adhd with
| street amphetamines and he talks about it similarly. I can't
| say with any certainty that either of you is doing anything
| wrong or even dangerous. But I do think you both are
| overconfident in your assessment of the risks.
| perdomon wrote:
| It's honestly encouraging to see an educator thinking about
| solutions instead of wagging a finger at LLMs and technology and
| this new generation. Homework in its current form cannot exist
| AND be beneficial for the students -- educators need to evolve
| with the technology to work alongside it. The Google Docs idea
| was smart, but the return to pen and paper in the classroom is
| great. Good typists will hate it at first, but transcribing ideas
| more slowly and semi-permanently has its benefits.
| acc_297 wrote:
| One of the last courses I took during my CS degree we had one on
| one 10 minute zoom calls with TAs who would ask a series of
| random detailed questions about any line of code in any file of
| our term project. It was easy to complete if you wrote the code
| by hand and I imagine would have been difficult for students who
| extensively cheated.
|
| In terms of creative writing I think we need to accept that any
| proper assessment will require a short essay to be written in
| person. Especially at the high school level there's no reason why
| a 12th grade student should be passing english class if they
| can't write something half-decent in 90 minutes. And it doesn't
| need to be pen and paper - I'm sure there are ways to lock a
| chromebook into some kind of notepad software that lacks writing
| assistance.
|
| Education should not be thought of as solely a pathway to
| employment it's about making sure people are competent enough to
| interface with most of society and to participate in our broader
| culture. It's literally an exercise in enlightenment - we want
| students to have original insights about history, culture,
| science, and art. It is crucial to produce people who are
| pleasant to be around and who are interesting to talk to -
| otherwise what's the point?
| rwyinuse wrote:
| I think AI is the perfect final ingredient to ruin the higher
| education system, which is already in ruins (at least over here
| in Finland).
|
| Even before AI, our governments have long wanted more grads to
| make statistics look good and to suppress wages, but don't want
| to pay for it. So what you get are more students, lower quality
| of education, lower standards to make students graduate faster.
| Thanks to AI, now students don't have to really meet even those
| low standards to pass the courses. What is left is just a huge
| waste of young people's time and tax payer's money.
|
| There are very few degrees I'm going to recommend to my children.
| Most just don't provide good value for one's time anymore.
| boringg wrote:
| What you then say is a good value for ones time instead?
| danhodgins wrote:
| Fight fire with fire.
|
| Use AI to determine potential essay topics that are as close to
| 'AI-proof' as possible.
|
| Here is an example prompt:
|
| "Describe examples of possible high school essay topics where
| students cannot use AI engines such as perplexity or ChatGPT to
| help complete the assignment. In other words - AI-proof topics,
| assignments or projects"
| dsign wrote:
| Caveat, I'm just armchair-commenting and I haven't thought much
| about this.
|
| After kids learn to read and do arithmetic, shouldn't we go back
| to apprenticeships? The system of standardized teaching and
| grading seems to be about to collapse, and what's the point of
| memorizing things when you can carry all that knowledge in your
| pocket? And, anyway, it doesn't stick until you have to use it
| for something. Plus, a teacher seems to be insufficient to
| control all the students in a classroom (but that's nothing new;
| it amazes me that I was able to learn anything at all in
| elementary school, with all the mayhem there always was in the
| classroom).
|
| Okay, I can already see a lot of downsides to this, starting with
| the fact that I would be an illiterate farmer if some in my
| family had had a say in my education. But maybe the aggregate
| outcome would be better than what is coming?
| randcraw wrote:
| A good start for this debate would be to reconsider the term
| "AI", perhaps choosing a term that's more intuitive, like
| "automation" or "robot assistant". It's obvious that learning to
| automate a task is no way to learn how to do it yourself. Nor is
| asking a robot to do it for you.
|
| Students need to understand that learning to write requires the
| mastery of multiple distinct cognitive and organizational skills,
| only the last of which is to generate text that doesn't sound
| stupid.
|
| Each of writing's component tasks must be understood and
| explicitly addressed by the student, to wit: (1) choosing a topic
| to argue, and the component points to make a narrative, (2)
| outlining the research questions needed to answer each point, and
| finally, (3) choosing ONLY the relevant points that are necessary
| AND sufficient to the argument AND based on referenced facts, and
| that ONLY THEN can be threaded into a coherent logical narrative
| exposition that makes the intended argument and that leads to the
| desired conclusion.
|
| Only then has the student actually mastered the craft of writing
| an essay. If they are not held responsible for implementing each
| and every one of these steps in the final product, they have NOT
| learned how to write. Their robot did. That essay is a FAIL
| because the robot has earned the grade; not they. They just came
| along for the ride, like ballast in a sailing ship.
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