[HN Gopher] Implications of AI to schools
___________________________________________________________________
Implications of AI to schools
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1993010584175141038
Author : bilsbie
Score : 124 points
Date : 2025-11-24 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| In other words, learn to use the tool BUT keep your critical
| thinking. Same with all new technologies.
|
| I'm not minimizing Karpathy in any way, but this is obviously the
| right way to do this.
| trauco wrote:
| This is the correct take. To contrast the Terance Tao piece from
| earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972), AI
| research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent
| researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. You can't,
| however, _become_ a Terence Tao by asking AI to solve your
| homework.
|
| So, in learning environments we might not have an option but to
| open the floodgates to AI use, but abandon most testing
| techniques that are not, more or less, pen and paper, in-person.
| Use AI as much as you want, but know that as a student you'll be
| answering tests armed only with your brain.
|
| I do pity English teachers that have relied on essays to grade
| proficiency for hundreds of years. STEM fields has an easier way
| through this.
| wffurr wrote:
| Yesterday's Doonesbury was on point here:
| https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23
|
| Andrej and Garry Trudeau are in agreement that "blue book
| exams" (I.e. the teacher gives you a blank exam booklet,
| traditionally blue) to fill out in person for the test, after
| confiscating devices, is the only way to assess students
| anymore.
|
| My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but
| I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school
| district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide
| "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Blue book was the norm for exams in my social science and
| humanities classes _way_ after every assignment was typed on
| a computer (and probably a laptop, by that time) with
| Internet access.
|
| I guess high schools and junior highs will have to adopt
| something similar, too. Better condition those wrists and
| fingers, kids :-)
| eitally wrote:
| I'm oldish, but when I was in college in the late 90s we
| typed a huge volume of homework (I was a history &
| religious studies double major as an undergrad), but the
| vast majority of our exams were blue books. There were
| exceptions where the primary deliverable for the semester
| was a lengthy research paper, but lots and lots of blue
| books.
| ecshafer wrote:
| New York State recently banned phones state wide in schools.
| nradov wrote:
| Oh how I hated those as a student. Handwriting has always
| been a slow and uncomfortable process for me. Yes, I tried
| different techniques of printing and cursive as well as
| better pens. Nothing helped. Typing on a keyboard is just so
| much faster and more fluent.
|
| It's a shame that some students will again be limited by how
| fast they can get their thoughts down on a piece of paper.
| This is such an artificial limitation and totally irrelevant
| to real world work now.
| wffurr wrote:
| Maybe this is a niche for those low distraction writing
| tools that pop up from time to time. Or a school managed
| Chromebook that's locked to the exam page.
| o11c wrote:
| Obviously the solution is to bring back manual typewriters.
| zahlman wrote:
| > My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet,
| but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school
| district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-
| wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.
|
| This sounds as if you expect that it will become possible to
| access an LLM in class without a phone or other similar
| device. (Of course, using a laptop would be easily noticed.)
| wffurr wrote:
| The phone ban certainly helps make such usage noticeable in
| class, but I'm not sure the academic structure is prepared
| to go to in-person assessments only. The whole thread is
| about homework / out of class work being useless now.
| Fomite wrote:
| In the process, we lose both the ability to accommodate
| students, or ask questions that take longer than the test
| period to answer.
|
| All for a calculator that can lie.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It is, but it does not matter, because:
|
| 1. Corporate interests want to sell product 2. Administrators
| want a product they can use 3. Compliance people want a
| checkbox they can check 4. Teachers want to be ablet to
| continue what they have been doing thus far within the existing
| ecosystem 5. Parents either don't know, don't care, or do, but
| are unable to provide a viable alternative or, can and do
| provide it
|
| We have had this conversation ( although without AI component )
| before. None of it is really secret. The question is really
| what is the actual goal. Right now, in US, education is mostly
| in name only -- unless you are involved ( which already means
| you are taking steps to correct it ) or are in the right zip
| code ( which is not a guarantee, but it makes your kids odds
| better ).
| ubj wrote:
| One of my students recently came to me with an interesting
| dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for
| another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection
| tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100%
| confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment.
|
| Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's
| question was: how could his sister convince the teacher she had
| actually written the essay herself? My only suggestion was for
| her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60
| minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she
| in fact knew the material. It's a dilemma that an increasing
| number of honest students will face, unfortunately.
| vondur wrote:
| I agree. Most campuses use a product called Turnitin, which was
| originally designed to check for plagiarism. Now they claim it
| can detect AI-generated content with about 80% accuracy, but I
| don't think anyone here believes that.
| phh wrote:
| 80% is catastrophic though. In a classroom of 30 all honest
| pupils, 6 will get a 0 mark because the software says its AI?
| v9v wrote:
| I suppose 80% means you don't give them a 0 mark because
| the software says it's AI, you only do so if you have other
| evidence reinforcing the possibility.
| yoavm wrote:
| The promise (not saying that it works) is probably that 20%
| of people who cheated will not get caught. Not that 20% of
| the work marked as AI is actually written by humans.
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| It depends on their test dataset. If the test set was
| written 80% by AI and 20% by humans, a tool that labels
| every essay as AI-written would have a reported accuracy of
| 80%. That's why other metrics such as specificity and
| sensitivity (among many others) are commonly reported as
| well.
|
| Just speaking in general here -- I don't know what specific
| phrasing TurnItIn uses.
| j45 wrote:
| I think it means every time AI is used, it will detect it
| 80% of the time. Not that 20% of the class will marked as
| using AI.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 80% accuracy could mean 0 false negatives and 20% false
| positives.
|
| My point is that accuracy is a terrible metric here and
| sensitivity, specificity tell us much more relevant
| information to the task at hand. In that formulation, a
| specificity < 1 is going to have false positives and it
| isn't fair to those students to have to prove their
| innocence.
| soVeryTired wrote:
| That's more like the false positive rate and false
| negative rate.
|
| If we're being literal, accuracy is (number correct
| guesses) / (total number of guesses). Maybe the folks at
| turnitin don't actually mean 'accuracy', but if they're
| selling an AI/ML product they should at least know their
| metrics.
| tyleo wrote:
| I had Turn It In mark my work as plagiarism some years ago
| and I had to fight for it. It was clear the teacher wasn't
| doing their job and blindly following the tool.
|
| What happened is that I did a Q&A worksheet but in each
| section of my report I reiterated the question in italics
| before answering it.
|
| The reiterated questions of course came up as 100% plagiarism
| because they were just copied from the worksheet.
| pirates wrote:
| This matches my experience pretty well. My high school was
| using it 15 years ago and it was a spotty, inconsistent
| morass even back then. Our papers were turned in over the
| course of the semester, and late into the year you'd get
| flagged for "plagiarizing" your own earlier paper.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Funny how it's the teachers that are plagiarizing the work
| of the tools.
| vkou wrote:
| > but I don't think anyone here believes that.
|
| All it takes is one moron with power and a poor understanding
| of statistics.
| huevosabio wrote:
| When I was in college, there was a cheating scandal for the
| final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest
| question of the exam.
|
| The professor noticed it (presumably via seeing poor "show your
| work") and gave zero points on the question to everyone. And
| once you went to complain about your grade, she would ask you
| to explain the answer there in her office and work through the
| problem live.
|
| I thought it was a clever and graceful way to deal with it.
| j45 wrote:
| This is a nice approach. The students who know the material,
| or even who manually prepare before seeing the prof achieve
| the objective of learning.
| onion2k wrote:
| It's not great for the teacher though. They're the ones who
| will truly suffer from the proliferation of AI - increased
| complexity of work around spotting cheating 'solved' by a
| huge increase in time pressure. Faced with that teachers
| will have three options: accept AI detection as gospel
| without appeals and be accused of unfairness or being bad
| at the job by parents, spend time on appeals to the
| detriment of other duties leading to more accusations of
| being bad at the job, or leave teaching and get an easier
| (and probably less stressful and higher paid) job. Given
| those choices I'd pick the third option.
| mavhc wrote:
| 4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they
| understand.
|
| Tests were created to save money, more students per
| teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually
| useful, method of talking to people to see if they
| understand what they've been taught.
|
| You weren't asked to write an essay because someone
| wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've
| understood something
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Only if she advertised that option somehow. I worked two jobs
| in college, I didn't take time off to go complain about my
| grades.
| rgblambda wrote:
| Not to mention there'd be at least a few students too timid
| to challenge the teacher, even if they knew they got it
| right.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Lol, in 3rd grade algebra, a teacher called 2 of us in for
| cheating. She had us take the test again, I got the same
| exact horribly failing score (a 38%) and the cheater got a
| better score, so the teacher then knew who the cheater was.
| He just chose the wrong classmate to cheat of of.
| darkwater wrote:
| I don't get it. If she called you too it was because your
| results were good, no? Who cheats to get a bad result?
| writebetterc wrote:
| The students had identical answers, I presume
| neom wrote:
| Doesn't google docs have fairly robust edit history? If I was a
| student these days I'd either record my screen of me doing my
| homework, or at least work in google docs and share the edit
| history.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Yes. When I was an educator, reviewing version history was an
| obvious way to clarify if/how much students plagiarized.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| This still leaves many options open for plagiarism (for
| example a second, seperate device)
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| Now imagine this but its a courtroom and you're facing 25 years
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| Family law judges, in my small experience, are so
| uninterested in the basic facts of a case that I would
| actually trust an LLM to do a better job. Not quite what you
| mean, but maybe there is a silver lining.
|
| We are already (in the US) living in a system of soft social-
| credit scores administered by ad tech firms and non-profits.
| So "the algorithms says you're guilty" has already been
| happening in less dramatic ways.
| perihelions wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238786 ( _" Sent to
| Prison by a Software Program's Secret Algorithms
| (nytimes.com)"_)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14285116 ( _'
| Justice.exe: Bias in Algorithmic sentencing
| (justiceexe.com)"_)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649811 ( _" Louisiana
| prison board uses algorithms to determine eligility for
| parole (propublica.org)"_)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753805 ( _" Machine
| Bias (propublica.org)"_)
| johanam wrote:
| edit history in Google docs is a good way to defend yourself
| from AI tool use accusations
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Ironic that one of the biggest AI companies is also the
| platform to offer a service to protect yourself from
| allegations of using it.
| hiddencost wrote:
| I seriously think the people selling AI detection tools to
| teachers should be sued into the ground by a coalition of state
| attorneys general, and that the tools should be banned in
| schools.
| j45 wrote:
| Easy if one of these options might be available to the writer:
|
| - Write it in google docs, and share the edit history in the
| google docs, it is date and time stamped.
|
| - Make a video of writing it in the google docs tab.
|
| If this is available, and sufficient, I would pursue a written
| apology to remind the future detectors.
|
| Edit: clarity
| obscurette wrote:
| There have always been problems like this. I had a classmate
| who wrote poems and short stories since age 6. No teacher
| believed she wrote those herself. She became a poet, translator
| and writer and admitted herself later in life that she wouldn't
| have believed it herself.
| mettamage wrote:
| I would screencast the whole thing and then tell my professor
| that we can watch a bit together.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Guess you have to videotape or screen-record yourself writing
| it. Oh what a world we've created :-S.
| inerte wrote:
| You mean you'll prompt Sora to create a video of you writing
| the essay :)
| rcv wrote:
| ... until you get accused of generating that video with
| another AI.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| No fair, i was born with 11 fingers!
| jancsika wrote:
| Seems like this could be practically addressed by teachers
| adopting the TSA's randomized screening. That is, roll some
| dice to figure out which student on a given assignment comes in
| either for the oral discussion or-- perhaps in higher grades--
| to write the essay in realtime.
|
| It should be way easier than TSA's goal because you don't need
| to _stop_ cheaters. You instead just need to ensure that you
| _seed_ skills into a minimal number of achievers so that the
| rest of the kids see what the _real_ target of education looks
| like. Kids try their best not to learn, but when the need kicks
| in they learn _way_ better spontaneously from their peers than
| any other method.
|
| Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program
| in the first place.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Write it in something like Google docs that tracks changes and
| then share the link with the revision history.
|
| If this is insufficient, then there are tools specifically for
| education contexts that track student writing process.
|
| Detecting the whole essay being copied and pasted from an
| outside source is trivial. Detecting artificial typing patterns
| is a little more tricky, but also feasible. These methods
| dramatically increase the effort required to get away with
| having AI do the work for you, which diminishes the benefit of
| the shortcut and influences more students to do the work
| themselves. It also protects the honest students from false
| positives.
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| Thought it is a good idea at first, but can easily be
| defeated with typing out AI contents. One can add
| pauses/deletions/edits or true edits from joining ideas
| different AI outputs.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| > Detecting artificial typing patterns is a little more
| tricky, but also feasible.
|
| Keystroke dynamics can detect artificial typing patterns
| (copying another source by typing it out manually). If a
| student has to go way out of their way to make their
| behavior appear authentic then it's decreasing advantage of
| cheating and less students will do it.
|
| If the student is integrating answers from multiple AI
| responses then maybe that's a good thing for them to be
| learning and the assessment should allow it.
| darkwater wrote:
| It will take 0 time to have some (smarter?) student
| create an AI agent that mimick keystrokes.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| How is that a dilemma for the students? What are their supposed
| options?
| renewiltord wrote:
| This couldn't have happened at a better time. When I was young my
| parents found a schooling system that had minimal homework so I
| could play around and live my life. I've moved to a country with
| a lot less flexibility. Now when my kids will soon be going to
| school, compulsory homework will be obsolete.
|
| Zero homework grades will be ideal. Looking forward to this.
| danielbln wrote:
| If AI gets us reliably to a flipped classroom (=research at
| home, work through work during class) then I'm here for it.
| Homework in the traditional sense is an anti pattern.
| mavhc wrote:
| Agreed, the Gutenberg method is preferred:
|
| 1. Assume printing press exists 2. Now there's no need for a
| teacher to stand up and deliver information by talking to a
| class for 60 mins 3. Therefore students can read at home (or
| watch prepared videos) and test their learning in class where
| there's experts to support them 4. Given we only need 1 copy
| of the book/video/interactive demo, we can spend wayyyyy more
| money making it the best it can possibly be
|
| What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has barely
| changed
| vkou wrote:
| > What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has
| barely changed
|
| From my extensive experience of four years of undergrad,
| the problem in your plan is "3. Therefore students can read
| at home " - half the class won't do the reading, and the
| half that did won't get what it means until they go to
| lecture[1].
|
| [1] If the lecturer is any good at all. If he spends most
| of his time ranting about his ex-wife...
| speff wrote:
| Most of what I learned in college was only because I did
| homework and struggled to figure it out myself. Classroom time
| was essentially just a heads up to what I'll actually be
| learning myself later.
|
| Granted, this was much less the case in grade school - but if
| students are going to see homework for the first time in
| college, I can see problems coming up.
|
| If you got rid of homework throughout all of the "standard"
| education path (grade school + undergrad), I would bet a lot of
| money that I'd be much dumber for it.
| vkou wrote:
| > but if students are going to see homework for the first
| time in college, I can see problems coming up.
|
| If the concept is too foreign for them, I'm sure we could
| figure out how to replicate the grade school environment.
| Give them their 15 hours/week of lecture, and then lock them
| in a classroom for the 30 hours they should spend on
| homework.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Now _that 's_ an optimistic take!
| ecshafer wrote:
| In my CS undergrad I had Doug Lea as a professor, really
| fantastic professor (best teacher I have ever had, bar none). He
| had a really novel way to handle homework hand ins, you had to
| demo the project. So you got him to sit down with you, you ran
| the code, he would ask you to put some inputs in (that were
| highly likely to be edge cases to break it). Once that was
| sufficient, he would ask you how you did different things, and to
| walk him through your code. Then when you were done he told you
| to email the code to him, and he would grade it. I am not sure
| how much of this was an anti-cheating device, but it required
| that you knew the code you wrote and why you did it for the
| project.
|
| I think that AI has the possibility of weakening some aspects of
| education but I agree with Karpathy here. In class work, in
| person defenses of work, verbal tests. These were corner stones
| of education for thousands of years and have been cut out over
| the last 50 years or so outside of a few niche cases (Thesis
| defense) and it might be a good thing that these come back.
| SirMaster wrote:
| So we are screwed once we get brain-computer interfaces?
| mercacona wrote:
| Yep, it's easy to shortcut AI plagiarism, but you need time. In
| most of the universities around the world (online universities
| especially), the number of students is way too big, while
| professors get more and more pressure on publishing and
| bureaucracy.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I did my masters in GaTech OMSCS (Chatgpt came out at the
| very end of my last semester). Tests were done with cameras
| on and it was recorded and then they were watched I think by
| TAs. Homework was done with automated checking and a
| plagiarism checker. Do you need to have in person proctoring
| via test centers or libraries? Video chats with professors? I
| am not sure. Projects are importants, but maybe they need to
| become a minority of grades and more being based on theory to
| circumvent AI?
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not even about plagiarism. But, sure, 1:1 or even 1:few
| instruction is great but even at elite schools is not really
| very practical. I went to what's considered a very good
| engineering school and classes with hundreds of students was
| pretty normal.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This doesn't adress the point that AI can replace going to
| school. AI can be your perfect personal tutor to help you learn
| thing 1:1. Needing to have a teacher and prove to them that you
| know what they teached will become a legacy concept. That we have
| an issue of AI cheating at school is in my eyes a temporary
| issue.
| alariccole wrote:
| ChatGPT just told me to put the turkey in my toaster oven legs
| facing the door, and you think it can replace school. Unless
| there is a massive architectural change that can be provably
| verified by third parties, this can never be. I'd hate for my
| unschooled surgeon to check an llm while I'm under.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Just curious, not being a turkey SME, what's the downside to
| positioning the turkey that way?
| patrickmay wrote:
| Most turkeys of my acquaintance would not fit into a
| toaster oven without some percussive assistance.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I see, I overlooked the 'toaster' part. That's a good
| world model benchmark question for models and a good
| reading comprehension question for humans. :-P
|
| GPT 5.1 Pro made the same mistake ("Face the legs away
| from the door.") Claude Sonnet 4.5 agreed but added
| "Note: Most toaster ovens max out around 10-12 pounds for
| a whole turkey."
|
| Gemini 3 acknowledged that toaster ovens are usually very
| compact and that the legs shouldn't be positioned where
| they will touch the glass door. When challenged, it hand-
| waved something to the effect of "Well, some toaster
| ovens are large countertop convection units that can hold
| up to a 12-pound turkey." When asked for a brand and
| model number of such an oven, it backtracked and admitted
| that no toaster oven would be large enough.
|
| Changing the prompt to explicitly specify a 12-pound
| turkey yielded good answers ("A 12-pound turkey won't fit
| in a toaster oven - most max out at 4-6 pounds for
| poultry. Attempting this would be a fire hazard and
| result in dangerously uneven cooking," from Sonnet.)
|
| So, progress, but not enough.
| charcircuit wrote:
| What's the alternate if someone didn't know something during
| a procedure? Just wing it? Getting another data point from an
| LLM seems beneficial to me.
| axus wrote:
| Ask a human who does. If there are no competent humans on-
| call before the procedure starts, reschedule the procedure.
| qingcharles wrote:
| For someone that wants to learn, I agree with this 100%. AI has
| been great at teaching me about 100s of topics.
|
| I don't yet know how we get AI to teach unruly kids, or kids
| with neurodivergencies. Perhaps, though, the AI can eventually
| be vastly superior to an adult because of the methods it can
| use to get through to the child, keep the child interested and
| how it presents the teaching in a much more interactive way.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| It is considered valuable and worthwhile for a society to
| educate all of its children/citizens. This means we have to
| develop systems and techniques to educate all kinds of people,
| not just the ones who can be dropped off by themselves at a
| library when they turn five, and picked up again in fifteen
| years with a PHD.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Sure. People who are self motivated are who will benefit the
| earliest. If a society values ensuring every single citizen
| gets a baseline education they can figure out how to get an
| AI to persuade or trick people into learning better than a
| human could.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Snap out of it. This is the best advice I can give you.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Snap out of what? I use chatgpt for learning every day.
| qsort wrote:
| It's a fair question, but there's maybe a bit of US defaultism
| baked in? If I look back at my exams in school they were mostly
| closed-book written + oral examination, nothing would really need
| to change.
|
| A much bigger question is what to teach assuming we get models
| much more powerful than those we have today. I'm still confident
| there's an irreducible hard core in most subjects that's well
| worth knowing/training, but it might take some soul searching.
| mark242 wrote:
| "You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used
| AI."
|
| That is just such a wildly cynical point of view, and it is
| incredibly depressing. There is a whole huge cohort of kids out
| there who genuinely want to learn and want to do the work, and
| feel like using AI is cheating. These are the kids who,
| ironically, AI will help the most, because they're the ones who
| will understand the fundamentals being taught in K-12.
|
| I would hope that any "solution" to the growing use of AI-as-a-
| crutch can take this cohort of kids into consideration, so their
| development isn't held back just to stop the less-ethical student
| from, well, being less ethical.
| tgv wrote:
| > There is a whole huge cohort of kids out there
|
| Well, it seems the vast majority doesn't care about cheating,
| and is using AI for everything. And this is from primary school
| to university.
|
| It's not just that AI makes it simpler, so many pupils cannot
| concentrate anymore. Tiktok and others have fried their mind.
| So AI is a quick way out for them. Back to their addiction.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Addiction created by you and me, laboring for Zuck's profit.
|
| There's a reason this stuff is banned in China. Their pupils
| suffer no such opiate.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Sure, but the point is that if 5% of students are using AI then
| you have to assume that any work done outside classroom has
| used AI, because otherwise you're giving a massive advantage to
| the 5% of students who used AI, right?
| techblueberry wrote:
| What possible solution could prevent this? The best students
| are learning on their own anyways, the school can't stop
| students using AI for their personal learning.
|
| There was a reddit thread recently that asked the question, are
| all students really doing worse, and it basically said that,
| there are still top performers performing toply, but that the
| middle has been hollowed out.
|
| So I think, I dunno, maybe depressing. Maybe cynical, but
| probably true. Why shy away from the truth?
|
| And by the way, I would be both. Probably would have used AI to
| further my curiosity and to cheat. I hated school, would
| totally cheat to get ahead, and am now wildly curious and
| ambitious in the real world. Maybe this makes me a bad person,
| but I don't find cheating in school to be all that unethical.
| I'm paying for it, who cares how I do it.
|
| People aren't one thing.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| AI is a boon to students who are intrinsically motivated.
| Most students aren't.
| KerryJones wrote:
| It seems like a good path forward is to somewhat try to replicate
| the idea of "once you can do it yourself, feel free to use it
| going forward" (knowing how various calculator operations work
| before you let it do it for you).
|
| I'm curious if we instead _gave_ students an AI tool, but one
| that would intentionally throw in _wrong_ things that the student
| had to catch. Instead of the student using LLMs, they would have
| one paid for by the school.
|
| This is more brainstorming then a well thought-out idea, but I
| generally think "opposing AI" is doomed to fail. If we follow a
| montessori approach, kids are _naturally inclined_ to want to
| learn thing, if students are trying to lie /cheat, we've already
| failed them by turning off their natural curiosity for something
| else.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I agree, I think schools and universities need to adapt, just
| like calculators, these things aren't going away. Let students
| leverage AI as tools and come out of Uni more capable than we
| did.
|
| AI _do_ currently throw in an occasional wrong thing. Sometimes
| a lot. A students job needs to be verifying and fact checking
| the information the AI is telling them.
|
| The student's job becomes asking the right questions and
| verifying the results.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems
| without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in
| class later.
|
| Learning how to prepare for in-class tests and writing exercises
| is a very particular skillset which I haven't really exercised a
| lot since I graduated.
|
| Never mind teaching the humanities, for which I think this is a
| genuine crisis, in class programming exams are basically the same
| thing as leetcode job interviews, and we all know what a bad
| proxy those are for "real" development work.
| iterateoften wrote:
| I use it every day.
|
| Preparing for a test requires understanding what the instructor
| wants. concentrate on the wrong thing get marked down.
|
| Same applies to working in a corporation. You need to
| understand what management wants. It's a core requirement.
| yannyu wrote:
| > in class programming exams are basically the same thing as
| leetcode job interviews, and we all know what a bad proxy those
| are for "real" development work.
|
| Confusing university learning for "real industry work" is a
| mistake and we've known it's a mistake for a while. We can have
| classes which teach what life in industry is like, but assuming
| that the role of university is to teach people how to fit
| directly into industry is mistaking the purpose of university
| and K-12 education as a whole.
|
| Writing long-form prose and essays isn't something I've done in
| a long time, but I wouldn't say it was wasted effort. Long-form
| prose forces you to do things that you don't always do when
| writing emails and powerpoints, and I rely on those skills
| every day.
| crooked-v wrote:
| There's no mistake there for all the students looking at job
| listings that treat having a college degree as a hard
| prerequisite for even being employable.
| mercacona wrote:
| I've been following this approach since last school year. I focus
| on in-class work and home-time is for reading and memorization.
| My classmates still think classrooms are for lecturing, but it's
| coming. The paper-and-pen era is back to school!
| Kelvinidan wrote:
| I recently wrote on something similar. I think the way we design
| evaluation methods for students needs to mirror the design of
| security systems. https://kelvinpaschal.com/blog/educators-
| hackers/
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I think legacy schooling just needs to be reworked. Kids should
| be doing way more projects that demonstrate the integration of
| knowledge and skills, rather than focusing so much energy on
| testing and memorization. There's probably a small core of things
| that really must be fully integrated and memorized, but for
| everything else you should just give kids harder projects which
| they're expected to solve by leveraging all the tools at their
| disposal. Focus on teaching kids how to become high-agency beings
| with good epistemics and a strong math core. Give them
| experiments and tools to play around and actually understand how
| things work. Bring back real chemistry labs and let kids blow
| stuff up.
|
| The key issue with schools is that they crush your soul and turn
| you into a low-agency consumer of information within a strict
| hierarchy of mind-numbing rules, rather than helping you develop
| your curiosity hunter muscles to go out and explore. In an ideal
| world, we would have curated gardens of knowledge and information
| which the kids are encouraged to go out and explore. If they find
| some weird topic outside the garden that's of interest to them,
| figure out a way to integrate it.
|
| I don't particularly blame the teachers for the failings of
| school though, since most of them have their hands tied by strict
| requirements from faceless bureaucrats.
| yannyu wrote:
| As much as I hated schooling, I do want to say that there are
| parts of learning that are simply hard. There are parts that
| you can build enthusiasm for with project work and prioritizing
| for engagement. But there are many things that people should
| learn that will require drudgery to learn and won't excite all
| people.
|
| Doing derivatives, learning the periodic table, basic language
| and alphabet skills, playing an instrument are foundational
| skills that will require deliberate practice to learn,
| something that isn't typically part of project based learning.
| At some point in education with most fields, you will have to
| move beyond concepts and do some rote memorization and
| repetition of principles in order to get to higher level
| concepts. You can't gamify your way out of education, despite
| our best attempts to do so.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Most learning curves in the education system today are very
| bumpy and don't adapt well to the specific student. Students
| get stuck on big bumps or get bored and demotivated at
| plateaus.
|
| AI has potential to smooth out all curves so that students
| can learn faster and maximize time in flow.
|
| I've spent literally thousands of hours thinking about this
| (and working on it). The future of education will be as
| different from today as today is to 300 years ago.
|
| Kids used to get smacked with a stick if they spelled a word
| wrong.
| seg_lol wrote:
| There is a huge opportunity here to have the stick smacking
| be automated and timed to perfection.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| You are 100% right on this. There is a reason school is so
| vastly different from the process most people follow when
| learning something on their own.
|
| Doing rather than memorizing outdated facts in a textbook.
| kingstnap wrote:
| Having had some experience teaching and designing labs and
| evaluating students in my opinion there is basically no problem
| that can't be solved with more instructor work.
|
| The problem is that the structure pushes for teaching
| productivity which basically directly opposes good pedagogy at
| this point in the optimization.
|
| Some specifics:
|
| 1. Multiple choice sucks. It's obvious that written response
| better evaluates students and oral is even better. But multiple
| choice is graded instantly by a computer. Written response needs
| TAs. Oral is such a time sink and needs so many TAs and lots of
| space if you want to run them in parallel.
|
| 1.5 Similarly having students do things on computers is nice
| because you don't have to print things and even errors in the
| question can be fixed live and you can ask students to refresh
| the page. But if the chatbots let them cheat too easily on
| computers doing hand written assesments sucks cause you have to
| go arrange for printing and scanning.
|
| 2. Designing labs is a clear LLM tradeoff. Autograded labs with
| testbenches and fill in the middle style completetions or API
| completetions are incredibly easy to grade. You just pull the
| commit before some specific deadline and run some scripts.
|
| You can do 200 students in the background when doing other work
| its so easy. But the problem is that LLMS are so good at fill in
| the middle and making testbenches pass.
|
| I've actually tried some more open ended labs before and its
| actually very impressive how creative students are. They are
| obviously not LLMs there is this diversity in thought and
| simplicity of code that you do not get with ChatGPT.
|
| But it is ridiculously time consuming to pull people's code and
| try to run open ended testbenches that they have created.
|
| 3. Having students do class presentations is great for evaluating
| them. But you can only do like 6 or 7 presentations in a 1 hr
| block. You will need to spend like a week even in a relatively
| small class.
|
| 4. What I will say LLMs are fun for are having students do open
| ended projects faster with faster iterations. You can scope creep
| them if you expect expect to use AI coding.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| I think part of the reason AI is having such a negative effect on
| schools in particular is because of how many education processes
| are reliant on an archaic, broken way of "learning." So much of
| it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information
| (which AI is unmatched at doing).
|
| School is packed with inefficiency and busywork that is
| completely divorced from the way people learn on their own. In
| fact, it's pretty safe to say you could learn something about 10x
| by typing it into an AI chat bot and having it tailor the
| experience to you.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Yes, the biggest problem with authentic exercises is evaluating
| the students' actions and giving feedback. The problem is that
| authentic assessments didnt previous scale (e.g. what worked in
| 1:1 coaching or tutoring couldn't be done for a whole
| classroom). But AI can scale them.
|
| It seems like AI will destroy education but it's only breaking
| the old education system, it will also enable a new and much
| better one. One where students make more and faster progress
| developing more relevant and valuable skills.
|
| Education system uses multiple choice quizzes and tests because
| their grading can be automated.
|
| But when evaluation of _any_ exercise can be automated with AI,
| such that students can practice any skill with iterative
| feedback at the pace of their own development, so much human
| potential will be unlocked.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I submitted this but why is there an xcancel link added to it?
| crabmusket wrote:
| X is a hostile experience when not logged in.
| paulorlando wrote:
| I did a lot of my blog and book writing before these AI tools,
| but now I show my readers images of handwritten notes and drafts
| (more out of interest than demonstrating proof of work).
| ishtanbul wrote:
| Here is my proposal for AI in schools: raise the bar
| dramatically. Rather than trying to prevent kids from using AI,
| just raise the expectations of what they should accomplish with
| it. They should be setting really lofty goals rather than just
| doing the same work with less effort.
| alexose wrote:
| Absolutely. I'd love to see the same effect happen in the
| software industry. Keep the volume of output the same, but
| increase the quality.
| ojr wrote:
| that is what they do in the software industry, before it was
| let me catch you off guard with asking how to reverse a
| linked list, now its leetcode questions that are so hard that
| you need to know and study them weekly, and prep for a year,
| interviewer can tell if you started prep 3 weeks prior
| oytis wrote:
| > Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the
| quality.
|
| Effect of AI applied to coding is precisely the opposite
| though?
| oytis wrote:
| AI doesn't help you do higher quality work. It helps you do (or
| imitate) mediocre work faster. But thing is, it is hard to
| learn how to do excellent work without learning to do mediocre
| work first.
| enjeyw wrote:
| I made a tool for this! It's an essay writing platform that
| tracks the edits and keystrokes rather than the final output, so
| its AI detection accuracy is _much_ higher than other tools:
| https://collie.ink/
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| As a teacher, I try to keep an open mind, but consistently I can
| find out in 5 minutes of talking to a student if they understand
| the material. I might just go all in for the oral exams.
| adidoit wrote:
| This is exactly why I'm focusing on job readiness and remediation
| rather than the education system. I think working all this out is
| simply too complex for a system with a lot of vested interest and
| that doesn't really understand how AI is evolving. There's an
| arms race between students, teachers, and institutions that hire
| the students.
|
| It's simply too complex to fix. I think we'll see increased
| investment by corporates who do keep hiring on remediating the
| gaps in their workforce.
|
| Most elite institutions will probably increase their efforts
| spent on interviewing including work trials. I think we're
| already seeing this with many of the elite institutions talking
| about judgment, emotional intelligence critical thinking as more
| important skills.
|
| My worry is that hiring turns into a test of likeability rather
| than meritocracy (everyone is a personality hire when cognition
| is done by the machines)
|
| Source: I'm trying to build a startup (Socratify) a bridge for
| upskilling from a flawed education system to the workforce for
| early stage professionals
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| How about just dispense with the AI nonsense in education and go
| to totally in-person, closed-book, manually-written, proctored
| exams? No homework, no assignments, no projects. Just pure mind-
| to-paper writing in a bare room under the eye of an examiner.
| Those that want to will learn and will produce intelligent work
| regardless of setting.
| thinkindie wrote:
| this is a very American issue. In my entire student career in
| Italy, home assignments were never graded. Maybe you had a
| project or two through university, but otherwise I got all my
| grades for onsite tests.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| AI can generate questions. It is feasible in principle to give
| every student a different exam - and use the same or another AI
| to ensure they're all exactly the same difficulty, either by
| generating them carefully, or by generating lots of candidate
| exams and rejecting the ones that are too hard/too easy.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-24 23:00 UTC)