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.
Balgair · 21h ago
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.
stonemetal12 · 17h ago
>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 · 17h ago
Funnily enough I only had 10-person-classes when I paid $125 for summer courses in a community college between expensive uni semesters.
kesslern · 13h ago
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 · 13h ago
Given that the adjuncts often aren't paid all that much better than the McDonalds workers...
rwyinuse · 16h ago
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 · 15h ago
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.
milesward · 11h ago
Huh, parameters as LLM bandwidth.
fakeBeerDrinker · 19h ago
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.
voilavilla · 12h ago
>> (where everyone cheated anyways)
This is depressing. I'm late GenX, I didn't cheat in college (engineering, RPI), nor did my peers. Of course, there was very little writing of essays so that's probably why, not to mention all of our exams were in person paper-and-pencil (and this was 1986-1990, so no phones). Literally impossible to cheat. We did have study groups where people explained the homework to each other, which I guess could be called "cheating", but since we all shared, we tended to oust anyone who didn't bring anything to the table. Is cheating through college a common millenial / gen z thing?
Balgair · 11h ago
Even before LLMs, if you walked into any frat and asked to see their test bank, you'd get thousands of files. Though not technically cheating, having every test a professor ever gave was a huge advantage. Especially since most profs would just reuse tests and HWs without any changes anyway.
To my generation, it wasn't that cheating was a 'thing' as much as it was impossible to avoid. Profs were so lazy that any semi-good test prep would have you discover that the profs were phoning it in and had been for a while. Things like not updating the course page with all the answers on them were unfortunately common. You could go and tell the prof, and most of us did, but then you'd be at a huge disadvantage relative to your peers who did download the answer key. Especially since the prof would still not update the questions! I want to make it clear: this is a common thing at R1 universities before LLMs.
The main issue is that at most R1s, the prof isn't really graded on their classes. That's maybe 5% of their tenure review. The thing they are most incentivized by is the amount of money they pull in from grants. I'm not all that familiar with R2 and below, but I'd imagine they have the same incentives (correct me if I'm wrong!). And with ~35% of students that go to R2 and below, the incentives for the profs for ~65% of students isn't well correlated with teaching said students.
voilavilla · 6h ago
Seems to me that studying a collection of every test over the years, without knowing what questions will be on the exam is... actually learning? >_<
phito · 5h ago
Not really. I had fellow students who understood nothing, could not program at all, but could tell you the answer to question 6 of the 2015 Java exam because they had memorized it all.
BobbyTables2 · 8h ago
Don’t know about frats, but I went to a lowly ranked “third tier” university and a “top 10” one.
While most of the classes were taught pretty well at both, the third tier ones were taught much better. Just couldn’t get an interview upon graduation despite near 4.0…
It is utterly bizarre that we use graduate research dollars to evaluate the quality of undergraduate education.
anon84873628 · 11h ago
Here's how cheating advanced since then.
1. People in the Greek system would save all homework sets and exams in a "library" for future members taking a given course. While professors do change (and a single professor will try to mix up problems) with enough time you eventually have an inventory of all the possible problems, to either copy outright or study.
2. Eventually a similar thing moved online, both with "black market" hired help, then the likes of Chegg Inc.
3. All the students in a course join a WhatsApp or Discord group and text each other the answers. (HN had a good blog about this from a data science professor, but I can't find it now. College cheating has been mentioned many times on HN).
a_bonobo · 10h ago
I think this is where it's going to end up.
The masses get the cheap AI education. The elite get the expensive, small class, analog education. There won't be a middle class of education, as in the current system - too expensive for too little gain.
armchairhacker · 15h ago
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 · 14h ago
> 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 · 14h ago
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).
msgodel · 13h ago
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.
theyinwhy · 13h ago
> I enjoy learning and think my job gets in the way of that
Spot on, this gave me ideas, thank you for that!
tgv · 20h ago
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 · 16h ago
Very common. Large lecture with a professor, and small "discussion sections" with a grad student for Q/A, homework help, exam review.
username223 · 20h ago
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 · 19h ago
> 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..."
jacobolus · 20h ago
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 · 19h ago
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 · 16h ago
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.
blibble · 13h ago
Oxbridge supervisinons/tutorials are typically two students, and at a push three (rarely)
certainly not anywhere close to ten!
Balgair · 12h ago
Thanks for the clarification there!
Yeah, 1:3 teacher to student ratio would make university a lot more expensive
nothercastle · 20h ago
All degrees are basically the same though and of 95% of the value is signaling nobody really cares about the education part
BrenBarn · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
throwaway2037 · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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.
keiferski · 23h ago
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 · 21h ago
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 · 20h ago
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 · 16h ago
This is true for research universities. There are many excellent teaching colleges where professors are hired to teach, and don't do research.
infecto · 1d ago
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.
lukan · 1d ago
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.
ninetyninenine · 1d ago
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.
lamename · 22h ago
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 · 19h ago
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.
datadrivenangel · 1d ago
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.
SoftTalker · 16h ago
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.
stackedinserter · 23h ago
Seriously, what so non-understandable in first 20 minutes of QM?
brookst · 22h ago
Probably depends on how it’s explained, no?
I could make arithmetic incomprehensible, let alone QM.
vonneumannstan · 21h ago
They never implied it was the first 20 minutes of the entire course
fastasucan · 1d ago
>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 · 18h ago
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.
dr_dshiv · 1d ago
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
rtkwe · 21h ago
> 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 · 15h ago
>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.
stevage · 1d ago
This is very different in France. Studying to be a teacher at university level is a big deal.
orwin · 23h ago
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 · 21h ago
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.
BrenBarn · 1d ago
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.
Telemakhos · 23h ago
A PhD was historically a teaching degree: that’s what the D stands for.
raverbashing · 23h ago
No?
PhD - Philosophy Doctor
valleyer · 22h ago
Doctor is Latin for teacher; cf. "doctrine", "docent".
raverbashing · 21h ago
Fair enough. I had looked into it but missed the "Doctor" part.
treis · 22h ago
Doctor is latin for teacher
Super_Jambo · 1d ago
Once you're an adult some of the best lessons come from having bad teachers.
iwanttocomment · 23h ago
Adult here! No.
vacuity · 20h ago
Adult here; there are lessons everywhere, but people learn very differently.
hoseja · 1d ago
Nobody knows "how" things should be taught. Pedagogy is utter disaster.
throwaway2037 · 1d ago
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 · 23h ago
A lot of research is made. Are the discoveries applied properly? Not always.
california-og · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
I think one of the outcomes might be a devaluation of the certifications offered in the public job marketplace.
throwaway2037 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 23h ago
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 · 16h ago
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.
BrenBarn · 7h ago
I agree. I tend to think though that the best way forward is to ignore all of these education issues and just focus on raising the floor. The difference between a "good-paying job" and a "not-so-good-paying job" should be small, and everyone should be able to have a good life regardless of what job they have. Then people can choose to go to college if they want to learn about things, and maybe to learn about subjects related to a job they want, but not because they think it's a way to make more money.
throwaway2037 · 45m ago
Well, see Germany. They do it pretty well. The expected lifetime earnings difference between university graduates and someone who took the trade/apprenticeship route is very similar. Does anyone know of other countries that are similar? Is it also true in Austria or Switzerland?
mcherm · 1d ago
You seem to be missing the first step: get hired for the job in the first place.
xsmasher · 17h ago
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.
intended · 1d ago
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.
halgir · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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).
intended · 23h ago
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 · 20h ago
> 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 · 19h ago
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.
I’ve been recommending network propaganda recently. The book has the data that makes the case better than I can about structural issues in the information ecosystem.
Also started going through this legal essay (paper?) recently, Lies, Counter-lies, and Disinformation in the Marketplace of Ideas
The book "Nexus" by Yuval Noah Harari essentially makes this same point. The way he phrases it is that information's primary role throughout history hasn't necessarily been to convey objective truth but to connect people and enable large scale cooperation. So more information is not necessarily better.
Worth a read or you can check out one of his recent podcast appearances for a quicker download.
BrenBarn · 4h ago
> 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.
This is another example of "AI is exacerbating existing problems". :-) That kind of grading policy is absurd and should never have existed in the first place, but now AI is really making that obvious.
jorvi · 1d ago
> 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.
SoftTalker · 16h ago
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.
halgir · 1d ago
That sounds horrible. Thanks for the insight.
throwaway2037 · 1d ago
> 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.
ninetyninenine · 1d ago
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.
sien · 1d ago
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 ?
wrp · 23h ago
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.
fn-mote · 1d ago
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.
directevolve · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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.
Baeocystin · 1d ago
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.
dataflow · 1d ago
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?
rtkwe · 21h ago
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.
kortilla · 1d ago
They tell you to come back when you’re ready to take the test. This can’t be surprising…
dyauspitr · 1d ago
Webcam is broken is now pretty universally interpreted as I don’t want to be on video.
RHSeeger · 1d ago
But it also only catches cheating on exams. For homework/projects, you can't really have that be in person.
armchairhacker · 22h ago
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 · 17h ago
> 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 · 16h ago
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.
baby_souffle · 1d ago
> 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.
Dwedit · 1d ago
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.
MrDarcy · 1d ago
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.
vintermann · 1d ago
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 · 17h ago
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.
jmb99 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
cjbgkagh · 1d ago
Or just have two calculators and swap them
wisty · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
userbinator · 1d ago
I'd rather go take the test in person than subject myself to such extreme surveillance of my own premises.
grogenaut · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
Making them surveil your employer instead is not a bad idea either.
grogenaut · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 14h ago
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 · 19h ago
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 · 19h ago
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 · 19h ago
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."
AStonesThrow · 1d ago
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.
Gigachad · 1d ago
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.
sien · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
Local LLMs are almost here, no Internet needed!
mystraline · 23h ago
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.
robotnikman · 12h ago
What model are you using and what kind of hardware are you running it on?
aerhardt · 21h ago
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.
barry-cotter · 1d ago
> 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.
vintermann · 1d ago
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.
foolswisdom · 1d ago
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.
ghaff · 1d ago
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 · 21h ago
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.
Aerroon · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
> 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).
redcobra762 · 1d ago
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.
dgfitz · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
> 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 · 23h ago
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.
throwaway2037 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
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 · 1d ago
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 · 22h ago
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...
bigfatkitten · 1d ago
Not even just large cities. Decent sized towns have them too, usually with local high school teachers or the like acting as proctors.
math_dandy · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
It does feel like easy side money for local schools and teachers that will have empty classrooms after 5pm.
postalrat · 21h ago
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.
baq · 1d ago
nope. too much impact on profit.
aaplok · 1d ago
> 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.
aketchum · 23h ago
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 · 22h ago
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 · 18h ago
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.
qwertycrackers · 13h ago
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.
542354234235 · 18h ago
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.
godelski · 1d ago
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.
armchairhacker · 21h ago
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.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 1d ago
> Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions
Isn't this part of life? Learning to excel anyway?
JoshTriplett · 1d ago
Life doesn't tend to take place under exam conditions, either.
crystal_revenge · 1d ago
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.
542354234235 · 17h ago
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”.
falcor84 · 1d ago
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 · 20h ago
> 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.
Aeolun · 1d ago
The important parts of life (like interviews) do.
JoshTriplett · 1d ago
> 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 · 18h ago
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 · 18h ago
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 · 18h ago
> 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 · 16h ago
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.
ecb_penguin · 9h ago
> I think there's a meaningful distinction between high-pressure situations at work and exams in school
Sure, in school there is no real consequence. That's why it's important. School exams are orders of magnitude easier than the real world.
> "thrives under pressure" is not a universal quality everyone is expected to have or use
School isn't intended to imbue everyone with universal qualities. Some people will excel and some wont. The ones that excel will go on to work in situations where you must thrive under pressure.
> 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
This is a different discussions then.
JoshTriplett · 8h ago
It seems like you have equated "excel" with "must thrive under pressure". That is precisely the point I am disputing. It's a skill, like any other. It is not the single most important skill everyone must have and everyone must be filtered on.
alabastervlog · 23h ago
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.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 22h ago
It's more about the meta-skill of learning to adapt. Learning to be uncomfortable sometimes.
aaplok · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
> 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 · 23h ago
and job interviews.
LunaSea · 23h ago
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 · 1d ago
>taking tests is a skill that must be learned
"I had to suffer so you must too."
ecb_penguin · 18h ago
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.
baq · 21h ago
"I'm hiring and want to see if his resume checks out"
DaSHacka · 16h ago
A one-on-one interview is completely different from a paper-and-pencil exam though.
math_dandy · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
djoldman · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
> 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.
Aeolun · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 1d ago
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.
thatfrenchguy · 19h ago
> 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 · 19h ago
Autism vs. ADHD
ecb_penguin · 18h ago
There is nothing to suggest that it is autism or ADHD.
GeoAtreides · 1d ago
>Many of them are neurodivergent
if "many" are "divergent" then... are they really divergent? or are they the new typical?
aaplok · 23h ago
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.
jay_kyburz · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
Too much proctoring and grading, not enough holding students' hands for stuff they should have learned from reading the textbook.
aerhardt · 22h ago
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 · 22h ago
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 · 21h ago
That’s what I did at HES and it was fine. Reasonable and not particularly stressful.
remarkEon · 1d ago
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.
RHSeeger · 1d ago
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.
coderatlarge · 1d ago
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…
dehrmann · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
paulorlando · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
Sorry to hear this. And thanks for sharing this warning to other educators. I hope you find a way through.
thih9 · 1d ago
Higher ups say yes to remote learning and no to remote work. Interesting to see this side by side like this.
seethishat · 1d ago
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 · 20h ago
> 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.
storus · 19h ago
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.
tangjurine · 11h ago
why not pay for students to take the pen and paper exams at some proctored location, perhaps independent of the university.
cebert · 1d ago
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.
amelius · 15h ago
Can't we use AI to monitor the students?
jofla_net · 1d ago
Thank you for not giving in. The slide downhill is so ravenous and will consume so much of our future until the wise intervene.
EGreg · 1d ago
So just have test centers, and flip the classroom.
math_dandy · 1d ago
I think this is a good approach.
joe_the_user · 1d ago
Yeah, the thing AI cheating is it seems inherent not in teaching but what mechanical, bureaucratic, for-profit teaching and universities have become.
jimnotgym · 1d ago
I'm not a teacher, but I came here to say the same thing. Pen and paper.
valiant55 · 1d ago
Capitalism and the constant thirst for growth is killing society. Since when did universities care almost solely about renevnue and growth?
DrillShopper · 1d ago
> Since when did universities care almost solely about renevnue and growth?
Since endowments got huge.
dehrmann · 1d ago
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 · 22h ago
> 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.
wwweston · 1d ago
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 · 22h ago
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.
wwweston · 11h ago
I see a correlation in some orgs, but can you explain the mechanics? I think I’ve also seen cases where the original mission continues to be the primary compass, so maybe the mechanics of the failure mode are what I don’t have a clear picture of yet.
thatguy0900 · 1d ago
With the us government now going after their funding they may have to start caring even more
thomastjeffery · 20h ago
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.
doug_durham · 1d ago
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.
AllegedAlec · 1d ago
> 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.
wrp · 22h ago
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.
lionkor · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
Most people would be happy to hire a writer with no consideration of how good their handwriting was.
ecb_penguin · 18h ago
> 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.
baq · 1d ago
> 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 · 23h ago
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
sshine · 1d ago
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.
timr · 1d ago
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.
NitpickLawyer · 1d ago
> 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).
intended · 22h ago
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.
eru · 1d ago
> 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.)
timr · 1d ago
...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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 20h ago
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 · 1d ago
> ...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 · 14h ago
You’re making it seem those guys worked the fields 14 hours straight. It’s just some paperwork..
bongodongobob · 1d ago
Why can't the teachers use LLMs to grade?
greenavocado · 15h ago
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.
obscurette · 1d ago
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 · 21h ago
Grading is already mechanical, it's just a human does it. I'm not sure what you're objecting to here.
No comments yet
eru · 1d ago
Might be interesting. You can at least use modern AI to turn scans of hand-scrawled-on paper into something readable.
throwawayffffas · 1d ago
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.
Aurornis · 1d ago
> 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.
thresher · 1d ago
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).
sshine · 13h ago
> 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.
timemct · 20h ago
>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 · 18h ago
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 · 18h ago
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 · 18h ago
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 · 13h ago
> 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.
nprateem · 1d ago
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?
intended · 22h ago
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.
throwawayffffas · 1d ago
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.
JoshTriplett · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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 · 20h ago
> 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.
rKarpinski · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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 · 20h ago
> 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 · 13h ago
> 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.
noisy_boy · 11h ago
When I was a student, my teachers basically didn't care; I may have not liked it then due to immaturity, but a blunt teacher would have been more beneficial to me than the apathetic ones I got.
chasd00 · 16h ago
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 · 13h ago
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.
mwigdahl · 20h ago
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.
simoncion · 12h ago
In response to the statement
> ...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
you said:
> Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life"...
You'd do well to slow down and re-read more carefully whenever you find something that offends you. You've failed to correctly identify the target of the "waste of life" commentary.
Moreover, were I paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for a self-improvement product, I'd be furious if the folks operating that product failed to notify me until three years into a four year program that I'd been getting next-to-nothing from the program. That's the sort of information you need right away, rather than thirty, sixty, (or more) thousand dollars in.
Aeolun · 1d ago
You can get one of those card punching machines and have them hand in stacks of cards?
downboots · 1d ago
And don't forget to get on their case with accusations of technology use that equate to the Turing test
sas224dbm · 1d ago
Grandpa can help with that too
protocolture · 1d ago
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.
NegativeLatency · 11h ago
I had numerous in person paper exams in CS (2009 - 2013) where we had to not only pseudo code an algorithm from a description, but also do the reverse of saying/describing what a chunk of pseudo code would do.
ccppurcell · 1d ago
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 · 23h ago
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.
lowbloodsugar · 15h ago
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 · 13h ago
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.
lowbloodsugar · 10h ago
I learned to program computers by reverse engineering. I don’t have a CS degree. I wonder if that’s what we need to teach kids now. The AI did this, but why? If the curriculum doesn’t change, then kids aren’t going to learn anything useful, because the AI can do the curriculum.
stevage · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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.
seniorThrowaway · 19h ago
>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.
stevage · 1d ago
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.
zer00eyz · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
Well given that the article is about young people in schools, a little paternalism isn’t a bad thing.
eru · 1d ago
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 · 13h ago
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 · 13h ago
> 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.
CalRobert · 17h ago
Do you find that thinking of your students as dum-dums makes you a better teacher?
sshine · 13h ago
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.
EGreg · 1d ago
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.
anal_reactor · 22h ago
> 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 · 22h ago
> 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 · 21h ago
Hence my personal policy of never working for a company with more than ~100-150 people.
sshine · 13h ago
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.
frelupin_ · 1d ago
> 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.
viccis · 1d ago
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.
ramraj07 · 1d ago
It already can. Im flabbergasted how people haven't still figured out how good gemini 2.5 is.
frelupin_ · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
Comments like this are just delusional shit can't even do uni homework lmao
plantwallshoe · 20h ago
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.
davidcbc · 18h ago
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.
danielhep · 20h ago
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?
plantwallshoe · 19h ago
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.
lispisok · 12h ago
Computer architecture and operating systems are really important classes imo. Maybe you dont touch the material again in your career but do you really want the thing you're supposed to be programming to be a black box? Personally I'm not ok working with black boxes.
aryamaan · 14h ago
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.
mathgeek · 19h ago
> 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 · 19h ago
Shout out to the fantastic Georgia Tech online masters program in CS:
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.
No comments yet
ghusto · 23h ago
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.
mrweasel · 21h ago
> 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 · 20h ago
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 · 20h ago
>>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 · 17h ago
>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.
jmmcd · 23h ago
> 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 · 23h ago
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.
criddell · 21h ago
> 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.
seb1204 · 22h ago
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.
tgv · 20h ago
> 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 · 20h ago
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 · 18h ago
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 · 8h ago
The bluff I'm referring to here is the measurement. The notion that an educational experience can be meaningfully measured, and that such a measurement can be guaranteed well enough to prevent uneducated people from obtaining fraudulent certification.
I don't see learning as a compromise with economics. I see each as entirely irrelevant to the other. Certification is not a tool for learning; it is a tool for capitalism. A certification is nothing more than evidence of victory over the educational institution. Sure, the intended path to victory involves a lot of learning, but we humans can never be truly constrained to intended paths. That's a good thing: we shouldn't be.
Cthulhu_ · 21h ago
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.
aerhardt · 21h ago
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 · 21h ago
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.
hirvi74 · 11h ago
I think you somewhat touched upon what I believe is the root of the problem:
> highly incentivized to get high grades, not necessarily to learn the material
Based on my own experiences and observations, I think grading is a far larger issue than cheating. I am not convinced that good grades are necessarily reflective of enrichment nor how much material has been learned. If a person makes the a high grade in a particular class, what does that actually mean?
I made high grades in plenty of classes that I couldn't tell you anything about what I actually learned.
karaterobot · 12h ago
> The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much your homework is worth.
I mean... if you removed the substring "home" from that sentence, is it still true in your opinion?
That is, do you believe that because AI can perform some task, that task must not have any value? If there's a difference, help me understand it better please.
thomastjeffery · 20h ago
> 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.
jumploops · 1d ago
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!)
analog31 · 1d ago
>>> 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 · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
>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 · 21h ago
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.
TimorousBestie · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
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 then Comenius was mostly forgotten in the enlightenment of 18th century - probably ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau took over - with insufficient backing.
obscurette · 1d ago
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.
gonzobonzo · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
gonzobonzo · 1d ago
> 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 · 22h ago
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 · 22h ago
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.
const_cast · 11h ago
This isn't true, education as a whole is built for the majority of people. If we look at K-12 it's explicitly built to work best for the neuro-typical child with a normal household. Outliers struggle, and they need other systems to catch them, like special education.
> basically wasted education
People say this but they don't understand how learning things works. Learning is inherently cummulative, everything builds off of everything else. We can't skip steps because then there will be holes. It's a big Jenga tower, and you're essentially advocating taking pieces out willy nilly because you don't think they're important.
Even coding, if you look at it, relies on English. English language arts and computer science are, in a lot of people's minds, completely opposite each other in the sphere of education. But they're actually not - because coding is a subset of the English language. Even naming variables, the people best at it are also the people who are good at conveying meaning in an essay. Because it's the same problem: conveying to an audience your intention as concisely, yet clearly, as possible.
Some relationships are obvious, like you can't learn calculus without algebra without arithmetic. But most are non-obvious.
boredhedgehog · 1d ago
> 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.
const_cast · 11h ago
Yes, because it's hostile to democracy and freedom as whole. Even if we could let everyone not read and write and use LLMs, this is just asking for trouble. Reading and writing is precursor for other skills, in fact, just about every skill.
This includes analysis, critical thinking, skepticism, morality, you name it. Without literacy, people are easy to manipulate. It won't happen immediately, but it won't be long until we revert to a world state where organizations like the Catholic Church control everything and order around millions of people to kill each other.
Dusseldorf · 1d ago
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.
dragonwriter · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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.
QuadmasterXLII · 1d ago
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_ · 1d ago
Wasn't this the promise of MOOCs in the 2010s?
Tryk · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
mcdeltat · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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 · 21h ago
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.
Footprint0521 · 9h ago
Do you have capacity for more developers? I’ve been wanting to help make this for a long time
ericmcer · 19h ago
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.
yazantapuz · 1d ago
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 · 22h ago
I hope by 'handwritten' you don't literally mean pen and paper?
xtracto · 20h ago
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 · 20h ago
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 · 19h ago
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?
yazantapuz · 16h ago
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.
xandrius · 16h ago
The professor is not actually compiling your code, the idea is to know whether you can pseudo code a solution, of course.
squigz · 12h ago
> if it had one single error (missed semicolon) or didn't compile for some reason, the whole thing was considered wrong
From GP
TallonRain · 14h ago
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.
sshine · 3h ago
Small algorithms, sure.
Outside of algorithms courses, the practice has diminishing practicality.
I once had to write a filesystem driver for a code, and it ended up being a little less than a thousand lines of C. I’m happy I didn’t need to do that on paper, it would have had limited value to my learning.
yazantapuz · 16h ago
Yes, pen and paper.
nkrisc · 1d ago
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.
lolinder · 1d ago
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.
fn-mote · 1d ago
> 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.
RobinL · 22h ago
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
carlosjobim · 1d ago
> 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 · 1d ago
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.
jay_kyburz · 1d ago
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.
_-_-__-_-_- · 1d ago
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.
gilbetron · 18h ago
> 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.
nkrisc · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
ryandrake · 1d ago
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.
bee_rider · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
bee_rider · 1d ago
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.
mitthrowaway2 · 1d ago
The course could offer nonlinear grading where you get the maximum of [exam grade, 0.8 exam + 0.2 hw]
HighGoldstein · 1d ago
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.
carlosjobim · 1d ago
You're there to pass and get your diploma. If you want to excel, there are other real venues for that ambition.
SketchySeaBeast · 21h ago
What if you want to get into grad school?
kenjackson · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
I can say that making my homework part of my grade is a great way to actually get me to do it.
bee_rider · 18h ago
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…
__loam · 1d ago
How do you suggest we measure whether the students have actually learned the stuff then?
pona-a · 1d ago
In person, pen and paper exams? They are closer to how most certifications are conducted.
jay_kyburz · 1d ago
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. :)
dghlsakjg · 1d ago
Tests, both oral and written.
__loam · 16h ago
Yes that's how we do it lol
downboots · 1d ago
Captcha, of course. \s
Aurornis · 1d ago
> 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
barrenko · 1d ago
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.
busyant · 1d ago
> 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!"
tylerflick · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
> the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to learning
Sounds laughably naive now, doesn’t it?
ai-christianson · 1d ago
Aren't the jobs they'll get be expecting them to use AI?
nkrisc · 1d ago
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.
TimorousBestie · 1d ago
“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.
jonfw · 19h ago
> 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.
Aerroon · 1d ago
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 · 22h ago
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.
throwaway290 · 1d ago
> 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.
ai-christianson · 1d ago
Employers are employees too
myaccountonhn · 1d ago
Even if you just use AI, you need to know the right prompts to ask.
Ekaros · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
> 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.
__loam · 1d ago
Would you rather be the guy using AI as a crutch or the guy who actually knows how to do things without it?
neom · 1d ago
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.
nkrisc · 23h ago
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.
throwaway290 · 1d ago
It doesn't matter if your boss's policy is to require a degree.
Aerroon · 1d ago
At the same time though: if AI based cheating is so effective then is college itself useful?
Aurornis · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
> 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 · 21h ago
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 · 19h ago
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.
hackable_sand · 12h ago
LLMs don't know how to write an essay or a song.
To be able to direct an LLM you would need to know how to do those things yourself.
throwaway290 · 5h ago
LLM don't "know" anything. It's a program. But those programs get fed so many (mostly stolen) essays and songs that it outputs a convincing essay or song.
So the end result is this. you don't need to know how to write an essay but you get an essay written for you. It's very different from using calculator and knowing math or using ProTools and knowing how to make a song.
nkrisc · 19h ago
> 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.
throwaway290 · 5h ago
Examples pls. I know people who can do mental math and it's maybe only sometimes useful in some games.
nkrisc · 19h ago
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.
Ekaros · 1d ago
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.
Had I known that college degrees from before the 2020s would increase in value, I'd have gotten one. Damn it!
andoando · 1d ago
Good, colleges have staryed far from their purpose
echelon · 1d ago
> 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.
addcommitpush · 23h ago
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.
banku_brougham · 1d ago
The credentials were never about having become learned.
marcus_holmes · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 21h ago
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 · 13h ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
marcus_holmes · 9h ago
Is there even such a thing as the "science of business"? One can form a hypothesis, and then conduct an experiment, but the experimental landscape is so messy that eliminating all other considerations is impossibly hard.
For example, there's a popular theory that the single major factor in startup success is timing - that the market is "ready" for ideas at specific times, and getting that timing right is the key factor in success. But it's impossible to predict when the market timing is right, you only find out in retrospect. How would you ever test this theory? There are so many other factors, half of which are outside the control of the experimenter, that you would have to conduct the experiment hundreds of time (effectively starting and failing at hundreds of startups) to exclude the confounding factors.
intended · 22h ago
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 · 12h ago
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.
hyperbovine · 1d ago
> - 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 · 12h ago
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?
agrippanux · 20h ago
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.
czhu12 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
Same here. AI is a great tool for learning, but a challenge for education.
jamesgill · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
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.
eternauta3k · 18h ago
No, we already have autonomous cars driving around even though they've already killed people.
RationPhantoms · 15h ago
This is a poor take. They are objectively safer drives then their human counterpart. Yes, with those unfortunate deaths included.
Nasrudith · 1d ago
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.
jaza · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
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.
randcraw · 14h ago
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.
snickerbockers · 1d ago
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 · 21h ago
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 · 20h ago
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.
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bosuanzi · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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?
owenpalmer · 1d ago
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.
TimorousBestie · 1d ago
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.
mullingitover · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
> 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.
the_snooze · 1d ago
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.
AlexCoventry · 1d ago
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.
noitpmeder · 1d ago
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 · 22h ago
apologies, their oracle, trying to improve pronoun usages...
TimorousBestie · 1d ago
“Butlerian Jihad” ideology is definitely overselling it.
AStonesThrow · 1d ago
How about Habakkuk chapter 2, or Daniel chapter XIV?
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.
TheFreim · 1d ago
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 · 21h ago
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 · 14h ago
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.
fn-mote · 1d ago
> 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 · 20h ago
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.
nkrisc · 1d ago
Sounds like an optimization for the students not interested in learning at the expense of the students who are.
catigula · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
rjsw · 1d ago
With an ageing population, I don't think we are going to run out of the need for basic healthcare workers.
catigula · 1d ago
Serfdom, possibly WALL-E but that's an optimistic scenario. WALL-E people actually live a somewhat dignified existence compared to other possibilities.
__loam · 1d ago
Digging people out of the codebases they're going to shit out with this technology.
hollow-moe · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
> Would the solution not be to pivot to more in-person demonstrations of skill and knowledge?
Yeah, this seems like the obvious conclusion.
ghaff · 1d ago
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 · 20h ago
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.
ghurtado · 1d ago
You sound like everything that is wrong with the US education system concentrated on one single person.
What made you get into teaching?
hkpack · 1d ago
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?
mythrwy · 13h ago
As long as you are upfront that you expect AI will be used, this seems like a solid and practical approach to me.
joe_the_user · 1d ago
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 · 21h ago
The point is that I will expect more high level thinking and less rote coding.
esafak · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
We're highly considering going back to onsite interviews, the big liniter is scheduling the interviewers.
CompoundEyes · 1d ago
I agree. An essay written on the spot in class with no electronics nearby seems like the counter.
rixed · 1d ago
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 · 18h ago
AI is bad for academia and the educational industrial complex, but it is great for people that actually want to learn.
rwyinuse · 16h ago
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 · 16h ago
What you then say is a good value for ones time instead?
Animats · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
What do you mean, “worth it”?
What is the alternative, we carry on without people skilled in the English language?
doctorpangloss · 1d ago
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?
solresol · 1d ago
I have been wrestling with this too. I only see two options: no tech university or AI wrangling university.
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?
Footprint0521 · 10h ago
> An infinitely patient digital tutor that can tackle any question…..You might feel like you are learning when querying a chatbot, but those intellectual gains are often illusory.
I get the shade here (kind of?) and have seen both sides in my life, but isn’t having a tutor exactly what you need to learn?
IMO, using it as an information butler is leagues different from a digital tutor. That’s the key— don’t bring forklifts to the gym lol
mrbonner · 1d ago
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.
blitzar · 1d ago
How did we solve this when calculators came along and ruined peoples ability to do mental arithmetic and use slide rulers?
raincole · 1d ago
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 · 21h ago
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)
gchamonlive · 1d ago
The impact LLMs have on education is arguably orders of magnitude higher than calculators
protocolture · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
sensanaty · 1d ago
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?
floren · 1d ago
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.
baconmania · 1d ago
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.
lurking_swe · 1d ago
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.
add-sub-mul-div · 1d ago
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.
yapyap · 1d ago
It sounds like you’re implying LLMs are to everything what calculators were to math, if so you are sorely mistaken
squigz · 1d ago
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.
keiferski · 23h ago
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.
ranger207 · 21h ago
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 · 20h ago
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.
sireat · 1d ago
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.
hiAndrewQuinn · 1d ago
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.
danhodgins · 15h ago
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"
lisenKaci · 21h ago
Maybe switching it up could work. What if learning happened at home with the use of AI and "homework" happened in class under supervision?
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?
nwlotz · 1d ago
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.
downboots · 1d ago
The issue is trust, AI is not the issue.
Culture, not technology.
djoldman · 1d ago
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.
Ekaros · 1d ago
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.
protocolture · 1d ago
>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.
EGreg · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
Aziell · 1d ago
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.
Sam6late · 1d ago
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?
johnea · 1d ago
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.
pugio · 1d ago
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 · 15h ago
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.
"...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.
wpm · 1d ago
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.
jaza · 1d ago
Back in my day, we also called it Garbage In Garbage Out.
lotu · 1d ago
Thank fuck for saying this
yeyeyeyeyeyeyee · 1d ago
s/fuck/you/
bugtodiffer · 1d ago
Maybe just stop giving homework and instead give the kids some time to live. Fixed it for you.
ookdatnog · 22h ago
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?
nateburke · 10h ago
Between widespread social media/short form video addiction and GPT for all homework starting in middle school, I think ASI is nearly guaranteed by virtue of the human birth/death process, with no further model improvement required.
andoando · 1d ago
Perhaps we should reconsider the purpose of teaching. If one does not want to learn, why are we teaching them?
TrackerFF · 23h ago
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 · 23h ago
That's a silly argument, onus is on the teacher to make the subject interesting for students.
andoando · 18h ago
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.
lotu · 1d ago
Because it is necessary, think about toilet training a toddler.
Aeolun · 1d ago
To avoid November 6, 2024?
Der_Einzige · 21h ago
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.
squigz · 1d ago
> 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"
BrtByte · 1d ago
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
acc_297 · 16h ago
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?
fallinditch · 1d ago
> 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.
perdomon · 18h ago
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.
kenjackson · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
Those higher level questions are likely outside the scope of the class. Like write a novel or something like that.
overgard · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
>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.
intended · 23h ago
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.
timnetworks · 12h ago
Stop giving boring ass essay assignments. Forest, trees.
enceladus06 · 1d ago
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.
TrackerFF · 23h ago
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.
edvardas · 1d ago
In your situation where LLMs can cover most material better than the university, what benefits does the university still provide you, if any?
xrtatee · 23h ago
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!
BrenBarn · 1d ago
> 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.
wiihack · 1d ago
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...
joering2 · 20h ago
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.
sudoaptinstall · 1d ago
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.
goodluckchuck · 23h ago
1
foxglacier · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
> "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 · 19h ago
"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is."
-- Leslie Lamport
Writing is an essential skill.
motohagiography · 1d ago
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.
globalnode · 1d ago
well worth the read just for the term "broligarch"
datahack · 1d ago
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.
blackbear_ · 1d ago
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?
fallinditch · 1d ago
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 · 1d ago
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.
TychoCelchuuu · 1d ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
I could understand US tuition if that were the case. These days with overworked adjuncts make it McDonalds at Michelin star prices.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is depressing. I'm late GenX, I didn't cheat in college (engineering, RPI), nor did my peers. Of course, there was very little writing of essays so that's probably why, not to mention all of our exams were in person paper-and-pencil (and this was 1986-1990, so no phones). Literally impossible to cheat. We did have study groups where people explained the homework to each other, which I guess could be called "cheating", but since we all shared, we tended to oust anyone who didn't bring anything to the table. Is cheating through college a common millenial / gen z thing?
To my generation, it wasn't that cheating was a 'thing' as much as it was impossible to avoid. Profs were so lazy that any semi-good test prep would have you discover that the profs were phoning it in and had been for a while. Things like not updating the course page with all the answers on them were unfortunately common. You could go and tell the prof, and most of us did, but then you'd be at a huge disadvantage relative to your peers who did download the answer key. Especially since the prof would still not update the questions! I want to make it clear: this is a common thing at R1 universities before LLMs.
The main issue is that at most R1s, the prof isn't really graded on their classes. That's maybe 5% of their tenure review. The thing they are most incentivized by is the amount of money they pull in from grants. I'm not all that familiar with R2 and below, but I'd imagine they have the same incentives (correct me if I'm wrong!). And with ~35% of students that go to R2 and below, the incentives for the profs for ~65% of students isn't well correlated with teaching said students.
While most of the classes were taught pretty well at both, the third tier ones were taught much better. Just couldn’t get an interview upon graduation despite near 4.0…
It is utterly bizarre that we use graduate research dollars to evaluate the quality of undergraduate education.
1. People in the Greek system would save all homework sets and exams in a "library" for future members taking a given course. While professors do change (and a single professor will try to mix up problems) with enough time you eventually have an inventory of all the possible problems, to either copy outright or study.
2. Eventually a similar thing moved online, both with "black market" hired help, then the likes of Chegg Inc.
3. All the students in a course join a WhatsApp or Discord group and text each other the answers. (HN had a good blog about this from a data science professor, but I can't find it now. College cheating has been mentioned many times on HN).
The masses get the cheap AI education. The elite get the expensive, small class, analog education. There won't be a middle class of education, as in the current system - too expensive for too little gain.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Spot on, this gave me ideas, thank you for that!
But that commercially oriented boards are ruining education, that's a given. That they would stoop to this level is a bit surprising.
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.)
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..."
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.
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.
certainly not anywhere close to ten!
Yeah, 1:3 teacher to student ratio would make university a lot more expensive
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Less "prestigious" universities apply less of that pressure.
I could make arithmetic incomprehensible, let alone QM.
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?
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.
Edit: and why perfectly capable professionals can’t be teachers without years of certification
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.
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.
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.
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.
PhD - Philosophy Doctor
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
No, you should fail them for turning in bad theses, just like you would before AI.
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).
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.
> But I can show you that counter speech fails
Could you show me that? What's your definition of failure?
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.
Also started going through this legal essay (paper?) recently, Lies, Counter-lies, and Disinformation in the Marketplace of Ideas
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Worth a read or you can check out one of his recent podcast appearances for a quicker download.
This is another example of "AI is exacerbating existing problems". :-) That kind of grading policy is absurd and should never have existed in the first place, but now AI is really making that obvious.
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.
If they want to use AI make them use it right.
Can't this be done 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it stops a casual cheater from having ChatGTP on a second device.
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.
I used a spare laptop I wipe.
ex “1% of test takers were disciplined for attempting to contact someone for help using a disallowed electronic device surreptitiously”
minimally as deterrance
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
So to your point, it’s easy to cheat even if the proctor tries to prevent it.
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?
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.
Not sure if that impression is accurate though, or if it's true of mathematical writing.
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).
[1] - https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/corporate/default
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't this part of life? Learning to excel anyway?
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.
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”.
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.
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.
The reality is life is full of time boxed challenges.
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.
Sure, in school there is no real consequence. That's why it's important. School exams are orders of magnitude easier than the real world.
> "thrives under pressure" is not a universal quality everyone is expected to have or use
School isn't intended to imbue everyone with universal qualities. Some people will excel and some wont. The ones that excel will go on to work in situations where you must thrive under pressure.
> 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
This is a different discussions then.
… 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.
Why? It's a useless skill that you will literally never have to use after your schooling.
If the company asks leet code problems, I guess they are making the same mistake as schools do.
"I had to suffer so you must too."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
if "many" are "divergent" then... are they really divergent? or are they the new typical?
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.
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.
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.
Teachers and professors: you can say "no". Your students will thank you in the future.
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…
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.
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.
Since endowments got huge.
A large endowment attracts greedy people who then want to make it larger, that is true regardless where you go.
It's probably not as bad for mathematical derivations. I still do those by hand since they are more like drawing than expression.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.)
> 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.
We made it. But, that’s survivorship bias, right? We can’t really know how much potential has wasted.
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.
You can very easily test CS concepts on paper, and programming is demonstrated via group projects.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
(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).
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
People could try to cheat, but it would be pretty stupid to think they would not catch you.
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.
I might not have liked that, but I sure would have liked to see my useless classmates being forced to learn without cheating.
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.
Wow.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> ...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
you said:
> Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life"...
You'd do well to slow down and re-read more carefully whenever you find something that offends you. You've failed to correctly identify the target of the "waste of life" commentary.
Moreover, were I paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for a self-improvement product, I'd be furious if the folks operating that product failed to notify me until three years into a four year program that I'd been getting next-to-nothing from the program. That's the sort of information you need right away, rather than thirty, sixty, (or more) thousand dollars in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Often I just paste an error with some scroll back but no instructions and it works out what I need.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, most legacy code is fairly primitive on that level, so my observation is in no way contradicting yours.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://pe.gatech.edu/degrees/computer-science
(not affiliated, just a fan)
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The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much your homework is worth. Teaching and learning are collaborative exercises.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
I don't see learning as a compromise with economics. I see each as entirely irrelevant to the other. Certification is not a tool for learning; it is a tool for capitalism. A certification is nothing more than evidence of victory over the educational institution. Sure, the intended path to victory involves a lot of learning, but we humans can never be truly constrained to intended paths. That's a good thing: we shouldn't be.
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.
> highly incentivized to get high grades, not necessarily to learn the material
Based on my own experiences and observations, I think grading is a far larger issue than cheating. I am not convinced that good grades are necessarily reflective of enrichment nor how much material has been learned. If a person makes the a high grade in a particular class, what does that actually mean?
I made high grades in plenty of classes that I couldn't tell you anything about what I actually learned.
I mean... if you removed the substring "home" from that sentence, is it still true in your opinion?
That is, do you believe that because AI can perform some task, that task must not have any value? If there's a difference, help me understand it better please.
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.
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!)
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> basically wasted education
People say this but they don't understand how learning things works. Learning is inherently cummulative, everything builds off of everything else. We can't skip steps because then there will be holes. It's a big Jenga tower, and you're essentially advocating taking pieces out willy nilly because you don't think they're important.
Even coding, if you look at it, relies on English. English language arts and computer science are, in a lot of people's minds, completely opposite each other in the sphere of education. But they're actually not - because coding is a subset of the English language. Even naming variables, the people best at it are also the people who are good at conveying meaning in an essay. Because it's the same problem: conveying to an audience your intention as concisely, yet clearly, as possible.
Some relationships are obvious, like you can't learn calculus without algebra without arithmetic. But most are non-obvious.
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.
This includes analysis, critical thinking, skepticism, morality, you name it. Without literacy, people are easy to manipulate. It won't happen immediately, but it won't be long until we revert to a world state where organizations like the Catholic Church control everything and order around millions of people to kill each other.
"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.
The specific examples I recall most vividly were from 4th grade and 7th grade.
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.
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.
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.
- 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)
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.
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.
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?
From GP
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.
Outside of algorithms courses, the practice has diminishing practicality.
I once had to write a filesystem driver for a code, and it ended up being a little less than a thousand lines of C. I’m happy I didn’t need to do that on paper, it would have had limited value to my learning.
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.
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.
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.
So I'm perfectly happy with a system of higher education that strongly rewards this behaviour
That is their problem, not your problem. You're not their nanny.
I think they would really benefit learning how to work a full day and develop some work life balance.
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.
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.
I agree that something will have to change to avert the current trend.
You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Universities need to accept that AI exists, and adjust their operations accordingly.
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.
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.
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.
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…
You could sit down at a workstation with all the tools you might need to test your skills. :)
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
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.
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!"
Sounds laughably naive now, doesn’t it?
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.
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.
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.
You hire humans to help train AI and when done you fire humans.
But 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.
It’s the same old story with a new set of technology.
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
To be able to direct an LLM you would need to know how to do those things yourself.
So the end result is this. you don't need to know how to write an essay but you get an essay written for you. It's very different from using calculator and knowing math or using ProTools and knowing how to make a song.
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.
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.
Just because machine can do things, doesn't mean humans should be able to do it too. Say reading a text aloud.
^ Why many go to Harvard. Very nice club.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, there's a popular theory that the single major factor in startup success is timing - that the market is "ready" for ideas at specific times, and getting that timing right is the key factor in success. But it's impossible to predict when the market timing is right, you only find out in retrospect. How would you ever test this theory? There are so many other factors, half of which are outside the control of the experimenter, that you would have to conduct the experiment hundreds of time (effectively starting and failing at hundreds of startups) to exclude the confounding factors.
May I ask a different question, why didn’t, or what stoped, you from engaging with the material itself ?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
I’m as cynical as they come, but even that’s a bit too much for me.
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.
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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.
How long before a centaur team of human + AI is less effective than the AI alone?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/habakkuk/2?18
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/daniel/14?23
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.
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?
It's a bit similar to making a class harder because some students are getting extra help via private tutoring.
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.
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.
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.
Not rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious and could see that being a real scenario.
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?
Yeah, this seems like the obvious conclusion.
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.
What made you get into teaching?
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.
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.
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.
What is the alternative, we carry on without people skilled in the English language?
https://solresol.substack.com/p/you-can-no-longer-set-an-und...
I get the shade here (kind of?) and have seen both sides in my life, but isn’t having a tutor exactly what you need to learn?
IMO, using it as an information butler is leagues different from a digital tutor. That’s the key— don’t bring forklifts to the gym lol
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.
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)
And tbh, lots of people historically would have loved a calculator that could write an essay about shakespeare or help code a simple game.
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.
You can ask chat gpt to pretend to be Julius Caesar, it still probably shouldnt be in an english exam.
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?
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.
When it's general thinking we've trained people not to have to do anymore, it's going to be dire.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"
I wrote my master thesis about that.
It‘s an old idea.
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?
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.
Culture, not technology.
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.
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.
I really think we need these policies to be developed by the opposite of misanthropists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But regardless I don't buy that, especially in college where you pick your own set of classes.
There's a reason why conservatives are so obsessed with school choice, LGBT book bans, etc.
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"
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?
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.
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...).
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writing is an essential skill.
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.
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.
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!
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.
https://www.semicolonblog.com/?p=32946
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.