5 ms·

\devil's advocate: If the augmented-student pair performs at the required level, what's the problem? The test should be how good they are at using LLMs. Tools s

\devil's advocate: If the augmented-student pair performs at the required level, what's the problem? The test should be how good they are at using LLMs. Tools should be absorbed. Similar to today, when grades are a proxy for ability, but private tutoring puts an average student in the 2% (Bloom's 2σ problem) for that stage, but doesn't boost the student's general intelligence for the next stage. Also, hard work, self-discipline, and focus will increase grades but not GI. (Of course, stidents do learn that specific stage, necessary for the next stage, so this criticism is just for use as a proxy). We might say what is really be evaluated is the ability to get good grades (duh) - whether through wealth or work. The same argument can be applied to LLMs. Using they is an important ability... so let's test that. This is the future. Similar to calculators and open-book exams.

bko 3y ago
> We might say what is really be evaluated is the ability to get good grades (duh) - whether through wealth or work. Isn't that a good thing? Grades shouldn't be an IQ test. It's pretty much meaningless if you're not significantly below average or using it for super specialized tasks. Getting good grades means you can sit your ass in a seat (be it at a public library or a private tutor) and learn enough to do well on some task. Yes, good grades doesn't mean you would be necessarily be good at some task. But it shows you can succeed in something that requires effort.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Gimpei 3y ago
Writing is as much about organizing your thoughts and learning how to build an argument as it is about putting words on the page. It is about learning how to think. If students rely on an LLM, they will never get a chance to practice this essential skill, and, in my opinion, will be a lot dumber as a result.
- analog31 3y ago
  My thoughts are along similar lines: People learn to think, to inquire, to persuade, etc. We don't know precisely how. Maybe it's correlated to education, but even the strength of a causal link is debatable. I certainly don't oppose reforming contemporary education, but at the same time, letting it be replaced by something else by default because that thing has exponentially more engagement power invokes Chesterton's Fence. I'm not sure we even know what we're giving up.
  - mbakke 3y ago
    Education has been in dire need for reform a long time. The writing was on the wall even with the advent of the Internet. We now have supercomputers in our pockets and hyperintelligent assistants at our fingertips. Chesterton could certainly not predict the exponential growth in access to tooling and knowledge. And we're only at the start of the curve. In my opinion we should go back to absolute basics. Forget grades. Focus on health, language, critical thinking, tool usage, and creativity. Skills that are intrinsic to humans. Make sure education is fun with lots of play. The main advantage humans have over computers is empathy and creativity. I'm not sure AI will ever "get it". Provide each student to the extent possible a path to follow their own curiosity and talents. Advanced maths, programming, writing, chemistry, physics, etc available for those interested, even at a young age. But the baseline education should focus on learning the absolute minimum to survive and otherwise maximize fun, creativity, and empathy.
    - theprivacydad 3y ago
      GPT4 can already convincingly analyse and explain why a drawn comic is funny or ironic. It's really unbelievable when you see it do that.
- matt_j 3y ago
  For me, and I assume others, the act of writing is an important part of the learning process. Writing on paper even more-so than typing on a keyboard. Writing forces me to organize my thoughts, summarize, elaborate, reference other parts of the text, iterate until the pure essence is clear, remove redundancies, and this cements the concepts in my mind. Merely reading, or worse, hearing, or worse copy/pasting something is only the first part of learning. It's similar with programming but I would take it even further. I never really understand complicated code until I've written tests and run the debugger and been very close to it. An AI chat bot is a powerful tool, but if you just use it to generate assignments you won't learn much. Inevitably it will be used both well and poorly and the results will be mixed.
doublespanner 3y ago
Current education is a ranking signal to see if we should continue investing in a student. Adding LLMs into things reduces the clarity of that signal, because the purpose is not to assess the quality of the students work, but the capabilities of the students.
thelock85 3y ago
Ultimately a potential problem lies further downstream in the reduction of creation of original work and knowledge. If you become an expert in performing via LLM, the LLM capabilities and underlying data represent the limits of knowledge creation. To your point about calculators and open-book exams, part of the challenge is for educators to rethink learning objectives and assessments in terms of outcomes that are outside the scope of LLMs.
melagonster 3y ago
let me try another way, if teacher require students write a article about Nazi, generated article pass the class. Is this fit the purpose of teacher?
make3 3y ago
Knowledge & skill are important, not just general intelligence. We need kids to know how to write, and how to elaborate their thoughts, for when they will need to do so in life. The LLMs can't guess what points you want to make to your boss or to your colleagues about the complex professional context you are in.
- Illotus 3y ago
  This. No matter how intelligent you are, you can not make connections between things you don't know about. If you externalise all knowledge you are ultimately just extension of that knowledge source.
acbart 3y ago
I won't speak about upper-division courses, but in the introductory computing courses, I'm dealing with students who still don't know the fundamentals but want to use the LLMs to "augment" their skills. But it's like trying to rely on a calculator before you learn how to do addition by hand... and the calculator sometimes misfires. They don't know enough to debug the stuff coming out, because they still don't yet have the fundamental problem-solving skills or understand the core programming techniques. In the hands of an expert (or even someone with moderate knowledge), I think these tools can be great. But there needs to be a period of development WITHOUT these tools too. "If you're nothing without the suit, then you shouldn't have it."
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  Similar to basic arithmetic? Perhaps the experience of symbolic calculators (like mathematica) is informing, since surely, for many years now, students have been able to have it do their homework for them. How do teachers handle that?
  - fny 3y ago
    They give an exam where Mathematica is not allowed. The ones that didn’t do the homework are in trouble.
    - hyperthesis 3y ago
      Huh, straightforward. So it just becomes the old problem of getting students to do their homework without cheating. \aside Some exams allow calculators and textbooks, and are really hard. Consider: what would an exam assess, where LLMs were allowed?
  - Foobar8568 3y ago
    25years ago, in the era post TI92, HP48, we would sometimes get table assessment without calculators in HS. University would just ban them for maths.
- Sai_ 3y ago
rf15 3y ago
> If the augmented-student pair performs at the required level, what's the problem? The problem is that they have none of the general knowledge themselves and their brain is exclusively optimised to seek out openAI interfaces for guidance. They'll be a drone, an AI zombie.
sacado2 3y ago
> If the augmented-student pair performs at the required level, what's the problem? There is one legal problem with the AI-student pair: the student doesn't own the copyright on what was produced with the AI. Meaning, any work submitted by the student that was at least partially generated by an AI is legally not 100% produced by the student. So the comparison with an open-book exam or using a calculator doesn't hold: if I search for information in a book, or use a calculator to compute a number, and make my own report in the end, I own the resulting product. I'm the sole author of that product. If I use ChatGPT, ChatGPT is the co-author of my work. So, using ChatGPT is the equivalent of calling your dad during the exam and ask him to answer the questions for you. Is that really what we want to evaluate?
- macrolime 3y ago
  If you use a calculator, you did not perform the calculation, the calculator did. In a similar vain an LLM could be seen as a calculator for text. With a calculator, you give it a task like perform the calculation 12*55. With an LLM you give a task like, write an outline of an essay on topic X. In both cases you used a tool to perform the task, the only difference is that the tools are becoming more powerful. Still, learning to calculate without using a calculator and learning to write without using an LLM are in themselves useful skills that can improve the thinking process, so both should be taught.
  - sacado2 3y ago
    That's not what the recent justice decisions said. If I'm using my calculator to compute 1255 and write "the result of 1255 is 660", I own the copyright on that sentence. I'm the author. If I submit that sentence to my teacher, I submit what is legally my own work. If I ask ChatGPT "i need to compute 12 * 55. Can you help me?" I get the following result: "To compute 12 multiplied by 55, you simply multiply the two numbers together: 12 * 55 = 660 So, 12 multiplied by 55 equals 660." I don't own the copyright on that paragraph. Nobody does. It's public domain. Meaning, I'm legally not the author of that work. If I give that to my teacher, I submit something I'm not the author of. It's legally the same as copy-pasting a block of text from a book or from the web and pretending I wrote it. That's not something teachers want to evaluate. In fact, not only will I fail my exam, but I'm also legally in trouble. Now, if I take ChatGPT's output and make my own content out of it, for instance rephrasing it as "according to ChatGPT, the result of 12 multiplied by 55 is 660", then it's my own work again, and ChatGPT was just a source. As a teacher, I cannot accept answers that are not produced by students. Whether they are produced by dad, by a domain expert who wrote a book, by wikipedia authors or by ChatGPT. But I can accept personal works that were inspired by those sources. Big, big difference.
woooooo 3y ago
You need the concepts in your head to have intuition. Bouncing each idea all the way out to an external resource is too slow. Can you fake it with an LLM for a while? Sure. But you hit a point where you need to know the right things to prompt with, and how to evaluate its output.
theprivacydad 3y ago
If you're testing for the skill of using LLMs, then no problem.

bko 3y ago

> We might say what is really be evaluated is the ability to get good grades (duh) - whether through wealth or work. Isn't that a good thing? Grades shouldn't be an IQ test. It's pretty much meaningless if you're not significantly below average or using it for super specialized tasks. Getting good grades means you can sit your ass in a seat (be it at a public library or a private tutor) and learn enough to do well on some task. Yes, good grades doesn't mean you would be necessarily be good at some task. But it shows you can succeed in something that requires effort.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Gimpei 3y ago

Writing is as much about organizing your thoughts and learning how to build an argument as it is about putting words on the page. It is about learning how to think. If students rely on an LLM, they will never get a chance to practice this essential skill, and, in my opinion, will be a lot dumber as a result.

analog31 3y ago
My thoughts are along similar lines: People learn to think, to inquire, to persuade, etc. We don't know precisely how. Maybe it's correlated to education, but even the strength of a causal link is debatable. I certainly don't oppose reforming contemporary education, but at the same time, letting it be replaced by something else by default because that thing has exponentially more engagement power invokes Chesterton's Fence. I'm not sure we even know what we're giving up.
- mbakke 3y ago
  Education has been in dire need for reform a long time. The writing was on the wall even with the advent of the Internet. We now have supercomputers in our pockets and hyperintelligent assistants at our fingertips. Chesterton could certainly not predict the exponential growth in access to tooling and knowledge. And we're only at the start of the curve. In my opinion we should go back to absolute basics. Forget grades. Focus on health, language, critical thinking, tool usage, and creativity. Skills that are intrinsic to humans. Make sure education is fun with lots of play. The main advantage humans have over computers is empathy and creativity. I'm not sure AI will ever "get it". Provide each student to the extent possible a path to follow their own curiosity and talents. Advanced maths, programming, writing, chemistry, physics, etc available for those interested, even at a young age. But the baseline education should focus on learning the absolute minimum to survive and otherwise maximize fun, creativity, and empathy.
  - theprivacydad 3y ago
    GPT4 can already convincingly analyse and explain why a drawn comic is funny or ironic. It's really unbelievable when you see it do that.
matt_j 3y ago
For me, and I assume others, the act of writing is an important part of the learning process. Writing on paper even more-so than typing on a keyboard. Writing forces me to organize my thoughts, summarize, elaborate, reference other parts of the text, iterate until the pure essence is clear, remove redundancies, and this cements the concepts in my mind. Merely reading, or worse, hearing, or worse copy/pasting something is only the first part of learning. It's similar with programming but I would take it even further. I never really understand complicated code until I've written tests and run the debugger and been very close to it. An AI chat bot is a powerful tool, but if you just use it to generate assignments you won't learn much. Inevitably it will be used both well and poorly and the results will be mixed.

doublespanner 3y ago

Current education is a ranking signal to see if we should continue investing in a student. Adding LLMs into things reduces the clarity of that signal, because the purpose is not to assess the quality of the students work, but the capabilities of the students.

thelock85 3y ago

Ultimately a potential problem lies further downstream in the reduction of creation of original work and knowledge. If you become an expert in performing via LLM, the LLM capabilities and underlying data represent the limits of knowledge creation. To your point about calculators and open-book exams, part of the challenge is for educators to rethink learning objectives and assessments in terms of outcomes that are outside the scope of LLMs.

melagonster 3y ago

let me try another way, if teacher require students write a article about Nazi, generated article pass the class. Is this fit the purpose of teacher?

make3 3y ago

Knowledge & skill are important, not just general intelligence. We need kids to know how to write, and how to elaborate their thoughts, for when they will need to do so in life. The LLMs can't guess what points you want to make to your boss or to your colleagues about the complex professional context you are in.

Illotus 3y ago
This. No matter how intelligent you are, you can not make connections between things you don't know about. If you externalise all knowledge you are ultimately just extension of that knowledge source.

acbart 3y ago

I won't speak about upper-division courses, but in the introductory computing courses, I'm dealing with students who still don't know the fundamentals but want to use the LLMs to "augment" their skills. But it's like trying to rely on a calculator before you learn how to do addition by hand... and the calculator sometimes misfires. They don't know enough to debug the stuff coming out, because they still don't yet have the fundamental problem-solving skills or understand the core programming techniques. In the hands of an expert (or even someone with moderate knowledge), I think these tools can be great. But there needs to be a period of development WITHOUT these tools too. "If you're nothing without the suit, then you shouldn't have it."

hyperthesis 3y ago
Similar to basic arithmetic? Perhaps the experience of symbolic calculators (like mathematica) is informing, since surely, for many years now, students have been able to have it do their homework for them. How do teachers handle that?
- fny 3y ago
  They give an exam where Mathematica is not allowed. The ones that didn’t do the homework are in trouble.
  - hyperthesis 3y ago
    Huh, straightforward. So it just becomes the old problem of getting students to do their homework without cheating. \aside Some exams allow calculators and textbooks, and are really hard. Consider: what would an exam assess, where LLMs were allowed?
- Foobar8568 3y ago
  25years ago, in the era post TI92, HP48, we would sometimes get table assessment without calculators in HS. University would just ban them for maths.
Sai_ 3y ago

rf15 3y ago

> If the augmented-student pair performs at the required level, what's the problem? The problem is that they have none of the general knowledge themselves and their brain is exclusively optimised to seek out openAI interfaces for guidance. They'll be a drone, an AI zombie.

sacado2 3y ago

> If the augmented-student pair performs at the required level, what's the problem? There is one legal problem with the AI-student pair: the student doesn't own the copyright on what was produced with the AI. Meaning, any work submitted by the student that was at least partially generated by an AI is legally not 100% produced by the student. So the comparison with an open-book exam or using a calculator doesn't hold: if I search for information in a book, or use a calculator to compute a number, and make my own report in the end, I own the resulting product. I'm the sole author of that product. If I use ChatGPT, ChatGPT is the co-author of my work. So, using ChatGPT is the equivalent of calling your dad during the exam and ask him to answer the questions for you. Is that really what we want to evaluate?

macrolime 3y ago
If you use a calculator, you did not perform the calculation, the calculator did. In a similar vain an LLM could be seen as a calculator for text. With a calculator, you give it a task like perform the calculation 12*55. With an LLM you give a task like, write an outline of an essay on topic X. In both cases you used a tool to perform the task, the only difference is that the tools are becoming more powerful. Still, learning to calculate without using a calculator and learning to write without using an LLM are in themselves useful skills that can improve the thinking process, so both should be taught.
- sacado2 3y ago
  That's not what the recent justice decisions said. If I'm using my calculator to compute 1255 and write "the result of 1255 is 660", I own the copyright on that sentence. I'm the author. If I submit that sentence to my teacher, I submit what is legally my own work. If I ask ChatGPT "i need to compute 12 * 55. Can you help me?" I get the following result: "To compute 12 multiplied by 55, you simply multiply the two numbers together: 12 * 55 = 660 So, 12 multiplied by 55 equals 660." I don't own the copyright on that paragraph. Nobody does. It's public domain. Meaning, I'm legally not the author of that work. If I give that to my teacher, I submit something I'm not the author of. It's legally the same as copy-pasting a block of text from a book or from the web and pretending I wrote it. That's not something teachers want to evaluate. In fact, not only will I fail my exam, but I'm also legally in trouble. Now, if I take ChatGPT's output and make my own content out of it, for instance rephrasing it as "according to ChatGPT, the result of 12 multiplied by 55 is 660", then it's my own work again, and ChatGPT was just a source. As a teacher, I cannot accept answers that are not produced by students. Whether they are produced by dad, by a domain expert who wrote a book, by wikipedia authors or by ChatGPT. But I can accept personal works that were inspired by those sources. Big, big difference.

woooooo 3y ago

You need the concepts in your head to have intuition. Bouncing each idea all the way out to an external resource is too slow. Can you fake it with an LLM for a while? Sure. But you hit a point where you need to know the right things to prompt with, and how to evaluate its output.

theprivacydad 3y ago

If you're testing for the skill of using LLMs, then no problem.