22 ms·

Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

• blitzar 1y ago
  How did we solve this when calculators came along and ruined peoples ability to do mental arithmetic and use slide rulers?
  • yapyap 1y ago
    It sounds like you’re implying LLMs are to everything what calculators were to math, if so you are sorely mistaken
    • squigz 1y 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.
  • gchamonlive 1y ago
    The impact LLMs have on education is arguably orders of magnitude higher than calculators
    • protocolture 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  • baconmania 1y 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.
  • sensanaty 1y 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?
  • lurking_swe 1y 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.
  • raincole 1y 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 1y 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)
      • Vegenoid 1y ago
        The way this worked in my mathematical education is that you can't have a computer solve the equations at the level of the thing you are learning, but you can let the computer do all the stuff that's a level below what you're learning. This way, you first learn it at a fundamental level, and then with that foundation you are permitted to use computers to do that stuff as you learn something new.
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y 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.
  • floren 1y 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.
• TimorousBestie 1y 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.
  • nathan_compton 1y ago
    The bigger problem is that kids can just hand write an essay that an AI gave them. I teach at a university and I just scale my homework assignments until they reach or exceed sightly the amount of work I expect a student to be able to do with AI. Before I would give them a problem set. Next semester homeworks will be more like entire projects.
    • hollow-moe 1y 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 1y 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?
• nkrisc 1y 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.
  • ai-christianson 1y ago
    Aren't the jobs they'll get be expecting them to use AI?
    • nkrisc 1y 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.
      • ai-christianson 1y ago
        Employers are employees too
      • TimorousBestie 1y 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.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
        • Aerroon 1y 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.
• esafak 1y 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 1y ago
    We're highly considering going back to onsite interviews, the big liniter is scheduling the interviewers.
  • CompoundEyes 1y ago
    I agree. An essay written on the spot in class with no electronics nearby seems like the counter.
• solresol 1y ago
  I have been wrestling with this too. I only see two options: no tech university or AI wrangling university. https://solresol.substack.com/p/you-can-no-longer-set-an-undergraduate https://solresol.substack.com/p/you-can-no-longer-set-an-und...
  • anonymousDan 1y ago
    Not sure I agree with either/or. In person assessments are still pretty robust. I think an ideal university will teach both with a clear division between them (e.g. whether a particular assessment or module allows AI). What I'm currently struggling with is how to design an assessment in which the student is allowed to use AI - how do I actually assess it? Where should the bar actually be? Can it be relative to peers? Does this reward students willing to pay for more advanced AI?
• math_dandy 1y ago
  I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams. Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge cash cow, and fattening it up is a very high priority. In-person, pen-and-paper assessment threatens their revenue growth model. Anyways, if we have seven sections of Calculus I, and one of these sections is offered online/remote, then none of the seven are allowed any in person assessment. For “fairness”. Seriously.
  • joe_the_user 1y ago
    Yeah, the thing AI cheating is it seems inherent not in teaching but what mechanical, bureaucratic, for-profit teaching and universities have become.
  • valiant55 1y ago
    Capitalism and the constant thirst for growth is killing society. Since when did universities care almost solely about renevnue and growth?
    • thatguy0900 1y ago
      With the us government now going after their funding they may have to start caring even more
    • DrillShopper 1y ago
      > Since when did universities care almost solely about renevnue and growth? Since endowments got huge.
      • wwweston 1y 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.
• fallinditch 1y 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.
• overgard 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
• mrbonner 1y 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.
• jumploops 1y 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!)
  • TimorousBestie 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
        • dragonwriter 1y 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.
• johnea 1y 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.
  • lotu 1y ago
    Thank fuck for saying this
    • yeyeyeyeyeyeyee 1y ago
      s/fuck/you/
  • pugio 1y 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.
• bosuanzi 1y 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 1y 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?
• sshine 1y 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.
  • JoshTriplett 1y 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 1y 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.
• kenjackson 1y 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 1y ago
    Those higher level questions are likely outside the scope of the class. Like write a novel or something like that.
• andoando 1y ago
  Perhaps we should reconsider the purpose of teaching. If one does not want to learn, why are we teaching them?
  • lotu 1y ago
    Because it is necessary, think about toilet training a toddler.
  • squigz 1y 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"
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    To avoid November 6, 2024?
    • Der_Einzige 1y 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.
  • TrackerFF 1y 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.
• owenpalmer 1y 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.
• djoldman 1y 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.
  • EGreg 1y 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 1y 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.
  • protocolture 1y 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.
  • Ekaros 1y 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.
• jamesgill 1y 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 1y 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. It reminds me of that scene from Good Will Hunting: https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0119217/quotes/?item=qt0408105 https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0119217/quotes/?item=qt04081...
  • turtletontine 1y ago
    I’m similarly worried about businesses all making “rational” decisions to replace their employees with “AI”, wherever they think they can get away with it. (Note that’s not the same thing as wherever “AI” can do the job well!) But I think one place where this hits a wall is liability and accountability. Lots of low stakes things will be enshittified by “AI” replacements for actual human work. But for things like airline pilots, cancer diagnoses, heart surgery - the cost of mistakes is so large, that humans in the loop are absolutely necessary. If nothing else, at least as an accountability shield. A company that makes a tumor-detector black box wants to be an assistive tool to improve doctor’s “efficiency”, not the actual front line medical care. If the tool makes a mistake, they want no liability. They want all the blame on the doctor for trusting their tool and not double checking its opinion. I hear that’s why a lot of “AI” tools in medicine are actually reducing productivity: double checking an “AI’s” opinion is more work than just thinking and evaluating with your own brain.
    • Nasrudith 1y 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.
• foxglacier 1y 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.
  • TychoCelchuuu 1y ago
    [dead]
  • ThrowawayR2 1y 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.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • patrickmay 1y ago
    "Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Leslie Lamport Writing is an essential skill.
    • foxglacier 1y ago
      Writing well requires both having organized thinking and writing skills to carry the reader's thinking and feelings along where you want them to go. You can put your organized thinking into an LLM, perhaps as bullet points or dense explanations and it can do the writing skills part. You just need to be able to read well enough to evaluate the output, which is a lot easier.
• datahack 1y 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.
• throwaway81523 1y ago
  No mention of Danny Dunn. Tsk. https://www.semicolonblog.com/?p=32946 https://www.semicolonblog.com/?p=32946
  • AStonesThrow 1y ago
    As late as 1984, Danny Dunn shared a place of honor on my bookshelves, along with Encyclopedia Brown. The long list of titles is interesting and almost leads us to a self-referential thought. These series were often known as "boiler-room novels" because they were basic and formulaic, and it was possible to command a team of entry-level writers to churn them out.
• czhu12 1y 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 1y ago
    Same here. AI is a great tool for learning, but a challenge for education.
• globalnode 1y ago
  well worth the read just for the term "broligarch"
• Aziell 1y 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.
• downboots 1y ago
  The issue is trust, AI is not the issue. Culture, not technology.
• hiAndrewQuinn 1y 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/ https://framery.com/en/ sells. Stick a computer in it, and a couple of cameras as well. The OS only lets you open what you want to open on it. Have the AI watch the student in real time, and flag any potential cheating behaviors, like how modern AI video baby monitors watch for unsafe behaviors in the crib. If a $2-3000 pod sounds too expensive for you over the course of your child's education, I'm sure remote schoolers can find ways to rent pods at much cheaper scale, like a gym subscription model. If the classes you take are primarily exam-based anyway you might be able to get away with visiting it once a week or less. I'm surprised nobody ever brings up this idea. It's obvious you have to fight fire with fire here, unless you want to 10x the workload of any teacher who honestly cares about cheating.
• rixed 1y 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 1y ago
    AI is bad for academia and the educational industrial complex, but it is great for people that actually want to learn.
• marcus_holmes 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
• Animats 1y 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 1y ago
    What do you mean, “worth it”? What is the alternative, we carry on without people skilled in the English language?
  • doctorpangloss 1y 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?
• nwlotz 1y 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.
• BrenBarn 1y 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.
• enceladus06 1y 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.
  • edvardas 1y 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 1y 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!
  • TrackerFF 1y 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.
• sireat 1y 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.
• wiihack 1y 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...
• BrtByte 1y 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
• Sam6late 1y 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?
• snickerbockers 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
• bugtodiffer 1y ago
  Maybe just stop giving homework and instead give the kids some time to live. Fixed it for you.
  • ookdatnog 1y 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?
• sudoaptinstall 1y 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.
• yazantapuz 1y 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 1y ago
    I hope by 'handwritten' you don't literally mean pen and paper?
    • xtracto 1y 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 1y 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.
• motohagiography 1y 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.
• ghusto 1y 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.
  • jmmcd 1y 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 1y 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.
      • ghusto 1y ago
        If the judge of your fitness took into account only the amount you could lift, then sure, why not use a forklift. This is what's happened in education. The education system is not concerned with teaching you to learn, or even teaching you, it's concerned with grades. As many have stated here, homework is practice for the student, and can be helpful in learning. However, it's given out as something to grade without any collaboration on the learning experience. By the way, I'm ranting about all this as someone who did very well in both high-school and university, so I feel somewhat justified in calling bullshit on the whole thing.
• keiferski 1y 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.
• goodluckchuck 1y ago
  1
• intended 1y 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.
• lisenKaci 1y 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?
  • Traubenfuchs 1y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom I wrote my master thesis about that. It‘s an old idea.
• ranger207 1y 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 1y 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.
• agrippanux 1y 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.
• joering2 1y 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.
  • Vegenoid 1y ago
    Up next: the judges use LLMs to evaluate arguments.
• plantwallshoe 1y 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.
  • danielhep 1y 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?
    • mathgeek 1y 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 1y ago
        Shout out to the fantastic Georgia Tech online masters program in CS: https://pe.gatech.edu/degrees/computer-science https://pe.gatech.edu/degrees/computer-science (not affiliated, just a fan)
    • plantwallshoe 1y 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.
• clutter55561 1y ago
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• perdomon 1y 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.
• acc_297 1y 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?
• rwyinuse 1y 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 1y ago
    What you then say is a good value for ones time instead?
• danhodgins 1y 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"
• dsign 1y ago
  Caveat, I'm just armchair-commenting and I haven't thought much about this. After kids learn to read and do arithmetic, shouldn't we go back to apprenticeships? The system of standardized teaching and grading seems to be about to collapse, and what's the point of memorizing things when you can carry all that knowledge in your pocket? And, anyway, it doesn't stick until you have to use it for something. Plus, a teacher seems to be insufficient to control all the students in a classroom (but that's nothing new; it amazes me that I was able to learn anything at all in elementary school, with all the mayhem there always was in the classroom). Okay, I can already see a lot of downsides to this, starting with the fact that I would be an illiterate farmer if some in my family had had a say in my education. But maybe the aggregate outcome would be better than what is coming?
• randcraw 1y 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.
  • BlueTemplar 1y ago
    The word is "machine". Quite relevant here (maybe not where Universities are directly concerned) is the history of Luddites breaking automated textile equipment to protest their high skilled jobs disappearing in favour of much less skilled jobs of machine operators.
• timnetworks 1y ago
  Stop giving boring ass essay assignments. Forest, trees.
• nateburke 1y 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.
• Footprint0521 1y 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
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• fewdaysto2025 1y ago
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