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A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

• gilbetron 1y ago
  I honestly think school systems will use AI as a way to pass "difficult" students. It has been a real problem dealing with students that are failing, and school systems have just basically looked the other way. Now they can look the other way as far as AI and most kids will just magically pass everything and move along their merry way. It's awful, but I think we'll see it happen, sadly.
• aabbcc1241 1y ago
  Instead of not letting the students to use AI, how about we adjust the assessment method, and learning objective, to let the students do something that AI along cannot do, so that they can do it w/wo AI but still build up their own skill. In the workplace, we're using AI anyway. I'm not sure if this direction is suitable for kids, like we still learn to do calculation even when we have calculator (which is needed for some cases, but for complex math, we opt for tools)
• dougb5 1y ago
  https://archive.is/twynO https://archive.is/twynO
• laweijfmvo 1y ago
  i get it, but i also think about all the useful things i could have been doing (perhaps now assisted by AI) instead of pounding through Algebra homework and English essays all night...
  • igor47 1y ago
    This is a ludicrous take. You of course have to have a basic understanding of the world to know what to do. Otherwise you're just floating along in some sort of solipsistic fog. Your brain came built in with amazing capacity to learn but you have to actually... Learn some stuff
• rvz 1y ago
  What are we going to do to solve this?
  • smitty1e 1y ago
    One possible starting point is offloading the plural. What am "I" doing to solve this? For both me and my children. Taking responsibility for my continuing education, for one. Locate interesting curricula and pursue them.
    • frollogaston 1y ago
      Yeah but "what are we going to do" is still a valid question
    • flappyeagle 1y ago
      Selfishness isn’t the solution try again
      • eigencoder 1y ago
        Recognizing that I can't control other people isn't selfishness
  • monero-xmr 1y ago
    Paper / blue book exams? It seems obvious to me. I went to college when we had giant desktops and CRTs but everything was paper when it mattered. Bizarre how no one can see the obvious
    • jay_kyburz 1y ago
      You _don't_ need to jump all the way back to paper and pencil. It's the internet that's the problem. Kids just need to do their work in class on a machine that is only connected to school network, not the wider internet. Updated to say what I was trying to say. (Apologies)
  • Overpower0416 1y ago
• zdragnar 1y ago
  I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision. Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience. Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves. I know it was a rough transition for my nephew, though, and I don't know that I would have handled it very well either. I'm not sure what would be a better option, though, given how much of a disservice such easy access to a mental crutch is.
  • nancyminusone 1y ago
    Homework is nothing more than the denial of childhood. I am very thankful I quit doing mine as soon as I could get away with it.
    • oceanplexian 1y ago
      I barely made it out of high school because of homework. And flunked college mostly because of it. What was going on with computers was far too interesting, I'd spend 10 hours learning to code or playing around with Linux, go to school the next day with 4 hours of sleep and missed homework. It worked out though, and I wouldn't do things any differently given the chance.
      • DaSHacka 1y ago
        You may be happy to learn that all of us who learn best like this are living large right now. We can just GPT all our busywork assignments and get back to working on our personal research and projects. I do feel a bit bad for the professors teaching the classes absolutely no one wants to take though (like "Global Issues" or "Gender Studies", the two most hated gen-ed courses at my uni). Everyone does the bare minimum to skate by with a C, so I imagine the professors probably revceive more GPT essays than not.
  • BobbyTables2 1y ago
• frollogaston 1y ago
  Maybe they can allow AI for writing but raise the bar on quality so the blind copy-paste submissions still fail. I've still never read a good AI-generated doc at work, it's always verbose and aimless. At this point I close the doc if I catch a whiff. Unlike the AI code which is fine. It's probably either that or ban it and do everything in-person, which might have to be the stopgap solution.
  • like_any_other 1y ago
    > Maybe they can allow AI for writing but raise the bar on quality so the blind copy-paste submissions still fail. These are highschoolers, still learning to write - their output won't be the best. It won't be long at all until AI can write as well as the average (honest, pre-AI) highschooler, if we're not past that point already.
    • xboxnolifes 1y ago
      We're well past the point of AI being able to write better than the average highschooler. It's not even close. What I remember from my high school was that the average student could barely put together 3 coherent paragraphs.
    • dghlsakjg 1y ago
      You have severely overestimated most high-school students. The whole reason that this is an issue is that LLMs have been able to match or beat student output since chatGPT 3.5.
  • UncleMeat 1y ago
    I am sure that there are ways of incorporating AI in pedagogically useful ways. But. Generative AI is new. Pedagogical research involving them is even newer. Teachers are rarely given resources to meaningfully explore new methods. Expecting teachers to stumble through updated processes to enable students to incorporate generative AI is a mess. Students are also children. They'll take the path of least resistance if it is available to them. Expecting students to meaningfully incorporate generative AI into their learning process rather than just reaching for "ugh this essay is dumb - chatgpt give me an essay on the use of time skipping in To the Lighthouse." The situation is a total mess.
• enceladus06 1y ago
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• pixxel 1y ago
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• akomtu 1y ago
  "The technology is producing a generation of eternal novices, unable to think or perform for themselves." A quite possible future: you're surrounded by dead-eyed humans with AI implants who mindlessly repeat whatever the chatbot tells them.
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    More specifically, whatever their tech giant of choice (and their advertisers) tell the chatbot to tell them.
    • blooalien 1y ago
      > "whatever their tech giant of choice (and their advertisers)" By that time it's highly unlikely they'll have any choice in the matter. ComcastMicrosoftDisneyPepsiTacoBell will make all their choices for them, including being their only provider of truth and knowledge.
• textadventure 1y ago
  This take from a Hermione-type High School senior shed next to zero new light on the subject. Yes, we know AI is redefining school and jobs and daily life. The perspective of an obnoxious A+ type student isn't helping, especially because you kind of can read between the lines that she isn't friends with these kids using AI, which would give her a deeper perspective of why and how they are using AI. Is this what The Atlantic has come down to, publishing a complain-y piece by the class president? EDIT: For anyone struggling with my criticism of the article, I very much agree that there is a problem of AI in education. Her suggestion which is "maybe more oral exams and less essays?" I'm sure has never been considered by teachers around the world rolls eyes. As for how to tackle this, I think the only solution is accept the fact that AI is going nowhere and integrate it into the class. Show kids in the class how to use AI properly, compare what different AI models say, and compare what they say to what scholars and authors have written, to what kids in the past have written in their essays. You don't have to fight AI to instill critical thinking in kids. You can embrace it to teach them its limitations.
  • bdangubic 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • textadventure 1y ago
      ANY real kid that is unpretentious would do. A "I use AI to cheat at school" article would be far more interesting that this "Oh my God, my peers are hopeless but not me" piece.
      • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
        If you're judging without even knowing the content of the hypothetical alternative then is the difference just that one premise offends you while the other supports you?
        • textadventure 1y ago
          Huh? I'm questioning the point of this pretentious article, that's all.
• mallowdram 1y ago
  Proves the simulation of AI never required the virtual plug in pod. It's simply pervasive in our reality as Baudrillard asserted (contrary to the Matrix dichotomy), and now requires its overthrow to obliterate automated seamless simulation from taking over. Say goodbye ML, we won't be missing you.
• dangus 1y ago
  It seems like the real problem here is the curriculum. The school should be removing students' ability to use AI on these assignments, and it really isn't that hard to do. Phones shouldn't be in the classroom, and devices used in the classroom shouldn't have any access to AI. Students shouldn't really have homework anyway so I think it's completely reasonable to just have kids doing work on pen and paper in the class for the most part.
  • wnc3141 1y ago
    A family member who is a teacher used to joke "They gutted the language learning programs and all I got was this lousy iPad." In their eyes, districts appeared to lose the script with the first principles of education and in place spent their resources on the latest tech.
• AIorNot 1y ago
  I’m an AI engineer but I think schools need a nuclear option Banish tech in schools (including cell phones) (except during comp classes) but allow it at home Ie in high school only allow paper and pencil/pen Go back to written exams (handwriting based) Be lenient on spelling and grammer Allow homework, digital tutoring AI assistants and AI only when it not primary- ie for homework not in class work Bring back oral exams (in a limited way) Encourage study groups in school but don’t allow digital tech in those groups in class or libraries only outside of campus or in computer labs Give up iPads and Chromebooks and Pearson etc
  • kazinator 1y ago
    There was a time when governments, banks, corporations and institutions had big iron computers, and they were not in the classroom. That time was okay; education happened, and some people who went into computing did very cool things anyway.
  • wnc3141 1y ago
    The best format I ever learned math was with plain sheets of printer paper, essentially a page per problem letting me doodle the problem and really think it through freely. After working with the concepts we then logged on to Mathematica for visualizations to really cement the concepts.
    • aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
      Maths is probably the safest subject. Reading compression and writing is the dangerous stuff. Its arguably the most important subject in regular school, 2nd only to socialisation skills.
  • Anonyneko 1y ago
    Back in the day we were writing code on paper (or on punched cards, using them as a paper substitute, as there were a lot of them left over from the Soviet times and they looked very "computer-y"), so even during computer classes you didn't necessarily need a computer. Not that I really think that it can still work in the year 2025 and beyond...
• rented_mule 1y ago
  An older analog is calculators. My college intro to stats course didn't allow them. We did simple arithmetic by hand and looked up things like roots and logs in tables. I still have my copy of this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0849306922 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0849306922 I just tutored my nephew through his college intro to stats course. Not only are calculators allowed, but they had a course web app so that all they did was select a dataset, select columns from those datasets, and enter some parameters. They were expected to be able to pick the right technique in the app, select the right things, and interpret the results. Because of the time savings, they covered far more techniques than we did in my day because they weren't spending so much time doing arithmetic. Despite lots of cries about "who will know how to make calculators?", this transition to calculators (and computers) being allowed was unavoidable because that's how these subjects would be applied later on in students' careers. The same is true of AI, so students need to learn to use it effectively (e.g., not blindly accepting AI answers as truth). It will be difficult for the teachers to make their lesson plans deeper, but I think that's where we're headed. Another lesson we can draw from the adoption of calculators is that not all kids could afford calculators, so schools sometimes needed to provide them. Schools might need to provide access to AI as well. Maybe you are required to use the school's version and it logs every student's usage as the modern version of "show your work"? And it could intentionally spit out bad answers occasionally to test that students are examining the output. There's a lot to figure out, but we can find inspiration in past transitions.
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    What the surface level take about calculators misses is that the average person can't do arithmetic in their head because they don't need to, but they also don't pull out a calculator in the many times a day it would be useful, like at the grocery store. People make horrible decisions with everyday home economics math and are taken advantage of. The lesson isn't that we survived calculators, it's that they did dull us, and our general thinking and creativity are about to get likewise dulled. Which is much scarier.
    • GianFabien 1y ago
      Actually the experience with calculators portends a dismal future. Before calculators, i.e. slide rules, log tables, hand arithmetic: by the time engineers completed their university education most could approximate relevant parameters in their work to +/- 5% or the actual value. Slide rules would give you a result to 3 (rarely 4) significant decimals, but you needed to know the expected result to within half an order of magnitude. After calculators, many graduate engineers will accept erroneous results from their calculations without noticing orders of magnitude discrepencies. We constantly hear of spreadsheet errors making their way into critical projects. With AI the risk is that even currently levels of critical thinking will be eroded.
• rich_sasha 1y ago
  It's weird. All of our attributes which we hold and value, and develop via a mix of genes and training - intelligence, but also strength, stamina, reflexes - we acquired, if you strip it all off to basics, to feed and to procreate. That's all evolution cares about. Now, we are social animals, and we grew to value these thing for their own right. Societies valued strength and bravery, as virtues, but I guess ultimately because having brave strong soldiers made for more food and babies. So over time, we tamed beasts and built tools, and most of these virtues kind of faded away. In our world of prosperity and machine power on tap, strength and bravery are not really extolled so much anymore. We work out because it makes us healthy and attractive, not because our societies demand this. We're happy to replace the hard work with a prosthetic. Intelligence all these millenia was the outlier. The thing separating us from the animals. It was so inconceivable that it might be replaced that it is very deeply ingrained in us. But if suddenly we don't need it? Or at least 95% of the population doesn't? Is it "ok" to lose it, like engineers of today don't rely on strength like blacksmiths used to? Maybe. Maybe it's ok that in 100 years we will all let our brains rot, occasionally doing a crossword as a work out. It feels sad, but maybe only in the way decline of swordsmanship felt to a Napoleonic veteran. The world moved on and we don't care anymore. We lost so many skills that were once so key: the average person can't farm, can't forage, can't start a fire or ride a horse. And maybe it's ok. Or, who knows, maybe not.
  • BlueTemplar 1y ago
    Plenty of people do not work out today. Soldiers do still go through physical training, and this seems to be a closer metaphor than swordsmanship. Quite scary in its implications for the future.
  • gyomu 1y ago
    It’s okay only if you’re okay deferring all power and agency to people who control the production and distribution of the tools.
    • rich_sasha 1y ago
      Do you feel particularly anxious that you delegated your walking stamina or horsemanship to car manufacturers?
• justaguitarist 1y ago
  I'm a sysadmin for a public school district and the admins are working on rolling out Gemini for students/staff. I've shared all the studies I can find about cognitive decline associated with LLM use, but it seems like it's falling on deaf ears.
  • nunez 1y ago
    Not surprising if this is in a state that wants to push vouchers.
  • kmacleod 1y ago
    As a district, aren't you also able to work with Google to enable research and educate modes in addition to the "give me the answer" modes?
    • justaguitarist 1y ago
      I believe that's what they are doing. I was removed from the committee after sharing the studies I found so I'm just pushing the buttons they tell me to push at this point.
  • Jimmc414 1y ago
    Could you link some of the more compelling studies you've found? I've only found one major empirical study directly examining cognitive decline from LLM use and there are substantial methodology problems. I've elaborated on the specifics here if you are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118819
  • EvanAnderson 1y ago
    I do contract network admin work for a K-12 school district and I'm hearing the same thing from the in-house sysadmin about his administration staff. The District superintendent is very enthusiastic about getting LLM tools into the hands of the students and teachers. The in-house sysadmin and I are both horrified at what we're enabling.
    • 1y ago
• nunez 1y ago
  I can definitely vouch for this based on stories from my wife stories (teacher at a private school), her friends (fellow teachers), and my experience working at coworking spaces and coffee shops. [^1] LLMs can be amazing [^0] as an assistive technology, but using them as a "do it for me" button is just way too easy, so that's how they are de facto used. I believe it will take about 5-10 years for us to fully comprehend how damaging unplanned remote classrooms and unchecked LLM use in the classroom was. Like heroin, it will be extremely hard to undo our dependence on them by that point. I'm pretty scared for how our students will fare on the global scale in the coming years. [^0] I strongly believe that 60% of the value of LLMs can be realized by learning how to use a search engine properly. Probably more. Nonetheless, I've fully embraced my accidentally-acquired curmudgeon identity and know that I'm in the minority about this. [^1] You won't believe how many people leave their laptops unlocked and their screen's contents visible for everyone to see. Committing identity theft has to be easier than ever these days. This basic infosec principle seems to be something we've lost since the great WFH migration.
• trescenzi 1y ago
  > We used to share memes about pounding away at the keyboard at 11:57, anxiously rushing to complete our work on time. These moments were not fun, exactly, but they did draw students together in a shared academic experience. This reminds me of type 1 vs type 2 fun. Type 1 fun is fun in the moment; drinks with friends. Type 2 isn’t fun in the moment but is fun in retrospect. Generally people choose type 1 if given a choice but type 2 I find is the most rewarding. It’s what you’ll talk about with your friends at the bar. I know it’s very much old man, well I guess this high schooler is too, yelling at clouds but I do worry what the elimination of challenge does to our ability to learn and form relationships. I’d expect there to be a sweet spot. Obviously too much challenge and people shut down.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  New York originally banned ChatGPT https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/new-york-city-public-schools-ban-chatgpt-devices-networks-rcna64446 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/new-york-city-public-... Then reverseed the ban https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/chatgpt-ban-dropped-new-york-city-public-schools-rcna85089 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/chatgpt-ban-dropped-new-york-ci...
• fzeroracer 1y ago
  For reference, a similar HN story from about a month ago [1] on teacher usage of AI tools in the classroom. It's pretty fucking dire. I think we're failing an entire generation of kids and the ramifications of this is going to be real bad in 5-10 years. I've heard similar stories from friends of mine whom are teachers. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808122
• hodder 1y ago
  The real irony is that this article was clearly, edited and formatted by an LLM.
  • HelloMcFly 1y ago
    What indicators make you so certain? Certainly the em-dashes in the third sentence raised my eyebrow, as they always do now (it's sad—I loved a good em-dash).
  • dghlsakjg 1y ago
    Can you tell me how you can tell with such certainty that you are willing to publicly libel a stranger? If you can, you have a massive ed-tech startup on your hands.
  • carabiner 1y ago
    That's not apparent at all. The NYT has published a couple AI-written articles like this one: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/style/modern-love-men-where-have-you-gone-please-come-back.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/style/modern-love-men-whe... but this New Yorker doesn't have any of the tells.
• yieldcrv 1y ago
  to me this is an indication that the priorities of these formative years should change, and it doesn't look like what "school" looks like the montessori and sudbury school model always seemed closest to what was necessary, although now I wonder if even those are cracking at the seams with outsourced thinking regardless, I think a re-evaluation of the point is absolutely necessary. self-motivated children are rare and require a specific environment and support system to thrive in, but will always be there to escape the more obvious return to serfs working on fiefs, unless born into capital themselves
• mystraline 1y ago
  So, its a "Kids these days", written by a kid. I've seen the same commentary about: Spellcheck Typed material Computer art programs Calculators
  • nyc_data_geek1 1y ago
    This is fundamentally different. It replaces, and thus atrophies, cognitive faculties in a way the other tools you mentioned never aspired to.
    • mystraline 1y ago
      No, it isn't. "Spellcheck removes the ability to spell" "Calculators prevent you from doing math." "Computer art will destroy real art" "Typing text will destroy cursive and handwritten". Same idea, that some form of tech will destroy something we should value.
      • schiem 1y ago
        People who heavily utilize any of those _do_ have the associated skills atrophied. It's just that in all of the listed cases, the actual associated skill may not have actually been important. The younger people at my job have atrocious spelling. My ability to do mental math is much worse than it was when I was regularly doing math without a calculator. People who have exclusively learned digital art do not have the muscle memory built up to seamlessly transition to analog art. Almost everyone I know has awful handwriting. So the question then is "What is the actual skill that AI tools are replacing?" And if the answer is "thinking," then that should be terrifying.
      • nyc_data_geek1 1y ago
        You are missing the point. Assistive tools do not replace the fundamental cognitive process. This does.
      • sensanaty 1y ago
        The calculator example everyone keeps bringing up is such a massive misunderstanding of what the issue with LLMs is. I did IGCSE/A-levels (International school following the British school system). For IGCSE, around grade 8 (if memory serves), you're allowed the use of calculators, including during all exams. For AS/A Levels (grades 11 and 12), you're also allowed calculators in all subjects that have any kind of mathematics at all, like Physics, Chemistry, Maths etc. On the front page of the exam papers, you also get a list of all formulae that might be relevant. For physics this will be things like the formula for calculating Force, or all the ones relating to electricity, or gravity etc. Similarly for math, you'll get common formulae for even the simple things that everyone is expected to know like Pythagoras' theorem. The thing is, the calculators and the formulae were of very little use to you if you didn't know the theory behind it in the first place. This same concept applies for the basics like arithmetic, if you yourself have never done arithmetic without the aid of a calculator, you can plug in all the numbers you want, but you don't have that intuition for what looks roughly right or not and you won't get very far. I still have memories of me punching in some numbers in the calculator, and then being confused by the resulting number, because for years I practiced my mental arithmetic and was at a state where I know that the number just looked different from what I was expecting. The thing here is that the years studying arithmetic weren't only relevant for just the math class I was doing, it was universally useful whenever I interacted with any numbers, including in other subjects like Physics (where you're often working with incomprehensible numbers that end with an `^11`, so having an intuition for orders of magnitudes really mattered) or Chemistry (similarly except it's ^-11). Even for the less STEM-focused subjects like Business studies, having an intuition for basic Mathematics makes a huge difference. LLMs/AIs in this context would be replacing all those foundation building years, for basically everything. You as the student relying on AI for everything will take a look at that exam sheet, take a look at that list of formulae and will have absolutely no clue what any of it means, because you haven't practiced any of it yourself. You'll see some number spat out by the calculator and it'll be negative when it should be positive, and the order of magnitude will be ^21 rather than ^11, and you'll lack the foundational knowledge to know intuitively that number is wrong and the answer is wrong. Except this will apply for everything that an LLM can answer, not just numbers. We already live in a world where people take anything they read online as gospel. People already don't know how to read graphs, and have no intuition for numbers. If something is said in an authoritative-enough tone, many people will just go with it even if the data shows the opposite of what is being said. We now want to introduce hallucination machines and have the future generations be dependent on them and to outsource all their thinking to them? Even though it's hilariously easy to get these systems spitting out absolute nonsense, just in a confident and well-written tone? > "Spellcheck removes the ability to spell" This has factually happened. How many people out there do you see that don't know the difference between your and you're, or that constantly mispell [sic] common words? Whether that's something that is important is a different discussion, but it is a truth. > "Typing text will destroy cursive and handwritten". This has also objectively happened. Again, whether it's truly important or not is a different topic, but I can use myself as an example, I basically have a child's handwriting because I haven't really written anything since high school. I still have to write from time to time, for example when filling out some gov't forms, and it's a genuine pain in the ass sometimes how terrible my handwriting is.
• djoldman 1y ago
  Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes. Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet. Caught with a cellphone, you fail the test. Caught twice you fail the class. The non-story beatings will continue until morale and common sense improve.
  • benreesman 1y ago
    Right a broader theme about AI safety and AI politics and all of it: we have choices as a society, so if our choices are good and our will to see those choices respected are intact, then the scope for harm is pretty manageable. When the one that can make Captain Trips bioweapon in a garage comes out, I'll start blaming the technology, at the moment, its the choices made by humans.
  • BinaryPie 1y ago
    All of our tests including computer science exams were written on paper with a pencil. We can just go back to that.
  • defen 1y ago
    Agreed. What we're actually witnessing is the end of mass-produced education.
  • godelski 1y ago
    Are you suggesting kids spend longer times in school or suggesting kids spend less time on education?
    • djoldman 1y ago
      Chicago Public Schools has 176 days of school in the school year. That's 88 days per semester. Take 8 of those and use them to assess student progress and determine grades in class. That leaves 90% of the school year for learning in class.
• gwbas1c 1y ago
  > or that they remove a sense of urgency from academics That was one of my frustrations with "prep" school: An artificial sense of urgency that does not, in any way, reflect how one leads a happy, healthy, and successful life; nor does one need a sense of urgency in academics to grow into an adult who makes a positive contribution to society. > Some students may use these tools to develop their understanding or explore topics more deeply, ... can also be used as a study aid I think the same can be said about internet searches. Altavista came around when I was in high school; and I lost all motivation to memorize arcane facts. The same can also be said about books and libraries. Instead, it's important to realize that a lot of topics taught in schools have to do with someone's agenda and opinion about what's important to know, and even political agendas; and then accept that many lessons from school are forgotten. > Student assessments should be focused on tasks that are not easily delegated to technology: oral exams ... or personalized writing assignments ... Portfolio-based or presentational grading Those are all time consuming; but they miss a bigger point: What's the real point of grades anyway? Perhaps its time to focus on quality instead of quantity in education?
  • syphia 1y ago
    I have to agree with you. It seems that most measures to make school harder or more rigorous turn it into an aptitude test or boot camp, because so little development can occur in that environment. It breaks down individuals or, at best, filters them. If that's what schools are supposed to be, so be it, but I'd like to see that outcome explicitly acknowledged (especially by other posters here) instead of implied.
• stephenlf 1y ago
  Idk this doesn’t really click for me. That first cheating example was entirely possible before GenAI (through sparknotes). And yet, we learned. Learning has always been a choice
  • ethbr1 1y ago
    Individually, sure. But across a population it matters what percentage of people have basic literacy and mathematical proficiency. And I think social has showed us that most people are lazy and swayed to the easiest approach. Ergo, making AI easy to abuse, at the cost of learning, is detrimental to societies as a whole.
• __lbracket__ 1y ago
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• lordnacho 1y ago
  Well, we can hope this is only a transitional issue. Here is why. AI will, like previous technologies, enable some of us to become more productive. In fact, it raises the bar on productivity, since an experienced programmer can now create much more code. (An inexperienced one can create much more mess, so you might not see it in aggregate statistics). When it comes to the classroom, we should do the same. We raise the bar so that in fact, you cannot do anything without using AI. Much as you would run out of time if you didn't have a spreadsheet in a stats course 20 years ago, or pandas 10 years ago. The new tech enables more work to get done in the form of learning more high level things, while relegating lower level things to just building blocks that can be understood in the same way we understand reference texts, ie "I've seen the principal once, and I can find it again if I get to that level of abstraction". Teaching needs to change. Perhaps the thing to do is have an Oxford tutorial rather than traditional class. For those who didn't attend, a tutorial is basically two students and a professor in a room, talking. You can't hide. You can prepare however you like, and you should spend quite a lot of hours if you're sparring with a politics or math professor. But once you're in the room, it becomes painfully obvious if you are unprepared. This is a way to get accountability. At the moment, we have this high school system testing that is a factory. Every test is done as a thing that is easily marked. Multiple choice, or short answer, or short essay. It encourages superficial learning when you know you can dance around the important topics and just pick up the easy points, as well as simply avoiding silly errors. You can also win by simply learning the likely questions, and aping the answers. Have a weekly small-group session with an expert, and they can find your limits. Yes, it will cost money.
• Animats 1y ago
  Makes you realize how fast this has happened. This is a "get off my lawn" article by a high school senior. It's part of the job of education to instill some common culture. (Which common culture varies, but not all that much outside political topics.) For students, questions about that culture are new issues. LLMs have digested a huge amount of existing material on it. LLMs are thus really good at things students are graded upon. This gives students the impression that LLMs are very smart. Which probably says more about educational practice than LLMs. The big problem is not cheating. It's that the areas schools cover are ones where LLMs are really good. There's no easy fix for this.
  • afdbcreid 1y ago
    But schools teach basic things (mostly). Basic things will have a lot of information about. Therefore, LLMs will always be good at things taught in schools. I don't think that's something we can change, children need to learn basic things.
• gabriel666smith 1y ago
  Someone I know (not SWIM, it actually wasn't me) did a little bit of work for a high-school-level tutoring company. The company got all their leads from TikTok. They did numbers on TikTok. The company was tutoring English Literature as one of its subjects. They were generating English Literature exam problems - for their users - using the ChatGPT web UI. They would upload the marking spec, and say: "Give me an excerpt from something that might be on this syllabus, and an appropriate question about it". Naturally, their users - the high school students - were getting, often, hallucinated excerpts from hallucinated works by existing authors. I think the kids will be fine - it'll be their world, at some point, and that world will look a lot different to now. Maybe that's too optimistic! I would hope, in that world, LLM literacy amongst adults has increased. Because I feel really, really bad for all the kids who are beating themselves up about getting badly marked by ChatGPT (I assume) on an imaginary excerpt of an imaginary Wordsworth poem by their functionally imaginary tutor. It makes me laugh, and reminds me of one of my favourite jokes, about the inflatable boy who - being of a rebellious nature - takes a safety pin to the inflatable school. Chaos ensues. Afterwards, the inflatable boy's inflatable teacher says: "You've let me down; you've let the school down, but worst of all, you've let yourself down." I guess I'm suspicious of the linked article. Call me full of hot air, but is it actually a safety pin? Or is it just designed to look really good on an application for an inflatable college?
  • f33d5173 1y ago
    In some sense that's useful practice. Instead of memorising the answer, learn to analyse a work from scratch without any reference. AI can be an incredibly powerful teacher if you let it be. Not the usual cram school style for sure though.
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• alphazard 1y ago
  The lesson here is adapt or die. The things they thought were important or difficult or impressive are no longer any of those things. Regurgitating information on a test or generating prose from the notes you took in class are tasks which are easy to stereotype, and now readily automated. Rather than framing this as destroying education, it should be interpreted as proof that these tasks were always shallow. AI is still much worse than humans at important things, why not focus on those things instead? The school systems are clearly not keeping up. Any kid who isn't doing project oriented creative work, aided by an LLM as needed, is not preparing for the the world they will likely inherit.
  • Loughla 1y ago
    I have to present to a group of pissed off college faculty tomorrow. They're pissed because we ended our contract with the AI checking software. We ended it because it checks not for AI but for professional writing, good grammar and spelling, and professional non-conversational word choice. WHICH ARE THE THINGS WE'RE TEACHING THESE STUDENTS IN OUR CLASSES. I have to look at a room of mostly out of touch faculty and tell them to be better at their jobs. I have to tell them that they simply cannot do what they've done for the last 30 years (which is only being forced because of AI, but should've been a thing the entire time). I have to, in five minutes, explain pedagogy and modern instructional design. And I have no idea what to say that won't make this situation worse. I'm thinking of leading with an explanation of what adaptation and evolution are as concepts. That should go well. I'm pretty excited.
    • alphazard 1y ago
      Were I in your shoes, I would make a point of explaining what "style transfer" is. It was one of the first things LLMs were really good at. e.g. "Write a rap battle between Shakespeare and Plato". Academic prose is just style transfer. Academia filters pretty heavily for humans that can do this particular kind of style transfer well. Everyone on the college faculty will be 2 standard deviations of good at writing academic prose. That skill is no longer valuable. It is now a cheap commodity measured in flops. The silver lining is that the content of one's writing is now paramount because the field has been leveled as far as style is concerned.
• greenspam 1y ago
  Imagine back in the days when calculators were just invented. An 8 year old kid might have the similar complain: “my classmate finished a 4 digits number multiplication problem in 5 seconds which generally took 1mins.” People might say, in the long term, the kid who cheated would be less proficient in arithmetic, which turned out to be true. But when you think about it, it seems not the end of the world when most high schooler in US cannot do complicated arithmetic quickly and accurately without a calculator.
  • Dzugaru 1y ago
    I have a feeling this is somehow different. The tool is broad enough, that I don't have to think myself in a wide variety of tasks, not just one. Which hurts my intelligence way more.
  • makeitdouble 1y ago
    To my knowledge, even before HP-48 level calculators came in the classroom nobody cared about arithmetic past middle school. The core of the teaching was proofs and a lot more theory, and that went on into CS for me. I'd compare it to the ability to write and run basic assembly. We did it, and got checked on it, but that was not what we were there for.
    • dehrmann 1y ago
      At the same time, I remember most of high school math barely needing calculators outside chemistry and physics. Look at some of the SAT math questions: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/digital-sat-sample-questions.pdf https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/digital-sat-samp... The questions are all designed to have a tidy, closed-form answer. A calculator is either marginally helpful or outright cheating.
  • ipython 1y ago
    Even today though you’re still taught arithmetic without a calculator. My kids have spelling words even though we have spell check. Why? Because otherwise they’d have no idea if the answer provided to them is “correct”. As the saying goes, garbage in garbage out. You type the wrong numbers into the calculator ? How would you know the answer is also wrong unless you knew “about” what the answer should be?
• Aeolun 1y ago
  They seem surprised about this, but the cheating kids were always there. They just use different (and arguably easier) tools now. Blocking the AI won’t stop them from cheating, it’ll just make them revert to the old way of doing it.
  • PokerFacowaty 1y ago
    They are not the same "cheating kids" though. How easy it is to get it to spit out your homework and how widespread it is encourages more people to give up, think "everyone is doing is, so why shouldn't I, I'm a loser if I work honestly", and do the same.
    • Aeolun 1y ago
      That’s exactly the same way kids in my school used to think about traditional cheating. Doing it well was considered a point of pride (amongst a certain group). I don’t think I ever understood it. It just making going to school a colossal waste of time.
• Waterluvian 1y ago
  I struggled in high school. I went off my ADHD meds in favour of a social life, a choice I don’t regret. But it made classwork and homework absolute torture. The torture mostly sucked but I did help me grow. I’m convinced I would have cheated if I had access to ChatGPT, and that’s pretty upsetting to think about when thinking about today’s students.b I hope that how we educate changes, forces by AI, improving in ways that would have helped people like me. I worry that might mean lessened access for all, if it requires the cost to go up.
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• hamish-b 1y ago
  I've been working hard at this problem over at https://kurnell.ai https://kurnell.ai. Our thesis is that going forward it's unrealistic to ban or detect-and-reprimand AI, therefore we need to meet students where they're at and democratize access to the best AI for all. We have great traction with universities in USA and Australia. The flywheel that we've constructed means that students are being prepared for industry + research in a Post-AI world, and professors can see exactly how students are using AI tooling. Our findings are that knowledge of how students are using AI goes a long way to helping institutions adapt. Keen to chat and share our findings - reach out at hamish(at)kurnell.ai !
• curtisszmania 1y ago
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• CuriouslyC 1y ago
  The future of high school tests is using an AI agent to research and build something amazing in a fixed time window, not knowing what it's going to be ahead of time. We just have to start thinking bigger with education, the trivial bullshit that we used to burden people with has been made obsolete. Education becomes a building workshop with a focus on helping students come to their own answers from first principles using modern tools.
• zyklonix 1y ago
  A high schooler writes about how absurd is a school system based on a fixed one-size-fits-all education and how AI is making this so obvious.
• unsungNovelty 1y ago
  > The technology has also led students to focus on external results at the expense of internal growth. But this has already been the case. We have all been running behind numbers for so long. Nobody gives a damn about actually learning. I started learning after I got my first job. Started focusimg on literature, arts and languages a lot more after I started working. AI only amplifies this to the next level. There are certain aspects like disciplinary and on time scenarios which I can agree with. But the education system has not been about education since for a long time. Sure, premium institutions had something going on. But maybe that is what will be takenover by AI as well?
• AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  There's going to be so much more tests in classrooms. The only thing I'll say that's good is it might lead to less homework, which I always thought was poorly designed and mostly busywork.
• viccis 1y ago
  Are high school teachers too lazy to do essays in class like they always were 20 years ago? Stop fucking using Google Drive or whatever. Start teaching these children like you used to do not so long ago. For FUCK'S sake.
• BrenBarn 1y ago
  A prescient cartoon from 15 years ago: https://archive.rall.com/main.php?g2_itemId=14184&g2_imageViewsIndex=1 https://archive.rall.com/main.php?g2_itemId=14184&g2_imageVi...
• Lerc 1y ago
  So I am going to be critical of how this piece is being presented. I'd like to start that by saying it is well written by an obviously talented person who will do well in life. I'm prefacing my comments with this because I really don't want my comments to be considered disrespectful or antagonistic. I just don't think this can be considered a representative view from 'A High Schooler' I don't think this is necessarily wrong, but over the years I have seen many high achieving senior students writing about or being interviewed about topics where they are less representing the community they are a member of, but the opinions that supports those who give them praise, support, and opportunities. I don't think it should reflect poorly on a student that does that, but I also don't think you can draw significant conclusions from their stated opinions. Most people like this have not yet found their own voice, what you hear is often the voice that they think they are supposed to have. For many, tertiary education is as much about finding that voice as it is studying specific fields Measuring what is best for students is an incredibly complex task, not least because 'best' can mean different things to different people, and often the wellbeing of the student is not considered high enough. There is science here, but given the importance of the field, way less than there should be. Changing education for the better is extremely difficult when the science conflicts with public opinion. There are forces at play that know that their only path to success is through swaying public opinion because the science is against them. The science of education can be laborious, slow, and full of difficult to express nuance. It is also the only sure process by which we can find out what actually works. So by all means follow the argument that it makes, but don't mistake the source as being representative. The author expresses their love for debating and development. I imagine that they would respect the sentiment that the work should stand on what was said, rather than who said it. [as a final thought] It would actually be an interesting research project to find articles like this written on contentious issues over the years and locating the writers to get their opinions on them with the benefit of hindsight.
• RobertEva 1y ago
  Two things can be true: keep phones/AI out during class, and admit they exist at home. A workable pattern: handwritten in-class checks; take-home projects with an artifact trail (sources, drafts, prompts); a 5-minute oral defense. AI becomes something to critique, not a crutch.
• marcus_holmes 1y ago
  An ex-gf of mine spent four years going through university to become an Occupational Therapist. She's severely dyslexic, so the university provided her with all sorts of assistance to get through her degree, from scribes in the exams to extra time for tests. She passed, and became a qualified Occupational Therapist. She landed a job in a local hospital. And on day one, was handed a huge pile of paperwork to complete. No scribes, no assistance, just "this is the job, get on with it". She failed the job, left after 3 months, spent a couple of years rethinking her entire life, and switched to a completely different career with less paperwork. My point is that education has to be aligned with the actual world outside. Everyone uses AI now, for all sorts of tasks. And if they don't now, they will in the next few years. Trying to exclude AI from education is not only pointless, it's doing the kids a disservice: AI is going to be a large part of their future, so it needs to be a large part of their education. If we follow the implied course of TFA we'd reduce AI use in schools and go back to old-skool teaching methods. Then that cohort of kids would get their first job and on day one they'd be handed an AI and told "this is the job, get on with it". Like with my ex-gf, everything they were taught would be useless because the basic foundation is different. I know education is not entirely vocational, but if it moves too far from the world of work that everyone actually spends most of their time in, then it gets too theoretical and academic. AI is part of it, education needs to change.
  • azemetre 1y ago
    Why is the answer to completely upend the education system rather than the original issue of your ex-gf working for a shitty company that couldn’t accommodate her? The ADA became a thing in the US for a reason after all.
  • mkesper 1y ago
    Honing your own skills of logic, critical thinking and perseverance are never useless.
    • quaintdev 1y ago
      This is so important. There are studies that indicate cognitive decline due to use of AI https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artificial-intelligence-use-reprograms-the-brain-leading-to-cognitive-decline/ https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artifi...
• OhioMan2943 1y ago
  The atlantic loves selling ai despair, alongside anti family rhetoric- I genuinely believe they have evil intentions and it is important to stay away from them.
• jmrm 1y ago
  You can avoid this problem easily not letting students using phones or computers in the classroom and making doing more tasks at the classroom than at home. If you're going to say "but in a working environment you use a computer", then teach them how to use text processing and spreadsheets int the computer room, a thing that didn't happen today in most schools btw.
• PokerFacowaty 1y ago
  I'd say oh-but-what-about-calculators-i-am-very-smart comments call for a drinking game, but no one should be doing this, as they'd die
• SunlightEdge 1y ago
  One of the things that doesn't seem to be emphasised enough is that LLMs can be great as Tutors for students. E.g. They could really help students not understanding fully a section of Mathematics and really break down the logic. Teachers can also use them to mark homework. They are a boon as much as they are a bane.
  • detaro 1y ago
    They could, if you wouldn't have to expect them to make hidden mistakes that a learner isn't able to spot. Using an LLM when you are qualified to verify its output is one thing, but a learner often can not do that or only with extreme difficulty, making them unsuitable. Especially with math, most LLMs will happy explain to you a "proof" for something that isn't proven or known false.
• edu 1y ago
  It seems we should go back to low tech (books, handwritten assignments, paper exams...) for all courses except the technology ones (which are still a must, but need to be improved). Of course, they could still AI to help them with homework but people were already copying the homework from their mates. But if they just copy and don't learn, that would be surfaced during the exams.
• zelos 1y ago
  Maybe AGI is impossible not for any technical reasons, but because AI is a self-limiting technology? As AI improves, it destroys the educational system that creates the researchers that develop it.
  • HPsquared 1y ago
    LLMs democratize personal tutoring. AI can massively improve education, if done right.
    • azemetre 1y ago
      There is nothing democratic about a technology being forced upon people. No one voted for this. IME when VC says “democratizing” you can substitute “degrading” for the real meaning.
      • HPsquared 1y ago
        Regular schools are already a forced experience. You're basically imprisoned for 12 years. A range of tutoring services seems like a massive upgrade in freedom.
        • azemetre 1y ago
          No, public schooling is something that lifts people out of poverty. 100 years ago public schooling only want to 6th or 8th grade in most states. Equating government welfare programs to better society with for profit systems is frankly disgusting. One has provided real empowerment and nearly erased illiteracy rates, the only is simply a system used to extract wealth for a few individuals and not society. I do not trust any system that has shown to be a degrading experience to raising literacy or teaching others to critically think for themselves.
    • sandworm101 1y ago
      They are working well now because they live off the pile of human-created online content. Give it a few years. When all the AI has to feed on is the output of other AI bots, they will likely hit a reality wall and halucinate themselves into insanity. Forget new physics. It will probably be hard to get an AI to admit the earth isnt flat.
• azangru 1y ago
  In the novel Tom Brown's School Days [0], published in mid 19-th century and depicting a public school in the first quarter of that century, there is a scene describing how students those days used "vulgus-books": collections of previous years' students' homeworks in Latin that new students copied from for their assignments in Latin composition. There was a boy named Arthur in that story who refused to copy from other students' essays, and worked on the compositions himself. He also tried to convince his friends to abandon that practice of copying, and to write their assignments on their own. This is what this article reminded me of. The student writes how her classmates use help from AI as if she cannot decide for herself to do the work on her own if she cares about learning. She writes as if she is devoid of agency. The Atlantic published a post on reddit about this article, titled "I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education." [1] And yet, it is the other students that the author primarily focuses on. Why does other students' cheating demolish _her_ education? [0] - https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1480/pg1480.txt https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1480/pg1480.txt [1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1n7ooke/im_a_high_schooler_ai_is_demolishing_my_education/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1n7o...
  • komali2 1y ago
    That's an interesting point, but one way I can think is that as AI generated homework is completed by AI, "all natural" student performance may seem abysmal in comparison. The students who use AI to do the "grunt work" like paper writing will have more time to do things like attend office hours, befriend professors, network, get internships, or whatever other useful things they can do with their time. It makes me think of the rampant cheating culture in the PRC. Cheating generally isn't considered immoral, or, it may be, but the attitude is basically "well everyone cheats, so you better do it too or you'll be left behind." University becomes a performance, and all thoughts are turned towards how to present the best in that performance. If you ask someone that buys into this system about the value of, idk, writing a paper so as to learn the material, they'll be very confused. What's the point of learning the material? The only thing that matters is getting the best grade possible. Then you can get the highest paying job possible. That's all that matters. This is of course not universal, the PRC is a country with a gajillion people in it, but this is what I experienced at university there and when I returned to the USA and was the defacto "PRC student tutor" at my university because of my Mandarin and time spent there. I must have been offered money to write essays for people over fifty times. So, I can imagine this happening with AI. What does it matter if you learn the material? You use AI to get a good score and then you use AI to do your job anyway so who cares. AI written emails summarized by AI, replies written by AIs, reports generated by AI, sent, summarized by another AI...
• _Algernon_ 1y ago
  Multiple uses of em-dash. Must be written by AI.
• cauliflower99 1y ago
  The examples used in this student's classes demonstrate how inept the teacher is at designing a classroom promoted for learning rather than performance. If I were a teacher and I send around sheets of paper of exercises, my first directive is "Close all laptops" (or never have them there in the first place) followed by "If I see any use of technology to cheat, you have failed the exam." This is EXACTLY what is was like when I was in school only a few years ago. Similarly for the debate club - why are teams allowed to have any technology in the hall in the first place? Education is supposed to be difficult - that's how we learn!! Teachers seem to pander more and more to students who complain that "This is too difficult". As if easy learning was ever a thing!