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> Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves. IMO getting too worried about this sort

> Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves. IMO getting too worried about this sort of homework “cheating” feels like the wrong way of looking at it. Although, there are lots of processes that accept and reinforce this wrong viewpoint. For k-12, getting the parent and the student to sit down outside of school and “cheat” by having the parent teach the kid is… victory! You’ve reinforced the idea that learning can happen outside schools. For college, having students get together and “cheat” by doing their homework together is… victory! You’ve gotten the students to network with their peers. That’s… like, the main value proposition of a university, to some. The problem is when undue grade weight is put on these processes. It is a hard balance to strike, because you need to offer enough grade to incentivize the stuff, but not enough that it feels unfair to those who go individually. As far as LLMs go, it offers an alternative to learning to collaborate with other humans. That’s bad, but the fix should be to figure out how to get the students to get back to collaborating with humans.

pavel_lishin 1y ago
> For k-12, getting the parent and the student to sit down outside of school and “cheat” by having the parent teach the kid is… victory! You’ve reinforced the idea that learning can happen outside schools. I don't think they were trying to prevent parents from working with children; I think they were trying to prevent parents doing the homework for children, or the kids farming it out to someone else online, or getting someone else to do it for them, period. Same with college; it wasn't exactly networking when someone I knew paid someone to do their homework for them.
- underlipton 1y ago
  >Same with college; it wasn't exactly networking when someone I knew paid someone to do their homework for them. Right, that's delegating.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    I certainly hope that doctors, civil engineers & researchers aren't doing too much delegating in college.
    - warkdarrior 1y ago
      They'll soon be replaced by chatbots, for better or for worse.
      - sethammons 1y ago
        "It says here, your shit's fucked up." --Doctor reading what the computer says in Idiocracy
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      Doctors are already running to ChatGPT. I went to an urgent care the other day and the PA regurgitated what the LLM told me in the waiting room.
      - pavel_lishin 1y ago
        Does that mean the PA also read the output of ChatGPT? Or that the same diagnosis was made by both?
Aurornis 1y ago
> For college, having students get together and “cheat” by doing their homework together is… victory! You’ve gotten the students to network with their peers. That’s… like, the main value proposition of a university, to some. This is a far too charitable interpretation of the problem. Students who cheat in these circumstances aren’t working together with their peers or LLMs to understand the subject matter. They’re using the LLM to bypass the learning part completely. Homework problem gets pasted into ChatGPT. Answer is copied and pasted out. This is analogous to a student who copies a peer’s homework answers without trying to understand them. This isn’t “learning to collaborate” or networking. It’s cheating. In practice, it catches up to students at test time. This is the primary problem for my friend who teaches a couple classes at a local community college: Students will turn in LLM work for the assignments and then be completely blindsided when they have to come in and take a test, as if they’ve never seen the material before. One time he assigned a short essay on a topic they discussed with a generic name. A large number of the submissions were about a completely unrelated thing that shared the generic name. It would not be possible for anyone to accidentally make this mistake if they were actually parsing the LLM output before turning it in. They just see it as an easy button to press to pass the course, until it catches up with them later and they’re too far behind to catch up to people who have been learning as they go.

pavel_lishin 1y ago

> For k-12, getting the parent and the student to sit down outside of school and “cheat” by having the parent teach the kid is… victory! You’ve reinforced the idea that learning can happen outside schools. I don't think they were trying to prevent parents from working with children; I think they were trying to prevent parents doing the homework for children, or the kids farming it out to someone else online, or getting someone else to do it for them, period. Same with college; it wasn't exactly networking when someone I knew paid someone to do their homework for them.

underlipton 1y ago
>Same with college; it wasn't exactly networking when someone I knew paid someone to do their homework for them. Right, that's delegating.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  I certainly hope that doctors, civil engineers & researchers aren't doing too much delegating in college.
  - warkdarrior 1y ago
    They'll soon be replaced by chatbots, for better or for worse.
    - sethammons 1y ago
      "It says here, your shit's fucked up." --Doctor reading what the computer says in Idiocracy
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    Doctors are already running to ChatGPT. I went to an urgent care the other day and the PA regurgitated what the LLM told me in the waiting room.
    - pavel_lishin 1y ago
      Does that mean the PA also read the output of ChatGPT? Or that the same diagnosis was made by both?

Aurornis 1y ago

> For college, having students get together and “cheat” by doing their homework together is… victory! You’ve gotten the students to network with their peers. That’s… like, the main value proposition of a university, to some. This is a far too charitable interpretation of the problem. Students who cheat in these circumstances aren’t working together with their peers or LLMs to understand the subject matter. They’re using the LLM to bypass the learning part completely. Homework problem gets pasted into ChatGPT. Answer is copied and pasted out. This is analogous to a student who copies a peer’s homework answers without trying to understand them. This isn’t “learning to collaborate” or networking. It’s cheating. In practice, it catches up to students at test time. This is the primary problem for my friend who teaches a couple classes at a local community college: Students will turn in LLM work for the assignments and then be completely blindsided when they have to come in and take a test, as if they’ve never seen the material before. One time he assigned a short essay on a topic they discussed with a generic name. A large number of the submissions were about a completely unrelated thing that shared the generic name. It would not be possible for anyone to accidentally make this mistake if they were actually parsing the LLM output before turning it in. They just see it as an easy button to press to pass the course, until it catches up with them later and they’re too far behind to catch up to people who have been learning as they go.