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Students fight back over course taught by AI
- jjgreen 10mo agoProphetic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991581
- morkalork 10mo ago"why can't college kids do math?"
- cranberryturkey 10mo agoCheckout summaryforge
- danishSuri1994 10mo agoAI can help with content generation or scaffolding, but teaching is still a bidirectional feedback process. When the model can’t adapt to misunderstanding or context, students immediately feel the gap. It’s a UX failure more than a “should AI be allowed” issue
- onetokeoverthe 10mo ago[dead]
- gdulli 10mo agoWe don't talk enough about AI as a vehicle for what's essentially austerity.
- emchammer 10mo agoSkimpflation is the best term I’ve heard in a long time for hiring one person when three will do.
- j45 10mo agoTeaching isn't bi directional. Understanding before application are two different steps. The issues you're outlining can be solved by arranging technology to go through a process to satisfy the above. Still, instruction, and instructors aren't really needing to be replaced, it's the silent elephant in the room that is rarely talked about that hopefully considers evolving.
- IAmBroom 10mo ago> Teaching isn't bi directional. ... said no decent teacher, ever. The flows aren't symmetrical, but they are bidirectional.
- Der_Einzige 10mo ago[flagged]
- beej71 10mo ago>"Those who can’t do… teach" I worked two decades in industry. Worked at megacorps, in games, at startups, and co-founded a successful company. I was pretty good at what I did. Not the best, but pretty good. And then I got humbled by trying to teach. It's a completely different skill. It's the hardest, most rewarding job I've ever had. So when I hear this line, I think, "Try it. Try to be a good teacher and see how well you do." Because I thought I'd be a good teacher, too... until I tried it. 7 years in and I'm still working my ass off trying to improve, and I now have enough skill to know that I have a long way to go.
- nerdjon 10mo agoAgreed, if teaching really was not bi-directional than there is zero reason for there to actually be a teacher in the first place when it could just be a book. There are some bad teachers where it is not bidirectional for sure. But to claim it isn't (or at least is not supposed to be)... is wild
- j45 10mo agoTeaching will get to evolve when the subject matter is changing faster than the delivery mechanisms. Where the subject matter doesn't change as quickly.. might be in for some trouble. This article is kind of strange. I would title it "Digitally and AI illiterate institution attempts to deliver course that looked impressive and amazing to them." Students do have standards and students baseline digital literacy passed by institutions a long, long time ago. I know, let's talk about MooCs.
- Yizahi 10mo agoContent often already exists and depending on the course not much effort is needed to adapt it to next year. Feedback and teaching is what hard and time consuming. Thus we will see the hard part being replaced first. Grading and exams are hard? Let's automate it. Lecturing is hard? Let's narrate text by a program. Etc. Meanwhile laying off "unneeded" teachers an getting hooked on the enterprise LLM subs. After these borderline bankrupt LLM corpos will raise prices several times universities will be paying even more while struggling with limited staff. This will translate into admin pressure on the teachers to automate more and more and more.
- zulban 10mo agoIt has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. Many professors have no passion or training in teaching, they just want to do research. Or they have no time or pay to prepare a course. So of course they use AI slop wherever they can. Even if they record their lectures, that's almost never better than the best free ones out there. Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building. Bad lectures delivered by rushed or apathetic professors is such a death march. Learning theatre.
- tekne 10mo agoWhen I started undergrad, my father told me that university was not for learning; that was what the Internet was for, and since I was in tech; it wasn't quite for proving myself either: that was internships and portfolio. It was, rather, for the people. And a place to grow up. That matters too.
- DerC4ptain 10mo agoSlides were generated via gamma obviously
- morkalork 10mo agoTangent: There's a short story I vaguely remember from when I was young about a kid being raised in a bunker after a nuclear war and the big twist was that all his friends he went to school with (virtually on the TV screen) were just AIs to keep him company. I could never find it again though, even when interrogating google or chatgpt I couldn't find it. Anyone else know of this story?
- HiroProtagonist 10mo agoThe story you’re recalling is “Just Deserts,” a short story by M. T. Anderson. It appears in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (2011), an anthology edited by Chris Van Allsburg where various authors wrote tales to match Van Allsburg’s mysterious illustrations. In “Just Deserts,” a lone child is raised in a simulated town after an apocalyptic event (implied nuclear war). He attends “school” and interacts with other children via screens, only to discover – in a scene involving a hollow pumpkin – that his parents and classmates are all artificial constructs created to keep him company. This twist reveals he is the last real child on Earth. The story was first published in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).
- jfletch321 10mo agoThis isn't true. You can read Just Deserts here https://readfrom.net/chris-van-allsburg/page,10,143450-the_chronicles_of_harris_burdick.html https://readfrom.net/chris-van-allsburg/page,10,143450-the_c... and it isn't at all like your AI response is saying.
- morkalork 10mo agoIt is an AI response... I remember chatgpt telling me the same thing. Except I'm remembering this from the late 90s.
- zkmon 10mo agoOutrageous at the least. These universities already became so commercial that they show photos of some Victorian era buildings as their campus, but most students never set foot in those buildings, as all classrooms are held in rented building outside of campus, and the main buildings are kept only as ornamental pieces. Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.
- j45 10mo agoWhich universities aren't commercial and about cashflow?
- _yvnd 10mo agoAll universities outside of the US Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!
- HeinzStuckeIt 10mo agoYour post is very naive. In the UK, some universities are so dependent now on foreign students paying high fees to break even, that it has been widely reported in the media. And in a few EU countries, polytechnics have been upgraded to university status (at least in their English-language names) in order to attract fee-paying students from the developing world. Finnish polytechnics, for example, run whole marketing campaigns in the Indian Subcontinent in order to get people to come and pay those sweet, sweet foreign-student fees.
- ecshafer 10mo agoAre Polytechnics not considered universities in Europe? RPI (Rensalear Polytechnic Institute) or CalPoly (California Polytechnic Institute) for example in the US are just normal universities, usually with more of a technical, engineering focused. But they are essentially the same "level" as a university.
- sureglymop 10mo agoThe student confronting the teacher was great! Well done.
- marstall 10mo agoI just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
- j45 10mo agoThis type of use while asking for annotations for all facts can be insightful to have the start of an informed conversation with a professional.
- marstall 10mo agoI am using it mostly to try to understand and get context about what the professionals tell me, the treatments they are offering, etc.
- locallost 10mo agoI've had this experience as well, but I also noticed I am much less blown away when the information is put to the test. So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.
- marstall 10mo agoWhat kind of area were you talking to it about?
- nancyminusone 10mo agoThere's no problem with that. It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?
- 10mo ago
- pessimizer 10mo agoWell the truth has finally been openly accepted by the universities themselves. They sell fancy pieces of paper with your name on them in nice calligraphy, not knowledge. I can't imagine having so little respect for my own reputation that as a professor I'd throw out unreviewed AI slop as my own intellectual work, but I bet nobody is getting fired for it so that's just a sign of my own stupidity. A professor with no pride, working for a university with no pride, giving students with no pride certifications that they can use to get ahead in an economy with no pride. I'm bullish on AI in education, because of the possibility of creating an individual student model that the machine can use to constantly target weaknesses in understanding. But that hasn't been invented yet. What you would get now is a teacher that hallucinates, simply lies to bridge gaps, forgets what it was supposed to be talking about, and constantly fabricates references.
- rhetocj23 10mo ago[dead]
- latexr 10mo agohttp://archive.today/ipTpO http://archive.today/ipTpO
- gonzo41 10mo agoIn a case of the worst person you know makes a great point, Jordan Peterson was remarking a few years back about how Youtube and MOOC's were really the new universities of the modern age. If you want knowledge it's there for the taking. The legacy institutions really are just a stamp / sorting hat for young people these days. For the money people spend these days on education, you'd think there'd be grounds for refunds based on false advertising of the product.
- j45 10mo agoMooCs are just glorified long videos of classrooms from 20 years ago. I wouldn't trust a Jordan Peterson type to have impartial position on a sudden EdTech psychosis when: - he appears to have a relatively new online academy - selling courses - in a way that is relatively new to him - don't seem welcome to teach in academic institutions - uses psychology on their audience for the above If MooCs weren't a thing, and courses on LaserDisc were, I think we'd know what we'd be hearing about a LaserDisc Academy by mail service.
- sureglymop 10mo agoI think that's not true. What I gain from university are three things: 1. Experts who compile/write the theoretical materials necessary (usually long form text, scripts). 2. The necessary pressure to actually read and understand these in order to pass the exams. 3. Social connections and the ability to work on interesting projects supervised by lecturers with experience and connections (clout if you will). It's not that much deeper. The actual classroom is a nice "sugar" but that's not where the real learning and understanding happens in my experience. Videos are okay in order to learn but imo text is always much better. Sure you could compile this all yourself but the university provides a good path and everything around it for you to succeed.
- IAmBroom 10mo agoExactly. A degree is not merely a proof that you've been exposed to, and temporarily retained, a certain set of knowledge, but proof you can work towards longterm (4yr) and short-term (quiz on Friday, homework tomorrow) goals successfully. College is 100x less forgiving of missing deadlines than the real world of jobs, for instance - but then, in college the only serious source of delays is yourself and your choices. It's actually quite a good litmus test for the ability to apply oneself towards externally imposed goals - which is most of what a job entails.
- ModernMech 10mo agoThis is the culmination of decades of cuts to education. I mean, what else was going to be the end point of having teachers buy supplies for their own kids, demonizing professors, demonizing higher education and the idea of education generally, not training enough teachers, and underpaying the teachers you already have. In America we have to deal with school shootings, the latest religious group mandating the 10 commandments be put up or rainbows be taken down, irate parents mad that you failed their kid who didn't do work all semester and has severe behavioral problems no one is allowed to discipline. And now of course with AI, the students aren't doing their work, and if you call them out on it they call their parents, they sue, you get deposed and have to admit you can't 100% prove it's AI... so why bother? Who would ever want to grow up to be a teacher anymore? So yeah, cut education, end up with AI students submitting AI papers to AI teachers. We have arrived. The only question now is... what are we going to do about it?
- thmsths 10mo agoI think you know the answer to your question: nothing until it becomes a major issue. This is like global warming, it's a slow moving catastrophe, you can see it coming from a mile away but it's expensive to fix so it's hard to convince people to do something about it and there is just enough ambiguity that the detractors can effectively block your efforts.
- marknutter 10mo agoSpending on education has increased over the last couple decades, not decreased. Outcomes, however, have gotten worse. You're entire premise is flawed.
- ModernMech 10mo agoThis is America, we have perfected the art of spending more to get less. That doesn't mean cuts to education aren't happening. See also: the entire healthcare system. I specifically mentioned: teachers paying for supplies out of their own pockets, underpaying teachers, not investing in safe teaching environments, increased litigation, demonizing the profession, increased political targeting, and lack of teacher agency in disciplining students. Fact is when I look at my district, over the last decade we've had to do more with less, and I don't know a single teacher who can say the opposite. So it is true we are spending more overall, it's not true we aren't cutting education.
- kittikitti 10mo agoUnpopular opinion, but I dislike how universities embraced vocational programs. These students were not there for academics, they were there for job and career training. The irony is that they complain about the high costs of tuition when they're just there to get more money. These professors have much better things to work on. I apologize if my opinion upsets you.
- j45 10mo agoGenerally, it's easy to be unpopular with a healthy income rolling in. Most students go to school to improve their access to opportunity to uplift their current and future descendants. Yes, often economic uplifting is a part of that.
- chemotaxis 10mo agoUh, now is this different from "normal" university education? I'd wager that 95%+ of people who go to college do it because they were told they have to for access to better job opportunities, not because they want to stay in the academia to publish books and do research for life. I get it that some professors don't like teaching and just want to do research, but teaching is what pays their bills, and if they can't be bothered to do their job well...
- josefritzishere 10mo agoWhat peice of trash thought that was an appropriate thing to do?
- IAmBroom 10mo agoThe real question. Some human decision-maker is responsible.
- josefritzishere 10mo agoWere I a student I'd be coordinating a class-action lawsuit. The impropriety and lack of responsibility is staggering.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- palmotea 10mo ago> But after a term of AI-generated slides being read, at times, by an AI voiceover, James said he had lost faith in the programme and the people running it, worrying he had “used up two years” of his life on a course that had been done “in the cheapest way possible”. This is the future guys, get used to it. The upside is Sam Altman will get really, really rich.
- wartywhoa23 10mo agoBut muh vibe coding :/ I'm now able to create a fucking shit nobody will ever care about in no time!
- karmakurtisaani 10mo agoBut the flip side is that the tuition will at least go down! ...right?
- jjmarr 10mo agoAI will continue to stratify education. The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models. Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
- throwawaysleep 10mo agoI kind of wonder whether we are past the point where waiting to be trained is feasible.
- sirsau 10mo agoWhat do you mean by that?
- ToValueFunfetti 10mo agoThis counts on there being more juice to squeeze out of learning than I think actually exists. The people currently spending $1000s/month on real tutors are probably learning at ~90% of their potential. An idealized AI might push that to 100%, but the people who can't afford tutors or college are going to see greater benefit from even the cheapest models. That scenario results in decreasing stratification.
- palmotea 10mo ago> AI will continue to stratify education. > The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models. > Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support. The better-off children whose parents are "spend[ing] $1000s/month" will get real teachers who are people, not fancier AIs. I mean look at food: The lower classes are eating industrially-processed McDonald's food, the upper classes are not eating more expensive but still industrially-processed stuff from McDonald's, they're eating organic, locally grown stuff from the farmer's market (which used to be the standard for food for everyone).
- tjpnz 10mo agoIf that wasn't made clear prior to enrolment I would be surprised if it wasn't fraud.
- nijave 10mo agoThe shrinkflation of higher ed?
- RA_Fisher 10mo agoWill make it a lot cheaper and more accessible.
- Herring 10mo agoThat's the Baumol effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect 1) Two-Sector Economy: In Baumol and Bowen's observations, the economy is divided into two parts: - A Progressive Sector: Productivity grows rapidly due to technology and automation (e.g., manufacturing, data processing). - A Stagnant Sector: Productivity grows slowly, if at all, because the service is labor-intensive (e.g., a string quartet performance, a haircut, K-12 teaching). 2) Wage Linkage: Both sectors compete for labor from the same pool of workers. As productivity gains allow wages to rise in the progressive sector, the stagnant sector must also increase its wages to attract and retain employees. 3) Divergent Cost Impact: - In the progressive sector, the higher wages are offset by the gains in productivity. The labor cost per unit of output can remain stable or even decrease. - In the stagnant sector, there are no corresponding productivity gains to offset the higher wages. The labor cost per unit of service must therefore increase. 4) Resulting Price Trend: The prices for services in the stagnant sector (e.g., concert tickets, college tuition, healthcare) must therefore rise and faster than the prices for goods from the progressive sector (e.g., electronics, cars). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#/media/File:Price_changes_in_US_1998%E2%80%932018.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#/media/File:Pric... 5) A lot of European countries fund these expensive services through general taxation rather than direct user fees. In the US that's not going to fly, so cost pressure incentivizes orgs to cut corners and reduce quality and automate as much as possible.
- Thorrez 10mo agoIn this specific case the university was in the UK.
- calibas 10mo agoSoon we'll have a system where students use AI for homework and teachers use AI to grade it. I'm sure it's already happening.
- beej71 10mo agoI'm lucky to teach in a school with relatively small classes (~25) and I can manually grade and review everything. (The autograde scripts I wrote in bash help.) But yes, it's happening. If I had 300 students, I couldn't do this. I'd need a bunch of TAs or some AI. Or just pure autograding, which I always hated since the person who did nothing gets the same F as the person who left out a semicolon. And students are definitely using AI, evidenced by their stratospheric code improvements in the last 18 months.
- 4b11b4 10mo agoIt is. It's called magicschool, and districts have already signed contracts
- simianwords 10mo agoi have seen this joke beaten to death so many times in so many forms
- beej71 10mo agoSpeaking as an instructor, everyone's goal should be to be better than the LLM. This includes teachers. And, yes, that requires work, but that's what we're getting paid for, and it's not particularly difficult to best an LLM in any field. If you can't do it better than an LLM, you have no more value than one to an employer. In short, it's shameful to provide a paid primarily-LLM-based product. People can just make those themselves with minimal effort and zero cost.
- recursivecaveat 10mo agoIt is crazy to me the amount of people who are auto-completing through their education. "I don't need to learn how to code, the ai will do it for me" etc. If the only value you provide is pressing [ok] on content you don't understand, why do you think someone won't replace you with a bot? To me it's like going to pilot's school and saying you'll just have your copilot fly the plane for you.
- squishington 10mo agoI was drawn to engineering by the joy of learning and problem solving. The pain of puzzling over a difficult problem, then the ecstatic release when you figure it out and get it working. I don't understand why someone would want to give that up. It gives meaning to the work.
- beej71 10mo agoPretty much all the experienced devs I know are bored with AI at work. Most of them just turn it off because it's in the way. I know for some jobs it's a great accelerator, but those jobs tend to be the ones that don't involve a lot of heavy duty problem solving, it seems.
- beej71 10mo agoI tell the students up front that AI is capable of solving all the problems we give them as undergrads. But I elaborate and tell them that it's because all the problems we give them are easy for software developers with any experience, regardless of how difficult the students find them to be. They're dumbbells designed to help you build muscle. Do you take your robot to the gym to lift the weights for you? Eventually you're going to get to a job interview and they're going to see that you don't have any muscles. And then you'll be 80 grand in debt with no job prospects. You might as well just quit now and buy a Corvette. I like to think that it has some impact, and yet I know they still use AI.
- Balgair 10mo agoSo one question is who owns the IP then? I know at the UCs, anything you do on campus is the UCs copyright. There's even little brass plaques they put in the ground when you walk on campus delineating that line. But when these PIs are sending all the student's data up to OpenAI (presumably via the free version), then OpenAI has that data and it's copyrights. Likely, yet another essay on the causes of the French Revolution is not ever going to be cared about. But there is a chance that something a student does in an upper division class may be worth something.