23 ms·

Implications of AI to schools

• ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago
  In other words, learn to use the tool BUT keep your critical thinking. Same with all new technologies. I'm not minimizing Karpathy in any way, but this is obviously the right way to do this.
• trauco 11mo ago
  This is the correct take. To contrast the Terance Tao piece from earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972), AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. You can't, however, become a Terence Tao by asking AI to solve your homework. So, in learning environments we might not have an option but to open the floodgates to AI use, but abandon most testing techniques that are not, more or less, pen and paper, in-person. Use AI as much as you want, but know that as a student you'll be answering tests armed only with your brain. I do pity English teachers that have relied on essays to grade proficiency for hundreds of years. STEM fields has an easier way through this.
  • wffurr 11mo ago
    Yesterday's Doonesbury was on point here: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23 https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23 Andrej and Garry Trudeau are in agreement that "blue book exams" (I.e. the teacher gives you a blank exam booklet, traditionally blue) to fill out in person for the test, after confiscating devices, is the only way to assess students anymore. My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.
    • phantasmish 11mo ago
      Blue book was the norm for exams in my social science and humanities classes way after every assignment was typed on a computer (and probably a laptop, by that time) with Internet access. I guess high schools and junior highs will have to adopt something similar, too. Better condition those wrists and fingers, kids :-)
      • eitally 11mo ago
        I'm oldish, but when I was in college in the late 90s we typed a huge volume of homework (I was a history & religious studies double major as an undergrad), but the vast majority of our exams were blue books. There were exceptions where the primary deliverable for the semester was a lengthy research paper, but lots and lots of blue books.
    • ecshafer 11mo ago
      New York State recently banned phones state wide in schools.
    • nradov 11mo ago
      Oh how I hated those as a student. Handwriting has always been a slow and uncomfortable process for me. Yes, I tried different techniques of printing and cursive as well as better pens. Nothing helped. Typing on a keyboard is just so much faster and more fluent. It's a shame that some students will again be limited by how fast they can get their thoughts down on a piece of paper. This is such an artificial limitation and totally irrelevant to real world work now.
      • wffurr 11mo ago
        Maybe this is a niche for those low distraction writing tools that pop up from time to time. Or a school managed Chromebook that’s locked to the exam page.
      • o11c 11mo ago
        Obviously the solution is to bring back manual typewriters.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 11mo ago
    It is, but it does not matter, because: 1. Corporate interests want to sell product 2. Administrators want a product they can use 3. Compliance people want a checkbox they can check 4. Teachers want to be ablet to continue what they have been doing thus far within the existing ecosystem 5. Parents either don't know, don't care, or do, but are unable to provide a viable alternative or, can and do provide it We have had this conversation ( although without AI component ) before. None of it is really secret. The question is really what is the actual goal. Right now, in US, education is mostly in name only -- unless you are involved ( which already means you are taking steps to correct it ) or are in the right zip code ( which is not a guarantee, but it makes your kids odds better ).
  • muldvarp 11mo ago
    > AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. This assumes we even need more Terence Taos by the time these kids are old enough. AI has gone from being completely useless to solving challening math problems in less than 5 years. That trajectory doesn't give me much hope that education will matter at all in a few years.
• ubj 11mo ago
  One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment. Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself? My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. It's a dilemma that an increasing number of honest students will face, unfortunately.
  • vondur 11mo ago
    I agree. Most campuses use a product called Turnitin, which was originally designed to check for plagiarism. Now they claim it can detect AI-generated content with about 80% accuracy, but I don’t think anyone here believes that.
    • phh 11mo ago
      80% is catastrophic though. In a classroom of 30 all honest pupils, 6 will get a 0 mark because the software says its AI?
      • v9v 11mo ago
        I suppose 80% means you don't give them a 0 mark because the software says it's AI, you only do so if you have other evidence reinforcing the possibility.
        • respondo2134 11mo ago
          no, you multiply their result by .8 to account for the "uncertainty"! /s
      • yoavm 11mo ago
        The promise (not saying that it works) is probably that 20% of people who cheated will not get caught. Not that 20% of the work marked as AI is actually written by humans.
• renewiltord 11mo ago
  This couldn’t have happened at a better time. When I was young my parents found a schooling system that had minimal homework so I could play around and live my life. I’ve moved to a country with a lot less flexibility. Now when my kids will soon be going to school, compulsory homework will be obsolete. Zero homework grades will be ideal. Looking forward to this.
  • danielbln 11mo ago
    If AI gets us reliably to a flipped classroom (=research at home, work through work during class) then I'm here for it. Homework in the traditional sense is an anti pattern.
    • mavhc 11mo ago
      Agreed, the Gutenberg method is preferred: 1. Assume printing press exists 2. Now there's no need for a teacher to stand up and deliver information by talking to a class for 60 mins 3. Therefore students can read at home (or watch prepared videos) and test their learning in class where there's experts to support them 4. Given we only need 1 copy of the book/video/interactive demo, we can spend wayyyyy more money making it the best it can possibly be What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has barely changed
      • vkou 11mo ago
        > What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has barely changed From my extensive experience of four years of undergrad, the problem in your plan is "3. Therefore students can read at home " - half the class won't do the reading, and the half that did won't get what it means until they go to lecture[1]. [1] If the lecturer is any good at all. If he spends most of his time ranting about his ex-wife...
  • speff 11mo ago
    Most of what I learned in college was only because I did homework and struggled to figure it out myself. Classroom time was essentially just a heads up to what I'll actually be learning myself later. Granted, this was much less the case in grade school - but if students are going to see homework for the first time in college, I can see problems coming up. If you got rid of homework throughout all of the "standard" education path (grade school + undergrad), I would bet a lot of money that I'd be much dumber for it.
• ecshafer 11mo ago
  In my CS undergrad I had Doug Lea as a professor, really fantastic professor (best teacher I have ever had, bar none). He had a really novel way to handle homework hand ins, you had to demo the project. So you got him to sit down with you, you ran the code, he would ask you to put some inputs in (that were highly likely to be edge cases to break it). Once that was sufficient, he would ask you how you did different things, and to walk him through your code. Then when you were done he told you to email the code to him, and he would grade it. I am not sure how much of this was an anti-cheating device, but it required that you knew the code you wrote and why you did it for the project. I think that AI has the possibility of weakening some aspects of education but I agree with Karpathy here. In class work, in person defenses of work, verbal tests. These were corner stones of education for thousands of years and have been cut out over the last 50 years or so outside of a few niche cases (Thesis defense) and it might be a good thing that these come back.
  • SirMaster 11mo ago
    So we are screwed once we get brain-computer interfaces?
  • mercacona 11mo ago
    Yep, it's easy to shortcut AI plagiarism, but you need time. In most of the universities around the world (online universities especially), the number of students is way too big, while professors get more and more pressure on publishing and bureaucracy.
    • ecshafer 11mo ago
      I did my masters in GaTech OMSCS (Chatgpt came out at the very end of my last semester). Tests were done with cameras on and it was recorded and then they were watched I think by TAs. Homework was done with automated checking and a plagiarism checker. Do you need to have in person proctoring via test centers or libraries? Video chats with professors? I am not sure. Projects are importants, but maybe they need to become a minority of grades and more being based on theory to circumvent AI?
• charcircuit 11mo ago
  This doesn't adress the point that AI can replace going to school. AI can be your perfect personal tutor to help you learn thing 1:1. Needing to have a teacher and prove to them that you know what they teached will become a legacy concept. That we have an issue of AI cheating at school is in my eyes a temporary issue.
  • alariccole 11mo ago
    ChatGPT just told me to put the turkey in my toaster oven legs facing the door, and you think it can replace school. Unless there is a massive architectural change that can be provably verified by third parties, this can never be. I’d hate for my unschooled surgeon to check an llm while I’m under.
    • CamperBob2 11mo ago
      Just curious, not being a turkey SME, what's the downside to positioning the turkey that way?
      • patrickmay 11mo ago
        Most turkeys of my acquaintance would not fit into a toaster oven without some percussive assistance.
        • CamperBob2 11mo ago
          I see, I overlooked the 'toaster' part. That's a good world model benchmark question for models and a good reading comprehension question for humans. :-P GPT 5.1 Pro made the same mistake ("Face the legs away from the door.") Claude Sonnet 4.5 agreed but added "Note: Most toaster ovens max out around 10-12 pounds for a whole turkey." Gemini 3 acknowledged that toaster ovens are usually very compact and that the legs shouldn't be positioned where they will touch the glass door. When challenged, it hand-waved something to the effect of "Well, some toaster ovens are large countertop convection units that can hold up to a 12-pound turkey." When asked for a brand and model number of such an oven, it backtracked and admitted that no toaster oven would be large enough. Changing the prompt to explicitly specify a 12-pound turkey yielded good answers ("A 12-pound turkey won't fit in a toaster oven - most max out at 4-6 pounds for poultry. Attempting this would be a fire hazard and result in dangerously uneven cooking," from Sonnet.) So, progress, but not enough.
• qsort 11mo ago
  It's a fair question, but there's maybe a bit of US defaultism baked in? If I look back at my exams in school they were mostly closed-book written + oral examination, nothing would really need to change. A much bigger question is what to teach assuming we get models much more powerful than those we have today. I'm still confident there's an irreducible hard core in most subjects that's well worth knowing/training, but it might take some soul searching.
• mark242 11mo ago
  "You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI." That is just such a wildly cynical point of view, and it is incredibly depressing. There is a whole huge cohort of kids out there who genuinely want to learn and want to do the work, and feel like using AI is cheating. These are the kids who, ironically, AI will help the most, because they're the ones who will understand the fundamentals being taught in K-12. I would hope that any "solution" to the growing use of AI-as-a-crutch can take this cohort of kids into consideration, so their development isn't held back just to stop the less-ethical student from, well, being less ethical.
  • tgv 11mo ago
    > There is a whole huge cohort of kids out there Well, it seems the vast majority doesn't care about cheating, and is using AI for everything. And this is from primary school to university. It's not just that AI makes it simpler, so many pupils cannot concentrate anymore. Tiktok and others have fried their mind. So AI is a quick way out for them. Back to their addiction.
    • drivebyhooting 11mo ago
      Addiction created by you and me, laboring for Zuck’s profit. There’s a reason this stuff is banned in China. Their pupils suffer no such opiate.
    • ethmarks 11mo ago
      As someone who had a college English assignment due literally just yesterday, I think that "the vast majority" is an overstatement. There are absolutely students in my class who cheat with AI (one of them confessed to it and got a metaphorical slap on the wrist with a 15 point deduction and the opportunity to redo the assignments, which doesn't seem fair but whatever), but the majority of my classmates were actively discussing and working on their essays in class. Whatever solution we implement in response to AI, it must avoid hurting the students who genuinely want to learn and do honest work. Treating AI detection tools as infallible oracles is a terrible idea because of the staggering number of false reports. The solution many people have proposed in this thread, short one-on-one sessions with the instructor, seems like a great way to check if students can engage with and defend the work they turned in.
• KerryJones 11mo ago
  It seems like a good path forward is to somewhat try to replicate the idea of "once you can do it yourself, feel free to use it going forward" (knowing how various calculator operations work before you let it do it for you). I'm curious if we instead gave students an AI tool, but one that would intentionally throw in wrong things that the student had to catch. Instead of the student using LLMs, they would have one paid for by the school. This is more brainstorming then a well thought-out idea, but I generally think "opposing AI" is doomed to fail. If we follow a montessori approach, kids are naturally inclined to want to learn thing, if students are trying to lie/cheat, we've already failed them by turning off their natural curiosity for something else.
  • jay_kyburz 11mo ago
    I agree, I think schools and universities need to adapt, just like calculators, these things aren't going away. Let students leverage AI as tools and come out of Uni more capable than we did. AI _do_ currently throw in an occasional wrong thing. Sometimes a lot. A students job needs to be verifying and fact checking the information the AI is telling them. The student's job becomes asking the right questions and verifying the results.
• sharkjacobs 11mo ago
  > The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. Learning how to prepare for in-class tests and writing exercises is a very particular skillset which I haven't really exercised a lot since I graduated. Never mind teaching the humanities, for which I think this is a genuine crisis, in class programming exams are basically the same thing as leetcode job interviews, and we all know what a bad proxy those are for "real" development work.
  • iterateoften 11mo ago
    I use it every day. Preparing for a test requires understanding what the instructor wants. concentrate on the wrong thing get marked down. Same applies to working in a corporation. You need to understand what management wants. It’s a core requirement.
  • yannyu 11mo ago
    > in class programming exams are basically the same thing as leetcode job interviews, and we all know what a bad proxy those are for "real" development work. Confusing university learning for "real industry work" is a mistake and we've known it's a mistake for a while. We can have classes which teach what life in industry is like, but assuming that the role of university is to teach people how to fit directly into industry is mistaking the purpose of university and K-12 education as a whole. Writing long-form prose and essays isn't something I've done in a long time, but I wouldn't say it was wasted effort. Long-form prose forces you to do things that you don't always do when writing emails and powerpoints, and I rely on those skills every day.
    • crooked-v 11mo ago
      There's no mistake there for all the students looking at job listings that treat having a college degree as a hard prerequisite for even being employable.
• mercacona 11mo ago
  I’ve been following this approach since last school year. I focus on in-class work and home-time is for reading and memorization. My classmates still think classrooms are for lecturing, but it's coming. The paper-and-pen era is back to school!
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• Kelvinidan 11mo ago
  I recently wrote on something similar. I think the way we design evaluation methods for students needs to mirror the design of security systems. https://kelvinpaschal.com/blog/educators-hackers/ https://kelvinpaschal.com/blog/educators-hackers/
• TheAceOfHearts 11mo ago
  I think legacy schooling just needs to be reworked. Kids should be doing way more projects that demonstrate the integration of knowledge and skills, rather than focusing so much energy on testing and memorization. There's probably a small core of things that really must be fully integrated and memorized, but for everything else you should just give kids harder projects which they're expected to solve by leveraging all the tools at their disposal. Focus on teaching kids how to become high-agency beings with good epistemics and a strong math core. Give them experiments and tools to play around and actually understand how things work. Bring back real chemistry labs and let kids blow stuff up. The key issue with schools is that they crush your soul and turn you into a low-agency consumer of information within a strict hierarchy of mind-numbing rules, rather than helping you develop your curiosity hunter muscles to go out and explore. In an ideal world, we would have curated gardens of knowledge and information which the kids are encouraged to go out and explore. If they find some weird topic outside the garden that's of interest to them, figure out a way to integrate it. I don't particularly blame the teachers for the failings of school though, since most of them have their hands tied by strict requirements from faceless bureaucrats.
  • yannyu 11mo ago
    As much as I hated schooling, I do want to say that there are parts of learning that are simply hard. There are parts that you can build enthusiasm for with project work and prioritizing for engagement. But there are many things that people should learn that will require drudgery to learn and won't excite all people. Doing derivatives, learning the periodic table, basic language and alphabet skills, playing an instrument are foundational skills that will require deliberate practice to learn, something that isn't typically part of project based learning. At some point in education with most fields, you will have to move beyond concepts and do some rote memorization and repetition of principles in order to get to higher level concepts. You can't gamify your way out of education, despite our best attempts to do so.
    • FloorEgg 11mo ago
      Most learning curves in the education system today are very bumpy and don't adapt well to the specific student. Students get stuck on big bumps or get bored and demotivated at plateaus. AI has potential to smooth out all curves so that students can learn faster and maximize time in flow. I've spent literally thousands of hours thinking about this (and working on it). The future of education will be as different from today as today is to 300 years ago. Kids used to get smacked with a stick if they spelled a word wrong.
• kingstnap 11mo ago
  Having had some experience teaching and designing labs and evaluating students in my opinion there is basically no problem that can't be solved with more instructor work. The problem is that the structure pushes for teaching productivity which basically directly opposes good pedagogy at this point in the optimization. Some specifics: 1. Multiple choice sucks. It's obvious that written response better evaluates students and oral is even better. But multiple choice is graded instantly by a computer. Written response needs TAs. Oral is such a time sink and needs so many TAs and lots of space if you want to run them in parallel. 1.5 Similarly having students do things on computers is nice because you don't have to print things and even errors in the question can be fixed live and you can ask students to refresh the page. But if the chatbots let them cheat too easily on computers doing hand written assesments sucks cause you have to go arrange for printing and scanning. 2. Designing labs is a clear LLM tradeoff. Autograded labs with testbenches and fill in the middle style completetions or API completetions are incredibly easy to grade. You just pull the commit before some specific deadline and run some scripts. You can do 200 students in the background when doing other work its so easy. But the problem is that LLMS are so good at fill in the middle and making testbenches pass. I've actually tried some more open ended labs before and its actually very impressive how creative students are. They are obviously not LLMs there is this diversity in thought and simplicity of code that you do not get with ChatGPT. But it is ridiculously time consuming to pull people's code and try to run open ended testbenches that they have created. 3. Having students do class presentations is great for evaluating them. But you can only do like 6 or 7 presentations in a 1 hr block. You will need to spend like a week even in a relatively small class. 4. What I will say LLMs are fun for are having students do open ended projects faster with faster iterations. You can scope creep them if you expect expect to use AI coding.
  • bjt 11mo ago
    > Written response needs TAs. Can AI not grade written responses?
    • kingstnap 11mo ago
      I tried that once. Specifically because I wanted to see if we could leverage some sort of productivity enhancements. I was using a local LLM around 4B to 14B, I tried Phi, Gemma, Qwen, and LLama. The idea was to prompt the LLM with the question, the answer key/rubric, and the student answer. The student answer at the end did some prompt caching to make it much faster. It was okay but not good, there were a lot of things I tried: * Endlessly messing with the prompt. * A few examples of grading. * Messing with the rubric to give more specific instructions. * Average of K. * Think step by step then give a grade. It was janky and I'll throw it up to local LLMs at the time being somewhat too stupid for this to be reasonable. They basically didn't follow the rubric very well. Qwen in particular was very strict giving zeros regardless of the part marks described in the answer key as I recall. I'm sure with the correct type of question and correct prompt and a good GPU it could work but it wasn't as trivially easy as I had thought at the time.
• SunshineTheCat 11mo ago
  I think part of the reason AI is having such a negative effect on schools in particular is because of how many education processes are reliant on an archaic, broken way of "learning." So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information (which AI is unmatched at doing). School is packed with inefficiency and busywork that is completely divorced from the way people learn on their own. In fact, it's pretty safe to say you could learn something about 10x by typing it into an AI chat bot and having it tailor the experience to you.
  • FloorEgg 11mo ago
    Yes, the biggest problem with authentic exercises is evaluating the students' actions and giving feedback. The problem is that authentic assessments didnt previous scale (e.g. what worked in 1:1 coaching or tutoring couldn't be done for a whole classroom). But AI can scale them. It seems like AI will destroy education but it's only breaking the old education system, it will also enable a new and much better one. One where students make more and faster progress developing more relevant and valuable skills. Education system uses multiple choice quizzes and tests because their grading can be automated. But when evaluation of any exercise can be automated with AI, such that students can practice any skill with iterative feedback at the pace of their own development, so much human potential will be unlocked.
  • aprilthird2021 11mo ago
    > So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information (which AI is unmatched at doing). No, lots of classes are focused on producing papers which aren't just memorization and regurgitation, but generative AI is king at... Generating text... So that class of work output is suspect now
  • l2silver 11mo ago
    Memorizing and tests at school are the archaic approach that schools don't believe in anymore (at least the school board my kids are at), but they happen to be AI proof. It's the softer, no memorizing, no tests, just assignments that you can hand in at anytime because there's no deadlines, and grades don't matter, type of education that is particularly useless with AI.
• bilsbie 11mo ago
  I submitted this but why is there an xcancel link added to it?
  • crabmusket 11mo ago
    X is a hostile experience when not logged in.
  • GuinansEyebrows 11mo ago
    besides the poor UX for unauthenticated users, i would rather not view ads from advertisers who still pay X for the access to my eyeballs (in the event i'm using a browser that doesn't block them to begin with).
• paulorlando 11mo ago
  I did a lot of my blog and book writing before these AI tools, but now I show my readers images of handwritten notes and drafts (more out of interest than demonstrating proof of work).
• ishtanbul 11mo ago
  Here is my proposal for AI in schools: raise the bar dramatically. Rather than trying to prevent kids from using AI, just raise the expectations of what they should accomplish with it. They should be setting really lofty goals rather than just doing the same work with less effort.
  • alexose 11mo ago
    Absolutely. I'd love to see the same effect happen in the software industry. Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.
    • ojr 11mo ago
      that is what they do in the software industry, before it was let me catch you off guard with asking how to reverse a linked list, now its leetcode questions that are so hard that you need to know and study them weekly, and prep for a year, interviewer can tell if you started prep 3 weeks prior
    • oytis 11mo ago
      > Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality. Effect of AI applied to coding is precisely the opposite though?
      • sothatsit 11mo ago
        Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue. You can absolutely write great code using AI. AI code review has unquestionably increased the quality of my code by helping me find bugs before they make it to production. AI coding tools give me speed to try out more options to land on a better solution. For example, I wrote a proxy, figured out problems with that approach, and so wrote a service that could accomplish the same thing instead. Being able to get more contact with reality, and seeing how solutions actually work before committing to them, gives you a lot of information to make better decisions. But then you still need good practices like code review, maintaining coding standards, and good project management to really keep code quality high. AI doesn’t really change that.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• enjeyw 11mo ago
  I made a tool for this! It's an essay writing platform that tracks the edits and keystrokes rather than the final output, so its AI detection accuracy is _much_ higher than other tools: https://collie.ink/ https://collie.ink/
• 11101010001100 11mo ago
  As a teacher, I try to keep an open mind, but consistently I can find out in 5 minutes of talking to a student if they understand the material. I might just go all in for the oral exams.
  • gsinclair 11mo ago
    It’s hard to go from (I privately think you’re cheating) to (I accuse you to your face), though.
  • nicce 11mo ago
    Oral exams don't scale well if there are +100 students and a lot of assignments. The main pain point.
    • fhgh2 11mo ago
      Do fewer graded assignments then
      • nicce 11mo ago
        Then learning targets only those assignments because students are the best optimizers.
    • LudwigNagasena 11mo ago
      A teacher in an environment with +100 students and a lot of assignments that are graded by a random grad student is useless anyway and might as well not exist. If AI could move us away from this cargo cult, that's great.
• adidoit 11mo ago
  This is exactly why I'm focusing on job readiness and remediation rather than the education system. I think working all this out is simply too complex for a system with a lot of vested interest and that doesn't really understand how AI is evolving. There's an arms race between students, teachers, and institutions that hire the students. It's simply too complex to fix. I think we'll see increased investment by corporates who do keep hiring on remediating the gaps in their workforce. Most elite institutions will probably increase their efforts spent on interviewing including work trials. I think we're already seeing this with many of the elite institutions talking about judgment, emotional intelligence critical thinking as more important skills. My worry is that hiring turns into a test of likeability rather than meritocracy (everyone is a personality hire when cognition is done by the machines) Source: I'm trying to build a startup (Socratify) a bridge for upskilling from a flawed education system to the workforce for early stage professionals
• theideaofcoffee 11mo ago
  How about just dispense with the AI nonsense in education and go to totally in-person, closed-book, manually-written, proctored exams? No homework, no assignments, no projects. Just pure mind-to-paper writing in a bare room under the eye of an examiner. Those that want to will learn and will produce intelligent work regardless of setting.
• thinkindie 11mo ago
  this is a very American issue. In my entire student career in Italy, home assignments were never graded. Maybe you had a project or two through university, but otherwise I got all my grades for onsite tests.
  • fluorinerocket 11mo ago
    When I was a kid in Italy in the late 80s early 90s the elentary school teachers also did "interrogazione" at the blackboard. That is individual kids would go up to the blackboard and get asked questions front of the rest of the class. Not sure if those two were just old school (they'd occasionally hit us/ pull ears too) but damn was I ahead of all the other kids when I came back to the USA Also the two teachers had the same class of kids for all of elementary school, teaching 1st through 5th grades sequentially So they got to know the kids quite well
    • thinkindie 11mo ago
      I started my school career in 1991 and it was still a thing, but more during middle school.
• cadamsdotcom 11mo ago
  AI can also generate questions of course. So it is feasible (in principle) to give every student a different exam! You’d use AI to generate lots of unique exams for your material, then ensure they’re all exactly the same difficulty (or extremely extremely close) by asking an LLM to reject any that are relatively too hard or too easy. Once you have generated enough individual exams, assign them to your students in your no-AI setting.
  • respondo2134 11mo ago
    except (like it or not) students are in direct competition with each other. Unique assessments would be impossible to defend the first time a student claimed your "unfair" test cost them a job, scholarship or other competitive opportunity.
  • raincole 11mo ago
    Why the hell would you want to do that lol. Casually 20x the teachers' workload for what? Who are going to grade these unique exams? AI as well?
    • cadamsdotcom 11mo ago
      AI should not grade them. Code that the AI writes would be used to grade them. - AI is great at some things. - Code is great at other things. - AI is bad at some things code is great for. - AI is great at coding. Therefore, leverage AI to quickly code up deterministic and fast tools for the tasks where code is best. And to help exams be markable by code, it makes sense to be smart about exam structure - eg. only ask questions with binary answers or multiple choice so you don’t need subjective judgment of correctness.
• solomonb 11mo ago
  In college I had a professor assign us to write a 100% plagiarized paper. You had to highlight every word in a color associated with the source. You couldn't plagiarize more then one sequential sentence from a single source. It ended up being harder then writing an ordinary paper but taught us all a ton about citation and originality. It was a really cool exercise. I imagine something similar could be done to teach students to use AI as a research tool rather then as a plagiarization machine.
  • vanviegen 11mo ago
    That's awesome! Contemporary alternative: Copy/paste an essay entirely from LLM output, but make sure none of the information contained checks out. One would want to use an older model for this. :-)
  • moffkalast 11mo ago
    Reminds me of that thing Olmo3 has in the web demo, where it shows you a trace for a selected sentence generated by the LLM and points you at the exact document in the training data it comes from verbatim. If they all had that it would be really trivial to verify sources, and more or less does that exact exercise for you at a press of a button.
    • frays 11mo ago
      Thanks for sharing, that's actually really cool: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3 https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3 Following to see what they do in the future.
    • solomonb 11mo ago
      > more or less does that exact exercise for you at a press of a button. Well it would give you a similar final artifact but it wouldn't be doing the exercise at all.
• WalterBright 11mo ago
  Cheaters and frauds are always wondering why they are "no hires" and are first to be laid off.
  • CamperBob2 11mo ago
    Meanwhile, in this reality, the cheaters and frauds end up winning elections and running things.
• markdown 11mo ago
  I've had to stop using em-dashes because people assume I'm using ai.
• dartharva 11mo ago
  I agree that focus should just shift to in-class work so that students are left free to do whatever they want once they are done for the day at school. Homework and at-home assignments are lazy handovers. Also, all of these AI threats to public education can be mitigated if we just step 1-2 decades back and go the pen-and-paper way. I am yet to see any convincing argument in favor of digital/screen-based teaching methods being superior in any way than the traditional ones, on the contrary I have seen thousands of arguments against them.
• doctorpangloss 11mo ago
  A detector is easy to write, simply monitor the kid’s computer and phone use. AI is ruining school but it will be solved in the lowest resistance way possible.
• thedoodleswrong 11mo ago
  I read that xcancel thread, the original one and now this hackernews thread and... IS NO ONE GOING TO POINT OUT MULTIPLE OF THOSE DOODLES ARE WRONG???
  • thedoodleswrong 11mo ago
    To be specific, it's the doodles that are, not the answers.
• siscia 11mo ago
  With my partner we have been working to invert the overall model. She started grading conversation than the students have with LLMs. From the question that the students ask, it is obvious who knows the material and who is struggling. We do have a custom setup, so that she creates an homework. There is a custom prompt to avoid the LLM answering the homework question. But thats pretty much it. The results seems promising, with students spending 30m or so going back and forth with the LLMs. If any educator wants to Ty or is interested in more information, let me know and we can see how we collaborate.
  • bo1024 11mo ago
    This makes some sense, but my first question would be how do you define a clear, fair grading rubric? Second, this sounds like it could work for checking who is smart, but can it motivate students to put in work to learn the material?
• Huppie 11mo ago
  Oxide and Friends recently had a podcast episode [0] with Michael Littman about this topic for anyone who's curious about this topic. This topic has been an interesting part of the discourse in a group of friends the past few weeks because one of us is a teacher who has to deal with this on an almost daily basis and is struggling to get her students to not cheat and the options available to her are limited (yes, physical monitoring would probably work but requires concessions from the school management etc. it's not something that has an easy or quick fix available.) [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-in-higher-education-with-michael-littman https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-in-highe...
• zkmon 11mo ago
  It's not the students. It's the teachers and school using AI first, and publicly. Why does he talk about only students using AI? Also, just like how calculators are allowed in the exam halls, why not allow AI usage in exams? In real-life job you are not going to avoid use of calculator or AI. So why test people in a different context? I think the tests should focus on the skills in using calculator and AI.
  • Huppie 11mo ago
    I real life if someone with an administrative job would jot 50 * 3,000 in a calculator and not notice the answer 1,500,000 is wrong (a typo) I will consider them most definitely at fault. Similarly I know some structural engineers who will notice something went wrong with the input if an answer is not within a given range. A calculator can be used to do things you know how to do _faster_ imho but in most jobs it still requires you to at least somewhat understand what is happening under the hood. The same principle applies to using LLMs at work imho. You can use it to do stuff you know how to do faster but if you don't understand the material there's no way you can evaluate the LLMs answer and you will be at fault when there's AI slop in your output. eta: Maybe it would be possible to design labs with LLM's in such a way that you teach them how to evaluate the LLM's answer? This would require them to have knowledge of the underlying topic. That's probably possible with specialized tools / LLM prompts but is not going to help against them using a generic LLM like ChatGPT or a cheating tool that feeds into a generic model.
    • nicce 11mo ago
      > Maybe it would be possible to design labs with LLM's in such a way that you teach them how to evaluate the LLM's answer? This would require them to have knowledge of the underlying topic. That's probably possible with specialized tools / LLM prompts but is not going to help against them using a generic LLM like ChatGPT or a cheating tool that feeds into a generic model. What you are desribing is that they should use LLM just after they know the topic. A dilemma.
      • Huppie 11mo ago
• intended 11mo ago
  Its really something to just casually say “all exams need to be in person”, reversing in a single move significant gains in education availability. It may not be obvious in a country with smaller student to teacher ratios, but for a place like India, you never have enough teachers for students. Being able to provide courses, and homework digitally, reduced the amount of work required to grade and review work. Then to add insult to injury, AI is removing entry level roles, removing other chances for people to do work which is easy to verify, practice and learn from. Yes, yes, eventually tool use will result in increases in GDP. Except our incentives are not to hire more teachers, build more schools, and improve educational outcomes. Those are all public goods, not private goods. We aren’t going to tax firms further, because commerce must be protected, yet we will socialize the costs to society.
• lvl155 11mo ago
  80-90% of the teachers are not equipped to handle AI in the classrooms. You can’t expect teachers to know the SOTA that’s rapidly changing. And at the same time punish students from using available tools. Especially in public schools, teaching quality has plummeted in the past decade. This also applies to lower tier colleges. The whole point of education is to learn. Not to weed out talent. If students want to use AI tools to take shortcuts then it’s entirely on them. It will catch up to them at some point.
  • moffkalast 11mo ago
    We're almost at the point that CGP grey predicted over a decade ago with the "digital Aristotle" concept. Teachers will have to eventually transition into class babysitting roles, but the transition period will be ugly as long as tech stays at this level where it renders regular teaching impossible while also not yet being on a level where it can useably replace it.
  • tim333 11mo ago
    At my school, long before AI, the work was of two kinds - homework type essays/problems that you could cheat on if you wanted but there was no point because the feedback was for your benefit and didn't count towards anything, and then proper exams where you were watched and couldn't cheat easily. Not sure why they don't just do that? It worked fine and would be compatible with LLM use.
• nephihaha 11mo ago
  Most of what schools teach is either useless or toxic. They rarely teach practical skills. I would argue for getting people to use handwriting/cursive as a workaround for this issue. It would mean that if they did use AI then they would have to process some of the content mentally rather than just present it.
  • danielbln 11mo ago
    Teenage me would be building the pen holding robot that same afternoon.
  • lqet 11mo ago
    > Most of what schools teach is either useless or toxic You must have a pretty broad definition of useless / toxic if you think that reading, writing and basic math, but also geometry, calculus, linear algebra, probability theory, foreign languages, a broad overview of history, and basic competency in physics / electronics fall under these categories. Sure, I learned a lot in school that turned out to be pretty useless for me (chemistry, basically anything I learned in PE, french), but I did not know that at the time and I am still grateful that I was being exposed to these topics. Some of my classmates developed successful careers from these early exposures.
    • nephihaha 11mo ago
      I was generalising of course, but that was my experience. My god daughter came out of school barely able to read or write. Others I know just remember being bullied by teachers. Out of that list you mention there (from my personal experience), we were never taught calculus, linear algebra or probability theory. The maths was very basic and uninspiring. The foreign language teaching was next to useless. (I learnt more in six months learning German after high school than six years of French in high school.) The science teaching was okay. The history teaching was appalling (I do like history but we were taught it in such a dull fashion, and from only one or two angles.) It would have been useful for me to learn basic cookery, how to open a bank account and so on. Sewing and clothing repair would also have been handy. We did do some carpentry and I.T. (which is obsolete, but was a useful foundation). I do use some of what I learnt in Geography class. Against this, they tried to instill some horrible habits in us. Like they would punish all of us when one person did something wrong (and they didn't know who). I saw that across multiple schools, and I still resent it. There was also the notion that we should obey teachers without question and accept everything they say (and they were frequently wrong). In my last school, you either went straight into university or the military but at that point in life neither was an option.
• gortok 11mo ago
  > The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators. Um. yea. This is the first time a non-deterministic technology has achieved mass adoption for every day use. Despite repeated warnings (which are not even close to the tenor of warnings they should broadcast), folks don’t understand that AI will likely hallucinate some or all of their answer. A calculator will not, and even the closest aspect of buggy behavior for a calculator (exploring the fringes of floating point numbers, for example) is light years away from the hallucination of generated AI for general, every day questions. The mass exuberance over generative AI has been clouding folks from the very real effects of over-adoption or AI, and we aren’t going to see the full impact of that for some time, and when we do, folks are going to ask questions like “how were we so dumb?” And of course the answer will be “no one saw this coming.” My spouse is an educator with nearly 20 years in the industry, and even her school has adopted AI. It’s shocking how quickly it has taken hold, even in otherwise lagging adoption segments. Her school finally went “1-1” with devices in 2020, just prior to COVID.
• mercurialsolo 11mo ago
  Trust goes offline. The value shift is happening in realtime as more in-person events, offline meetups take more value over digital communications and meetups. You can forge in the digital space but the real you is in-person.
  • ekianjo 11mo ago
    For now. Until you will have contact lenses with micro screens that tell you what to say and what to think.
• nalekberov 11mo ago
  > Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. Calculator analogy is extremely inaccurate, understandably people keep doing this comparison. The premise is that calculator didn't take bookkeepers' job, but instead it helped them. First of all calculator do one job and does it very well, you never question it because it solely works with numbers. But AI wants to be everything, calculator, translator, knowledge base etc.. And, it's very confident at everything all the time until you start to question it, and even then it continues to lie. Because sadly current AI products' purpose isn't to give you accurate answer, it's about making you believe that it's giving you credible information. More importantly calculators are not connected to the internet, and they are not capable of creating profile of an individual. It's sad to see big players push this agenda to make people believe that they don't need to think anymore, AI will do everything for them.
• polyrand 11mo ago
  There is too much focus on students cheating with AI and not enough on the other side of the equation: teachers. I've seen assignments that were clearly graded by ChatGPT. The signs are obvious: suggestions that are unrelated to the topic or corrections for points the student actually included. But of course, you can't 100% prove it. It's creating a strange feedback loop: students use an LLM to write the essay, and teachers use an LLM to grade it. It ends up being just one LLM talking to another, with no human intelligence in the middle. However, we can't just blame the teachers. This requires a systemic rethink, not just personal responsibility. Evaluating students based on this new technology requires time, probably much more time than teachers currently have. If we want teachers to move away from shortcuts and adapt to a new paradigm of grading, that effort needs to be compensated. Otherwise, teachers will inevitably use the same tools as the students to cope with the workload. Education seemed slow to adapt to the internet and mobile phones, usually treating them as threats rather than tools. Given the current incentive structure and the lack of understanding of how LLMs work, I'm not optimistic this will be solved anytime soon. I guess the advantage will be for those that know how to use LLMs to learn on their own instead of just as a shortcut. And teachers who can deliver real value beyond what an LLM can provide will (or should) be highly valued.
  • gchallen 11mo ago
    As a teacher, I agree. There's a ton of covert AI grading taking place on college campuses. Some of it by actual permanent faculty, but I suspect most of it by overworked adjuncts and graduate student teaching assistants. I've seen little reporting on this, so it seems to be largely flying under the radar. For now. But it's definitely happening. Is using AI to support grading such a bad idea? I think that there are probably ways to use it effectively to make grading more efficient and more fair. I'm sure some people are using good AI-supported grading workflows today, and their students are benefiting. But of course there are plenty of ways to get it wrong, and the fact that we're all pretending that it isn't happening is not facilitating the sharing of best practices. Of course, contemplating the role of AI grading also requires facing the reality of human grading, which is often not pretty. Particularly the relationship between delay and utility in providing students with grading feedback. Rapid feedback enables learning and change, while once feedback is delayed too long, its utility falls to near zero. I suspect this curve actually goes to zero much more quickly than most people think. If AI can help educators get feedback returned to students more quickly, that may be a significant win, even if the feedback isn't quite as good. And reducing grading burden also opens up opportunities for students to directly respond to the critical feedback through resubmission, which is rare today on anything that is human-graded. And of course, a lot of times university students get the worst of both worlds: feedback that is both unhelpful and delayed. I've been enrolling in English courses at my institution—which are free to me as a faculty member. I turned in a 4-page paper for the one I'm enrolled in now in mid-October. I received a few sentences of written feedback over a month later, and only two days before our next writing assignment was due. I feel lucky to have already learned how to write, somehow. And I hope that my fellow students in the course who are actual undergraduates are getting more useful feedback from the instructor. But in this case, AI would have provided better feedback, and much more quickly.
• gyulai 11mo ago
  I was very much the kind of student who didn't perform well under exam-taking pressure. For marked work that I did outside of school, it was straight-As for me. For written exams performed under time pressure and oral examinations (administered without advance notice), it was very much hit-and-miss. If my son should grow up to run into the same kinds of cognitive limitations, I really don't know what I will tell him and do about it. I just wish there was a university in a Faraday cage somewhere where I could send him, so that he can have the same opportunities I had. Fun fact on the side: Cambridge (UK) getting a railway station was a hugely controversial event at the time. The corrupting influence of London being only a short journey away was a major put-off.
  • iteria 11mo ago
    As a parent of a kid like this: start early with low stakes. You can increase your child's tolerance for pressure. I sometimes hear my kid saying sometimes after a deep breath, "There nothing to it, but to do it". And then work on focusing on what they did better versus how they did in absolute terms. I see collapsing under pressure to be either a kind of anxiety or a fixation on perfect outcomes. Teaching a tolerance for some kinds of failure is the fix for both.
    • gyulai 11mo ago
      Thanks!
• swapnilt 11mo ago
  The framing here is typically optimistic. Three years in, we're seeing AI primarily used for homework completion (defeating the stated purpose of learning) and administrative busywork. The real implication isn't 'personalized learning'—it's credential devaluation. If every student can produce 'their own' essays with AI assistance, how do we distinguish actual capability? The schools adopting AI fastest are ironically the ones least equipped to enforce academic integrity. The policy question isn't 'how do we use AI in schools?' but 'what's education for if not to demonstrate work capability?'
  • renegade-otter 11mo ago
    It's like a Meta interview - it's not "can you program", it's "can you make AI to program for you?". Basically, an AI operator.
• CuriouslyC 11mo ago
  The answer to AI use in schools breaking old teaching and evaluation methods isn't to cripple students, it's to create new assignments and evaluation methods. One idea: Have students generate videos with their best "ELI5" explanations for things, or demos/teaching tools. Make the conciseness and clarity of the video video and the quality/originality of the teaching tools the grading criteria. Make the videos public, so classmates can compare themselves with their peers. Students will be forced to learn the material and memorize it to make a good video. They'll be forced to understand it to create really good teaching tools. The public aspect will cause students to work harder not to feel foolish in front of their peers. The beauty of this is that most kids these days want to be influencers, so they're likely to invest time into the assignment even if they're not interested in the subject.
• CivBase 11mo ago
  > the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments) My wife is a teacher. He school did this a long time ago, long before AI. But they also gave every kid a laptop and forced the teachers to move all tests/assignments to online applications with the curriculum picked out by the administrators (read as: some salesperson talked them into it). Even with assignments done in class, it's almost impossible to catch kids using AI when they're all on laptops all the time and she can't teach and monitor them all at the same time. Bring back pencil and paper. Bring back calculators. Internet connected devices do not belong in the classroom.
• danielvaughn 11mo ago
  At this point, I'd be happy to send my child to an entirely analog school. No computers, just books, pencils and paper.
• Balgair 11mo ago
  Again, AI is not getting rid of degrees or learning or education. It's getting rid of cheap methods. Scantrons and bluebooks were always a way that made it cheap for institutions to produce results. Now those methods kinda seem silly, right? 500 person freshman lectures seem kinda absurd now, right? Teaching via adjuncts that had 3 days notice for the class and are paid nothing is kinda scammy, right? R1s professors whose tenure evals have nothing to do with teaching is kinda wrong, right? The Oxbridge model of 5-10 person classes with a proctor is what the education with AI is going to be about. It's small, intimate, and expensive.
  • FuckButtons 11mo ago
    Hurray! We’ve just made education only viable for the wealthy! Good job everyone, I can see this technology revolution is already living up to its promise of distributing wealth and power more evenly throughout society.
    • tpdly 11mo ago
      I just looked up some numbers for UCLA as an example. <45k students (undergrad and grad) and >5k faculty (and another 30k on staff)— so thats a pessimistic ratio of 1 to 9. If you imagine students take 4 classes per semester and faculty teach 4 per semester… it seems stunningly feasible.
    • disqard 11mo ago
      sama in 2023: "We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models" sama in 2024: "using technology to create abundance--intelligence, energy, longevity, whatever--will not solve all problems and will not magically make everyone happy. but it is an unequivocally great thing to do, and expands our option space. to me, it feels like a moral imperative." sama in 2025: ...proposals requiring AI developers to vet their systems before rolling them out would be 'disastrous' for the industry. Nothing to see here.
  • thefaux 11mo ago
    If the value of human labor is going to zero, which some say ai will induce, wouldn't the oxbridge model become the most cost effective option?
• cgearhart 11mo ago
  It’s mind boggling that image generators can solve physics and chem problems like this—but I will note that there are a few slight mistakes in both. (An extra i term in LHS, a few of the chemical names look wrong, etc.) Unbelievable that we’re here, but it still remains an essential to check the work.
• credit_guy 11mo ago
  One more thing: teachers should use LLMs for grading. Grading is a boring chore, the majority of teachers hate it. Many procrastinate, and return the graded tests or assignments with a significant delay, well beyond the window where the kids are curious to see how they did. This completely destroys the feedback purpose of grading. With an LLM, you feed the scanned tests, the LLMs gives you back the graded test, and the teacher can quickly do a bit of quality control to see the LLM did not make any mistakes. If the LLM makes mistakes, then wait 6 months, there will be new version that won't make those mistakes.
• disambiguation 11mo ago
  The current education system is going to collapse. Teachers and students alike won't be able to resist the ultimate cheat code. Schools need to become tech free zones. Education needs to reorient around more frequent standardized tests. Any "tech" involved needs to be exclusively applied towards solving the supply and demand issue - the number of "quality teachers" to "students per classroom." I admire Karpathy for advocating common sense, but none of this will happen because SV is full of IQ realists who only see "education" as a business opportunity and the bureaucratic process is too dysfunctional for common sense decisions to prevail. The future is chrome books with GPT browsers for every student.
• lucideng 11mo ago
  To me the solution is: Ban homework. All projects, essays, tests, etc are done at school on air-gapped machines or written by hand. Work is monitored by the teacher with video surveillance in 'test halls'. Cell phones can be kept in a small locker. If the student needs to be reached, a parent or whomever can call the school. Internet research should be done in a separate environment, printed out, then taken to the 'work' location. Like how you used to photo-copy sections of a book. Printed text can be cataloged by the school and compared to completed work for plagiarism. Take away the internet. Except in a research/library scenario. Give them a limited time to complete tasks. This would promote a stronger work ethic, memory/recall and more realistic to time management skills. They need to learn to rely on themselves, not technology. The only effective way is to remove tech from the equation, otherwise the temptation to cheat to compete/complete is too strong.
  • aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
    > To me the solution is: Ban homework. All projects, essays, tests, etc are done at school on air-gapped machines or written by hand. Rather: don't grade homework. Make the homework rather the preparation that if you did it seriously will prepare you for the test (and if you didn't do it seriously, you won't have the skills that are necessary to pass the test).
    • lucideng 11mo ago
      I would accept that as well
  • nkrisc 11mo ago
    Assign homework that, if one actually does the work themselves, will help them hone the skills they'll need for the in-class assessment. Then allow students who want their homework evaluated for feedback to turn it in, but no homework will be graded. This relegates the use of AI to personal choice of learning style and any misuse of AI is only hurting the student.
    • georgebcrawford 11mo ago
• biff1 11mo ago
  What is the point of learning after all? Is it to get a job? Is it human development? We have to answer this before pondering what ai means for schools. I don’t see much agreement to be arrived at. It’s a religious conundrum.