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I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn

by curun1r 6mo ago

I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, answers were complex and the only way to know whether you'd done the question correctly was to be sure of your method. They even allowed us to write programs in TI-BASIC that we could use on tests, the only limitation was that we were not allowed to share programs with other students. I discovered that rather than trying to cram for exams, I could just write a program that would solve each class of problem we were likely to see on the exam, and by essentially teaching my calculator to pass the test, I also taught myself. It was a vastly better way for me to study. It also led to my decision to major in comp sci and my career in software. I'm forever grateful to those teachers for choosing to see the latest technology as a multiplier of student potential rather than a way students could cheat to avoid learning. So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? These tools are not going to cease to exist. The students they are preparing are going to live and work in a world where they exist. To my mind, you best prepare students by teaching them how to use the tools most effectively, not by teaching them how to work without the tools. Students should be learning how to prompt AI without hinting it towards a specific answer. They should be learning how to double check the answers AI gives them to ferret out hallucinations. They should be learning how to produce work that is a hundred times more complex than what us older folks had to do in school. We should be graduating students who are so much more capable than any generation before them. I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations. The world they will inhabit has changed radically from the one we entered into following school.

sdevonoes 6mo ago
There’s one significant difference between: typewriters and calculators are a one-time-paymeny device. LLMs are subscription based baked by billionaire companies. That alone leaves LLMs in a bad enough place
- fph 6mo ago
  You have a point, but it is very ironic that this sounds a lot like the old argument "you must still learn to compute by hand because you won't have a calculator with you all the time".
oerdier 6mo ago
A critical difference between a calculator and an LLM is that a calculator doesn't make decisions. A calculator performs the operations you type in, nothing more. An LLM does make decisions. The human operator of the LLM needs to be able to evaluate the decisions made by the LLM. That requires education and experience beforehand. An LLM is a force multiplier only, not a replacement. It's a personal assistant to an expert. To use an LLM in a acceptable way, you still first have to learn how to do what it does yourself. I think your suggestion for people to be taught how to use LLMs is justified, but they should do so only after first being taught a no-LLM curriculum. I think this should be entirely after what the notion of an education was in pre-LLM times. Don't incorporate LLMs into our current education, instead teach use of LLMs after our current education.
- prox 6mo ago
  The post yesterday about the teacher who gave students an Apple II and taught assembly was very enlightening and example of how to go forward.
- vincnetas 6mo ago
  continuing on personal asistant analogy, i bet even now we have ultra rich people who are not smart enough to do things themselves but are smart enough to buy (hire) smart people to work for them. And even allow them to make decisions without understanding them. But with only a guard rails : does this produce wealth for me. If yes, do what you need, i don't care :) So this i think is applicable to AI also, pay for smarter than you AI's pit them against each other, let them supervise each other and measure the outcomes you need. Who cares how they achieve that (sound clinical and scary)
  - oerdier 6mo ago
    It has gone well enough for these rich people because their hired assistants were human. With humans there is some degree of responsibility, liability and a slow tempo (= time to correct) involved. LLMs are a significantly different beast.
muzzleflash 6mo ago
I think the controversial part about AI is far above the "it is a new technology so use it". When the scientific calculator was invented, people could easily know what went into its production. As in what circuitry appears in them. You knew that if you bought it, it is yours. Want to program it? Grab a book and do this. The whole package would be a fixed price. You are in control. With AI? You are not at all in control. You rely on a big tech giant (or just like 4 useful ones) who is riding what people controversially still call an economic disaster. You are relying on a technology that is designed to very likely bait-and-switch you. As soon as you get too comfortable with AI, the big tech companies can just bump the prices up and you will not be able to say no. You rely on a technology that you do not control. The comparison of AI to a calculator or any other technological advancement for students is apples and oranges for that reason. Imagine giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them. This may be more of a fair comparison. PS Training students on using AI, especially for free, is setting them up for reliance on the big tech companies and the subscription model.
- mquander 6mo ago
  Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute to download and operate exactly that for free, with performance perhaps a year behind the state of the art.
  - latexr 6mo ago
    > but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute Even if we assume that to be true, you severely underestimate how many people that condition excludes.
    - mquander 6mo ago
      It doesn't exclude people who attend high schools and colleges that have a computer lab.
      - 6mo ago
ksenzee 6mo ago
There's a big difference between learning to program a calculator, which is deterministic, and "learning" to prompt an LLM-based AI service that is tuned deliberately to be non-deterministic and that changes every few months. I would prefer my kids learn things like thinking critically and communicating and logic, not spend their time "chatting" with an unpredictable oracle.
shmichael 6mo ago
Imagine military instructors would say that it's important to focus on cavalry and bayonette use just because they can't figure out how to adapt their curriculum to the new reality. World war I was very much that.
galkk 6mo ago
It was good for you but you don’t address reality of life. Here’s one possible scenario: After graduation, you (or somebody else) shares the program with friend, with a promise to not to share further. Soon enough, it’s on everybody’s calculator. What did real educational thing for you, is just cheat where one needs to press the right buttons and get the right answer. This completely destroys the educational purpose, but significant amount of people just don’t care and want to get a pass. Yes, there always is a counter weapon by teachers: for example, to point to random line and ask to explain and whatever, but this is not (always) scalable. I’ve seen this in reality in college, when there was a cs/database course final project implementation, written in Delphi (very popular at a time in xussr), that was passed from year to year, that the professors and ta were so fed up, that I got almost auto pass because I wrote mine in C++… —— To summarize - the overinreasing amount of pure slop is seen everywhere. Regular multi-thousand line prs where author didn’t even bother to look into code, written by ai. Just prompt -> commit, push, or. Nobody wants to deal with that Same is happening here - u it’s not to punish people who use tool in proper context, it’s to filter out people who just don’t give a fuck.
amtamt 6mo ago
> Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? That is way to high recurring cost that many won't be able to afford. One could get a second hand calculator or even computer, and then additional resources needed was one's willingness. With mandating AI usage, we'd only increase the gap of haves and have-nots. I personally do not like the idea.
- madrox 6mo ago
  This is probably the fairest counter argument I’ve heard. One can hope that today’s AI will eventually be as cheap as a calculator, though.
  - encrux 6mo ago
    AI in it‘s current phase, definitely. However, we‘ve been seeing the transformer architecture plateauing in the last couple of years. There are still improvements, but open source models are catching up. I feel like at this point it’s an inevitability that given enough time, capable models will be cheap enough for everyone.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 6mo ago
      If poor students have capable models but rich students have much better models that go the extra mile for a great mark and do everything in a single prompt, it would still be unfair. For it to be fair, you would not only need good free models, but actual parity between free models and the highest subscription tier the big AI companies can offer. And I don't think that will happen in the short or mid term future.
      - madrox 5mo ago
        When I was in AP classes in high school, you were required to have a TI-89 calculator. If you couldn't afford one, there were assistance programs. You were not allowed to use a TI-92, which was the next step up. It had built-in solvers for many kinds of problems. I'm not saying this isn't a concern, but addressing financially-based inequities in learning is not a new problem within certain bounds. There's established ways to deal with it. If we can get AI cheap enough that you can cover a year of education with $100 then we're in a good range.
ZiiS 6mo ago
The difference is you learned useful maths teaching your calculator. At the moment a teacher can't tell if you even read the LLM output. Even if all future literature is writen with an LLM it is highly likely the are skills you need to learn to become a best selling author.
deleted 6mo ago
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lpcvoid 6mo ago
>why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Because this makes a subscription a requirement for education, and thus advances the grift that is subscriptions, rent-seeking and dependence on a service. This isn't something we should ingrain into our children from an early age. Calculators were buy once, use forever. Subscriptions to slop generators are a long term dependency and I want my children to not be exposed to that until they can decide for themselves.
latexr 6mo ago
At this stage, I can no longer take comparing LLMs to calculators as a good faith argument. That’s a talking point, a framing device, one whose flaws have been explained ad nauseam (as exemplified by the sibling replies), and I’m left questioning either the reasoning abilities or the honesty of those still making it. They. Are not. The same. Have you ever known people to commit suicide, kill, or give themselves rare diseases because of their calculators? How about people dating their calculator and going batshit for a software update? Not to mention learning to do on your own is a useful skill to teach you to think, and an essential skill to (as you suggest) verify answers. People not understanding how things work is exactly why they take bullshit output from an LLM as gospel. I also note that such arguments tend to be profoundly selfish and self-centred. Your anecdote happened to have an outcome you enjoyed and benefitted from, but I bet that wasn’t the reality for all your colleagues. Just like you are glad for the calculators in your class, some other student may be glad for the lack of them in theirs and it may be the reason they got into their field of study.
deleted 6mo ago
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yorwba 6mo ago
So, scientific calculators - made tasks easy that were a necessary prerequisite for advanced math (basic arithmetic), but not what the lesson was supposed to be about - could in theory also let students skip over what they were supposed to be learning (applying the correct operations in the correct order to solve a problem) but doing so would require programming or getting a program from someone else, which the teachers probably figured was a high-enough hurdle to accept the risk Hence, scientific calculators helped teachers by removing unnecessary friction. Meanwhile, current LLMs - will happily attempt to do the student's entire homework for them - cannot reliably be restricted in functionality to leave the part the students are supposed to do themselves to the student Hence, LLMs undermine teachers by removing necessary effort. Sure, in theory LLMs could enable even more focused lessons by removing even bigger unnecessary frictions (e.g. in history class, have a LLM scour a large collection of primary sources to exhaustively list passages mentioning a certain topic), but students cannot be trusted to use them this way. Hence, teachers are trying to use all kinds of tricks to ensure that what they wanted to teach actually passed through the student's brain at some point.
- PunchyHamster 6mo ago
  Homework is waste of time for everyone involved tho
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  > - cannot reliably be restricted in functionality to leave the part the students are supposed to do themselves to the student Small local LLMs are essentially that. If an LLM can tell you to eat rocks as a tasty snack or use glue to make the cheese stick to your pizza, imagine what it says when you ask it to analyze/explain complex academic subjects, or solve fiddly problems. But it will still reliably help you polish your language, like a subject-specific dictionary/thesaurus.
  - yorwba 6mo ago
    Small LLMs are certainly restricted, but they're not reliably restricted in a way that aligns with educational goals. Even Qwen3.5-0.8B, the smallest, dumbest LLM I have lying around, can solve quadratic equations. In math class, learning about quadratic equations for the first time, such helpfulness defeats the purpose. In physics, learning about ballistic trajectories, it might be acceptable, as long as the students themselves come up with the correct equation to model the problem, and do the reasoning to identify which of the two theoretical solutions corresponds to the physical setup. A single model that can do many things, some less reliably than others, independently of what the requirements for the lesson are, is not a good tool to give students. You would need something that can do ancillary tasks perfectly, but won't do the part student are supposed to practice doing themselves. And what exactly that is changes with every exercise. If you want to give students access to thesaurus functionality and nothing else, you're better off with a thesaurus.
PunchyHamster 6mo ago
> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Because using AI is the complete opposite of "I learned programming just to make tests easier". By learning how to program solver, you not only learned how to program but also learned the method well enough to write it. By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it. You can use AI to get some knowledge about the problem (assuming you won't hit hallucination) but that's not what will happen when you use it for test. And if you DO want to teach students how to use AI effectively, you can just have an AI class...
- logicchains 6mo ago
  >By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it. If you got AI to produce a working solution, you solved the problem. In the real world nobody who's paying you cares about the method as long as you deliver results. Students taught to solve easy problems by themselves will be at a big disadvantage in the workforce compared to students taught to solve hard problems using AI.
  - Gander5739 6mo ago
    I don't think the entire purpose of schools is to teach you how to answer some specific set of questions; they want to improve your knowledge and skills in various domains, and the questions are merely a roundabout way to assess that. If you can answer the questions but don't know the knowledge, you're missing the most important part.
    - logicchains 6mo ago
      For most students the "purpose" of studying computer science at university is to get a better job and make more money. And for the people for whom this isn't the case, they're generally smart and motivated enough to learn the extra details they're interested in by themselves.
rwmj 6mo ago
We weren't allowed to use calculators until aged 16 and I'm glad because I learned to do mental arithmetic. Many people I know, even in STEM, aren't able to do that, or lack a feel for numbers.
qwedaH 6mo ago
Because AI is different from calculators. People stop thinking and just excel at verbose and incomplete rationalizations of every evil, just like you do in your reply.
spaqin 6mo ago
Replace "using AI" with "asking your parents". From a student's perspective, their parents are probably an expert in anything, but sometimes might make things up and they won't be any wiser to notice, because they don't yet have the basic knowledge to know what to double check for. Just like LLMs. Why doesn't the essay class allow us asking your parents to write it for them? The art class, why not ask your parents to paint something for you? Geography, why not let ask your parents during a test?
exceptione 6mo ago
Bad idea. This is pretty much endgame territory you are talking about. You would give the brains of the younger generation to American tech oligarchy, a class of people openly hostile to the principles of the democratic rule of law. If you want to see the damage actors like Fox News et alii alone can do, just take a look around in the US. Now imagine them taking over the parenting and teaching role; you wouldn't need gerrymandering if you can control people's beliefs.
intended 6mo ago
The calculator analogy comes up very often, and it’s a good one because it also illustrates where AI diverges. The other analogy is taking a forklift to the gym. Sure you lift weights, but you don’t really do any exercise to develop your own muscles. AI automates a significant chunk of the exercises. So you are left with people who didn’t build any mental muscles. This would be bad enough, but it’s worse because AI severely benefits experts who have build mental reflexes/taste and can judge / verify output with minimum information.
Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
Just like computers in schools nowadays, I will concede that part of the education should be about learning how to use AI - but they should also learn how to do research and accomplish things without the help of AI.
ilovecake1984 6mo ago
In the Uk we have two exam papers that make up the age 16 mathematics exam. In one you use a calculator and one your don’t. You need to be able to do both things. We don’t need to make it a choice.
fho 6mo ago
Yeah... We had those bulky TI Voyage 200 graphical calculators in school [1]. They could do everything the teachers could throw at us up to the point of having all but a few formulas build in. I would say that definitely shaped me in a way where I rarely bother with the underlying details and tend to focus on how high level abstractions interact. [2] [1] German "Mathe-LK", we could chose specializing in two things, for me it was math and computer science, the later being quite novel back in 2003. [2] I _do_ tend to specialize in things, but e.g. for LLMs or GLMMs, while I do have the capability to understand the technical details, I just don't bother.
Al-Khwarizmi 6mo ago
Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? It's an interesting debate, but I see several reasons not to. 1. As a human you need to learn gradually, e.g. in CS you need to learn the basics of programming before going into more complex stuff. If you embrace AI from the beginning, it can let you skip the basics (why would you code a simple 200-line program if the LLM can do it?) and then you don't have the fundamentals when you reach the more complex level where human thought is needed. It's a similar problem as firing the juniors (because AI can do their work) but then who will become senior if you have no juniors. 2. If you evaluate coursework with the expectation of students using AI, those who pay the $200 subscription will have an advantage over those who pay $20, and in turn over those who use free LLMs. The only way to make it fair would be to provide all students with the best available LLM. 3. While I have heard the analogy with calculators many times, I feel that LLMs are at a different qualitative level. The calculator doesn't really replace human thought, or if it does, it's only some very specific form of it. LLMs replace human thought in a very broad way, so I think they are much more dangerous for learning.
- bendergarcia 6mo ago
  I agree with all these points. The algorithm to multiplying being done by the calculator, is not the same because you still have to learn why you are multiplying. If you rely on ai you may not know why the ai is giving the answer. All you’ve learned is copy paste. Figuring out how someone can use ai and give the wrong answer will solve the a huge problem. But it feels quite difficult at the time being. Ai is so general it’s hard to think of how to pose the question in a way that ai can’t answer. Maybe submitting prompts and judging prompts that bypass understanding. What if the test was more how to teach the ai? Meh ai in education is filled with gotchas.
- curun1r 6mo ago
  The issue I have is that people are still trying to shove AI into a pre-AI educational paradigm. And yes, if you introduce AI into a world where people are still trying to teach kids the way that they were taught in the 20th century, AI looks like a threat because it allows kids to cheat, both testing and themselves. But we have the option to stop trying to teach kids the way that they were taught in the 20th century, which I think people here are fundamentally not understanding. It's an old book now, but Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age includes the vision that we should have for education. We literally have the tools today to build his fictional "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer." What he envisioned was not that far off from an iPad with a Claude subscription where Claude has specific goals for the conversation. It's not teachers lecturing a class, it's individualized education where an AI teaches students at their own pace using their own interests. And built into AI is the ability for precocious kids to go beyond the curriculum, either on tangents or to more advanced subjects. This is impossible in a world where a teacher is trying to shepherd dozens of students through a curriculum as a group. In the 2010s, we got some of the way there with Khan Academy. It was genuinely new that a student could rewatch something until it clicked rather than having to digest a lecture and have any question that didn't immediately spring to mind go unanswered. AI offers the possibility to go a step beyond this. Instead of rewatching the exact same content, AI can present it to the student in multiple ways based on a student's confusion and keep explaining it until a topic clicks. It can find examples of things that a student finds interesting to show how what they're learning isn't just theoretical. If a student likes space, the AI can discuss how the trig concepts they're learning apply to the Artemis II mission. If they like sports, it could apply the same concepts to tennis. Students in literary classes could read different books according to their interests while AI ensures that they understand the same sorts of concepts while discussing them. By customizing based on the specific curiosity of the student, it can make learning far more engaging and actually fun. To address your #2, schools should be working with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to shape a new personalized paradigm of educating students. They should be working out deals that give access to AI to their entire district. If I were heading the Department of Education, I would go a step further and get companies to bid on a contract to put their AI in the hands of every public school child in America. A version of the AI where teachers input their curriculum into the AI and students work through it with the AI, either alone or in small groups and the AI reports back to teachers so they can intervene where they are most needed would allow school districts with staffing shortages to serve more students more efficiently and with better results. Sometimes it feels like our current system of education is only secondarily concerned with students actually learning and the primary concern is testing students to sort them into different tiers to be absorbed into different strata of our workforce. AI does compromise this sorting process to some extent. But if we can get back to the true mission of education and think creatively to deploy AI to best educate students, we have the potential to transform education like never before. What if we don't need to test students? An AI can give an individualized assessment of how well a student has grasped what they're supposed to be learning based on weeks of individualized work. It's as if we can give every student their own private tutor who will report back to the teacher on the student's actual progress. When you have that, stress-inducing exams are a ridiculous substitute. I've been pretty shocked at how closed-minded the responses to my comment have been. We're supposed to be a community that envisions radically better futures that can be built with technology. And here we have a revolutionary new technology that upends a staid and increasingly problematic part of our society and the majority of the responses are geared towards explaining why that staid and problematic institution should be maintained unchanged. AI is fundamentally a danger to our current education model, but that model can change radically for the better. And I would've hoped that more people here would have recognized that.
mold_aid 6mo ago
It's not a bad point, but the "calculator" metaphor is not the best one. First, schools don't create schoolwork. Teachers in different disciplines do. Second, calculators aren't in pervasive use across disciplines; AI products are. Third, schools provide these AI products for free - teachers don't. So a student in a psych methods class uses a free tier to create lit reviews, or whatever. The asymmetry there creates a problem for most assessments of skill, because students want expediency, and teachers assess skills and memory. Finally, nobody seems to know what teachers are actually discussing. To your assertion: >So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Many teachers do create schoolwork that requires AI. Many teachers ban it. Everybody's trying to work out policy (to the detriment of other policy discussions, particularly the new ADA landscape). Many ED departments are captured by AI vendors - AI is a normal technological competency for ED majors at different levels. It's not that the discussion is not "are students going to work with AI?" The discussion is "how do we teach?" which is what the discussion always is. But policy is a part of that. Admin will have guidance and policy statements, and each instructor will as well. Students, who get thrown off balance if they have two teachers with different nav bars in the CMS, want clarity of policy: can I use it? is a different question than should I use it? But "should I use it?" is the much more relevant question for instructors. The instructors passed through the 90s/00s/10s blissfully unaware of anything that was happening in these fields. >These tools are not going to cease to exist. Which tools, precisely? Because I'd assert your 200-dollar-or-whatever tier that runs out of tokens on Monday does not functionally exist for most students. I don't know what happens at MIT but Penn State satellite campus students aren't whipping up agentic solutions to "I have a summer online course with discussion boards." They're just plugging that shit into whatever chatbot they have on their phone. Honestly, most online courses aren't even worth that effort, but: different discussion. The only reason there is pervasive student use is because someone made it free. The CoPilot window that comes with the basic tier of 365 and all the other in-app copilots are what my students have; the Google Docs stuff exists, and the Grammarly stuff exists, and the best way to "ban" it (which is just fine as an approach) is to make it even slightly more expensive. If someone does that, yeah, I think some of these products might cease to exist. >I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations Students graduate into a world where all kinds of stuff is going on and all sorts of ideological forces shape what they encounter in schools. "AI" more a dominant element in that force than the calculator was because calculators didn't have hundreds of billions of dollars of investments, and I'm not sure I ever knew what the prevailing political project of Texas Instruments was. Maybe TI's CEO had a manifesto; tbf, I do remember IBM's corporate culture being strong enough to drive cultural change. But it would be naive to not recognize that these products are made by people antagonistic to the idea of education as a compulsory and public good.
shagie 6mo ago
> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Back in college, my assembly class was in MIPS (incidentally taught by Professor Larus of SPIM fame). I remember slogging through writing the assembly to compute factorial and saving registers and then dealing the frame pointer and the stack pointer. One of the other students had access to a DecStation, wrote the program in C, and ran gcc -S to get the MIPS assembly from it. However, the compiler realized the for loop (and tail call) optimizations and instead of making it a recursive function (and help us practice and understand $fp) write it with a jump instruction instead. Aside from getting a 0 on that homework, they struggled with the next assignment that presupposed understanding of how write function calls. --- You could argue that learning C makes needing to learn assembly irrelevant (and MIPS is even less relevant today than back in the 90s). But for learning in school, it's not about the assignment but rather the journey that one takes to get to that assignment and learn from it. Being able to check the answers that are provided to someone requires the understanding of what goes before and beneath the answer itself. Writing the assignment in C when you're learning the before and beneath of "this is how assembly works" means that when you later take the complier class you won't be able to debug if your code generation is incorrect. Working with an AI as the primary tool for learning problem solving keeps the person at the higher level. There is some foundational level that a person needs to learn without relying on an AI to do it for them. The AI and other abstractions of the underlying problem do allow us to work with more complex problems. Would you trust a bridge built by an engineer who built it with AI and didn't understand the underlying math and physics themselves? This is especially at issue in college where some students are taking classes to get the requirement out of the way, some are taking classes for that directly - an accountant is taking the math class to do math with the numbers, while the engineer is taking the math as a prerequisite for physics which is a prerequisite for a material science class which is a perquisite for a soil mechanics class. If you don't understand the various foundational levels without using AI then trying to identify where the AI (or any other tool) got it wrong isn't something that you're necessarily able to do.
binarypixel 6mo ago
Interesting thought! I wonder what kind of assignments, etc. would require AI that would still allow assessing how the student has absorbed the knowledge. Maybe the assignment would require sending in the prompts and the whole conversation how the problem was approached and solved? With the calculator analogy, I think that the calculator automates executing certain algorithms (like multiplication, etc.), but using AI takes away some (most?) of the thinking.

by curun1r 6mo ago

sdevonoes 6mo ago

There’s one significant difference between: typewriters and calculators are a one-time-paymeny device. LLMs are subscription based baked by billionaire companies. That alone leaves LLMs in a bad enough place

fph 6mo ago
You have a point, but it is very ironic that this sounds a lot like the old argument "you must still learn to compute by hand because you won't have a calculator with you all the time".

oerdier 6mo ago

A critical difference between a calculator and an LLM is that a calculator doesn't make decisions. A calculator performs the operations you type in, nothing more. An LLM does make decisions. The human operator of the LLM needs to be able to evaluate the decisions made by the LLM. That requires education and experience beforehand. An LLM is a force multiplier only, not a replacement. It's a personal assistant to an expert. To use an LLM in a acceptable way, you still first have to learn how to do what it does yourself. I think your suggestion for people to be taught how to use LLMs is justified, but they should do so only after first being taught a no-LLM curriculum. I think this should be entirely after what the notion of an education was in pre-LLM times. Don't incorporate LLMs into our current education, instead teach use of LLMs after our current education.

prox 6mo ago
The post yesterday about the teacher who gave students an Apple II and taught assembly was very enlightening and example of how to go forward.
vincnetas 6mo ago
continuing on personal asistant analogy, i bet even now we have ultra rich people who are not smart enough to do things themselves but are smart enough to buy (hire) smart people to work for them. And even allow them to make decisions without understanding them. But with only a guard rails : does this produce wealth for me. If yes, do what you need, i don't care :) So this i think is applicable to AI also, pay for smarter than you AI's pit them against each other, let them supervise each other and measure the outcomes you need. Who cares how they achieve that (sound clinical and scary)
- oerdier 6mo ago
  It has gone well enough for these rich people because their hired assistants were human. With humans there is some degree of responsibility, liability and a slow tempo (= time to correct) involved. LLMs are a significantly different beast.

muzzleflash 6mo ago

I think the controversial part about AI is far above the "it is a new technology so use it". When the scientific calculator was invented, people could easily know what went into its production. As in what circuitry appears in them. You knew that if you bought it, it is yours. Want to program it? Grab a book and do this. The whole package would be a fixed price. You are in control. With AI? You are not at all in control. You rely on a big tech giant (or just like 4 useful ones) who is riding what people controversially still call an economic disaster. You are relying on a technology that is designed to very likely bait-and-switch you. As soon as you get too comfortable with AI, the big tech companies can just bump the prices up and you will not be able to say no. You rely on a technology that you do not control. The comparison of AI to a calculator or any other technological advancement for students is apples and oranges for that reason. Imagine giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them. This may be more of a fair comparison. PS Training students on using AI, especially for free, is setting them up for reliance on the big tech companies and the subscription model.

mquander 6mo ago
Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute to download and operate exactly that for free, with performance perhaps a year behind the state of the art.
- latexr 6mo ago
  > but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute Even if we assume that to be true, you severely underestimate how many people that condition excludes.
  - mquander 6mo ago
    It doesn't exclude people who attend high schools and colleges that have a computer lab.
    - 6mo ago

ksenzee 6mo ago

There's a big difference between learning to program a calculator, which is deterministic, and "learning" to prompt an LLM-based AI service that is tuned deliberately to be non-deterministic and that changes every few months. I would prefer my kids learn things like thinking critically and communicating and logic, not spend their time "chatting" with an unpredictable oracle.

shmichael 6mo ago

Imagine military instructors would say that it's important to focus on cavalry and bayonette use just because they can't figure out how to adapt their curriculum to the new reality. World war I was very much that.

galkk 6mo ago

It was good for you but you don’t address reality of life. Here’s one possible scenario: After graduation, you (or somebody else) shares the program with friend, with a promise to not to share further. Soon enough, it’s on everybody’s calculator. What did real educational thing for you, is just cheat where one needs to press the right buttons and get the right answer. This completely destroys the educational purpose, but significant amount of people just don’t care and want to get a pass. Yes, there always is a counter weapon by teachers: for example, to point to random line and ask to explain and whatever, but this is not (always) scalable. I’ve seen this in reality in college, when there was a cs/database course final project implementation, written in Delphi (very popular at a time in xussr), that was passed from year to year, that the professors and ta were so fed up, that I got almost auto pass because I wrote mine in C++… —— To summarize - the overinreasing amount of pure slop is seen everywhere. Regular multi-thousand line prs where author didn’t even bother to look into code, written by ai. Just prompt -> commit, push, or. Nobody wants to deal with that Same is happening here - u it’s not to punish people who use tool in proper context, it’s to filter out people who just don’t give a fuck.

amtamt 6mo ago

> Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? That is way to high recurring cost that many won't be able to afford. One could get a second hand calculator or even computer, and then additional resources needed was one's willingness. With mandating AI usage, we'd only increase the gap of haves and have-nots. I personally do not like the idea.

madrox 6mo ago
This is probably the fairest counter argument I’ve heard. One can hope that today’s AI will eventually be as cheap as a calculator, though.
- encrux 6mo ago
  AI in it‘s current phase, definitely. However, we‘ve been seeing the transformer architecture plateauing in the last couple of years. There are still improvements, but open source models are catching up. I feel like at this point it’s an inevitability that given enough time, capable models will be cheap enough for everyone.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 6mo ago
    If poor students have capable models but rich students have much better models that go the extra mile for a great mark and do everything in a single prompt, it would still be unfair. For it to be fair, you would not only need good free models, but actual parity between free models and the highest subscription tier the big AI companies can offer. And I don't think that will happen in the short or mid term future.
    - madrox 5mo ago
      When I was in AP classes in high school, you were required to have a TI-89 calculator. If you couldn't afford one, there were assistance programs. You were not allowed to use a TI-92, which was the next step up. It had built-in solvers for many kinds of problems. I'm not saying this isn't a concern, but addressing financially-based inequities in learning is not a new problem within certain bounds. There's established ways to deal with it. If we can get AI cheap enough that you can cover a year of education with $100 then we're in a good range.

ZiiS 6mo ago

The difference is you learned useful maths teaching your calculator. At the moment a teacher can't tell if you even read the LLM output. Even if all future literature is writen with an LLM it is highly likely the are skills you need to learn to become a best selling author.

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lpcvoid 6mo ago

>why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Because this makes a subscription a requirement for education, and thus advances the grift that is subscriptions, rent-seeking and dependence on a service. This isn't something we should ingrain into our children from an early age. Calculators were buy once, use forever. Subscriptions to slop generators are a long term dependency and I want my children to not be exposed to that until they can decide for themselves.

latexr 6mo ago

At this stage, I can no longer take comparing LLMs to calculators as a good faith argument. That’s a talking point, a framing device, one whose flaws have been explained ad nauseam (as exemplified by the sibling replies), and I’m left questioning either the reasoning abilities or the honesty of those still making it. They. Are not. The same. Have you ever known people to commit suicide, kill, or give themselves rare diseases because of their calculators? How about people dating their calculator and going batshit for a software update? Not to mention learning to do on your own is a useful skill to teach you to think, and an essential skill to (as you suggest) verify answers. People not understanding how things work is exactly why they take bullshit output from an LLM as gospel. I also note that such arguments tend to be profoundly selfish and self-centred. Your anecdote happened to have an outcome you enjoyed and benefitted from, but I bet that wasn’t the reality for all your colleagues. Just like you are glad for the calculators in your class, some other student may be glad for the lack of them in theirs and it may be the reason they got into their field of study.

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yorwba 6mo ago

So, scientific calculators - made tasks easy that were a necessary prerequisite for advanced math (basic arithmetic), but not what the lesson was supposed to be about - could in theory also let students skip over what they were supposed to be learning (applying the correct operations in the correct order to solve a problem) but doing so would require programming or getting a program from someone else, which the teachers probably figured was a high-enough hurdle to accept the risk Hence, scientific calculators helped teachers by removing unnecessary friction. Meanwhile, current LLMs - will happily attempt to do the student's entire homework for them - cannot reliably be restricted in functionality to leave the part the students are supposed to do themselves to the student Hence, LLMs undermine teachers by removing necessary effort. Sure, in theory LLMs could enable even more focused lessons by removing even bigger unnecessary frictions (e.g. in history class, have a LLM scour a large collection of primary sources to exhaustively list passages mentioning a certain topic), but students cannot be trusted to use them this way. Hence, teachers are trying to use all kinds of tricks to ensure that what they wanted to teach actually passed through the student's brain at some point.

PunchyHamster 6mo ago
Homework is waste of time for everyone involved tho
zozbot234 6mo ago
> - cannot reliably be restricted in functionality to leave the part the students are supposed to do themselves to the student Small local LLMs are essentially that. If an LLM can tell you to eat rocks as a tasty snack or use glue to make the cheese stick to your pizza, imagine what it says when you ask it to analyze/explain complex academic subjects, or solve fiddly problems. But it will still reliably help you polish your language, like a subject-specific dictionary/thesaurus.
- yorwba 6mo ago
  Small LLMs are certainly restricted, but they're not reliably restricted in a way that aligns with educational goals. Even Qwen3.5-0.8B, the smallest, dumbest LLM I have lying around, can solve quadratic equations. In math class, learning about quadratic equations for the first time, such helpfulness defeats the purpose. In physics, learning about ballistic trajectories, it might be acceptable, as long as the students themselves come up with the correct equation to model the problem, and do the reasoning to identify which of the two theoretical solutions corresponds to the physical setup. A single model that can do many things, some less reliably than others, independently of what the requirements for the lesson are, is not a good tool to give students. You would need something that can do ancillary tasks perfectly, but won't do the part student are supposed to practice doing themselves. And what exactly that is changes with every exercise. If you want to give students access to thesaurus functionality and nothing else, you're better off with a thesaurus.

PunchyHamster 6mo ago

> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Because using AI is the complete opposite of "I learned programming just to make tests easier". By learning how to program solver, you not only learned how to program but also learned the method well enough to write it. By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it. You can use AI to get some knowledge about the problem (assuming you won't hit hallucination) but that's not what will happen when you use it for test. And if you DO want to teach students how to use AI effectively, you can just have an AI class...

logicchains 6mo ago
>By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it. If you got AI to produce a working solution, you solved the problem. In the real world nobody who's paying you cares about the method as long as you deliver results. Students taught to solve easy problems by themselves will be at a big disadvantage in the workforce compared to students taught to solve hard problems using AI.
- Gander5739 6mo ago
  I don't think the entire purpose of schools is to teach you how to answer some specific set of questions; they want to improve your knowledge and skills in various domains, and the questions are merely a roundabout way to assess that. If you can answer the questions but don't know the knowledge, you're missing the most important part.
  - logicchains 6mo ago
    For most students the "purpose" of studying computer science at university is to get a better job and make more money. And for the people for whom this isn't the case, they're generally smart and motivated enough to learn the extra details they're interested in by themselves.

rwmj 6mo ago

We weren't allowed to use calculators until aged 16 and I'm glad because I learned to do mental arithmetic. Many people I know, even in STEM, aren't able to do that, or lack a feel for numbers.

qwedaH 6mo ago

Because AI is different from calculators. People stop thinking and just excel at verbose and incomplete rationalizations of every evil, just like you do in your reply.

spaqin 6mo ago

Replace "using AI" with "asking your parents". From a student's perspective, their parents are probably an expert in anything, but sometimes might make things up and they won't be any wiser to notice, because they don't yet have the basic knowledge to know what to double check for. Just like LLMs. Why doesn't the essay class allow us asking your parents to write it for them? The art class, why not ask your parents to paint something for you? Geography, why not let ask your parents during a test?

exceptione 6mo ago

Bad idea. This is pretty much endgame territory you are talking about. You would give the brains of the younger generation to American tech oligarchy, a class of people openly hostile to the principles of the democratic rule of law. If you want to see the damage actors like Fox News et alii alone can do, just take a look around in the US. Now imagine them taking over the parenting and teaching role; you wouldn't need gerrymandering if you can control people's beliefs.

intended 6mo ago

The calculator analogy comes up very often, and it’s a good one because it also illustrates where AI diverges. The other analogy is taking a forklift to the gym. Sure you lift weights, but you don’t really do any exercise to develop your own muscles. AI automates a significant chunk of the exercises. So you are left with people who didn’t build any mental muscles. This would be bad enough, but it’s worse because AI severely benefits experts who have build mental reflexes/taste and can judge / verify output with minimum information.

Cthulhu_ 6mo ago

Just like computers in schools nowadays, I will concede that part of the education should be about learning how to use AI - but they should also learn how to do research and accomplish things without the help of AI.

ilovecake1984 6mo ago

In the Uk we have two exam papers that make up the age 16 mathematics exam. In one you use a calculator and one your don’t. You need to be able to do both things. We don’t need to make it a choice.

fho 6mo ago

Yeah... We had those bulky TI Voyage 200 graphical calculators in school [1]. They could do everything the teachers could throw at us up to the point of having all but a few formulas build in. I would say that definitely shaped me in a way where I rarely bother with the underlying details and tend to focus on how high level abstractions interact. [2] [1] German "Mathe-LK", we could chose specializing in two things, for me it was math and computer science, the later being quite novel back in 2003. [2] I _do_ tend to specialize in things, but e.g. for LLMs or GLMMs, while I do have the capability to understand the technical details, I just don't bother.

Al-Khwarizmi 6mo ago

Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? It's an interesting debate, but I see several reasons not to. 1. As a human you need to learn gradually, e.g. in CS you need to learn the basics of programming before going into more complex stuff. If you embrace AI from the beginning, it can let you skip the basics (why would you code a simple 200-line program if the LLM can do it?) and then you don't have the fundamentals when you reach the more complex level where human thought is needed. It's a similar problem as firing the juniors (because AI can do their work) but then who will become senior if you have no juniors. 2. If you evaluate coursework with the expectation of students using AI, those who pay the $200 subscription will have an advantage over those who pay $20, and in turn over those who use free LLMs. The only way to make it fair would be to provide all students with the best available LLM. 3. While I have heard the analogy with calculators many times, I feel that LLMs are at a different qualitative level. The calculator doesn't really replace human thought, or if it does, it's only some very specific form of it. LLMs replace human thought in a very broad way, so I think they are much more dangerous for learning.

bendergarcia 6mo ago
I agree with all these points. The algorithm to multiplying being done by the calculator, is not the same because you still have to learn why you are multiplying. If you rely on ai you may not know why the ai is giving the answer. All you’ve learned is copy paste. Figuring out how someone can use ai and give the wrong answer will solve the a huge problem. But it feels quite difficult at the time being. Ai is so general it’s hard to think of how to pose the question in a way that ai can’t answer. Maybe submitting prompts and judging prompts that bypass understanding. What if the test was more how to teach the ai? Meh ai in education is filled with gotchas.
curun1r 6mo ago
The issue I have is that people are still trying to shove AI into a pre-AI educational paradigm. And yes, if you introduce AI into a world where people are still trying to teach kids the way that they were taught in the 20th century, AI looks like a threat because it allows kids to cheat, both testing and themselves. But we have the option to stop trying to teach kids the way that they were taught in the 20th century, which I think people here are fundamentally not understanding. It's an old book now, but Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age includes the vision that we should have for education. We literally have the tools today to build his fictional "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer." What he envisioned was not that far off from an iPad with a Claude subscription where Claude has specific goals for the conversation. It's not teachers lecturing a class, it's individualized education where an AI teaches students at their own pace using their own interests. And built into AI is the ability for precocious kids to go beyond the curriculum, either on tangents or to more advanced subjects. This is impossible in a world where a teacher is trying to shepherd dozens of students through a curriculum as a group. In the 2010s, we got some of the way there with Khan Academy. It was genuinely new that a student could rewatch something until it clicked rather than having to digest a lecture and have any question that didn't immediately spring to mind go unanswered. AI offers the possibility to go a step beyond this. Instead of rewatching the exact same content, AI can present it to the student in multiple ways based on a student's confusion and keep explaining it until a topic clicks. It can find examples of things that a student finds interesting to show how what they're learning isn't just theoretical. If a student likes space, the AI can discuss how the trig concepts they're learning apply to the Artemis II mission. If they like sports, it could apply the same concepts to tennis. Students in literary classes could read different books according to their interests while AI ensures that they understand the same sorts of concepts while discussing them. By customizing based on the specific curiosity of the student, it can make learning far more engaging and actually fun. To address your #2, schools should be working with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to shape a new personalized paradigm of educating students. They should be working out deals that give access to AI to their entire district. If I were heading the Department of Education, I would go a step further and get companies to bid on a contract to put their AI in the hands of every public school child in America. A version of the AI where teachers input their curriculum into the AI and students work through it with the AI, either alone or in small groups and the AI reports back to teachers so they can intervene where they are most needed would allow school districts with staffing shortages to serve more students more efficiently and with better results. Sometimes it feels like our current system of education is only secondarily concerned with students actually learning and the primary concern is testing students to sort them into different tiers to be absorbed into different strata of our workforce. AI does compromise this sorting process to some extent. But if we can get back to the true mission of education and think creatively to deploy AI to best educate students, we have the potential to transform education like never before. What if we don't need to test students? An AI can give an individualized assessment of how well a student has grasped what they're supposed to be learning based on weeks of individualized work. It's as if we can give every student their own private tutor who will report back to the teacher on the student's actual progress. When you have that, stress-inducing exams are a ridiculous substitute. I've been pretty shocked at how closed-minded the responses to my comment have been. We're supposed to be a community that envisions radically better futures that can be built with technology. And here we have a revolutionary new technology that upends a staid and increasingly problematic part of our society and the majority of the responses are geared towards explaining why that staid and problematic institution should be maintained unchanged. AI is fundamentally a danger to our current education model, but that model can change radically for the better. And I would've hoped that more people here would have recognized that.

mold_aid 6mo ago

It's not a bad point, but the "calculator" metaphor is not the best one. First, schools don't create schoolwork. Teachers in different disciplines do. Second, calculators aren't in pervasive use across disciplines; AI products are. Third, schools provide these AI products for free - teachers don't. So a student in a psych methods class uses a free tier to create lit reviews, or whatever. The asymmetry there creates a problem for most assessments of skill, because students want expediency, and teachers assess skills and memory. Finally, nobody seems to know what teachers are actually discussing. To your assertion: >So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Many teachers do create schoolwork that requires AI. Many teachers ban it. Everybody's trying to work out policy (to the detriment of other policy discussions, particularly the new ADA landscape). Many ED departments are captured by AI vendors - AI is a normal technological competency for ED majors at different levels. It's not that the discussion is not "are students going to work with AI?" The discussion is "how do we teach?" which is what the discussion always is. But policy is a part of that. Admin will have guidance and policy statements, and each instructor will as well. Students, who get thrown off balance if they have two teachers with different nav bars in the CMS, want clarity of policy: can I use it? is a different question than should I use it? But "should I use it?" is the much more relevant question for instructors. The instructors passed through the 90s/00s/10s blissfully unaware of anything that was happening in these fields. >These tools are not going to cease to exist. Which tools, precisely? Because I'd assert your 200-dollar-or-whatever tier that runs out of tokens on Monday does not functionally exist for most students. I don't know what happens at MIT but Penn State satellite campus students aren't whipping up agentic solutions to "I have a summer online course with discussion boards." They're just plugging that shit into whatever chatbot they have on their phone. Honestly, most online courses aren't even worth that effort, but: different discussion. The only reason there is pervasive student use is because someone made it free. The CoPilot window that comes with the basic tier of 365 and all the other in-app copilots are what my students have; the Google Docs stuff exists, and the Grammarly stuff exists, and the best way to "ban" it (which is just fine as an approach) is to make it even slightly more expensive. If someone does that, yeah, I think some of these products might cease to exist. >I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations Students graduate into a world where all kinds of stuff is going on and all sorts of ideological forces shape what they encounter in schools. "AI" more a dominant element in that force than the calculator was because calculators didn't have hundreds of billions of dollars of investments, and I'm not sure I ever knew what the prevailing political project of Texas Instruments was. Maybe TI's CEO had a manifesto; tbf, I do remember IBM's corporate culture being strong enough to drive cultural change. But it would be naive to not recognize that these products are made by people antagonistic to the idea of education as a compulsory and public good.

shagie 6mo ago

> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Back in college, my assembly class was in MIPS (incidentally taught by Professor Larus of SPIM fame). I remember slogging through writing the assembly to compute factorial and saving registers and then dealing the frame pointer and the stack pointer. One of the other students had access to a DecStation, wrote the program in C, and ran gcc -S to get the MIPS assembly from it. However, the compiler realized the for loop (and tail call) optimizations and instead of making it a recursive function (and help us practice and understand $fp) write it with a jump instruction instead. Aside from getting a 0 on that homework, they struggled with the next assignment that presupposed understanding of how write function calls. --- You could argue that learning C makes needing to learn assembly irrelevant (and MIPS is even less relevant today than back in the 90s). But for learning in school, it's not about the assignment but rather the journey that one takes to get to that assignment and learn from it. Being able to check the answers that are provided to someone requires the understanding of what goes before and beneath the answer itself. Writing the assignment in C when you're learning the before and beneath of "this is how assembly works" means that when you later take the complier class you won't be able to debug if your code generation is incorrect. Working with an AI as the primary tool for learning problem solving keeps the person at the higher level. There is some foundational level that a person needs to learn without relying on an AI to do it for them. The AI and other abstractions of the underlying problem do allow us to work with more complex problems. Would you trust a bridge built by an engineer who built it with AI and didn't understand the underlying math and physics themselves? This is especially at issue in college where some students are taking classes to get the requirement out of the way, some are taking classes for that directly - an accountant is taking the math class to do math with the numbers, while the engineer is taking the math as a prerequisite for physics which is a prerequisite for a material science class which is a perquisite for a soil mechanics class. If you don't understand the various foundational levels without using AI then trying to identify where the AI (or any other tool) got it wrong isn't something that you're necessarily able to do.

binarypixel 6mo ago

Interesting thought! I wonder what kind of assignments, etc. would require AI that would still allow assessing how the student has absorbed the knowledge. Maybe the assignment would require sending in the prompts and the whole conversation how the problem was approached and solved? With the calculator analogy, I think that the calculator automates executing certain algorithms (like multiplication, etc.), but using AI takes away some (most?) of the thinking.