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This fits with my priors. I was in grad school during covid and had some professors I was close to (and whose class I was taking) reach out asking for feedback
by hgoel 6mo ago
This fits with my priors. I was in grad school during covid and had some professors I was close to (and whose class I was taking) reach out asking for feedback on their exam because students were blatantly cheating despite the allowances the professors were making (up to being open to the internet, just no direct communication). They couldn't punish them, and they were perplexed why anyone would bother cheating on even trivial exams.
Even recently when I last spoke to them, the profs described how students were refusing to think for themselves even when given open ended projects. They were just having ChatGPT come up with the project idea for them instead of taking advantage of the freedom to do something they enjoyed.
- AnnikaL 6mo agoWait, why can't the students be punished?
- hgoel 6mo agoThis was during the start of the covid disruptions, so students were allowed to get away with almost anything in the name of covid-related stress.
- eecc 6mo agoHmm, anxiety of making the wrong choice and have it on record? I’ve read that later gens are extremely aware of “the internet never forgets” and are terrified of any choice being the embarrassing and defining moment of the rest of their life
- hgoel 6mo agoI feel like that anxiety has been a thing with regard to education for a while. Worrying about bad grades following you through life has been a thing for much longer than the internet's existence. I think the issue is largely that in the age of AI, learning a skill requires one to be deliberate and dedicated, but the entire reason grades and exams are so prominent is because most students need the threat of near term failure to learn. Open ended projects were always my favorite ones because I was able to utilize some of my personal projects on them. Profs also enjoy seeing students' passion for their topic. That kind of student is probably still doing well.
- tdeck 6mo ago> students were refusing to think for themselves even when given open ended projects. They were just having ChatGPT come up with the project idea for them instead of taking advantage of the freedom to do something they enjoyed. Those kinds of projects are a big trap for certain kinds of people. If I had used ChatGPT in college, maybe I wouldn't have come up with overly-ambitious projects that seemed doable at the time but instead took several full weeks of work and basically made my semester miserable.
- hgoel 6mo agoI agree that they can be a trap, but I think that is remedied by requiring a small project proposal step. Ensures that students have a plan, that the goals are achievable, and can help to spread out the project's points. Also helps when profs make it clear that they're more concerned about seeing what you know/learned and how you approached the problem, not whether or not you achieved exactly what you promised.
- Aurornis 6mo agoSounds like a very valuable learning experience. LLM over-reliance has an analogous problem: People start using LLMs to start projects that get in over their heads, then when the LLM has gone through all of the easy and medium problems they're left with only the hardest problems to solve on top of a project where they didn't learn much doing the easy and medium parts first.