14 ms·

Instead of banning AI, I made a classroom contract with my students

95 points by digital55 3mo ago

krater23 3mo ago
> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely? ...because I'm that I'm writing this article be a AI himself...
llbbdd 3mo ago
I'm glad to see more of this approach to modernizing education. I roll my eyes seeing people argue that we should go back to pen + paper or other weird rose-colored regressive approaches to preventing AI usage. It's part of education now, it's part of work now, and learning environments that don't acknowledge that are going to be dragged kicking and screaming into a future with empty classrooms.
- bonzini 3mo ago
  Both things can be true at the same time. The article mention switching to shorter reports and oral discussion but other courses may not have the luxury, especially the introductory ones.
Apreche 3mo ago
> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely? Uh, by also avoiding it entirely?
- kowbell 3mo ago
  How do you feel about the lines preceeding that? > He didn’t try to hide that he had used AI to generate much of his assignment. Instead, he admitted his anxiety. He felt that mastering these tools was essential for his future career, yet he had no idea how—or even whether—he was allowed to use them. I'm empathetic to the student: I'd bet a large majority of employers/careers he's researching right now are making a lot of press noise about "the importance of AI" and how "it's a necessary part of the workplace now." Can you really expect someone in his shoes to avoid it entirely?
- fantasizr 3mo ago
  a football coach is not required to do all the drills and that doesn't make him a hypocrite
tonymet 3mo ago
Instruction needs to shift to accommodate AI rather than preventing it from being used to complete assignments and tests. Assignments and tests were always lossy, and over time more cheating crept in. Instruction should shift to benchmarking productive output, strategic thinking and group collaboration. Similar to labs where you are tested on completing an experiment or a project with artifacts. Or an MBA program with quarterly group objectives. A major part of the group effort is dealing with collaboration and overcoming obstacles like laggards. Hopefully people will realize how poor testing is for preparing students for the real world. the ultimate goal is preparing the students for a productive life, most commonly in commercial enterprise, but even academic pursuits require collaboration, productivity and other characteristics that were not well assessed by traditional testing and homework.
- BDPW 3mo ago
  What would you do instead to make sure the student actually possesses the skills they are intended to have learned by the end of a program?
  - saghm 3mo ago
    I'm not sure it's possible to force someone to learn who doesn't want to. From what I can tell, the article is basically saying that giving the students some form of agency and trust is a better way to motivate them to take it seriously than being a strict top-down disciplinarian. This fits with my experience (both from when I was a student and in my interactions with younger people as an adult), and I would expect that most people who have seriously evaluated this strategy would come to the same conclusion. It's not perfect, as some students may try to take advantage of things or will still phone it in, but the same thing happens with every other way of trying to engage with them.
    - BDPW 3mo ago
      My experience has been the complete opposite, a bit of pressure goes a long way. There are many people who need to know X or Y and just dont have the maturity or innate motivation to do it properly. This comes from the experience of a Dutch school system so perhaps its different in other countries.
Rutledge 3mo ago
Would love to see the 'contract'
Aboutplants 3mo ago
The older I get the more I realize “moderation in everything” is the key to success and happiness. Moderation in the sense of using or consuming something to only a certain degree. In this case, education, the answer is in the middle. It’s exploring and utilizing new tools while ensuring the base foundation of education. It’s really simple. Apply “moderation” to nearly any facet of your life and it’s probably the correct choice. Want to consume alcohol? Moderate consumption. Enjoy TikTok or other video entertainment? Moderation. Work? Don’t destroy yourself, moderate extreme effort. This isn’t to say don’t follow passions or pursue things to a moderate extreme, just don’t ever let it consume you.
- marginalia_nu 3mo ago
  Moderation in fentanyl, too? Some habits are arguably just vices, that have few justifiable middle grounds.
  - _aavaa_ 3mo ago
    Are you seriously trying to compare “AI” in education to fentanyl? The difference between AI robbing you of learning opportunities and acting as a tutor or sounding board is what question you ask.
    - marginalia_nu 3mo ago
      No I'm arguing against the false fairness in moderation in anything. It's just not correct. (Though I do sense a sort of cognitive fent fold in certain heavy AI-users, so maybe I should)
      - _aavaa_ 3mo ago
        Do you think that moderation when it comes to AI in education is not correct?
        marginalia_nu 3mo ago
causality0 3mo ago
After some debate, we drew a line separating mechanical churning from actual thinking. Automating repetitive tasks or literature searches was acceptable. Was there any possibility of this not being the case? Rules which are not enforceable do not exist. If it's any part of the process you can't check, students are going to do it in the easiest way possible.
- neonmagenta 3mo ago
  I feel like that agreement gives the student a "win" in their minds, that they were going to do anyway, but now its approved so they can feel some labor lifted on their end.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
grayhatter 3mo ago
My job is to teach students how to get stronger. Instead of forcing them to stack and rerack their own weights, and instead of using the existing university policy against plagiarism, or the existing social contract. I made them sign an additional set of rules where they promise to only use the magic weight lift button when stacking or reracking. I feel that this middle ground is superior: I'd rather sacrifice the subtle exercise benefits of moving relatively light weight in weird ways; that extremely important toward helping prevent injuries, instead of actually dealing with the desire of students (human nature) to get out of the effort that goes into learning. I have no idea how accurate, or useful that analogy is, but personal intuition tells me it's really close. I also don't envy teachers. I used to teach, so I do understand the position they feel that they are required to adapt into. However, I prefer CS programs that don't encourage people to tolerate non-determinism, or otherwise unpredictable outputs. They're the source of some of the most intractable bugs, one i doubt the next generation of students will be able to troubleshoot correctly if they never learn to solve beginner level bugs without LLM assistance.
ckemere 3mo ago
I found this article frustrating. In my experience, the students who participate in the “co-creation of a contract” would likely also have done their best to comply with Professor induced rules. The challenge is the 10-20% who, stressed and overworked, will be just as likely to ignore this contract as any other. I would have liked to understand how the situation is changed compared to no rules at all…
ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
As an educator, I found that the institution was often powerless to prevent or detect cheating, because many, many applicants are highly motivated by perverse incentives. Many students attend because it's a "piece of paper" that's mandatory for their career aspirations. They'll never get hired without the college cred, and so they need to grab it by any means necessary. It's often not their own money they're spending: it's a federal grant, a loan, or mommy and daddy pining to give the same or better opportunity to the next generation. So family pressure to achieve is often immense, and overwhelming to a child being shoved through this system. Other students, they already have a job and/or family, striving to get ahead and be upwardly mobile according to the American Dream, and so they simply don't have time for actual study or homework, but they paid tuition and purchased books, and these consumers need their product that they already invested in. Perverse incentives abound in higher education, and without removing those or reforming the system, you'll never, ever stop or slow down the cheating, which is pervasive and rampant, believe you me.
lioeters 3mo ago
"Science" dot org, shilling for the highest bidder yet again. Keep the name of science out your mouth.
vitamark 3mo ago
I have no problem with AI as-is, but writing should be concise and to the point, and without heavy tweaking current models write pretentious hard-to-read stuff like this article. A person who has something to say often has trouble stopping writing. Outsourcing writing to AI then feels like the opposite, as if the author doesn't care but wants to just spew some content.
BobbyTables2 3mo ago
If there were a way an AI could generate output only based on the student’s own knowledge, it could be somewhat beneficial... Unfortunately that’s not how it works… Long ago, WordPerfect’s grammar checker showed me my writing flaws and helped me improve. Pasting a poorly written report and getting a dramatically restructured report wouldn’t be as instructive, even if the final result looked “better”.
moi2388 3mo ago
I like how professors are all anti AI but had no problems with group work in which at least one student usually didn’t do anything
HomeDeLaPot 3mo ago
This seems key: "So, I now limit written papers to two pages and base students’ grades more heavily on oral discussions of their work, which allows me to probe their thought process and challenge their decisions." Oral discussions. That's probably the way education should work, but it requires the professor to spend time talking to each student individually, so it might not scale to large classes with hundreds of students.
3dedb728-3f77 3mo ago
Why are so many articles like this one? It read like an ads. Why push an ads?

95 points by digital55 3mo ago

> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely? ...because I'm that I'm writing this article be a AI himself...

llbbdd 3mo ago

I'm glad to see more of this approach to modernizing education. I roll my eyes seeing people argue that we should go back to pen + paper or other weird rose-colored regressive approaches to preventing AI usage. It's part of education now, it's part of work now, and learning environments that don't acknowledge that are going to be dragged kicking and screaming into a future with empty classrooms.

bonzini 3mo ago
Both things can be true at the same time. The article mention switching to shorter reports and oral discussion but other courses may not have the luxury, especially the introductory ones.

Apreche 3mo ago

> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely? Uh, by also avoiding it entirely?

kowbell 3mo ago
How do you feel about the lines preceeding that? > He didn’t try to hide that he had used AI to generate much of his assignment. Instead, he admitted his anxiety. He felt that mastering these tools was essential for his future career, yet he had no idea how—or even whether—he was allowed to use them. I'm empathetic to the student: I'd bet a large majority of employers/careers he's researching right now are making a lot of press noise about "the importance of AI" and how "it's a necessary part of the workplace now." Can you really expect someone in his shoes to avoid it entirely?
fantasizr 3mo ago
a football coach is not required to do all the drills and that doesn't make him a hypocrite

tonymet 3mo ago

Instruction needs to shift to accommodate AI rather than preventing it from being used to complete assignments and tests. Assignments and tests were always lossy, and over time more cheating crept in. Instruction should shift to benchmarking productive output, strategic thinking and group collaboration. Similar to labs where you are tested on completing an experiment or a project with artifacts. Or an MBA program with quarterly group objectives. A major part of the group effort is dealing with collaboration and overcoming obstacles like laggards. Hopefully people will realize how poor testing is for preparing students for the real world. the ultimate goal is preparing the students for a productive life, most commonly in commercial enterprise, but even academic pursuits require collaboration, productivity and other characteristics that were not well assessed by traditional testing and homework.

BDPW 3mo ago
What would you do instead to make sure the student actually possesses the skills they are intended to have learned by the end of a program?
- saghm 3mo ago
  I'm not sure it's possible to force someone to learn who doesn't want to. From what I can tell, the article is basically saying that giving the students some form of agency and trust is a better way to motivate them to take it seriously than being a strict top-down disciplinarian. This fits with my experience (both from when I was a student and in my interactions with younger people as an adult), and I would expect that most people who have seriously evaluated this strategy would come to the same conclusion. It's not perfect, as some students may try to take advantage of things or will still phone it in, but the same thing happens with every other way of trying to engage with them.
  - BDPW 3mo ago
    My experience has been the complete opposite, a bit of pressure goes a long way. There are many people who need to know X or Y and just dont have the maturity or innate motivation to do it properly. This comes from the experience of a Dutch school system so perhaps its different in other countries.

Rutledge 3mo ago

Would love to see the 'contract'

Aboutplants 3mo ago

The older I get the more I realize “moderation in everything” is the key to success and happiness. Moderation in the sense of using or consuming something to only a certain degree. In this case, education, the answer is in the middle. It’s exploring and utilizing new tools while ensuring the base foundation of education. It’s really simple. Apply “moderation” to nearly any facet of your life and it’s probably the correct choice. Want to consume alcohol? Moderate consumption. Enjoy TikTok or other video entertainment? Moderation. Work? Don’t destroy yourself, moderate extreme effort. This isn’t to say don’t follow passions or pursue things to a moderate extreme, just don’t ever let it consume you.

marginalia_nu 3mo ago
Moderation in fentanyl, too? Some habits are arguably just vices, that have few justifiable middle grounds.
- _aavaa_ 3mo ago
  Are you seriously trying to compare “AI” in education to fentanyl? The difference between AI robbing you of learning opportunities and acting as a tutor or sounding board is what question you ask.
  - marginalia_nu 3mo ago
    No I'm arguing against the false fairness in moderation in anything. It's just not correct. (Though I do sense a sort of cognitive fent fold in certain heavy AI-users, so maybe I should)
    - _aavaa_ 3mo ago
      Do you think that moderation when it comes to AI in education is not correct?
      - marginalia_nu 3mo ago

causality0 3mo ago

After some debate, we drew a line separating mechanical churning from actual thinking. Automating repetitive tasks or literature searches was acceptable. Was there any possibility of this not being the case? Rules which are not enforceable do not exist. If it's any part of the process you can't check, students are going to do it in the easiest way possible.

neonmagenta 3mo ago
I feel like that agreement gives the student a "win" in their minds, that they were going to do anyway, but now its approved so they can feel some labor lifted on their end.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

grayhatter 3mo ago

My job is to teach students how to get stronger. Instead of forcing them to stack and rerack their own weights, and instead of using the existing university policy against plagiarism, or the existing social contract. I made them sign an additional set of rules where they promise to only use the magic weight lift button when stacking or reracking. I feel that this middle ground is superior: I'd rather sacrifice the subtle exercise benefits of moving relatively light weight in weird ways; that extremely important toward helping prevent injuries, instead of actually dealing with the desire of students (human nature) to get out of the effort that goes into learning. I have no idea how accurate, or useful that analogy is, but personal intuition tells me it's really close. I also don't envy teachers. I used to teach, so I do understand the position they feel that they are required to adapt into. However, I prefer CS programs that don't encourage people to tolerate non-determinism, or otherwise unpredictable outputs. They're the source of some of the most intractable bugs, one i doubt the next generation of students will be able to troubleshoot correctly if they never learn to solve beginner level bugs without LLM assistance.

ckemere 3mo ago

I found this article frustrating. In my experience, the students who participate in the “co-creation of a contract” would likely also have done their best to comply with Professor induced rules. The challenge is the 10-20% who, stressed and overworked, will be just as likely to ignore this contract as any other. I would have liked to understand how the situation is changed compared to no rules at all…

ButlerianJihad 3mo ago

As an educator, I found that the institution was often powerless to prevent or detect cheating, because many, many applicants are highly motivated by perverse incentives. Many students attend because it's a "piece of paper" that's mandatory for their career aspirations. They'll never get hired without the college cred, and so they need to grab it by any means necessary. It's often not their own money they're spending: it's a federal grant, a loan, or mommy and daddy pining to give the same or better opportunity to the next generation. So family pressure to achieve is often immense, and overwhelming to a child being shoved through this system. Other students, they already have a job and/or family, striving to get ahead and be upwardly mobile according to the American Dream, and so they simply don't have time for actual study or homework, but they paid tuition and purchased books, and these consumers need their product that they already invested in. Perverse incentives abound in higher education, and without removing those or reforming the system, you'll never, ever stop or slow down the cheating, which is pervasive and rampant, believe you me.

lioeters 3mo ago

"Science" dot org, shilling for the highest bidder yet again. Keep the name of science out your mouth.

vitamark 3mo ago

I have no problem with AI as-is, but writing should be concise and to the point, and without heavy tweaking current models write pretentious hard-to-read stuff like this article. A person who has something to say often has trouble stopping writing. Outsourcing writing to AI then feels like the opposite, as if the author doesn't care but wants to just spew some content.

BobbyTables2 3mo ago

If there were a way an AI could generate output only based on the student’s own knowledge, it could be somewhat beneficial... Unfortunately that’s not how it works… Long ago, WordPerfect’s grammar checker showed me my writing flaws and helped me improve. Pasting a poorly written report and getting a dramatically restructured report wouldn’t be as instructive, even if the final result looked “better”.

moi2388 3mo ago

I like how professors are all anti AI but had no problems with group work in which at least one student usually didn’t do anything

HomeDeLaPot 3mo ago

This seems key: "So, I now limit written papers to two pages and base students’ grades more heavily on oral discussions of their work, which allows me to probe their thought process and challenge their decisions." Oral discussions. That's probably the way education should work, but it requires the professor to spend time talking to each student individually, so it might not scale to large classes with hundreds of students.

3dedb728-3f77 3mo ago

Why are so many articles like this one? It read like an ads. Why push an ads?