10 ms·
AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
https://archive.is/w1eng https://archive.is/w1eng
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618
- 2716057 2mo agohttps://archive.is/w1eng https://archive.is/w1eng
- andsoitis 2mo agoMoneyshot: "The results are eye-opening. After six months, pupils using ai saw their average homework score rise by 18% across all subjects. The time they took to complete each assignment fell from an average of 64 minutes to 45. But come exam time, the same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not called on ai’s help. Homework scores once predicted exam performance; now those who score highest are, perversely, more likely to do worse in exams." Study design: "David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where ai adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group."
- magicalhippo 2mo ago> Homework scores once predicted exam performance As with most training the journey is the point, not the destination. That said, I think smart use of AI could help. It could explain concepts in a way that might help you understand better, it could probe your knowledge in a more dynamic way by tailoring questions, and so on. This requires the AI be restrained by some harness, not free to write down the answers for you.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- oblio 2mo ago> This requires the AI be restrained by some harness How would this magic harness look like and why would anyone use it?
- jedberg 2mo ago"I need help with my homework, but I don't want answers, just guidance on how to get to the answer". Put that in your agents.md.
- oblio 2mo agoI'm way beyond homework, but I do appreciate the compliment on seeming young! I meant: what's going to stop the average lazy student from ignoring whatever harness the university recommends and instead use an unrestricted LLM, thus learning nothing?
- jedberg 2mo ago> what's going to stop the average lazy student from ignoring whatever harness the university recommends and instead use an unrestricted LLM, thus learning nothing? Nothing until they start failing exams and maybe seeing the error of their ways. My suggestions wasn't for you, it was for the smart student who wants to use AI to enhance their learning but not have it do all the work. But cheating isn't new. People have been cheating in school for centuries. It's easier now, but the consequences were always the same. At some point the chickens come home to roost and you pay the piper.
- oblio 2mo ago> But cheating isn't new. People have been cheating in school for centuries. It's easier now, but the consequences were always the same. At some point the chickens come home to roost and you pay the piper. My concern is that with LLMs and above average bullshitting abilities, the chickens might never come home to roost.
- 1mo ago
- nxc18 2mo ago> help. It could explain concepts in a way that might help you understand better People say that all the time, but does anyone really think a lack of good explanations for things is a limiting factor in 2026? Or even 2010?
- magicalhippo 2mo agoBack when I was studying there were topics which I had a really hard time grasping. Having a personal tutor that I could ask specific questions and have a back and forth with would have helped a lot I think. At least the few times I did have such an opportunity that was definitely the case.
- sensanaty 2mo agoKids are, by and large, lazy however. Hell, adults are lazy, this isn't even an indictment on kids or even people in general, I think our bodies & brains are simply wired to seek the path of least resistance from an evolutionary POV. Kids won't be using LLM tooling as a personal tutor following some sort of Socratic method, they'll ask it to solve their home/coursework for them and blindly copy/paste the answer. Hell, they'll just manually copy down what's on their screen if copy/pasting isn't possible for whatever reason. Obviously exceptions exist, but I'd wager from being an ex-kid myself the type of kid who would genuinely use these tools for actual proper self-tutoring would be an extreme rarity.
- jedberg 2mo agoWhen I was in college, we had office hours with the prof and the TAs, we had group study sessions, and private tutors. Or you could ask your friends. All of those required going somewhere at a specific place and time and asking someone else to give up their time for you. AI gives you a way to get the same help without asking another human. Say of that what you will, but not everyone was comfortable asking other humans for help even back then.
- bendmorris 2mo agoYou also have your book and a wealth of online resources, which also don't require interacting with someone, and which have the same information the AI is trained on. Fundamentally nothing is different. We don't see positive outcomes from students using AI as an aid even if hypothetically it could be possible.
- mdrzn 2mo agoUse AI for homework, you will get it done faster and get a higher grade, and then get crushed on the exam.
- GPerson 2mo agoThe kids who used AI and studied for a similar amount of time as the non-AI high performers apparently had similar (slightly higher) performance. The kids who used AI and did poorly used the AI to do the homework for them (this is what the article says). I believe AI is basically an amplifier of bad and good. I’m cynical about the world and assume it will be used more for bad than good, but I don’t doubt some of the best people in every field will be using AI to amplify their work in good ways.
- the_real_cher 2mo agoThis is my thoughts as well! It makes smarter people smarter and dumb people dumber!
- doctorwho42 2mo agoAll at the cost of ... {List of negatives regarding the construction and powering of AI data centers }
- dan_ggggg 2mo agoThe social costs are worse.
- doctorwho42 2mo agoI dunno, concentrating the environmental impact of 20GW of gas based power generation would be the equivalent of 6-9 Million cars running... All in the space of a corner of a small city
- dan_ggggg 2mo agoThat sounds much worse than I had expected. Is this enough consumption to significantly affect the local price of gasoline? Edit: Why don't they have lower-emission power sources?
- tolugenius 2mo agoI know this study is focused in China but one thing I'd like to understand is the nuance in what kind of student is likely to always reach for ai for homework help as I think (especially in the US, can't speak for other countries) the varying powers that be that can determine the quality and type of education you can receive (does your country have means to buy textbooks per student or shared, do you have funds to give students ipads to take home or no, what sets the bar on how far curriculums can go, are teacher and faculty pay and incentives simply tied to student pass rates, etc.) and those do more in shaping what "use AI responsibly" will look like and why it's so different.
- jsisto 2mo agoi’m pretty sure there’s already a correlation between technology in the classroom and worse learning outcomes
- pjc50 2mo agoTaking a forklift to the gym increases the number on the bar, but mysteriously your gains go down.
- lapetitejort 2mo agoTo extend this analogy: Using the forklift as a spotter and to assist in loading weights increased gains. Then again, a human can do all those things, and provide real human connection.
- kermatt 2mo agoIt is stopping some of the adults I work with from learning. In the case of some management, is causing them to unlearn, forgetting about proper review and maintenance practices.
- jimmar 2mo agoIn my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.
- alpha_squared 2mo agoYour career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.
- oreally 2mo agoDisagree. School exams test for academia-readiness too. And sometimes the schools and lecturers are filled with ideology irrelevant to real work. Career exams tend to be a mix but a lot less ideology.
- phoghed 2mo agoFortune cookie ass statement. Your career is more akin to the totality of school than it is to any specific facet of it imo. The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
- alpha_squared 2mo ago> Fortune cookie ass statement. > The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time. To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
- phoghed 2mo agoAnd yet if nobody likes you your career is going to stall. If you’re annoying, if you smell bad, if you dress poorly, if you’re fat and ugly, just like in school you’re going to have worse career outcomes. And I could also call most of those things assignments instead of exams and nobody would bat an eye. Your analogy was both thoughtless and stands up to no scrutiny
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago[flagged]
- cyanydeez 2mo agoyou know we let social media companies cause massive harm over 2 decades; but clearly, this will be deifferent!
- add-sub-mul-div 2mo agoSure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine. (You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo agoHumans aren't going to be doing a better job of thinking and creativity in the long run compared to AI; there's fun in doing it for yourself, but that's not a great reason to force it on everyone, rather than just those who find it fulfilling. There'll be plenty of people who still think and create as a hobby, but if the AI can cover the creativity that the economy needs, why not let it? I'm pretty sure people will consume the creative output of AI, since it'll be better able to make things catered to precisely what they find interesting. Human creativity is on its way out.
- antonyt 2mo agoThese are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition. Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are. Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.
- zemo 2mo agoabolish homework
- GPerson 2mo agoThis is the answer. Many (all?) European schools don’t give homework (this is partly because of the way the grad programs work). It’s on the students to study in order to pass the (difficult) exams.
- Ajedi32 2mo agoSeems this did effectively abolish homework if AI is now doing it all for them. The result seems to be that fewer students pass the exams, not more. As with any skill, practice is necessary to achieve competence. If homework is no longer a viable way to force students to practice, you'll need to find some replacement, you can't just abolish it and expect there to be no negative consequences.
- GPerson 2mo agoThe replacement is students maturing into functional adults who learn they must study to pass exams, not to treat them like babies.
- Ajedi32 2mo ago> The replacement is students maturing into functional adults By what means? Have you got a magic wand that will turn 3rd graders into mature functional adults who will study on their own without homework?
- GPerson 2mo agoI’m talking about university students. I don’t think I third graders are turning into functional adults any time soon.
- 2mo ago
- johnnyApplePRNG 2mo ago[flagged]
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoSo your complaint is...it's boring? The point is to train the brain via repitition and iteration. If your goal is entertainment, I'm not sure what you are looking for.
- dan_ggggg 2mo agoThis site is flush with C students who are upset that they graduated before AI had the opportunity to destroy their learning experience.
- dgellow 2mo agoIt’s about having something engaging, not entertaining. As someone with ADHD, the difference between a homework that feels engaging and interesting and one that is a waste of time is massive. I wish I had learned the distinction and got my diagnostic when I was young, but I now see it clearly as I take courses as an adult.
- johnnyApplePRNG 1mo agoExactly! I actually did very well with my homework. I got into every university I applied to. I figured out how to deal with the boredom. But most of my friends couldn't.
- __mharrison__ 2mo agoYep, learning is hard work.
- dan_ggggg 2mo agoI don't like doing anything hard, which is why I outsource all of my thoughts to for-profit slop generators. Don't make any commentary on my intelligence or I'll get you banned.
- grahammccain 2mo agoGuess what this is probably fine. AI helps people do their work on a daily basis and probably makes them memorize less things. That’s how the world is moving. You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic. And we shouldn’t organize our society around memorizing things for exams.
- rektomatic 2mo agoGood exams don't just test memorization
- 0x457 2mo agoYup, when you find such exam please let us know.
- smohare 2mo ago[dead]
- ezst 2mo agoI had the privilege of being educated in several countries and cultures. This might come across as "your education system sucks", and that's essentially what it boils down to, but on the upside I'm truly sorry for you and will oppose a comment to your cynicism. Good exams test your ability to express coherent thoughts about the concepts you learned, and let you generalize upon them by having you use and combine them to solve cases and problems that were not those seen in the teaching material. You can even teach and test history that way, and make it much more insightful and captivating than a laundry list of dates and events (as I suppose was your case?)
- 0x457 2mo agoSame, but all the exams I ever took mostly tested your memory more than anything else. I don't think it's possible to test people at scale any other way.
- 2mo ago
- shuwix 2mo agoEducation sustem is not about the actual knowledge, but about training various aspects of the brain during kids development. So even memorizing literature have benefits, even though it doesn't bring any career use. If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.
- beambot 2mo agoMaybe. As the nature of assistive tools changes, so does pedagogy. Calculators are the easy example since most of us are (still) familiar. But there are others that were just as pronounced -- e.g. log tables and slide rules were transformational and instrumental at one time, and you've (probably) never used them. If you had used slide rules to solve your homework problems then were excluded from using them on exams, you'd see a similar effect. AI is a big change; pedagogy is going to change too.
- ezst 2mo ago> As the nature of assistive tools changes I mean, does it? The way I see it, the best LLMs have to offer is infinite patience (until they inevitably and unpredictably start to confabulate, which should be a gigantic red flag, anyhow), I don't see how LLMs can be used to explore teaching paradigms that haven't been explored before. We know pretty well from centuries of empirical experimentation how children's brains develop under different stimuli. It's not exactly something the software industry needed to "hack".
- beambot 1mo ago"Does it?" - Yes? Did you learn arithmetic with log & exponent tables, or just calculators?
- ezst 1mo agoThat's not answering my question, what precisely do LLM enable in ways of educating children that hasn't been thoroughly studied before? What role do you want to give chatbots in the complex framework of child brain development? How do you back it up?
- criddell 2mo agoFor some of the classes my kids were in, the lessons and homework time were reversed. Learning the material (using the text book and videos) was what they had to do at night and class time was spent working through problems or applying the material in some way.
- ekjhgkejhgk 2mo agoInteresting. Ages?
- criddell 2mo agoThis was probably middle school.
- ekjhgkejhgk 2mo agoWhat do you think about it? I think that the ability to study by yourself is probably the most valuable thing one could get from school and most kids usually don't. Your setup would suggest that demanding that a kids know how to study by themselves is going mainstream...? Your answer - middle school - I find it extremely young for this, which is extra interesting.
- criddell 2mo agoIMHO, my kid was assigned way too much homework. One year I eventually told her to do some amount per class (I think it was 45 minutes) and then be done with it so that she would have time for sports and family stuff. She was spending 4 or 5 hours every night on homework and this was in 4th grade. That year I sent an email to her teacher to let them know that I'm the one responsible for her not doing all the work and if that's a problem, we need to talk. It wasn't a problem. The one class that was flipped was a relief because she could breeze through the lesson much faster than would normally be spent on it in class and the amount of time on exercises was limited to the class time slot.
- ako 2mo ago
- josefritzishere 2mo agoI think we need to accept that AI causes cognitive decline, like Alzheimer's. For an Adult this may be manageable, but in a young brain, this is detrimental.
- OroPla 2mo agoI remember reading about people talking how writing and reading books leads to cognitive decline because people won't need to remember things anymore. Pretty sure the way social media is designed contributes more to short attention spans and atrophy of the cerebral cortex.
- dgellow 2mo agoThe fact people were wrong in the past doesn’t mean it’s wrong with regards to AI
- pessimizer 2mo agoAnd they were not wrong. It's just that being able to consult with the dead, the distant, and your own past was an offsetting benefit.
- graemep 2mo agoThere was a decline in brain size that greatly predated widespread literacy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-has-been-shrinking-and-no-one-quite-knows-why https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240517-the-human-brai...
- OroPla 1mo agoAlternative view: the human brain did never decrease in size: https://www.unlv.edu/news/release/unlv-research-no-human-brain-did-not-shrink-3000-years-ago https://www.unlv.edu/news/release/unlv-research-no-human-bra... I have no idea which position is correct, but both can't be true.
- josefritzishere 2mo ago
- francisofascii 2mo agoAre all of our LeetCode scores down, too? We should probably code the old fashioned way periodically to ensure we still "got it".
- addag 2mo ago[dead]
- OroPla 2mo agoThis feels like the calculator debate all over again. Yes, using a calculator leads to worse outcomes in your learning. But also, yes, everyone always carries a calculator on their person 24/7 these days and you'll never be as fast and as accurate as a calculator. I think it would have been kinda cool if you could have unlocked the privilege of using a calculator in school through good grades in math class. Prove you can do what the tool can, then you get to use it. Would have also provided at least one incentive for students to get good grades in at least one class.
- graemep 2mo ago> Yes, using a calculator leads to worse outcomes in your learning. Does it? https://www.jstor.org/stable/749255 https://www.jstor.org/stable/749255
- OroPla 1mo agoOffloading problems makes it so you do not have to solve them. If you don't have to solve a problem, your brain does not have that work to do. Your brain working less means it has less opportunities to train. The consequence is worse cognitive abilities which is tied to worse learning outcomes. - From your link: > Sustained calculator use in Grade 4 appears to hinder the development of basic skills in average students. It noted the following positive outcome: > apparently improves the average student's basic skills with paper and pencil, both in working exercises and in problem solving But this only measured the outcome for solving math. Yes, offloading problems will make it easier to solve problems, at the cost of not training your brain, which leads to worse learning outcomes across all subjects.
- zadikian 2mo agoYou do sometimes get to unlock it by being allowed to use calculators in more advanced classes
- yipinwong 2mo agoThe article does not relate AI usage for homework to exam score drops. It tries to link them together with no obvious cause and effect. The score could have dropped due to worse environment at schools or kids who were stuck at home studying online and now in physical locations could not adapt fast enough (meaning, possibly just temporary drops). We do not yet have enough metrics gathered yet. This type of article bashing AI for the root of any problems, I find it appalling without any evidence. It's nothing but a conjecture.
- dang 2mo ago(This was originally posted in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389565, which has a different article. We've since merged the threads.)
- djeastm 2mo agoThey left 20% of the 87,000 students as a control group. Is that not enough to allow for differences in environment, etc?
- closetheloopdev 2mo agoStudents seem to optimize for local maxima/short-term rewards (homework scores) at the expense of the global maximum/long-term rewards (learning).
- ezst 2mo agoWhich was pretty much the whole damn premise of needing a teacher to begin with. What a surprise!
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- lxe 2mo agoIf you structure learning in such a way that makes learning just a means to some end, and overindex on that end being the ultimate goal, that's what you get. This is a pedagogical problem that AI merely exposed. Educators need to figure out How to make students choose the scenic route instead of having them optimize for the most efficient completion of a task.
- Nevin1901 2mo agoSchool has always been about creating compliant workers, not educating people. They will double down on "performing the right things" and "morals" while the economy will continue on its K shaped path as AI gets more capable.
- ezst 2mo agoCould it be that you vastly overgeneralize? While there's no perfect education system, many are much better than the nightmare you describe.
- mettamage 2mo agoYea, also the programs are too different. My psychology bachelor felt like a tea party. My computer science master was 60 hours per week during the hardest courses (which were supposed to go for 20 hours per week - so I could only do one course if it was at this level). My game design master felt more like we were dumped into an art school masquerading as a psychology/CS master but it really was art school. My information science bachelor felt like the only "normal" study program. All of this was at university of which 3 of them were at the same university. Especially the artsy game design program definitely did not feel like it was preparing me to be a cog in some giant corporate wheel.
- lxe 2mo ago[dead]
- tancop 2mo agoAll AI did here is exposed an old problem in education. Kids are expected to get everything perfectly for the first time but a lot of them don't so the class gets easier next year to keep up pass rates. We need to restructure the system to treat failure as a signal instead of a disaster. Grades should come from hard randomized exams with unlimited retakes so one bad day won't hurt you. Homework should be optional material for self study, evaluated by teachers if you choose to do it but never forced. Hold back students for individual classes instead of a whole grade so failing one can't ruin your social life and teachers are more willing to do it. F students will realize they have to study, start actually learning and then pass on the second time. No big deal. It happened to my friends in college, no reason they can't do it in high schools. Discipline is a skill and it's one you have to get from experience. If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.
- doctorpangloss 2mo ago> If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail. this rhetoric is pretending to be an alternative to coercion. IMO the ideas you are talking about are well trodden and are still coercion nonetheless.
- alightsoul 2mo agoCoercion explains it perfectly. A lot of kids see no future because of the environment they live in, so they have exactly zero motivation to study
- grog454 2mo agoI could be mistaken but my interpretation is that "studying for your own good" is being contrasted with "studying so you don't fail". If you actually fail students, they'll have a second motivation beyond trusting some authority figure's advice. Namely consequences.
- deckar01 2mo ago
- AlwaysBetOnJS 2mo agoI used to skip homework in high school because it was boring and cut into my personal life outside of school (including my job) but I would always do very well on tests. Then I stopped caring about tests too. I did the same thing through college. The only reason they passed me and I got a degree is that I built the school’s website and I built personal ecommerce sites for the head of art and his wife to sell their paintings. I haven’t done shit since like 7th grade. Worked at Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, same behavior there - did basically nothing for them while making thousands off my games on App Store. Fuck authority
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoThe homework helps the teacher track their performance/progress. When the signal is removed, this is what you get.
- mpalczewski 2mo agoWhen you get out into the real world, what will matter is how effectively you use AI. When you are done with school, you can take the "exam" using AI. The problem is that teaching is trying to teach skills that are no longer relevant and is always behind what the latest going on in the industry. Every time without fail you got interns, who after two years at stanford would learn more in the 3 months on a google internship than in those two years at stanford. They learn useless shit. My own experience is that college is fun. You can spend the time wisely, but school stuff, is not what makes you money. Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy and make colleges under write them. The problem will get solved quickly.
- nick486 2mo agoWay before AI, the problem was very similar - universities do not teach practically useful stuff. Its been a permanent complaint about the education system, really, at least for the last 50 years. AI just gave the students a way to dodge the slog. But university was never intended to teach the bleeding edge. That would really be impossible in practice. Pre-phd, it is supposed to teach ways to efficiently attack a problem. you can take a bunch of "play courses", and succeeding at any of those requires pretty much only that one skill. Nowadays, the challenge they face, is to keep teaching "problem attack methods" in a way that can't be trivialized by AI. Though fundamentally, if you go to university, and evade learning the one thing you can learn there - thats your loss.
- 1-6 2mo agoTeachers have become proctors and not educators.
- theaiedge 2mo ago[flagged]
- theaiedge 2mo ago[flagged]
- baud9600 2mo agoI am waiting for AI Viva Voce (“AVV”). I am really surprised we aren’t hearing more about this idea? Try it for yourself by making a prompt like this (adapt as needed): Pretend I am an undergraduate student of Computer Science. I am learning about early microprocessors from the 1970s. I want you to ask me an examination question as if you were doing a viva voce exam with me, to test my understanding of concepts. I want you to receive my answer and then based on what I said I want you to ask me a more specific question to probe my understanding. Repeat this interaction up to 5 times. Then grade my understanding so far, by giving me a pass, merit, credit, or distinction. Can you explain how you arrive at the grade based on my answers and your expectation of undergraduate knowledge of microprocessor theory?
- idontwantthis 2mo agoI've tried stuff like this, but the problem is that you don't know if it's answers are correct, and more importantly, you don't know if its questions are on base or not. Plus its too easy to go off on tangents, especially when you ask it questions to clarify. You can get some more success by writing down a framework beforehand, but openended dialog is still not a good way to learn with AI, from my experience.
- baud9600 2mo agoGood points. I’ve tried this a few times and I’ve been impressed by the dialogue. Given this was a very simple prompt, I am convinced a more precise version could be developed, including a rubric, a library of course content, starter questions and other guidance to the AI. I haven’t seen anything like this and schools / universities seem to be “struggling” with AI, which has me wondering why not embrace LLMs for learning and assessment, like this?
- Avicebron 2mo agoI mean, everyone I know has been using socratic dialogue for months to aid understanding, this seems like a variation of that. The issue is that if the answer is too easy to obtain it's hard to have the discipline not to cheat.
- tehnoslow 2mo agoHonestly I wouldn't demonize AI in education. When we were students we were forbidden from using calculators, then the internet and now it's become the norm. It's the same with AI, I think. AI has already become a part of our lives. The important thing is just teaching children how to use it correctly.
- jmcgough 2mo agoUnlike AI, calculator use has been studied and shown to be useful for math education. Our understanding of these things evolved over time, however the results of this study are concerning.
- mmargenot 2mo agoGlad to have scientific results on this, though in my view you could get this from first principles. Homework is onerous but it forces you to learn the material and get it into a configuration that works in your head, which you then validate with the exam.
- mmargenot 2mo agoas a fun aside here from the abstract it does come down to how you use it: > AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses. If the pure completion time of homework goes drops significantly with an LLM tool, I suspect these students are spending the extra time turning the material over in different ways to internalize, which is interesting.
- AlEzlive 2mo agoIf others studies tend toward this result, a question comes to my mind: it is a problem with AI or our educational system? or both? I would like to have some comments...
- r0m4n0 2mo agoI know someone who pasted all their six sigma certification questions directly into an AI tool and they got a 98% on their exam. Seems like it would help their exam score too if they were allowed to use it on both the homework and exams /s
- 1saadcodes 2mo agoAI itself is not the problem imo. The core issue is basically outsourcing your entire brain to the LLM and never trying to solve a problem yourself When I was in school there were multiple instances where I would be stuck on a problem for nearly an hr but I always learnt something from it. They key I think is to accurately identify when to and when not to use AI
- est 2mo agoI find we are using AI wrong. AI shouldn't be "helping" with homework. AI should be the homework. Start with any topic or problem, students should be encouraged interact with AI, and learn stuff using Socratic method. Teachers should rate the chat session instead. And iterate the process to high profeciency.
- Ozzie-D 1mo ago[flagged]
- devtaste 1mo ago[flagged]
- Hnrobert42 1mo agoIt's an ad hominem attack, I know, but why am I not surprised that the Economist loves this? True or not, it supports a narrative of "kids these days...", of a morally bankrupt educational system, of indulgent adults spoiling children, of just desserts to the wicked and lazy. Again, I'm not saying the article is right or wrong. I'm saying I'm skeptical because it so tidily aligns with the Economist's editorial world view.
- visarga 1mo agoShould have let the kids use AI during exam too, later in life they will be solving tasks with AI not manually. Just make the test questions difficult enough even with AI. I see our current approach like a driving school training its students at fast running.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- qeternity 1mo agoCollege stopped being about getting an education a long time ago. It's just a low pass filter for the job market. Students aren't actually interested in learning anything, they have been condition for a long time to jump through the hoops. It would be much better if we actually returned to exam and performance based evaluation of students, and stopped giving everyone As just for trying hard. But parents look at college fees as buying their kid a job opportunity, and so grade inflation has basically ruined the SNR of academic performance for all but the lowest performers.
- stephbook 1mo agoI meet a lot of noj-college people and let's just say, "just a low pass filter" is still A LOT of value.
- Nition 1mo agoAlthough surely highpass filter would make more sense in the analogy here?
- dag100 1mo agoIt depends on college attendance. In developed countries, it is a low-excluding - or the inverse of a low-pass - filter as most graduate, while in developing countries it is a high-pass filter as few have the resources to reach an undergraduate level of education.
- Nition 1mo agoI'm confused by your point here. You seem to be saying it's a highpass in developing countries and also a highpass in developed countries?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- bsenftner 1mo agoNow, what this tells me is that LLM AIs can supply the knowledge of the moment for the prepared human person, and the person does not need to learn that knowledge, for a extremely large class of problems. Which is fantastic for capitalism and business in general, and very very bad for humanity in general.
- mangecoeur 1mo agoTo the surprise of no one who’s doing any teaching these days.
- 13639366668 1mo ago[flagged]
- mycall 1mo agoWhat if learners used teacher AIs such that the AIs would keep track (and submit to class teacher) of the scoring for different "mini exams" it put the learner through, so in effect better preparing for exams.
- andy_ppp 1mo agoI was thinking how tricky it would be to learn to program now, honestly a sense of laziness is one of the reasons I learned programming - so that I could automate away repetitive tasks. Our generation might be the last people who can actually program properly, everyone will just learn some basic architecture and point the AI in vaguely the right direction.
- rzerowan 1mo agoSeems if any assignments are to be handed out they should be structured in such a way that takes into account the potential of LLM use. Additionally to make the output (hardcopy? handwritten?oral presentation?) in such a way that even if LLms are used at the very least some part will be forcibly undertaken by the students in preparation of finals/real life. Open book exams existed for a long time and even take home assignments where the net was usable to complete the tasks. Difference was one actually had to do the reseach and learn something along the way regarding research skills or the topic itself. LLms just make the automation and laziness with a lower barrier to polished output.
- KrasynEMR 1mo ago[flagged]
- threethirtytwo 1mo agoDo the exam scores matter when in the real world ai is the one handling the tasks. Why are we measuring human exam scores.
- zeryx 1mo agoI full heartedly recommend anyone who wants to learn, to use the Socrates skill, and then build a daily 1 hour curriculum that you will tackle. It's painful and not pleasant, but it works quite well when to don't have a teacher and want to learn something really hard and complicated
- tarikguney 1mo ago“ Those who used AI but spent as long on assignments as non-users paid little penalty.” What is the point of using of AI if that is not going to speed up learning.
- edtechdev 1mo agoHere's research showing the same exact effect 15 years ago, except it's about homework copying: https://news.mit.edu/2010/homework-copying-0318 https://news.mit.edu/2010/homework-copying-0318 Students who copied their homework more saw their grades go down more throughout the semester. A/B students became C/D students. A name people use for this phenomenon now with AI is cognitive offloading. I coincidentally took advantage of the cheap DeepSeek Flash pricing the past couple of weeks to compile & synthesize a knowledge base/wiki of hundreds of educational AI research studies like this one here: https://edtechdev.github.io/aied/ https://edtechdev.github.io/aied/ Here's the summary of this article: https://edtechdev.github.io/aied/articles/stromberg-generative-ai-learning-penalty-secondary-2026/ https://edtechdev.github.io/aied/articles/stromberg-generati...
- bitwize 1mo ago"Won't that be grand! Computers and programs will start thinking, and the people will stop!" —Walter Gibbs, Tron
- naveen99 1mo agoHomework should just be practice tests, self scored.