3 ms·

The scary thing is that 81% of AI users in this study were determined to be "outsourcing" their homework to the LLMs - and the rate increases the more exposure

The scary thing is that 81% of AI users in this study were determined to be "outsourcing" their homework to the LLMs - and the rate increases the more exposure they had to LLMs. The "slightly higher" performance is based on statistically insignificant samples (between 4 and 20 students, depending on the context, out of the total population of 26,000): https://bsky.app/profile/benjaminjriley.bsky.social/post/3mtj7fc5oas2o https://bsky.app/profile/benjaminjriley.bsky.social/post/3mt...

moffkalast 1mo ago
I thought that it was generally accepted by now that homework in the volumes that it is being assigned in the modern day was not found to be beneficial in any significant way in the first place? Maybe once all students start outsourcing it to AI it might finally die like it deserves to. People these days grow up with almost no free time for themselves, it's all school, sports/extracurriculars or homework nonstop. All worker drone and no play makes for an increasingly dysfunctional society.
- idiotsecant 1mo ago
  All play and no work makes for an even more dysfunctional society. Kids need to do their homework, both to train their minds but also to develop integrity and work ethic. Being able to diligently work toward a distant goal is not something you're born with.
  - j4yav 1mo ago
    But I keep reading here on HN about the brave future where everyone carries around a little box that you put coins in whenever you need to know how to compose a song, solve a problem, write some code, etc, and it will give you your answer you can take credit for without actually wasting time on learning or work ethic.
  - yoz-y 1mo ago
    I think there are better ways to teach this particular skill than homework. But I agree that practicing is very important. In hindsight I think that the concept of TD (classes where you only do exercises and have a teacher guide you if needed) in France is really good. (This is not the same thing as lab classes)
- dataflow 1mo ago
  > I thought that it was generally accepted by now that homework in the volumes that it is being assigned in the modern day was not found to be beneficial in any significant way in the first place? Citation needed? I have no clue where you got this from. I hadn't even heard of it as a conjecture, let alone as something anyone accepted, let alone as generally accepted...
  - heddhunter 1mo ago
    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00220973.2012.745469 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00220973.2012.74...
    - dataflow 1mo ago
      Before I dive into the paper: the claim was that some effect was generally accepted, not that a study was performed on it and that it drew a particular conclusion. Is this actually going to establish the former or are we just assuming that the existence of a study implies general acceptance of its conclusion?
- vkou 1mo ago
  How do you expect students to learn anything when: 1. They don't do any homework. 2. All the in-class time is split between the teacher babysitting and playing social worker to problem students, and lecturing, with little to no opportunity to actually practice what they've learned? I understand that some students don't have home environments that are conductive to doing homework well. I understand that some students are enrolled in five hours a day of extracurricular university-application-padding activities. I understand that some students have incredibly poor screen discipline and impulse control. But I don't understand that anyone has magically figured out how to teach complicated things to students, and have it stick without them spending a lot of time practicing what they are learning. As anyone who has tried to do something hard knows, the first step to being good at something is to spend a lot of time being pretty shit at it. A student who has written and received feedback on 500,000 written words is going to be way better at writing than that same student who wrote 50,000, just like someone who has put 5,000 hours of focused practice into playing the piano is going to be better than my dumb ass, who has only put 100 hours in. (If you found the solution to get good at stuff without practicing it, I'd love to get good at piano without putting any homework in on it.)
  - sebastiennight 1mo ago
    > I'd love to get good at piano without putting any homework in on it I'm pretty sure there is a way to fine-tune this [0] to auto-complete away any of your hesitations or mistakes :) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373456
    - vkou 1mo ago
      I suppose I could always place my phone that's playing Rachmaninoff somewhere under a pile of sheet music, while I mash the keys on an unplugged electric piano.
  - Broken_Hippo 1mo ago
    You don't have to do a lot of repetitive, boring exercises to learn piano. Once you learn how to hold your hands a little, read music, and learn where the notes are, you can simply try songs you like, and switch songs when you please. On other instruments, you might not need to read music (I've met many guitarists and drummers that cannot read music, nor do they use printed music to play - and blind folks can play instruments too) Art is similar. You can look up skills as necessary to try to make the piece you want. Adult art learners often just start with the type of art they want to make. In both cases, the finished piece might not be the quality you want, but in neither case are you necessarily doing repetitive stuff to learn (playing scales over and over or sketching the same bits over and over). You can retry a piece or move on - the skills will still carry over. None of these reflect homework in school. Now, I know I graduated school decades ago, but math homework was repetitive with seemingly no real-world application and absolutely no help if I needed it. I took a math course online some years later and it was much better: Instant feedback if I got the problem wrong and instant help to walk through the problem if I needed it - then a different but similar problem was given for the homework. This was actual practice in ways traditional homework wasn't. Homework in the traditional sense isn't practice - they are all miniature tests that affect your grade. I didn't have to practice writing - I just did the papers assigned and rushed through them. You can grade papers for other subjects on prose and grammar instead of just doing it for language courses. You don't have to read classics to read better if you just read a variety of things you are interested in. You'll read plenty of boring things for other subjects and get that sort of practice. With most of this stuff, having actual homework isn't necessary as long as students are given time for practice. Practice is what makes you good at something, not homework, and practice can take many forms.
- ebiederm 1mo ago
  What I remember hearing is that exercises and practice are needed to transform words on the page to something you know and master. What I remember being questioned is does it make sense to do those exercises as homework or would they be better in school. Or on the flip side should school get out early like 11 or noon, like I think the german gymnasium does and have all the exercises as homework. The US system where children get out of school at 15:30 and still have a bunch of homework seems a little lopsided someplace. The 3 month break in-between school years is definitely questionable. I think the answer is a complex one because it intersects with personality and neurodivergence. Depending on who you are and your family situation any form of homework can be a real challenge. Not because of what you are studying but because of how difficult it is to sit down and do anything you aren't passionate about. Certainly anyone with an executive function disability will have that challenge.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
- jkhdigital 1mo ago
  The problem was never the volume of homework, it is the targeting and specificity. Learning happens through repetitive deliberate practice, full stop. You can’t learn through osmosis; effort is required. Industrialized mass education has always suffered from a unit economics problem: the labor required to assign individually-tailored problem sets and manually grade them in the volume needed for most students to actually learn the material is prohibitively expensive.
- bendmorris 1mo ago
  This study seems to have proven the opposite. Doing the work without AI resulted in higher exam scores.

moffkalast 1mo ago

I thought that it was generally accepted by now that homework in the volumes that it is being assigned in the modern day was not found to be beneficial in any significant way in the first place? Maybe once all students start outsourcing it to AI it might finally die like it deserves to. People these days grow up with almost no free time for themselves, it's all school, sports/extracurriculars or homework nonstop. All worker drone and no play makes for an increasingly dysfunctional society.

idiotsecant 1mo ago
All play and no work makes for an even more dysfunctional society. Kids need to do their homework, both to train their minds but also to develop integrity and work ethic. Being able to diligently work toward a distant goal is not something you're born with.
- j4yav 1mo ago
  But I keep reading here on HN about the brave future where everyone carries around a little box that you put coins in whenever you need to know how to compose a song, solve a problem, write some code, etc, and it will give you your answer you can take credit for without actually wasting time on learning or work ethic.
- yoz-y 1mo ago
  I think there are better ways to teach this particular skill than homework. But I agree that practicing is very important. In hindsight I think that the concept of TD (classes where you only do exercises and have a teacher guide you if needed) in France is really good. (This is not the same thing as lab classes)
dataflow 1mo ago
> I thought that it was generally accepted by now that homework in the volumes that it is being assigned in the modern day was not found to be beneficial in any significant way in the first place? Citation needed? I have no clue where you got this from. I hadn't even heard of it as a conjecture, let alone as something anyone accepted, let alone as generally accepted...
- heddhunter 1mo ago
  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00220973.2012.745469 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00220973.2012.74...
  - dataflow 1mo ago
    Before I dive into the paper: the claim was that some effect was generally accepted, not that a study was performed on it and that it drew a particular conclusion. Is this actually going to establish the former or are we just assuming that the existence of a study implies general acceptance of its conclusion?
vkou 1mo ago
How do you expect students to learn anything when: 1. They don't do any homework. 2. All the in-class time is split between the teacher babysitting and playing social worker to problem students, and lecturing, with little to no opportunity to actually practice what they've learned? I understand that some students don't have home environments that are conductive to doing homework well. I understand that some students are enrolled in five hours a day of extracurricular university-application-padding activities. I understand that some students have incredibly poor screen discipline and impulse control. But I don't understand that anyone has magically figured out how to teach complicated things to students, and have it stick without them spending a lot of time practicing what they are learning. As anyone who has tried to do something hard knows, the first step to being good at something is to spend a lot of time being pretty shit at it. A student who has written and received feedback on 500,000 written words is going to be way better at writing than that same student who wrote 50,000, just like someone who has put 5,000 hours of focused practice into playing the piano is going to be better than my dumb ass, who has only put 100 hours in. (If you found the solution to get good at stuff without practicing it, I'd love to get good at piano without putting any homework in on it.)
- sebastiennight 1mo ago
  > I'd love to get good at piano without putting any homework in on it I'm pretty sure there is a way to fine-tune this [0] to auto-complete away any of your hesitations or mistakes :) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373456
  - vkou 1mo ago
    I suppose I could always place my phone that's playing Rachmaninoff somewhere under a pile of sheet music, while I mash the keys on an unplugged electric piano.
- Broken_Hippo 1mo ago
  You don't have to do a lot of repetitive, boring exercises to learn piano. Once you learn how to hold your hands a little, read music, and learn where the notes are, you can simply try songs you like, and switch songs when you please. On other instruments, you might not need to read music (I've met many guitarists and drummers that cannot read music, nor do they use printed music to play - and blind folks can play instruments too) Art is similar. You can look up skills as necessary to try to make the piece you want. Adult art learners often just start with the type of art they want to make. In both cases, the finished piece might not be the quality you want, but in neither case are you necessarily doing repetitive stuff to learn (playing scales over and over or sketching the same bits over and over). You can retry a piece or move on - the skills will still carry over. None of these reflect homework in school. Now, I know I graduated school decades ago, but math homework was repetitive with seemingly no real-world application and absolutely no help if I needed it. I took a math course online some years later and it was much better: Instant feedback if I got the problem wrong and instant help to walk through the problem if I needed it - then a different but similar problem was given for the homework. This was actual practice in ways traditional homework wasn't. Homework in the traditional sense isn't practice - they are all miniature tests that affect your grade. I didn't have to practice writing - I just did the papers assigned and rushed through them. You can grade papers for other subjects on prose and grammar instead of just doing it for language courses. You don't have to read classics to read better if you just read a variety of things you are interested in. You'll read plenty of boring things for other subjects and get that sort of practice. With most of this stuff, having actual homework isn't necessary as long as students are given time for practice. Practice is what makes you good at something, not homework, and practice can take many forms.
ebiederm 1mo ago
What I remember hearing is that exercises and practice are needed to transform words on the page to something you know and master. What I remember being questioned is does it make sense to do those exercises as homework or would they be better in school. Or on the flip side should school get out early like 11 or noon, like I think the german gymnasium does and have all the exercises as homework. The US system where children get out of school at 15:30 and still have a bunch of homework seems a little lopsided someplace. The 3 month break in-between school years is definitely questionable. I think the answer is a complex one because it intersects with personality and neurodivergence. Depending on who you are and your family situation any form of homework can be a real challenge. Not because of what you are studying but because of how difficult it is to sit down and do anything you aren't passionate about. Certainly anyone with an executive function disability will have that challenge.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
jkhdigital 1mo ago
The problem was never the volume of homework, it is the targeting and specificity. Learning happens through repetitive deliberate practice, full stop. You can’t learn through osmosis; effort is required. Industrialized mass education has always suffered from a unit economics problem: the labor required to assign individually-tailored problem sets and manually grade them in the volume needed for most students to actually learn the material is prohibitively expensive.
bendmorris 1mo ago
This study seems to have proven the opposite. Doing the work without AI resulted in higher exam scores.