At this point, I'd be happy to send my child to an entirely analog school. No computers, just books, pencils and paper.
One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment.<p>Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself? My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. It's a dilemma that an increasing number of honest students will face, unfortunately.
I wouldn't mind seeing education return to its roots of being about learning instead of credentialization. In an age where having a degree is increasingly meaningless in part due to many places simply becoming thinly veiled diploma treadmills (which are somehow nonetheless accredited), this is probably more important than ever. This is doubly so if the AI impact extremists end up being correct.<p>So why is the issue you described an issue? Because it's about a grade. And the reason that's relevant is because that credential will then be used to determine where she can to to university which, in turn, is a credential that will determine her breadth of options for starting her career, and so on. But why is this all done by credentials instead of simple demonstrations of skill? What somebody scored in a high school writing class should matter far less than the output somebody is capable of producing when given a prompt and an hour in a closed setting. This is how you used to apply to colleges. Here [1], for instance, is Harvard's exam from 1869. If you pass it, you're in. Simple as that.<p>Obviously this creates a problem of institutions starting to 'teach the test', but with sufficiently broad testing I don't see this as a problem. If a writing class can teach somebody to write a compelling essay based on an arbitrary prompt, then that was simply a good writing class! As an aside this would also add a major selling point to all of the top universities that offer free educational courses online. Right now I think 'normal' people are mostly disinterested in those because of the lack of widely accepted credentials, which is just so backwards - people are actively seeking to maximize credentials over maximizing learning.<p>This is one of the very few places I think big tech in the US has done a great job. Coding interviews can be justifiably critiqued in many ways, but it's still a much better system than raw credentialization.<p>[1] - <a href="https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...</a>
>What somebody scored in a high school writing class should matter far less than the output somebody is capable of producing when given a prompt and an hour in a closed setting<p>Sure, but it takes < 1 second to read a GPA.
In a world where some but not all programs are “diploma treadmills,” you would expect that the reputation of the bad credentials would go down and the good credentials would go up. In some sense if the credentials were really being used (and not just as a perfunctory first pass elimination), you’d expect the most elite programs to have the highest signal to noise ratio. But the market doesn’t seem to respond to changes in credentialing capability (by hiring more from programs that start focusing on the “right” things to test). Instead it’s really just a background check.
> This is one of the very few places I think big tech in the US has done a great job. Coding interviews can be justifiably critiqued in many ways, but it's still a much better system than raw credentialization.<p>Just so we're clear, the coding tests are in <i>addition</i> to credentialisation. I'll never forget when I worked at Big Tech (from Ireland) and I would constantly hear recruiters talk about the OK school list (basically the Ivy league). Additionally, I remember having to check the University a candidate had attended before she had an interview with one of our directors.<p>He was fine with her, because she had gone to Oxford. Honestly, I'm surprised that I was able to get hired there given all this nonsense.
My experience with big tech has been the polar opposite - nobody has ever cared and I've never tried to hide it either. Which one was it if you don't mind me asking?<p>I'm a drop out (didn't finish BSc) from a no name Northern European university and I've worked at or gotten offers from:<p>- Meta<p>- Amazon<p>- Google<p>- Microsoft<p>- Uber<p>- xAI<p>+ some unicorns that compete with FAANG+ locally.<p>I didn't include some others that have reached out for interviews which I declined at the time. The lack of a degree has literally never come up for me.
If anything, it will get worse. There was a deficit of tech workers, from now on, there will be an excess. Which means that differentiators will be even more important.
That's an absolutely dreadful exam. Would you mind explaining the point you wanted to make with it?
Always stunned by how much teachers can accuse without proof and invert the "innocent until proven guilty".<p>Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works" (or at least should work). So should the teachers.<p>Student unions and similar entities should exist and be ready to intervene to help students in such situations.<p>This is nothing new, AI will just make this happen more often, revealing how stupid so many teachers are. But when someone spent thousands for a tool, which purports to be reliable, and is so quick to use, how can an average person resist it? The teacher is as lazy as the cheaters they intend to catch.
Student unions tend to focus on all sorts of other issues, I wouldn't trust them to handle cases like this.<p>The only way to reliably prevent the use of AI tools without punishing innocent students is to monitor the students while they work.<p>Schools can either do that by having essays be written on premise, either by hand or by using computers managed by the school.<p>But students that are worried that they will be targeted can also do this themselves, by setting up their phone to film them while working.<p>And if they do this, and the teacher tries to punish someone who can prove they wrote the essay themselves, either the teacher or the school should hopefully learn that such tools can't be trusted.
It’s strange watching people put so much faith in these so called “AI detection tools”. Nobody really knows how they work yet they’re treated like flawless judges. In practice they’re black boxes that quietly decide who gets flagged for “fraud”, and because the tool said so everyone pretends it must be true. The result is a neat illusion that all the “cheaters” were caught, when in reality the system is mostly just picking people at random and giving the process a fake sense of certainty.<p>Bizzare and unfair
In the United States, we all used to take a required course called Civics.<p>We learned how government and justice worked.
> Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works"<p>And to add to that, there should be a justice system there. The idea of due process is laughable in most educational settings.
When I was in college, there was a cheating scandal for the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam.<p>The professor noticed it (presumably via seeing poor "show your work") and gave zero points on the question to everyone. And once you went to complain about your grade, she would ask you to explain the answer there in her office and work through the problem live.<p>I thought it was a clever and graceful way to deal with it.
I think this kind of approach is the root of (the US's) hustle culture. Instead of receiving a fair score, you get a zero and need to "hustle" and challenge your teacher.<p>The teacher effectively filtered out the shy boys/girls who are not brave enough to "hustle." Gracefully.
Nah, the professor wasn't American (as is often the case) and she had a tricky situation. She had strong reasons to believe people were cheating and had to sort out who did and who did not in a swift way.<p>This has nothing to do with American Hustle culture and just with that professor's judgment.
I don't even think it is about shyness. Some professors do not respond well to being challenged on every possible exam question.<p>The time spent challenging exam grades is usually better spent studying for the next exam. I've never gotten a significant grade improvement from it.
This is completely incorrect. Hustle culture is what made kids cheat in the first place.<p>She didn't ask them to challenge them, she asked them additional questions. The test already asks them questions.<p>If you are really shy, a culture where no one cheats is far better because your actual ability and intelligence shines through
> And once you went to complain about your grade
They had to challenge her first. So, yes, challenging her was the only way to get better grade. And you still knew im advance what questions are giing to be.<p>Cheaters and non cheaters were punished in exactly the same way. Effectively cheating gave you an advantage and being shy gave you disadvantage.
Only if she advertised that option somehow. I worked two jobs in college, I didn't take time off to go complain about my grades.
Lol, in 3rd grade algebra, a teacher called 2 of us in for cheating. She had us take the test again, I got the same exact horribly failing score (a 38%) and the cheater got a better score, so the teacher then knew who the cheater was. He just chose the wrong classmate to cheat of of.
I know the US has fallen behind in math, but where are you taking algebra in 3rd grade? We didn't get it until 8th..
I don't get it. If she called you too it was because your results were good, no? Who cheats to get a bad result?
I assume that the cheating student didn't know that he was copying answers from someone who was doing poorly. It was third graders after all; one wouldn't necessarily expect them to be able to pick the best target every time.
Oh. That would have never crossed my mind! So the cheater student was copying from GP who had worse results, and when they both redid it all by themselves the cheater answered correctly, and GP did not.<p>How the heck is that even possible? :o
The students had identical answers, I presume
Except the power imbalance: position, experience, social, etc. meant that the vast majority just took the zero and never complained or challenged the prof. Sounds like your typical out-of-touch academic who thought they were super clever.
It's an incredible abuse of power to intentionally mark innocent students' answers wrong when they're correct. Just to solve your own problem, that you may very well be responsible for.<p>Knowing the way a lot of professors act, I'm not surprised, but it's always disheartening to see how many behave like petty tyrants who are happy to throw around their power over the young.
This is a nice approach. The students who know the material, or even who manually prepare before seeing the prof achieve the objective of learning.
It's not great for the teacher though. They're the ones who will truly suffer from the proliferation of AI - increased complexity of work around spotting cheating 'solved' by a huge increase in time pressure. Faced with that teachers will have three options: accept AI detection as gospel without appeals and be accused of unfairness or being bad at the job by parents, spend time on appeals to the detriment of other duties leading to more accusations of being bad at the job, or leave teaching and get an easier (and probably less stressful and higher paid) job. Given those choices I'd pick the third option.
Or option 4 (a lot more likely in my opinion), pretend nothing is happening.
4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand.<p>Tests were created to save money, more students per teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually useful, method of talking to people to see if they understand what they've been taught.<p>You weren't asked to write an essay because someone wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've understood something
I really believe this is the way forward, but how do you make sure the AI is speaking to the student rather than to another AI impersonating the student? You could make it in person but that's a bit sad.
> 4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand<p>Personally I don't believe that any of the problems caused by AI are going to be solved by "more AI"
> Tests were created to save money<p>I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.
Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized.<p>The lesson of how to swim sometimes only comes in applying the learning.
Both can be true at the same time. You outlined the objective, the money is an extra constraint (and let's be honest, when isn't money an extra constraint?)
I agree. Most campuses use a product called Turnitin, which was originally designed to check for plagiarism. Now they claim it can detect AI-generated content with about 80% accuracy, but I don’t think anyone here believes that.
I had Turn It In mark my work as plagiarism some years ago and I had to fight for it. It was clear the teacher wasn’t doing their job and blindly following the tool.<p>What happened is that I did a Q&A worksheet but in each section of my report I reiterated the question in italics before answering it.<p>The reiterated questions of course came up as 100% plagiarism because they were just copied from the worksheet.
This matches my experience pretty well. My high school was using it 15 years ago and it was a spotty, inconsistent morass even back then. Our papers were turned in over the course of the semester, and late into the year you’d get flagged for “plagiarizing” your own earlier paper.
Funny how it's the teachers that are plagiarizing the work of the tools.
80% is catastrophic though. In a classroom of 30 all honest pupils, 6 will get a 0 mark because the software says its AI?
80% accuracy could mean 0 false negatives and 20% false positives.<p>My point is that accuracy is a terrible metric here and sensitivity, specificity tell us much more relevant information to the task at hand. In that formulation, a specificity < 1 is going to have false positives and it isn't fair to those students to have to prove their innocence.
That's more like the false positive rate and false negative rate.<p>If we're being literal, accuracy is (number correct guesses) / (total number of guesses). Maybe the folks at turnitin don't actually mean 'accuracy', but if they're selling an AI/ML product they should at least know their metrics.
It depends on their test dataset. If the test set was written 80% by AI and 20% by humans, a tool that labels every essay as AI-written would have a reported accuracy of 80%. That's why other metrics such as specificity and sensitivity (among many others) are commonly reported as well.<p>Just speaking in general here -- I don't know what specific phrasing TurnItIn uses.
The promise (not saying that it works) is probably that 20% of people who cheated will not get caught. Not that 20% of the work marked as AI is actually written by humans.
I suppose 80% means you don't give them a 0 mark because the software says it's AI, you only do so if you have other evidence reinforcing the possibility.
I think it means every time AI is used, it will detect it 80% of the time. Not that 20% of the class will marked as using AI.
> but I don’t think anyone here believes that.<p>All it takes is one moron with power and a poor understanding of statistics.
I have had Turnitin flag my work as plagiarism for quotes from the relevant text that were quite clearly indicated as quotes.<p>It's shit software for schools and teachers to cover their ass. Nothing more, and deserves no more attention.
Had a professor use this but it was student-led. We had to run it through ourselves and change our stuff enough to get a high enough mark to pass TurnItIn. Avoided the false allegations problems at least.
There have always been problems like this. I had a classmate who wrote poems and short stories since age 6. No teacher believed she wrote those herself. She became a poet, translator and writer and admitted herself later in life that she wouldn't have believed it herself.
> My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material.<p>This sounds like, a good solution? It’s the exception case, so shouldn’t be constant (false positives), although I suppose this fails if everyone cheats and everyone wants to claim innocence.
The oral discussion does not scale well in large classes. The solution is to stop using essays for evaluation, relying on (supervised) examinations instead.<p>Of course, there will be complaints from many students. However, as a prof for decades, I can say that some will prefer an exam-based solution. This includes the students who are working their way through university and don't have much time for busy-work, along with students who write their essays themselves and get lower grades than those who do not.
Seems like this could be practically addressed by teachers adopting the TSA's randomized screening. That is, roll some dice to figure out which student on a given assignment comes in either for the oral discussion or-- perhaps in higher grades-- to write the essay in realtime.<p>It should be way easier than TSA's goal because you don't need to <i>stop</i> cheaters. You instead just need to ensure that you <i>seed</i> skills into a minimal number of achievers so that the rest of the kids see what the <i>real</i> target of education looks like. Kids try their best not to learn, but when the need kicks in they learn <i>way</i> better spontaneously from their peers than any other method.<p>Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program in the first place.
> Kids try their best not to learn<p>Often it is more work to cheat than just learn it.
> Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program in the first place.<p>Pre-k is preschool aka kindergarten?<p>Is this really needed? It's really stressful for kids under 5 or 6 to read and is there a big enough statistical difference in outcome enough to rob them of some of their early youth?<p>I started reading around 6 years old and I was probably ahead of the vast majority of kids within 6 months.<p>Kids starting around 6 years old have much better focus and also greatly enhanced mental abilities overall.
My high school history teacher gave me an F on my term paper. I asked him why, and he said it was "too good" for a high school student. The next day I dumped on his desk all the cited books, which were obscure and in my dad's extensive collection. He capitulated, but disliked me ever since.
Now imagine this but its a courtroom and you're facing 25 years
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238786">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238786</a> (<i>"Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms (nytimes.com)"</i>)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14285116">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14285116</a> (<i>'Justice.exe: Bias in Algorithmic sentencing (justiceexe.com)"</i>)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649811">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649811</a> (<i>"Louisiana prison board uses algorithms to determine eligility for parole (propublica.org)"</i>)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753805">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753805</a> (<i>"Machine Bias (propublica.org)"</i>)
<a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11374696/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11374696/</a><p>> language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of [African American English] be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death.<p>This one is just so <i>extra</i> insidious to me, because it can happen even when a well-meaning human has already "sanitized" overt references to race/ethnicity, because the model is just that good at learning (bad but real) signals in the source data.
Family law judges, in my small experience, are so uninterested in the basic facts of a case that I would actually trust an LLM to do a better job. Not quite what you mean, but maybe there is a silver lining.<p>We are already (in the US) living in a system of soft social-credit scores administered by ad tech firms and non-profits. So “the algorithms says you’re guilty” has already been happening in less dramatic ways.
The legal system has never been so easy thanks to Cinco e-Trial!<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL2RLTmqG4w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL2RLTmqG4w</a>
I've had the same problem online for years, when I translate something people presume I am using Google Translate (even though in one case said language isn't on Google Translate — I checked!)... Or got the answer off Wikipedia.<p>One of the funniest things was being accused of plagiarising Wikipedia, when I'd actually written most of the Wikipedia article on said subject. The irony... Wikipedia doesn't just use unpaid labour, it ends up undermining the people who wrote it.
Write it in something like Google docs that tracks changes and then share the link with the revision history.<p>If this is insufficient, then there are tools specifically for education contexts that track student writing process.<p>Detecting the whole essay being copied and pasted from an outside source is trivial. Detecting artificial typing patterns is a little more tricky, but also feasible. These methods dramatically increase the effort required to get away with having AI do the work for you, which diminishes the benefit of the shortcut and influences more students to do the work themselves. It also protects the honest students from false positives.
The new trick being used by some professors in college classes is to mandate a specific document editor with a history view. If the document has unusual copy/paste patterns or was written in unusual haste then they may flag it. That being said, they support use of ai in the class and have confidence the student is not able to one shot the assignment with ai.
I suspect this is going in the wrong direction. Telling a sandboxed AI to have a long conversation with a student to ensure they actually know what they're talking about, while giving minimal hints away, seems like the scalable solution. Let students tackle the material however they will, knowing that they will walk into class the next day and be automatically grilled on it, unaided. There's no reason a similar student couldn't have their essay fed into the AI and then asked questions about what they meant on it.<p>Once this becomes routine the class can become e.g. 10 minutes conversation on yesterday's topic, 40 minutes lecturing and live exercises again. Which is really just reinventing the "daily quiz" approach, but again the thing we are trying to optimize for is compliance.
Doesn't google docs have fairly robust edit history? If I was a student these days I'd either record my screen of me doing my homework, or at least work in google docs and share the edit history.
this is a really flimsy method and it would be trivial to write something that works around this.
Yes. When I was an educator, reviewing version history was an obvious way to clarify if/how much students plagiarized.
This still leaves many options open for plagiarism (for example a second, seperate device)
Not really, document editors save every few moments. Someone cheating with AI assistance will not have a similar saved version pattern as someone writing and editing themselves. And if one did have the same pattern, it would defeat the purpose of cheating because it would take a similar amount of time to pull off
It's not that hard to prove that you did the work and not an AI. Show your work. Explain to the teacher why you wrote what you did, why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to you and you chose that as the basis for your work. Show an outline on which the paper was based. Show rough drafts. Explain how you revised the work, where you found your references, and why you retained some sources in the paper and not others.<p>To wit, show the teacher that YOU did the work and not someone else. If the teacher is not willing to do this with every student they accuse of malfeasance, they need to find another job. They're lazy as hell and suck at teaching.
I agree, it isn't hard! Watch:<p>Computer, show "my" work and explain to the teacher why "I" wrote what "I" did, describe why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to "me" and "I" chose that as the basis of "my" work. Produce an outline on which the paper could have been based and possible rough drafts, then explain how I could have revised the work to produce the final result.
Yeah, this, but also as an adult; When you are a non-native speaker and you use AI to make things more concise and correct. The detector will go off. People may find some wording "AI-ish" (even though I replaced em-dashes with commas and told it to "avoid American waiter-like enthusiasm"). My reaction is: Ok. you want my original? Which is much harder to read and uses 2x the amount of words? Fine.<p>I mean, what is the problem? It's my report! I know all the ins and outs, I take full responsibility for it. I'm the one taking this to the board of directors who will grill me on all the details. I'm up for it. So why is this so "not done"? Why do you assume I let the AI do the "thinking"? I'm appalled by your lack of trust in me.
I routinely see people accuse any writing they don't like the style or as being AI generated. There is no possible evidence for this being the case, pple are just dicks.
Is it possible the same problems that cause you to write less-readable words also lead you to choose poor AI outputs?<p>If no, why not?<p>Personally I would rather read a human's output than their selection of machine outputs.
I guess you've never read the English of a Dutch person ;) During my PhD defense I was told I "should have checked with a native speaker." Pre-LLMs, I'd go to my American colleague and she'd mostly remove text and rewrite some bit to make texts much more readable.<p>Nowadays, often I put my text into the LLM, and say: Make more concise, include all original points, don't be enthusiastic, use business style writing.
And then it will come with some lines of which I think: Yes! That is what I meant!<p>I can't imagine you'd rather read my Dunglish. Sure, I could have "studied harder", but one simply is just much more clever in their native tongue, I know more words, more subtleties etc. Over time, and I believe due to LLM use I do get better at it myself! It's a language model after all, not a facts model. I can trust it to make nice sentences.
Guess you have to videotape or screen-record yourself writing it. Oh what a world we've created :-S.
> how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself?<p>She can't because she didn't write the essay herself, obviously.
I would screencast the whole thing and then tell my professor that we can watch a bit together.
When I was a university student in 2009 a lecturer accused me of plagiarising a c++ win32 project I submitted.<p>It turned out he ran it through a plagiarism detector and multiple lines of code where identical to lines in their database.<p>It was very silly because there’s a lot of boiler plate code in win32 projects
You don't convince the teacher, you talk with the Dean.
I wrote a paper about building web applications in 10th grade a long time ago. When class was out the teacher asked me to stay for a minute after everybody left. He asked in disbelief, “did you really write that paper?”<p>I could see why he didn’t, so I wasn’t offended or defensive and started to tell him the steps required to build web apps and explained it in a manner he could understand using analogies. Towards the end of our conversation he could see I both knew about the topic and was enthusiastic about it. I think he was still a bit shocked that I wrote that paper, but he could tell from the way I talked about it that it was authentic.<p>It will be interesting to see how these situations evolve as AI gets even better. I suspect assessment will be more manual and in-person.
on a side note, I wonders if anyone submitting code to github is feeling the same way about the "duplication detection filter" type AI guardrails.
How is that a dilemma for the students? What are their supposed options?
Easy if one of these options might be available to the writer:<p>- Write it in google docs, and share the edit history in the google docs, it is date and time stamped.<p>- Make a video of writing it in the google docs tab.<p>If this is available, and sufficient, I would pursue a written apology to remind the future detectors.<p>Edit: clarity
Welcome to the post-truth society so many were and are so eager to build.
edit history in Google docs is a good way to defend yourself from AI tool use accusations
The funny part is that Googe has all the edit history data. In other words, it's a piece of cake for them to train a model that mimics human editing process.<p>The only thing prevents them from doing so is the fact Google is too big to sell a "plagiarism assistant."
I’m very tempted to write a tool that emulates human composition and types in assignments in a human-like way, just to force academia to deal with their issues sooner.
Ironic that one of the biggest AI companies is also the platform to offer a service to protect yourself from allegations of using it.
its defamation. flimsy proof like that needs to be sued.
I seriously think the people selling AI detection tools to teachers should be sued into the ground by a coalition of state attorneys general, and that the tools should be banned in schools.
If you, like AI, have been trained on real literature -- perhaps including em-dashes, as real books do -- then you might register as AI.<p>but if u talk like this boss i had, then obv ur a human, kthx<p>Great incentives. /s
The framing here is typically optimistic. Three years in, we're seeing AI primarily used for homework completion (defeating the stated purpose of learning) and administrative busywork. The real implication isn't 'personalized learning'—it's credential devaluation. If every student can produce 'their own' essays with AI assistance, how do we distinguish actual capability? The schools adopting AI fastest are ironically the ones least equipped to enforce academic integrity. The policy question isn't 'how do we use AI in schools?' but 'what's education for if not to demonstrate work capability?'
In my CS undergrad I had Doug Lea as a professor, really fantastic professor (best teacher I have ever had, bar none). He had a really novel way to handle homework hand ins, you had to demo the project. So you got him to sit down with you, you ran the code, he would ask you to put some inputs in (that were highly likely to be edge cases to break it). Once that was sufficient, he would ask you how you did different things, and to walk him through your code. Then when you were done he told you to email the code to him, and he would grade it. I am not sure how much of this was an anti-cheating device, but it required that you knew the code you wrote and why you did it for the project.<p>I think that AI has the possibility of weakening some aspects of education but I agree with Karpathy here. In class work, in person defenses of work, verbal tests. These were corner stones of education for thousands of years and have been cut out over the last 50 years or so outside of a few niche cases (Thesis defense) and it might be a good thing that these come back.
Yep, it's easy to shortcut AI plagiarism, but you need time. In most of the universities around the world (online universities especially), the number of students is way too big, while professors get more and more pressure on publishing and bureaucracy.
I did my masters in GaTech OMSCS (Chatgpt came out at the very end of my last semester). Tests were done with cameras on and it was recorded and then they were watched I think by TAs. Homework was done with automated checking and a plagiarism checker. Do you need to have in person proctoring via test centers or libraries? Video chats with professors? I am not sure. Projects are importants, but maybe they need to become a minority of grades and more being based on theory to circumvent AI?
It's not even about plagiarism. But, sure, 1:1 or even 1:few instruction is great but even at elite schools is not really very practical. I went to what's considered a very good engineering school and classes with hundreds of students was pretty normal.
For many of the “very good” engineering schools that I know of they got “very good” status because of their graduate programs. In graduate school a 1:few relation is almost certain. In undergraduate, not so much.
Ironically the practically of such instruction goes down as the status of the school goes up. I got a lot of 1:1 or 1:few time with my community college professors.
In some university systems it seems to be possible (I'm thinking of the khôlle system in France), so I don't see how the much better funded US system would not be able to do it.
Strongly agree. I was involved with several CS lectures in the past ~10 years that did not require a final exam, and we <i>always</i> did a 1:1 session between student and tutor in which the tutor asked the student detailed questions about their past exercise sheet solutions. Over the years, I estimate that I conducted about 100 of such 1:1s. It was always obvious when the students did not write the code themselves. They couldn't really explain their design process, they didn't encounter the edge cases themselves during testing, and you couldn't discuss possible improvements with them.
15+ years ago I was doing a CS undergrad (or Bachelors? not sure how it translates) at the local uni in a small EU Country and this approach was the standard across all subjects as part of 'lab work'. There were people there to do that, not the prof himself, but approach was exactly the same. And after a few months they had a really good picture on what level everyone is ect.<p>On the other hand, I had a neighbour ask me if he can make his 1 month apprenticeship when he finished his 3rd year of CS High School (eg ~18 years old, 3 of 4 years of 'CS trade school') 6 months ago or so. I was totally gobsmacked by his lack of basic understanding of how computers work, I am confident that he did not confidentially know the difference between a file and a folder. But he was very confident in the AI slop he produced. I had a grand plan of giving him tasks that would show him the pitfalls of AI -> no need for that, he blindly copied whatever AI gave him (he did not figure out Claude Code exsists), even when the results were very visibly bad - even from afar. I tried explaining stuff to him to no avail. I know this is a sample size of 1, but damn, I did not expect it to be that bad.
So we are screwed once we get brain-computer interfaces?
The TL:DR of every "AI vs Schools, what should teachers do?" article boils down to exactly this: Talk with the students 1-1. You can fake an essay, you can't fake a conversation about the topic at hand.
Or just do some work/exam in a controlled setting.<p>Talking to students in order to gauge their understanding is not as easy or reliable as some people make it out to be.<p>There are many students who are basically just useless when required to answer on the spot, some of whom likely to score top-of-the-class given an assignment and time to work on it alone (in a proctored setting).<p>And then there are students whom are very likable and swift to pick up on subtle signals the examiners might be giving of, and constantly adjusting course accordingly.<p>Grading objectively is extremely hard when doing oral exams. Especially when when you're doing them back-to-back for an entire workday, which is quite likely to happen if most examination is to be done in this way.
Not yet but we are getting close to be able to do it, tiny microphone, tiny earpiece, zero AI lag, I give it less than 10 years before it's trivial for anyone.
Maybe as a society we can take some of the productivity gains from AI and funnel them into moving teaching away from scantrons and formulaic essays. I want to be optimistic.
As someone who was incredibly lazy intellectually in high school, I can't imagine what would have got me motivated beyond time and growing up.<p>I did nothing in high school and then by 19 for fun on Saturdays I was checking out 5 non-fiction books from the library and spending all Saturday reading.<p>There was no inspiring teacher or anything like that for me that caused this. At 16 I only cared about girls and maneuvering within the high school social order.<p>The only thing I can think of that would have changed things for me is if the math club were the cool kids and the football team were the outcasts.<p>At 16 anything intellectual seemed too remote to bother. That is why I would suspect the real variable is ultimately how much the parents care about grades. Mine did not care at all so there was no way my 16 year old self was going to become intrinsically motivated to grow intellectually.<p>All AI would have done for me in high school would have been swapping a language model for copying my friend's homework.
In college I had a professor assign us to write a 100% plagiarized paper. You had to highlight every word in a color associated with the source. You couldn't plagiarize more then one sequential sentence from a single source.<p>It ended up being harder then writing an ordinary paper but taught us all a ton about citation and originality. It was a really cool exercise.<p>I imagine something similar could be done to teach students to use AI as a research tool rather then as a plagiarization machine.
That's awesome!<p>Contemporary alternative: Copy/paste an essay entirely from LLM output, but make sure none of the information contained checks out. One would want to use an older model for this. :-)
Reminds me of that thing Olmo3 has in the web demo, where it shows you a trace for a selected sentence generated by the LLM and points you at the exact document in the training data it comes from verbatim. If they all had that it would be really trivial to verify sources, and more or less does that exact exercise for you at a press of a button.
There is too much focus on students cheating with AI and not enough on the other side of the equation: teachers.<p>I've seen assignments that were clearly graded by ChatGPT. The signs are obvious: suggestions that are unrelated to the topic or corrections for points the student actually included. But of course, you can't 100% prove it. It's creating a strange feedback loop: students use an LLM to write the essay, and teachers use an LLM to grade it. It ends up being just one LLM talking to another, with no human intelligence in the middle.<p>However, we can't just blame the teachers. This requires a systemic rethink, not just personal responsibility. Evaluating students based on this new technology requires time, probably much more time than teachers currently have. If we want teachers to move away from shortcuts and adapt to a new paradigm of grading, that effort needs to be compensated. Otherwise, teachers will inevitably use the same tools as the students to cope with the workload.<p>Education seemed slow to adapt to the internet and mobile phones, usually treating them as threats rather than tools. Given the current incentive structure and the lack of understanding of how LLMs work, I'm not optimistic this will be solved anytime soon.<p>I guess the advantage will be for those that know how to use LLMs to learn on their own instead of just as a shortcut. And teachers who can deliver real value beyond what an LLM can provide will (or should) be highly valued.
I think legacy schooling just needs to be reworked. Kids should be doing way more projects that demonstrate the integration of knowledge and skills, rather than focusing so much energy on testing and memorization. There's probably a small core of things that really must be fully integrated and memorized, but for everything else you should just give kids harder projects which they're expected to solve by leveraging all the tools at their disposal. Focus on teaching kids how to become high-agency beings with good epistemics and a strong math core. Give them experiments and tools to play around and actually understand how things work. Bring back real chemistry labs and let kids blow stuff up.<p>The key issue with schools is that they crush your soul and turn you into a low-agency consumer of information within a strict hierarchy of mind-numbing rules, rather than helping you develop your curiosity hunter muscles to go out and explore. In an ideal world, we would have curated gardens of knowledge and information which the kids are encouraged to go out and explore. If they find some weird topic outside the garden that's of interest to them, figure out a way to integrate it.<p>I don't particularly blame the teachers for the failings of school though, since most of them have their hands tied by strict requirements from faceless bureaucrats.
As much as I hated schooling, I do want to say that there are parts of learning that are simply hard. There are parts that you can build enthusiasm for with project work and prioritizing for engagement. But there are many things that people should learn that will require drudgery to learn and won't excite all people.<p>Doing derivatives, learning the periodic table, basic language and alphabet skills, playing an instrument are foundational skills that will require deliberate practice to learn, something that isn't typically part of project based learning. At some point in education with most fields, you will have to move beyond concepts and do some rote memorization and repetition of principles in order to get to higher level concepts. You can't gamify your way out of education, despite our best attempts to do so.
> Doing derivatives<p>Not something everyone learns. My kids seemed to enjoy it. My older daughter learned quite a lot of algebra etc. by doing physics.<p>> learning the periodic table<p>You do not need to rote learn all of it, and you remember enough by learning about particular elements etc.<p>> basic language and alphabet skills<p>My kids learned to read through firstly reading with me (or others) so enjoying the story and learning words as we went and guessing words on flashcards. Then on to reading because they linked it.<p>Admittedly none of the above was in school, but my point is that its not intrinsic to learning.<p>> At some point in education with most fields, you will have to move beyond concepts and do some rote memorization and repetition of principles in order to get to higher level concepts.<p>Not a great deal and it does not feel like as much of a grind if you enjoy the subject and know where you are going.
> At some point in education with most fields, you will have to move beyond concepts and do some rote memorization and repetition of principles in order to get to higher level concepts. You can't gamify your way out of education, despite our best attempts to do so.<p>I don't know if we'll ever be successful, but the entire point of gamification is to make the rote parts more palatable. A lot of gamification techniques try to model after MMO gaming for a reason, as that's a genre where people willingly subject themselves to a lot of rote tasks.
Yeah, I agree that there's some skills that require deliberate practice. I think LLMs will be a huge boon there as well, because you can get real-time feedback as you're solving problems. And if you get stuck you can get immediate help or clarification, which is closer to having a personal tutor. In college if I got stuck on a problem, I might end up having to wait multiple days to ask someone for help.<p>In software engineering we often come across build environments that make code iteration really difficult and slow, and speeding up that iteration cycle usually results in being able to experiment more and ship faster changes.
Most learning curves in the education system today are very bumpy and don't adapt well to the specific student. Students get stuck on big bumps or get bored and demotivated at plateaus.<p>AI has potential to smooth out all curves so that students can learn faster and maximize time in flow.<p>I've spent literally thousands of hours thinking about this (and working on it). The future of education will be as different from today as today is to 300 years ago.<p>Kids used to get smacked with a stick if they spelled a word wrong.
I just went and had a flutter at being a high school math teacher. I went in saying 'I never used math to create until my honours year, I want different for my students'.<p>I soon changed my mind; I think those of us who become expert have often have really rich memories of a project where we learnt so much, but we just don't remember <i>episodically</i> all the accumulated learning that happened in boring classrooms to enable the project-induced higher order synthesis.
You are 100% right on this. There is a reason school is so vastly different from the process most people follow when learning something on their own.<p>Doing rather than memorizing outdated facts in a textbook.
Increase spending on schools by an order of magnitude and it would be possible.<p>All of schooling breaks down to costs and society’s willingness and desire to invest in child nutrition, education, and training.<p>We simply do not even have the wherewithal to have the conversation about it, without getting blackholed by cultural minefields and assumptions of child rearing, parental responsibility, morality and religion.
But testing and paper assessments are cheap and feasible for mass education. There are only so many workshop projects you can have before you run out of budget.
People have been saying that we "focus too much on memorization" for as long as I have been alive. To be honest, I don't really think that is true, if anything we don't focus enough on memorization nowadays since people leave school without knowing basic things about the world whether in science or in history. Knowing things allows one to make connections and see things in a different way that you simply cannot get if you rely on the internet or LLMs or whatever to look everything up.
I was very much the kind of student who didn't perform well under exam-taking pressure. For marked work that I did outside of school, it was straight-As for me. For written exams performed under time pressure and oral examinations (administered without advance notice), it was very much hit-and-miss.<p>If my son should grow up to run into the same kinds of cognitive limitations, I really don't know what I will tell him and do about it. I just wish there was a university in a Faraday cage somewhere where I could send him, so that he can have the same opportunities I had.<p>Fun fact on the side: Cambridge (UK) getting a railway station was a hugely controversial event at the time. The corrupting influence of London being only a short journey away was a major put-off.
Having had some experience teaching and designing labs and evaluating students in my opinion there is basically no problem that can't be solved with more instructor work.<p>The problem is that the structure pushes for teaching productivity which basically directly opposes good pedagogy at this point in the optimization.<p>Some specifics:<p>1. Multiple choice sucks. It's obvious that written response better evaluates students and oral is even better. But multiple choice is graded instantly by a computer. Written response needs TAs. Oral is such a time sink and needs so many TAs and lots of space if you want to run them in parallel.<p>1.5 Similarly having students do things on computers is nice because you don't have to print things and even errors in the question can be fixed live and you can ask students to refresh the page. But if the chatbots let them cheat too easily on computers doing hand written assesments sucks cause you have to go arrange for printing and scanning.<p>2. Designing labs is a clear LLM tradeoff. Autograded labs with testbenches and fill in the middle style completetions or API completetions are incredibly easy to grade. You just pull the commit before some specific deadline and run some scripts.<p>You can do 200 students in the background when doing other work its so easy. But the problem is that LLMS are so good at fill in the middle and making testbenches pass.<p>I've actually tried some more open ended labs before and its actually very impressive how creative students are. They are obviously not LLMs there is this diversity in thought and simplicity of code that you do not get with ChatGPT.<p>But it is ridiculously time consuming to pull people's code and try to run open ended testbenches that they have created.<p>3. Having students do class presentations is great for evaluating them. But you can only do like 6 or 7 presentations in a 1 hr block. You will need to spend like a week even in a relatively small class.<p>4. What I will say LLMs are fun for are having students do open ended projects faster with faster iterations. You can scope creep them if you expect expect to use AI coding.
I know a teacher who basically only does open questions but since everything is digital nowadays students just use tools like Cluely [0] that run on the background and provide answers.<p>Since the testing tool they use does notice and register 'paste'-events they've resorted to simply assigning 0 points to every answer that was pasted.<p>A few of us have been telling her to move to in-class testing etc. but like you also notice everything in the school organization pushes for teaching productivity so this does require convincing management / school board etc. which is a slow(er) process.<p>[0] <a href="https://cluely.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cluely.com/</a>
> Written response needs TAs.<p>Can AI not grade written responses?
I tried that once. Specifically because I wanted to see if we could leverage some sort of productivity enhancements.<p>I was using a local LLM around 4B to 14B, I tried Phi, Gemma, Qwen, and LLama. The idea was to prompt the LLM with the question, the answer key/rubric, and the student answer. The student answer at the end did some prompt caching to make it much faster.<p>It was okay but not good, there were a lot of things I tried:<p>* Endlessly messing with the prompt.
* A few examples of grading.
* Messing with the rubric to give more specific instructions.
* Average of K.
* Think step by step then give a grade.<p>It was janky and I'll throw it up to local LLMs at the time being somewhat too stupid for this to be reasonable. They basically didn't follow the rubric very well. Qwen in particular was very strict giving zeros regardless of the part marks described in the answer key as I recall.<p>I'm sure with the correct type of question and correct prompt and a good GPU it could work but it wasn't as trivially easy as I had thought at the time.
It's a fair question, but there's maybe a bit of US defaultism baked in? If I look
back at my exams in school
they were mostly closed-book written + oral examination, nothing would really need to change.<p>A much bigger question is what to teach assuming we get models much more powerful than those we have today. I'm still confident there's an irreducible hard core in most subjects that's well worth knowing/training, but it might take some soul searching.
As a teacher, I try to keep an open mind, but consistently I can find out in 5 minutes of talking to a student if they understand the material. I might just go all in for the oral exams.
Oral exams don't scale well if there are +100 students and a lot of assignments. The main pain point.
A teacher in an environment with +100 students and a lot of assignments that are graded by a random grad student is useless anyway and might as well not exist. If AI could move us away from this cargo cult, that's great.
Do fewer graded assignments then
It’s hard to go from (I privately think you’re cheating) to (I accuse you to your face), though.
Oxide and Friends recently had a podcast episode [0] with Michael Littman about this topic for anyone who's curious about this topic.<p>This topic has been an interesting part of the discourse in a group of friends the past few weeks because one of us is a teacher who has to deal with this on an almost daily basis and is struggling to get her students to <i>not cheat</i> and the options available to her are limited (yes, physical monitoring would probably work but requires concessions from the school management etc. it's not something that has an easy or quick fix available.)<p>[0] <a href="https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-in-higher-education-with-michael-littman" rel="nofollow">https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-in-highe...</a>
80-90% of the teachers are not equipped to handle AI in the classrooms. You can’t expect teachers to know the SOTA that’s rapidly changing. And at the same time punish students from using available tools. Especially in public schools, teaching quality has plummeted in the past decade. This also applies to lower tier colleges. The whole point of education is to learn. Not to weed out talent. If students want to use AI tools to take shortcuts then it’s entirely on them. It will catch up to them at some point.
At my school, long before AI, the work was of two kinds - homework type essays/problems that you could cheat on if you wanted but there was no point because the feedback was for your benefit and didn't count towards anything, and then proper exams where you were watched and couldn't cheat easily.<p>Not sure why they don't just do that? It worked fine and would be compatible with LLM use.
We're almost at the point that CGP grey predicted over a decade ago with the "digital Aristotle" concept. Teachers will have to eventually transition into class babysitting roles, but the transition period will be ugly as long as tech stays at this level where it renders regular teaching impossible while also not yet being on a level where it can useably replace it.
I think part of the reason AI is having such a negative effect on schools in particular is because of how many education processes are reliant on an archaic, broken way of "learning." So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information (which AI is unmatched at doing).<p>School is packed with inefficiency and busywork that is completely divorced from the way people learn on their own. In fact, it's pretty safe to say you could learn something about 10x by typing it into an AI chat bot and having it tailor the experience to you.
It's the opposite.<p>> focused upon memorization and regurgitation<p>This is what is easy to test in-class.<p>Teachers worry about AI because they do <i>not</i> just care about memorization. Before AI, being able to write cohesive essays about a subject is a good proxy to prove your understanding beyond simple memorization. Now it's gone.<p>A lazy, irresponsible teacher who only cares about memorization will just grade students via in-class multi choices tests exclusively and call it a day. They don't need to worry about AI at all.
> Before AI, being able to write cohesive essays about a subject is a good proxy to prove your understanding beyond simple memorization. Now it's gone.<p>Take-homes were never a good proxy for anything because any student can pay for private "lessons" and get their homework done for them.<p>> A lazy, irresponsible teacher who only cares about memorization will just grade students via in-class multi choices tests exclusively and call it a day. They don't need to worry about AI at all.<p>What stops a diligent responsible teacher from doing in-class essays?
Yes, the biggest problem with authentic exercises is evaluating the students' actions and giving feedback. The problem is that authentic assessments didnt previous scale (e.g. what worked in 1:1 coaching or tutoring couldn't be done for a whole classroom). But AI can scale them.<p>It seems like AI will destroy education but it's only breaking the old education system, it will also enable a new and much better one. One where students make more and faster progress developing more relevant and valuable skills.<p>Education system uses multiple choice quizzes and tests because their grading can be automated.<p>But when evaluation of <i>any</i> exercise can be automated with AI, such that students can practice any skill with iterative feedback at the pace of their own development, so much human potential will be unlocked.
The way you learn is totally different from the way a novice learns; they don't have a vast memorised store of knowledge, let alone the connected structure over that memorised knowledge. When you learn something, it gets incoporated thanks to these foundations.<p>But the foundations start with memorisation.
Memorizing and tests at school are the archaic approach that schools don't believe in anymore (at least the school board my kids are at), but they happen to be AI proof.<p>It's the softer, no memorizing, no tests, just assignments that you can hand in at anytime because there's no deadlines, and grades don't matter, type of education that is particularly useless with AI.
> So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information, which AI is unmatched at doing.<p>This applies both to education, and to what people need to know to do work. Knowing all the written stuff is less valuable. Automated tools can been able to look it up since the Google era. Now they can work with what they look up.<p>There was a time when programmers poured over <i>Fundamental Algorithms</i>. No one does that today. When needed, you find existing code that does that stuff. Probably better than you could write. Who codes a hash table today?
> So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information (which AI is unmatched at doing).<p>No, lots of classes are focused on producing papers which aren't just memorization and regurgitation, but generative AI is king at... Generating text... So that class of work output is suspect now
The answer to AI use in schools breaking old teaching and evaluation methods isn't to cripple students, it's to create new assignments and evaluation methods.<p>One idea: Have students generate videos with their best "ELI5" explanations for things, or demos/teaching tools. Make the conciseness and clarity of the video video and the quality/originality of the teaching tools the grading criteria. Make the videos public, so classmates can compare themselves with their peers.<p>Students will be forced to learn the material and memorize it to make a good video. They'll be forced to understand it to create really good teaching tools. The public aspect will cause students to work harder not to feel foolish in front of their peers.<p>The beauty of this is that most kids these days want to be influencers, so they're likely to invest time into the assignment even if they're not interested in the subject.
> the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments)<p>My wife is a teacher. He school did this a long time ago, long before AI. But they also gave every kid a laptop and forced the teachers to move all tests/assignments to online applications with the curriculum picked out by the administrators (read as: some salesperson talked them into it). Even with assignments done in class, it's almost impossible to catch kids using AI when they're all on laptops all the time and she can't teach <i>and</i> monitor them all at the same time.<p>Bring back pencil and paper. Bring back calculators. Internet connected devices do not belong in the classroom.
With my partner we have been working to invert the overall model.<p>She started grading conversation than the students have with LLMs.<p>From the question that the students ask, it is obvious who knows the material and who is struggling.<p>We do have a custom setup, so that she creates an homework. There is a custom prompt to avoid the LLM answering the homework question. But thats pretty much it.<p>The results seems promising, with students spending 30m or so going back and forth with the LLMs.<p>If any educator wants to Ty or is interested in more information, let me know and we can see how we collaborate.
This makes some sense, but my first question would be how do you define a clear, fair grading rubric? Second, this sounds like it could work for checking who is smart, but can it motivate students to put in work to learn the material?
Trust goes offline. The value shift is happening in realtime as more in-person events, offline meetups take more value over digital communications and meetups. You can forge in the digital space but the real you is in-person.
"You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI."<p>That is just such a wildly cynical point of view, and it is incredibly depressing. There is a whole huge cohort of kids out there who genuinely want to learn and want to do the work, and feel like using AI is cheating. These are the kids who, ironically, AI will help the most, because they're the ones who will understand the fundamentals being taught in K-12.<p>I would hope that any "solution" to the growing use of AI-as-a-crutch can take this cohort of kids into consideration, so their development isn't held back just to stop the less-ethical student from, well, being less ethical.
> There is a whole huge cohort of kids out there<p>Well, it seems the vast majority doesn't care about cheating, and is using AI for everything. And this is from primary school to university.<p>It's not just that AI makes it simpler, so many pupils cannot concentrate anymore. Tiktok and others have fried their mind. So AI is a quick way out for them. Back to their addiction.
What possible solution could prevent this? The best students are learning on their own anyways, the school can't stop students using AI for their personal learning.<p>There was a reddit thread recently that asked the question, are all students really doing worse, and it basically said that, there are still top performers performing toply, but that the middle has been hollowed out.<p>So I think, I dunno, maybe depressing. Maybe cynical, but probably true. Why shy away from the truth?<p>And by the way, I would be both. Probably would have used AI to further my curiosity and to cheat. I hated school, would totally cheat to get ahead, and am now wildly curious and ambitious in the real world. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I don't find cheating in school to be all that unethical. I'm paying for it, who cares how I do it.<p>People aren't one thing.
Sure, but the point is that if 5% of students are using AI then you have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI, because otherwise you're giving a massive advantage to the 5% of students who used AI, right?
> The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators.<p>Um. yea. This is the first time a non-deterministic technology has achieved mass adoption for every day use. Despite repeated warnings (which are not even close to the tenor of warnings they should broadcast), folks don’t understand that AI will likely hallucinate some or all of their answer.<p>A calculator will not, and even the closest aspect of buggy behavior for a calculator (exploring the fringes of floating point numbers, for example) is light years away from the hallucination of generated AI for general, every day questions.<p>The mass exuberance over generative AI has been clouding folks from the very real effects of over-adoption or AI, and we aren’t going to see the full impact of that for some time, and when we do, folks are going to ask questions like “how were we so dumb?” And of course the answer will be “no one saw this coming.”<p>My spouse is an educator with nearly 20 years in the industry, and even her school has adopted AI. It’s shocking how quickly it has taken hold, even in otherwise lagging adoption segments. Her school finally went “1-1” with devices in 2020, just prior to COVID.
It's not the students. It's the teachers and school using AI first, and publicly. Why does he talk about only students using AI?<p>Also, just like how calculators are allowed in the exam halls, why not allow AI usage in exams? In real-life job you are not going to avoid use of calculator or AI. So why test people in a different context? I think the tests should focus on the skills in using calculator and AI.
With calculators, you cannot replace the thinking process. LLM can do that and that is the problem.
I real life if someone with an administrative job would jot 50 * 3,000 in a calculator and not notice the answer 1,500,000 is wrong (a typo) I will consider them most definitely at fault. Similarly I know some structural engineers who will notice something went wrong with the input if an answer is not within a given range.<p>A calculator can be used to do things you know how to do _faster_ imho but in most jobs it still requires you to at least somewhat understand what is happening under the hood. The same principle applies to using LLMs at work imho. You can use it to do stuff you know how to do faster but if you don't understand the material there's no way you can evaluate the LLMs answer and you will be at fault when there's AI slop in your output.<p>eta: Maybe it would be possible to design labs with LLM's in such a way that you teach them how to evaluate the LLM's answer? This would require them to have knowledge of the underlying topic. That's probably possible with specialized tools / LLM prompts but is not going to help against them using a generic LLM like ChatGPT or a cheating tool that feeds into a generic model.
In other words, learn to use the tool BUT keep your critical thinking. Same with all new technologies.<p>I'm not minimizing Karpathy in any way, but this is obviously the right way to do this.
> The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later.<p>Learning how to prepare for in-class tests and writing exercises is a very particular skillset which I haven't really exercised a lot since I graduated.<p>Never mind teaching the humanities, for which I think this is a genuine crisis, in class programming exams are basically the same thing as leetcode job interviews, and we all know what a bad proxy those are for "real" development work.
> in class programming exams are basically the same thing as leetcode job interviews, and we all know what a bad proxy those are for "real" development work.<p>Confusing university learning for "real industry work" is a mistake and we've known it's a mistake for a while. We can have classes which teach what life in industry is like, but assuming that the role of university is to teach people how to fit directly into industry is mistaking the purpose of university and K-12 education as a whole.<p>Writing long-form prose and essays isn't something I've done in a long time, but I wouldn't say it was wasted effort. Long-form prose forces you to do things that you don't always do when writing emails and powerpoints, and I rely on those skills every day.
I use it every day.<p>Preparing for a test requires understanding what the instructor wants. concentrate on the wrong thing get marked down.<p>Same applies to working in a corporation. You need to understand what management wants. It’s a core requirement.
Most of what schools teach is either useless or toxic. They rarely teach practical skills. I would argue for getting people to use handwriting/cursive as a workaround for this issue. It would mean that if they did use AI then they would have to process some of the content mentally rather than just present it.
K-12 is first and foremost a daycare so both parents can be "productive". Its not only a daycare, but this is certainly its primary function since I've been able to observe the world.
> Most of what schools teach is either useless or toxic<p>You must have a pretty broad definition of useless / toxic if you think that reading, writing and basic math, but also geometry, calculus, linear algebra, probability theory, foreign languages, a broad overview of history, and basic competency in physics / electronics fall under these categories.<p>Sure, I learned a lot in school that turned out to be pretty useless for me (chemistry, basically anything I learned in PE, french), but I <i>did not know that at the time</i> and I am still grateful that I was being exposed to these topics. Some of my classmates developed successful careers from these early exposures.
Teenage me would be building the pen holding robot that same afternoon.
Here is my proposal for AI in schools: raise the bar dramatically. Rather than trying to prevent kids from using AI, just raise the expectations of what they should accomplish with it. They should be setting really lofty goals rather than just doing the same work with less effort.
This is great for a “capstone project” at the end of a degree. But along the way, you have to master sub tasks and small skills in order to build on them later to accomplish lofty goals. So you need to learn the basics first. But AI is really good at helping you cheat on the basics without learning. So we still need to get them to the point of being able to use AI intelligently
AI doesn't help you do higher quality work. It helps you do (or imitate) mediocre work faster. But thing is, it is hard to learn how to do excellent work without learning to do mediocre work first.
Absolutely. I'd love to see the same effect happen in the software industry. Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.
> Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.<p>This will _never_ happen. Output will increase and quality will decrease.
> Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.<p>Effect of AI applied to coding is precisely the opposite though?
Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue. You can absolutely write great code using AI.<p>AI code review has unquestionably increased the quality of my code by helping me find bugs before they make it to production.<p>AI coding tools give me speed to try out more options to land on a better solution. For example, I wrote a proxy, figured out problems with that approach, and so wrote a service that could accomplish the same thing instead. Being able to get more contact with reality, and seeing how solutions actually work before committing to them, gives you a lot of information to make better decisions.<p>But then you still need good practices like code review, maintaining coding standards, and good project management to really keep code quality high. AI doesn’t really change that.
that is what they do in the software industry, before it was let me catch you off guard with asking how to reverse a linked list, now its leetcode questions that are so hard that you need to know and study them weekly, and prep for a year, interviewer can tell if you started prep 3 weeks prior
It seems like a good path forward is to somewhat try to replicate the idea of "once you can do it yourself, feel free to use it going forward" (knowing how various calculator operations work before you let it do it for you).<p>I'm curious if we instead <i>gave</i> students an AI tool, but one that would intentionally throw in <i>wrong</i> things that the student had to catch. Instead of the student using LLMs, they would have one paid for by the school.<p>This is more brainstorming then a well thought-out idea, but I generally think "opposing AI" is doomed to fail. If we follow a montessori approach, kids are <i>naturally inclined</i> to want to learn thing, if students are trying to lie/cheat, we've already failed them by turning off their natural curiosity for something else.
I agree, I think schools and universities need to adapt, just like calculators, these things aren't going away. Let students leverage AI as tools and come out of Uni more capable than we did.<p>AI _do_ currently throw in an occasional wrong thing. Sometimes a lot. A students job needs to be verifying and fact checking the information the AI is telling them.<p>The student's job becomes asking the right questions and verifying the results.
This is the correct take. To contrast the Terance Tao piece from earlier (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972</a>), AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. You can't, however, <i>become</i> a Terence Tao by asking AI to solve your homework.<p>So, in learning environments we might not have an option but to open the floodgates to AI use, but abandon most testing techniques that are not, more or less, pen and paper, in-person. Use AI as much as you want, but know that as a student you'll be answering tests armed only with your brain.<p>I do pity English teachers that have relied on essays to grade proficiency for hundreds of years. STEM fields has an easier way through this.
Yesterday's Doonesbury was on point here: <a href="https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23" rel="nofollow">https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23</a><p>Andrej and Garry Trudeau are in agreement that "blue book exams" (I.e. the teacher gives you a blank exam booklet, traditionally blue) to fill out in person for the test, after confiscating devices, is the only way to assess students anymore.<p>My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.
Blue book was the norm for exams in my social science and humanities classes <i>way</i> after every assignment was typed on a computer (and probably a laptop, by that time) with Internet access.<p>I guess high schools and junior highs will have to adopt something similar, too. Better condition those wrists and fingers, kids :-)
I'm oldish, but when I was in college in the late 90s we typed a huge volume of homework (I was a history & religious studies double major as an undergrad), but the vast majority of our exams were blue books. There were exceptions where the primary deliverable for the semester was a lengthy research paper, but lots and lots of blue books.
That was how I took most of my school and university exams. I hated it then and I'd hate it now. For humanities, at least, it felt like a test of who could write the fastest (one which I fared well at, too, so it's not case of sour grapes).<p>I'd be much more in favour of oral examinations. Yes, they're more resource-intensive than grading written booklets, but it's not infeasible. Separately, I also hope it might go some way to lessening the attitude of "teaching to the test".
Oh how I hated those as a student. Handwriting has always been a slow and uncomfortable process for me. Yes, I tried different techniques of printing and cursive as well as better pens. Nothing helped. Typing on a keyboard is just so much faster and more fluent.<p>It's a shame that some students will again be limited by how fast they can get their thoughts down on a piece of paper. This is such an artificial limitation and totally irrelevant to real world work now.
Obviously the solution is to bring back manual typewriters.
Maybe this is a niche for those low distraction writing tools that pop up from time to time. Or a school managed Chromebook that’s locked to the exam page.
In the process, we lose both the ability to accommodate students, or ask questions that take longer than the test period to answer.<p>All for a calculator that can lie.
> My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.<p>This sounds as if you expect that it will become possible to access an LLM in class without a phone or other similar device. (Of course, using a laptop would be easily noticed.)
New York State recently banned phones state wide in schools.
It is, but it does not matter, because:<p>1. Corporate interests want to sell product
2. Administrators want a product they can use
3. Compliance people want a checkbox they can check
4. Teachers want to be ablet to continue what they have been doing thus far within the existing ecosystem
5. Parents either don't know, don't care, or do, but are unable to provide a viable alternative or, can and do provide it<p>We have had this conversation ( although without AI component ) before. None of it is really secret. The question is really what is the actual goal. Right now, in US, education is mostly in name only -- unless you are involved ( which already means you are taking steps to correct it ) or are in the right zip code ( which is not a guarantee, but it makes your kids odds better ).
> AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS.<p>This assumes we even need more Terence Taos by the time these kids are old enough. AI has gone from being completely useless to solving challening math problems in less than 5 years. That trajectory doesn't give me much hope that education will matter at all in a few years.
AI can also generate questions of course.<p>So it is feasible (in principle) to give every student a different exam!<p>You’d use AI to generate lots of unique exams for your material, then ensure they’re all exactly the same difficulty (or extremely extremely close) by asking an LLM to reject any that are relatively too hard or too easy. Once you have generated enough individual exams, assign them to your students in your no-AI setting.
Why the hell would you want to do that lol. Casually 20x the teachers' workload for what? Who are going to grade these unique exams? AI as well?
AI should not grade them.<p>Code that the AI <i>writes</i> would be <i>used</i> to grade them.<p>- AI is great at some things.<p>- Code is great at other things.<p>- AI is bad at some things code is great for.<p>- AI is great at coding.<p>Therefore, leverage AI to quickly code up deterministic and fast tools for the tasks where code is best.<p>And to help exams be markable by code, it makes sense to be smart about exam structure - eg. only ask questions with binary answers or multiple choice so you don’t need subjective judgment of correctness.
except (like it or not) students are in direct competition with each other. Unique assessments would be impossible to defend the first time a student claimed your "unfair" test cost them a job, scholarship or other competitive opportunity.
I made a tool for this! It's an essay writing platform that tracks the edits and keystrokes rather than the final output, so its AI detection accuracy is _much_ higher than other tools:
<a href="https://collie.ink/" rel="nofollow">https://collie.ink/</a>
> Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc.<p>Calculator analogy is extremely inaccurate, understandably people keep doing this comparison. The premise is that calculator didn't take bookkeepers' job, but instead it helped them.<p>First of all calculator do one job and does it very well, you never question it because it solely works with numbers. But AI wants to be everything, calculator, translator, knowledge base etc.. And, it's very confident at everything all the time until you start to question it, and even then it continues to lie. Because sadly current AI products' purpose isn't to give you accurate answer, it's about making you believe that it's giving you credible information.<p>More importantly calculators are not connected to the internet, and they are not capable of creating profile of an individual.<p>It's sad to see big players push this agenda to make people believe that they don't need to think anymore, AI will do everything for them.
I recently wrote on something similar. I think the way we design evaluation methods for students needs to mirror the design of security systems. <a href="https://kelvinpaschal.com/blog/educators-hackers/" rel="nofollow">https://kelvinpaschal.com/blog/educators-hackers/</a>
I’ve been following this approach since last school year. I focus on in-class work and home-time is for reading and memorization. My classmates still think classrooms are for lecturing, but it's coming. The paper-and-pen era is back to school!
I did a lot of my blog and book writing before these AI tools, but now I show my readers images of handwritten notes and drafts (more out of interest than demonstrating proof of work).
This couldn’t have happened at a better time. When I was young my parents found a schooling system that had minimal homework so I could play around and live my life. I’ve moved to a country with a lot less flexibility. Now when my kids will soon be going to school, compulsory homework will be obsolete.<p>Zero homework grades will be ideal. Looking forward to this.
If AI gets us reliably to a flipped classroom (=research at home, work through work during class) then I'm here for it. Homework in the traditional sense is an anti pattern.
Agreed, the Gutenberg method is preferred:<p>1. Assume printing press exists
2. Now there's no need for a teacher to stand up and deliver information by talking to a class for 60 mins
3. Therefore students can read at home (or watch prepared videos) and test their learning in class where there's experts to support them
4. Given we only need 1 copy of the book/video/interactive demo, we can spend wayyyyy more money making it the best it can possibly be<p>What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has barely changed
> What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has barely changed<p>From my extensive experience of four years of undergrad, the problem in your plan is "3. Therefore students can read at home " - half the class won't do the reading, and the half that did won't get what it means until they go to lecture[1].<p>[1] If the lecturer is any good at all. If he spends most of his time ranting about his ex-wife...
Most of what I learned in college was only because I did homework and struggled to figure it out myself. Classroom time was essentially just a heads up to what I'll actually be learning myself later.<p>Granted, this was much less the case in grade school - but if students are going to see homework for the first time in college, I can see problems coming up.<p>If you got rid of homework throughout all of the "standard" education path (grade school + undergrad), I would bet a lot of money that I'd be much dumber for it.
> but if students are going to see homework for the first time in college, I can see problems coming up.<p>If the concept is too foreign for them, I'm sure we could figure out how to replicate the grade school environment. Give them their 15 hours/week of lecture, and then lock them in a classroom for the 30 hours they should spend on homework.
Now <i>that's</i> an optimistic take!
I submitted this but why is there an xcancel link added to it?
X is a hostile experience when not logged in.
besides the poor UX for unauthenticated users, i would rather not view ads from advertisers who still pay X for the access to my eyeballs (in the event i'm using a browser that doesn't block them to begin with).
I read that xcancel thread, the original one and now this hackernews thread and...<p>IS NO ONE GOING TO POINT OUT MULTIPLE OF THOSE DOODLES ARE WRONG???
Cheaters and frauds are always wondering why they are "no hires" and are first to be laid off.
this is a very American issue. In my entire student career in Italy, home assignments were never graded. Maybe you had a project or two through university, but otherwise I got all my grades for onsite tests.
This is exactly why I'm focusing on job readiness and remediation rather than the education system. I think working all this out is simply too complex for a system with a lot of vested interest and that doesn't really understand how AI is evolving. There's an arms race between students, teachers, and institutions that hire the students.<p>It's simply too complex to fix. I think we'll see increased investment by corporates who do keep hiring on remediating the gaps in their workforce.<p>Most elite institutions will probably increase their efforts spent on interviewing including work trials. I think we're already seeing this with many of the elite institutions talking about judgment, emotional intelligence critical thinking as more important skills.<p>My worry is that hiring turns into a test of likeability rather than meritocracy (everyone is a personality hire when cognition is done by the machines)<p>Source: I'm trying to build a startup (Socratify) a bridge for upskilling from a flawed education system to the workforce for early stage professionals
A detector is easy to write, simply monitor the kid’s computer and phone use. AI is ruining school but it will be solved in the lowest resistance way possible.
I agree that focus should just shift to in-class work so that students are left free to do whatever they want once they are done for the day at school. Homework and at-home assignments are lazy handovers.<p>Also, all of these AI threats to public education can be mitigated if we just step 1-2 decades back and go the pen-and-paper way. I am yet to see any convincing argument in favor of digital/screen-based teaching methods being superior in any way than the traditional ones, on the contrary I have seen thousands of arguments against them.
I've had to stop using em-dashes because people assume I'm using ai.
How about just dispense with the AI nonsense in education and go to totally in-person, closed-book, manually-written, proctored exams? No homework, no assignments, no projects. Just pure mind-to-paper writing in a bare room under the eye of an examiner. Those that want to will learn and will produce intelligent work regardless of setting.
Its really something to just casually say “all exams need to be in person”, reversing in a single move significant gains in education availability.<p>It may not be obvious in a country with smaller student to teacher ratios, but for a place like India, you never have enough teachers for students.<p>Being able to provide courses, and homework digitally, reduced the amount of work required to grade and review work.<p>Then to add insult to injury, AI is removing entry level roles, removing other chances for people to do work which is easy to verify, practice and learn from.<p>Yes, yes, eventually tool use will result in increases in GDP. Except our incentives are not to hire more teachers, build more schools, and improve educational outcomes. Those are all public goods, not private goods. We aren’t going to tax firms further, because commerce must be protected, yet we will socialize the costs to society.
This doesn't adress the point that AI can replace going to school. AI can be your perfect personal tutor to help you learn thing 1:1. Needing to have a teacher and prove to them that you know what they teached will become a legacy concept. That we have an issue of AI cheating at school is in my eyes a temporary issue.
ChatGPT just told me to put the turkey in my toaster oven legs facing the door, and you think it can replace school. Unless there is a massive architectural change that can be provably verified by third parties, this can never be. I’d hate for my unschooled surgeon to check an llm while I’m under.
Don't worry, someone will put another hack on top the model to teach it to handle this specific case better. That will totally fix the problem, right? Right?
What's the alternate if someone didn't know something during a procedure? Just wing it? Getting another data point from an LLM seems beneficial to me.
Ask a human who does. If there are no competent humans on-call before the procedure starts, reschedule the procedure.
A trained professional making their best guess is far more capable and trustworthy than the slop LLMs put out. So yeah, winging it is a good alternative here.
Just curious, not being a turkey SME, what's the downside to positioning the turkey that way?
It is considered valuable and worthwhile for a society to educate all of its children/citizens. This means we have to develop systems and techniques to educate all kinds of people, not just the ones who can be dropped off by themselves at a library when they turn five, and picked up again in fifteen years with a PHD.
For someone that wants to learn, I agree with this 100%. AI has been great at teaching me about 100s of topics.<p>I don't yet know how we get AI to teach unruly kids, or kids with neurodivergencies. Perhaps, though, the AI can eventually be vastly superior to an adult because of the methods it can use to get through to the child, keep the child interested and how it presents the teaching in a much more interactive way.
Snap out of it. This is the best advice I can give you.