Implications of AI to schools

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1993010584175141038

by bilsbie • 8 months ago

363 434 8 months ago

twitter.com

https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1993010584175141038

ekjhgkejhgk• 8 months ago

In other words, learn to use the tool BUT keep your critical thinking. Same with all new technologies.

I'm not minimizing Karpathy in any way, but this is obviously the right way to do this.

trauco• 8 months ago

This is the correct take. To contrast the Terance Tao piece from earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972), AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. You can't, however, become a Terence Tao by asking AI to solve your homework.

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.

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.

wffurr4• 8 months ago

Yesterday's Doonesbury was on point here: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23

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.

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.

phantasmish• 8 months ago

Blue book was the norm for exams in my social science and humanities classes way after every assignment was typed on a computer (and probably a laptop, by that time) with Internet access.

I guess high schools and junior highs will have to adopt something similar, too. Better condition those wrists and fingers, kids :-)

ecshafer4• 8 months ago

New York State recently banned phones state wide in schools.

nradov• 8 months ago

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.

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.

zahlman• 8 months ago

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.

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.)

Fomite• 8 months ago

In the process, we lose both the ability to accommodate students, or ask questions that take longer than the test period to answer.

All for a calculator that can lie.

nmfisher• 8 months ago

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).

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".

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2• 8 months ago

It is, but it does not matter, because:

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

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 ).

muldvarp3• 8 months ago

AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS.

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.

ubj• 8 months ago

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.

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.

vondur• 8 months ago

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.

phh• 8 months ago

80% is catastrophic though. In a classroom of 30 all honest pupils, 6 will get a 0 mark because the software says its AI?

tyleo• 8 months ago

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.

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.

The reiterated questions of course came up as 100% plagiarism because they were just copied from the worksheet.

vkou3• 8 months ago

but I don’t think anyone here believes that.

All it takes is one moron with power and a poor understanding of statistics.

jimbob45• 8 months ago

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.

ball_of_lint3• 8 months ago

I have had Turnitin flag my work as plagiarism for quotes from the relevant text that were quite clearly indicated as quotes.

It's shit software for schools and teachers to cover their ass. Nothing more, and deserves no more attention.

seanw265• 8 months ago

If they are serious they should realize that "80% accuracy" is almost meaningless for this kind of classifier. They should publish a confusion matrix if they haven't already.

huevosabio2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

I thought it was a clever and graceful way to deal with it.

j458• 8 months ago

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.

lazyasciiart3• 8 months ago

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.

smileysteve• 8 months ago

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.

respondo21345• 8 months ago

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.

raincole6• 8 months ago

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.

The teacher effectively filtered out the shy boys/girls who are not brave enough to "hustle." Gracefully.

stonemetal12• 8 months ago

Story doesn't make sense.

the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam.

They got the question but not the answer so they had to work it out before the test. They couldn't explain it later?

neom• 8 months ago

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.

germinalphrase2• 8 months ago

Yes. When I was an educator, reviewing version history was an obvious way to clarify if/how much students plagiarized.

HelloUsername• 8 months ago

This still leaves many options open for plagiarism (for example a second, seperate device)

beeflet4• 8 months ago

this is a really flimsy method and it would be trivial to write something that works around this.

Verdex• 8 months ago

Yeah that was my thought. Although, I went a bit more paranoid with it.

If it looks like AI cheating software will be a problem for my children (and currently it has not been an issue), then I'm considering recording them doing all of their homework.

I suspect school admin only has so much appetite for dealing with an irate parent demanding a real time review of 10 hours of video evidence showing no AI cheating.

bad_haircut72• 8 months ago

Now imagine this but its a courtroom and you're facing 25 years

stocksinsmocks• 8 months ago

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.

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.

perihelions• 8 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238786 ("Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms (nytimes.com)")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14285116 ('Justice.exe: Bias in Algorithmic sentencing (justiceexe.com)")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649811 ("Louisiana prison board uses algorithms to determine eligility for parole (propublica.org)")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753805 ("Machine Bias (propublica.org)")

GuinansEyebrows2• 8 months ago

The legal system has never been so easy thanks to Cinco e-Trial!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL2RLTmqG4w

johanam• 8 months ago

edit history in Google docs is a good way to defend yourself from AI tool use accusations

andrewinardeer• 8 months ago

Ironic that one of the biggest AI companies is also the platform to offer a service to protect yourself from allegations of using it.

Ancapistani• 8 months ago

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.

raincole6• 8 months ago

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.

The only thing prevents them from doing so is the fact Google is too big to sell a "plagiarism assistant."

hiddencost• 8 months ago

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.

j458• 8 months ago

Easy if one of these options might be available to the writer:

- Write it in google docs, and share the edit history in the google docs, it is date and time stamped.

- Make a video of writing it in the google docs tab.

If this is available, and sufficient, I would pursue a written apology to remind the future detectors.

Edit: clarity

obscurette• 8 months ago

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.

mettamage• 8 months ago

I would screencast the whole thing and then tell my professor that we can watch a bit together.

rkagerer• 8 months ago

Guess you have to videotape or screen-record yourself writing it. Oh what a world we've created :-S.

inerte• 8 months ago

You mean you'll prompt Sora to create a video of you writing the essay :)

rcv• 8 months ago

... until you get accused of generating that video with another AI.

jancsika• 8 months ago

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.

It should be way easier than TSA's goal because you don't need to stop cheaters. You instead just need to ensure that you seed skills into a minimal number of achievers so that the rest of the kids see what the real target of education looks like. Kids try their best not to learn, but when the need kicks in they learn way better spontaneously from their peers than any other method.

Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program in the first place.

WalterBright5• 8 months ago

Kids try their best not to learn

Often it is more work to cheat than just learn it.

oblio5• 8 months ago

Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program in the first place.

Pre-k is preschool aka kindergarten?

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?

I started reading around 6 years old and I was probably ahead of the vast majority of kids within 6 months.

Kids starting around 6 years old have much better focus and also greatly enhanced mental abilities overall.

FloorEgg9• 8 months ago

Write it in something like Google docs that tracks changes and then share the link with the revision history.

If this is insufficient, then there are tools specifically for education contexts that track student writing process.

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.

fuzzythinker• 8 months ago

Thought it is a good idea at first, but can easily be defeated with typing out AI contents. One can add pauses/deletions/edits or true edits from joining ideas different AI outputs.

jstummbillig• 8 months ago

How is that a dilemma for the students? What are their supposed options?

eloisant5• 8 months ago

Accept to be unjustly marked as a cheater, or submit to a 30-60 minutes interrogation where the teacher think you're guilty and you need to prove that you're innocent.

It's only an obvious choice if you have total faith that your teacher will be fair, which you might doubt if the situation starts with "You're a cheater unless you prove me otherwise". In the worse case scenario you'll be grilled for one hour and still be marked as a cheater because you didn't convince the teacher.

WalterBright5• 8 months ago

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.

totetsu• 8 months ago

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.

lumost• 8 months ago

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.

CuriouslyC2• 8 months ago

"Please take this finished essay and write me a rough first draft version of it that looks like something someone might type in on the fly before editing"

hiAndrewQuinn• 8 months ago

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.

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.

edwcross2• 8 months ago

Always stunned by how much teachers can accuse without proof and invert the "innocent until proven guilty".

Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works" (or at least should work). So should the teachers.

Student unions and similar entities should exist and be ready to intervene to help students in such situations.

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.

icsa• 8 months ago

In the United States, we all used to take a required course called Civics.

We learned how government and justice worked.

trashtester2• 8 months ago

Student unions tend to focus on all sorts of other issues, I wouldn't trust them to handle cases like this.

The only way to reliably prevent the use of AI tools without punishing innocent students is to monitor the students while they work.

Schools can either do that by having essays be written on premise, either by hand or by using computers managed by the school.

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.

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.

miki1232113• 8 months ago

Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works"

And to add to that, there should be a justice system there. The idea of due process is laughable in most educational settings.

hsuduebc2• 8 months ago

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.

Bizzare and unfair

bradgessler• 8 months ago

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?”

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.

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.

randcraw• 8 months ago

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.

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.

beeflet4• 8 months ago

I agree, it isn't hard! Watch:

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.

ball_of_lint3• 8 months ago

You don't convince the teacher, you talk with the Dean.

lll-o-lll2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

throwaway311312• 8 months ago

You hinted to it but at what point are you basically giving individual oral exams to the entire class for every assignment? There are surveys where 80% of high school students self report using AI on assignments.

I guess we could go back to giving exams soviet Russia style where you get a couple of questions that you have to answer orally in front of the whole class and that’s your grade. Not fun…

globalnode• 8 months ago

its defamation. flimsy proof like that needs to be sued.

somenameforme• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

disgruntledphd22• 8 months ago

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.

Just so we're clear, the coding tests are in addition 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.

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.

andrepd• 8 months ago

That's an absolutely dreadful exam. Would you mind explaining the point you wanted to make with it?

thfuran• 8 months ago

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

Sure, but it takes < 1 second to read a GPA.

alpinisme• 8 months ago

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.

snickerbockers2• 8 months ago

I still don't understand why standardized testing gets so much pushback. Having the students do their work in a controlled environment is the obvious solution to AI and many other problems related to academic integrity.

Its also the only way that students can actually be held to the same standards. When I was a freshman in college with a 3.4 highschool GPA, I was absolutely gobsmacked by how many kids with perfect >= 4.0 GPAs couldn't pass the simple algebra test that the university administered to all undergraduates as a prerequisite for taking any advanced mathematics course.

eloisant5• 8 months ago

In an age where having a degree is increasingly meaningless

I wish I would agree with you, but I think that having a degree (or rather the right degree) is more important than ever.

Basically grades exist to decide who gets a laid back high paying job, and who has to work 2 low paying labor intensive job just to live paycheck to paycheck.

As one teacher told me once: we could have all of you practice chess, make a big tournament and you get to choose your university based on your chess ranking. It wouldn't be any less stupid than the current system.

teekert4• 8 months ago

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.

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.

Borealid2• 8 months ago

Is it possible the same problems that cause you to write less-readable words also lead you to choose poor AI outputs?

If no, why not?

Personally I would rather read a human's output than their selection of machine outputs.

singpolyma3• 8 months ago

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.

nephihaha3• 8 months ago

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.

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.

gspencley2• 8 months ago

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.

Surely it would be relatively easy to offer to show the edit history to prove that you actually contributed to the article? And, by doing so, would flip the situation in your favour by demonstrating your expertise?

The fact that you should have to is pretty annoying but also fairly edge case. And if a teacher or institute refuses to review that evidence then I don't think the credential on the table worth the paper it's printed on anyway.

wartywhoa23• 8 months ago

Welcome to the post-truth society so many were and are so eager to build.

4pkjai• 8 months ago

When I was a university student in 2009 a lecturer accused me of plagiarising a c++ win32 project I submitted.

It turned out he ran it through a plagiarism detector and multiple lines of code where identical to lines in their database.

It was very silly because there’s a lot of boiler plate code in win32 projects

bluenose69• 8 months ago

The oral discussion does not scale well in large classes. The solution is to stop using essays for evaluation, relying on (supervised) examinations instead.

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.

FooBarBizBazz• 8 months ago

If you, like AI, have been trained on real literature -- perhaps including em-dashes, as real books do -- then you might register as AI.

but if u talk like this boss i had, then obv ur a human, kthx

Great incentives. /s

apwell23• 8 months ago

how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself?

She can't because she didn't write the essay herself, obviously.

_vqpz• 8 months ago

You joke but I would be willing to bet this is actually the case.

snarf21• 8 months ago

The real problem here is (in this case) lazy teachers. These kind of tools should only be used to flag potential AI generation. If the teacher read the essay and thought it reflected standard work for this student, then all would be fine. Instead they are just running the tool first to be lazy and taking the tool as gospel.

This reminds me of when GPS routing devices first came onto the scene. Lots of people drove right into a lake or ocean because the device said keep going straight. (because of poorly classified multi-modal routing data)

theptip2• 8 months ago

Yeah, these AI detector tools are bad. (They also punish ESL as this tends to result in simpler language patterns that parse as LLM.)

The great thing about AI is that with a bit of imagination it can be used to amplify teachers too.

In this case, yes, you need to do a viva voce to convince the teacher (though I suspect they should be able to get fairly confident in 10-15 minutes).

But you could also have students convince an AI (probably in a proctored space?) if you need to scale this approach out.

swah• 8 months ago

Vídeo of her typing the essay>?

motbus3• 8 months ago

That's an interesting point. It seems it makes cheaper to provide knowledge but more expensive to have individual assessments.

I think AI got me some brain rot as I concern to finish stuff on time and I can't bare to spend brain energy on that (and spend on it anyway because AI sucks)

rdudek• 8 months ago

This stuff is getting more pervasive too. I'm working on my Master's degree right now and any code I submit, I make sure it has spelling mistakes and make it god awful because I don't want to get flagged by some 3rd party utility that checks if it was AI generated or copied from someone else.

JTon• 8 months ago

Is this how you defeat AI detection? I.e. Generate a report, then manually introduce spelling and/or grammatical errors?

ako• 8 months ago

My son recently told me his teacher used him as an example for the class as someone who wrote a good piece himself. Teacher accused all the other students of using AI.

He also told me that he had in fact used AI, but asked AI multiple times to simplify the text, and he had entered the simplified version. He liked the first version best, but was aware his teacher would consider it written by AI.

Guess the teachers have already lost...

scruple3• 8 months ago

Further, what's to stop anyone from pumping text into an LLM and then re-writing it's output to match their own style, etc.?

FuriouslyAdrift• 8 months ago

There's an easy fix. All course work must be completed in class without tools.

RobRivera2• 8 months ago

Giving a teacher judge/jury powers on administrative punishment jist creates a tyranny of the classroom.

Bart Simpson, we need you.

MisterTea• 8 months ago

Years ago in the 90's my brother wrote a short story for a fourth grade assignment and the teacher accused him of plagiarism because how could a 9 year old come up with such a vivid and elaborate story so he received a zero. I forget the details but my mother went to the school making a big stink and eventually had the zero changed to an A.

RobRivera2• 8 months ago

It creates another layer of arbitrary gate-keeping. I experience this in interviews too. If I need to think about the low latency response I can give to derive djikstras algo verbatim, I get accused of reading notes on another monitor, not someone who studied for success.

It is beginning to become an awful situation where these companies are selling tools that undermine the student. Education is suppose to be the great equalizer in society, not another toggle or tool for oppression.

renewiltord• 8 months ago

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.

Zero homework grades will be ideal. Looking forward to this.

danielbln2• 8 months ago

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.

mavhc2• 8 months ago

Agreed, the Gutenberg method is preferred:

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

What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has barely changed

speff• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

vkou3• 8 months ago

but if students are going to see homework for the first time in college, I can see problems coming up.

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.

lazyasciiart3• 8 months ago

Now that's an optimistic take!

ecshafer4• 8 months ago

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.

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.

SirMaster• 8 months ago

So we are screwed once we get brain-computer interfaces?

mercacona2• 8 months ago

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.

ecshafer4• 8 months ago

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?

ghaff7• 8 months ago

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.

BobbyJo• 8 months ago

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.

Libidinalecon• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All AI would have done for me in high school would have been swapping a language model for copying my friend's homework.

ball_of_lint3• 8 months ago

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.

vanviegen2• 8 months ago

Or just do some work/exam in a controlled setting.

Talking to students in order to gauge their understanding is not as easy or reliable as some people make it out to be.

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).

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.

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.

AmbroseBierce• 8 months ago

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.

jinzo• 8 months ago

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.

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.

titanomachy• 8 months ago

“Undergrad” or “bachelor’s degree” are both correct and commonly used in US/Canada.

lqet2• 8 months ago

Strongly agree. I was involved with several CS lectures in the past ~10 years that did not require a final exam, and we always 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.

charcircuit4• 8 months ago

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.

alariccole• 8 months ago

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.

CamperBob23• 8 months ago

Just curious, not being a turkey SME, what's the downside to positioning the turkey that way?

charcircuit4• 8 months ago

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.

bigstrat20033• 8 months ago

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?

qingcharles• 8 months ago

For someone that wants to learn, I agree with this 100%. AI has been great at teaching me about 100s of topics.

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.

sharkjacobs3• 8 months ago

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.

charcircuit4• 8 months ago

Sure. People who are self motivated are who will benefit the earliest. If a society values ensuring every single citizen gets a baseline education they can figure out how to get an AI to persuade or trick people into learning better than a human could.

nathan_compton• 8 months ago

Snap out of it. This is the best advice I can give you.

charcircuit4• 8 months ago

Snap out of what? I use chatgpt for learning every day.

qsort• 8 months ago

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.

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.

mark242• 8 months ago

"You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI."

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.

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.

tgv• 8 months ago

There is a whole huge cohort of kids out there

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.

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.

drivebyhooting• 8 months ago

Addiction created by you and me, laboring for Zuck’s profit.

There’s a reason this stuff is banned in China. Their pupils suffer no such opiate.

ethmarks2• 8 months ago

As someone who had a college English assignment due literally just yesterday, I think that "the vast majority" is an overstatement. There are absolutely students in my class who cheat with AI (one of them confessed to it and got a metaphorical slap on the wrist with a 15 point deduction and the opportunity to redo the assignments, which doesn't seem fair but whatever), but the majority of my classmates were actively discussing and working on their essays in class.

Whatever solution we implement in response to AI, it must avoid hurting the students who genuinely want to learn and do honest work. Treating AI detection tools as infallible oracles is a terrible idea because of the staggering number of false reports. The solution many people have proposed in this thread, short one-on-one sessions with the instructor, seems like a great way to check if students can engage with and defend the work they turned in.

sharkjacobs3• 8 months ago

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?

techblueberry• 8 months ago

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.

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.

So I think, I dunno, maybe depressing. Maybe cynical, but probably true. Why shy away from the truth?

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.

People aren't one thing.

ACCount37• 8 months ago

AI is a boon to students who are intrinsically motivated. Most students aren't.

KerryJones• 8 months ago

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).

I'm curious if we instead gave students an AI tool, but one that would intentionally throw in wrong things that the student had to catch. Instead of the student using LLMs, they would have one paid for by the school.

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 naturally inclined 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.

jay_kyburz• 8 months ago

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.

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.

The student's job becomes asking the right questions and verifying the results.

sharkjacobs3• 8 months ago

The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later.

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.

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.

iterateoften• 8 months ago

I use it every day.

Preparing for a test requires understanding what the instructor wants. concentrate on the wrong thing get marked down.

Same applies to working in a corporation. You need to understand what management wants. It’s a core requirement.

yannyu2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

crooked-v• 8 months ago

There's no mistake there for all the students looking at job listings that treat having a college degree as a hard prerequisite for even being employable.

mercacona2• 8 months ago

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!

Kelvinidan• 8 months ago

I recently wrote on something similar. I think the way we design evaluation methods for students needs to mirror the design of security systems. https://kelvinpaschal.com/blog/educators-hackers/

TheAceOfHearts2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

yannyu2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

FloorEgg9• 8 months ago

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.

AI has potential to smooth out all curves so that students can learn faster and maximize time in flow.

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.

Kids used to get smacked with a stick if they spelled a word wrong.

TheAceOfHearts2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

xboxnolifes• 8 months ago

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.

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.

graemep2• 8 months ago

Doing derivatives

Not something everyone learns. My kids seemed to enjoy it. My older daughter learned quite a lot of algebra etc. by doing physics.

learning the periodic table

You do not need to rote learn all of it, and you remember enough by learning about particular elements etc.

basic language and alphabet skills

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.

Admittedly none of the above was in school, but my point is that its not intrinsic to 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.

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.

cameronh902• 8 months ago

I have never had to rote learn anything mental since at least mid childhood. I can't remember before then.

If it's something I need to do regularly, I eventually learn it through natural repetition while working towards the high level goal I was actually trying to achieve. Derivatives were like this for me. I still don't fully know the periodic table though, because it doesn't really come up in my life; if it's not something I need to do regularly, I just don't learn it.

My guess is this doesn't work for everything (or for everyone), and it probably depends on the learning curve you experience. If there are cliff edges in the curve that are not aligned with useful or enjoyable output, dedicated practice of some sort is probably needed to overcome them, which may take the form of rote learning, or, maybe better, spaced repetition or quizzing or similar. However at least for me, I've not encountered anything like that.

If I was to speculate why rote learning doesn't work well for me, I don't seem to experience a feeling of reward during it, and it seems like my ability to learn is really heavily tied somehow to that feeling. I learn far more quickly if it's a problem I've been struggling with for a while that I solve, or it's a problem I really wanted to solve, as the reward feeling is much higher.

SunshineTheCat3• 8 months ago

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.

Doing rather than memorizing outdated facts in a textbook.

dartharva2• 8 months ago

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.

hazbot3• 8 months ago

Projects are less efficient for learning foundational skills. They have their place, but with infinite funds I would still give my children an education with a bedrock of boring drill and testing and memorisation.

intended2• 8 months ago

Increase spending on schools by an order of magnitude and it would be possible.

All of schooling breaks down to costs and society’s willingness and desire to invest in child nutrition, education, and training.

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.

suddenlybananas• 8 months ago

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.

hazbot3• 8 months ago

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'.

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 episodically all the accumulated learning that happened in boring classrooms to enable the project-induced higher order synthesis.

kingstnap2• 8 months ago

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.

The problem is that the structure pushes for teaching productivity which basically directly opposes good pedagogy at this point in the optimization.

Some specifics:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But it is ridiculously time consuming to pull people's code and try to run open ended testbenches that they have created.

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.

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.

bjt• 8 months ago

Written response needs TAs.

Can AI not grade written responses?

kingstnap2• 8 months ago

I tried that once. Specifically because I wanted to see if we could leverage some sort of productivity enhancements.

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.

It was okay but not good, there were a lot of things I tried:

* 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.

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.

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.

Maken• 8 months ago

You still need someone to check the grades. AI can and will totally misgrade.

Huppie4• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://cluely.com/

SunshineTheCat3• 8 months ago

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).

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.

FloorEgg9• 8 months ago

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.

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.

Education system uses multiple choice quizzes and tests because their grading can be automated.

But when evaluation of any 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.

aprilthird20215• 8 months ago

So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information (which AI is unmatched at doing).

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

l2silver• 8 months ago

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.

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.

Animats• 8 months ago

So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information, which AI is unmatched at doing.

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.

There was a time when programmers poured over Fundamental Algorithms. 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?

raincole6• 8 months ago

It's the opposite.

focused upon memorization and regurgitation

This is what is easy to test in-class.

Teachers worry about AI because they do not 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.

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.

LudwigNagasena2• 8 months ago

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.

Take-homes were never a good proxy for anything because any student can pay for private "lessons" and get their homework done for them.

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.

What stops a diligent responsible teacher from doing in-class essays?

SunshineTheCat3• 8 months ago

Again, the essay you're talking about is the "regurgitation."

Who do you think will "learn" archery quicker? The kid writing an essay about it or the kid shooting a bow?

hazbot3• 8 months ago

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.

But the foundations start with memorisation.

bilsbie• 8 months ago

I submitted this but why is there an xcancel link added to it?

crabmusket• 8 months ago

X is a hostile experience when not logged in.

GuinansEyebrows2• 8 months ago

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).

paulorlando• 8 months ago

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).

ishtanbul• 8 months ago

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.

alexose• 8 months ago

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.

ojr• 8 months ago

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

oytis2• 8 months ago

Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.

Effect of AI applied to coding is precisely the opposite though?

muldvarp3• 8 months ago

Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.

This will _never_ happen. Output will increase and quality will decrease.

oytis2• 8 months ago

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.

bo10242• 8 months ago

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

enjeyw• 8 months ago

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: https://collie.ink/

11101010001100• 8 months ago

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.

gsinclair• 8 months ago

It’s hard to go from (I privately think you’re cheating) to (I accuse you to your face), though.

nicce4• 8 months ago

Oral exams don't scale well if there are +100 students and a lot of assignments. The main pain point.

fhgh23• 8 months ago

Do fewer graded assignments then

LudwigNagasena2• 8 months ago

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.

adidoit• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

theideaofcoffee• 8 months ago

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.

thinkindie2• 8 months ago

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.

fluorinerocket• 8 months ago

When I was a kid in Italy in the late 80s early 90s the elentary school teachers also did "interrogazione" at the blackboard. That is individual kids would go up to the blackboard and get asked questions front of the rest of the class.

Not sure if those two were just old school (they'd occasionally hit us/ pull ears too) but damn was I ahead of all the other kids when I came back to the USA

Also the two teachers had the same class of kids for all of elementary school, teaching 1st through 5th grades sequentially So they got to know the kids quite well

thinkindie2• 8 months ago

I started my school career in 1991 and it was still a thing, but more during middle school.

cadamsdotcom2• 8 months ago

AI can also generate questions of course.

So it is feasible (in principle) to give every student a different exam!

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.

respondo21345• 8 months ago

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.

raincole6• 8 months ago

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?

cadamsdotcom2• 8 months ago

AI should not grade them.

Code that the AI writes would be used to grade them.

- AI is great at some things.

- Code is great at other things.

- AI is bad at some things code is great for.

- AI is great at coding.

Therefore, leverage AI to quickly code up deterministic and fast tools for the tasks where code is best.

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.

solomonb2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

I imagine something similar could be done to teach students to use AI as a research tool rather then as a plagiarization machine.

vanviegen2• 8 months ago

That's awesome!

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. :-)

moffkalast2• 8 months ago

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.

frays• 8 months ago

Thanks for sharing, that's actually really cool: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3

Following to see what they do in the future.

solomonb2• 8 months ago

more or less does that exact exercise for you at a press of a button.

Well it would give you a similar final artifact but it wouldn't be doing the exercise at all.

WalterBright5• 8 months ago

Cheaters and frauds are always wondering why they are "no hires" and are first to be laid off.

CamperBob23• 8 months ago

Meanwhile, in this reality, the cheaters and frauds end up winning elections and running things.

markdown• 8 months ago

I've had to stop using em-dashes because people assume I'm using ai.

dartharva2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

doctorpangloss• 8 months ago

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.

thedoodleswrong2• 8 months ago

I read that xcancel thread, the original one and now this hackernews thread and...

IS NO ONE GOING TO POINT OUT MULTIPLE OF THOSE DOODLES ARE WRONG???

thedoodleswrong2• 8 months ago

To be specific, it's the doodles that are, not the answers.

siscia• 8 months ago

With my partner we have been working to invert the overall model.

She started grading conversation than the students have with LLMs.

From the question that the students ask, it is obvious who knows the material and who is struggling.

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.

The results seems promising, with students spending 30m or so going back and forth with the LLMs.

If any educator wants to Ty or is interested in more information, let me know and we can see how we collaborate.

bo10242• 8 months ago

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?

Huppie4• 8 months ago

Oxide and Friends recently had a podcast episode [0] with Michael Littman about this topic for anyone who's curious about this topic.

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 not cheat 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.)

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-in-highe...

zkmon• 8 months ago

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?

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.

Huppie4• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

nicce4• 8 months ago

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.

What you are desribing is that they should use LLM just after they know the topic. A dilemma.

nicce4• 8 months ago

With calculators, you cannot replace the thinking process. LLM can do that and that is the problem.

ethmarks2• 8 months ago

I beg to differ. Tactical use of a scientific or graphing calculator can absolutely replace large parts of the thinking process. If you're testing for the ability to solve differential equations, a powerful enough calculator can trivialize it, so they aren't allowed in calculus exams. A 10-digit calculator cannot trivialize calculus, so they are allowed. That's the distinction. LLMs operate at the maximum level of "helpfulness" and there's no good way to dial them back.

SkyBelow• 8 months ago

Also, just like how calculators are allowed in the exam halls, why not allow AI usage in exams?

Dig deeper into this. When are calculators allowed, and when are they not? If it is kids learning to do basic operations, do we really allow them to use calculators? I doubt it, and I suspect that places that do end up with students who struggle with more advanced math because they off loaded the thinking already.

On the other hand, giving a calculus student a 4 function calculator is pretty standard, because the type of math they can do isn't what is being tested, and having a student be able to plug 12 into x^3 - 4x^2 + 12 very quickly instead of having to work it out doesn't impact their learning. On the other hand, more advanced calculator are often not allowed when they trivialize the content.

LLMs are much more powerful than a calculator, so finding where in education it doesn't trivialize the learning process is pretty difficult. Maybe at grad level or research, but anything grade school it is as bad as letting a kid learning their times tables use a calculator.

Now, if we could create custom LLMs that are targeted at certain learning levels? That would be pretty nice. A lot more work. Imagine a Chemistry LLM that can answer questions, but know the homework well enough to avoid solving problems for students. Instead, it can tell them what chapter of their textbook to go read, or it can help them when they are having a deep dive beyond the level of material and give them answers to the sorts of problems they aren't expected to solve. The difficulty is that current LLMs aren't this selective and are instead too helpful, immediately answering all problems (even the ones they can't).

intended2• 8 months ago

Its really something to just casually say “all exams need to be in person”, reversing in a single move significant gains in education availability.

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.

Being able to provide courses, and homework digitally, reduced the amount of work required to grade and review work.

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.

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.

lvl155• 8 months ago

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.

moffkalast2• 8 months ago

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.

tim333• 8 months ago

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.

Not sure why they don't just do that? It worked fine and would be compatible with LLM use.

nephihaha3• 8 months ago

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.

danielbln2• 8 months ago

Teenage me would be building the pen holding robot that same afternoon.

lqet2• 8 months ago

Most of what schools teach is either useless or toxic

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.

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 did not know that at the time and I am still grateful that I was being exposed to these topics. Some of my classmates developed successful careers from these early exposures.

nephihaha3• 8 months ago

I was generalising of course, but that was my experience. My god daughter came out of school barely able to read or write. Others I know just remember being bullied by teachers.

Out of that list you mention there (from my personal experience), we were never taught calculus, linear algebra or probability theory. The maths was very basic and uninspiring. The foreign language teaching was next to useless. (I learnt more in six months learning German after high school than six years of French in high school.) The science teaching was okay. The history teaching was appalling (I do like history but we were taught it in such a dull fashion, and from only one or two angles.)

It would have been useful for me to learn basic cookery, how to open a bank account and so on. Sewing and clothing repair would also have been handy. We did do some carpentry and I.T. (which is obsolete, but was a useful foundation). I do use some of what I learnt in Geography class.

Against this, they tried to instill some horrible habits in us. Like they would punish all of us when one person did something wrong (and they didn't know who). I saw that across multiple schools, and I still resent it. There was also the notion that we should obey teachers without question and accept everything they say (and they were frequently wrong). In my last school, you either went straight into university or the military but at that point in life neither was an option.

pluralmonad• 8 months ago

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.

gortok• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

mercurialsolo• 8 months ago

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.

ekianjo• 8 months ago

For now. Until you will have contact lenses with micro screens that tell you what to say and what to think.

nalekberov• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

More importantly calculators are not connected to the internet, and they are not capable of creating profile of an individual.

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.

polyrand• 8 months ago

There is too much focus on students cheating with AI and not enough on the other side of the equation: teachers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

gchallen• 8 months ago

As a teacher, I agree. There's a ton of covert AI grading taking place on college campuses. Some of it by actual permanent faculty, but I suspect most of it by overworked adjuncts and graduate student teaching assistants. I've seen little reporting on this, so it seems to be largely flying under the radar. For now. But it's definitely happening.

Is using AI to support grading such a bad idea? I think that there are probably ways to use it effectively to make grading more efficient and more fair. I'm sure some people are using good AI-supported grading workflows today, and their students are benefiting. But of course there are plenty of ways to get it wrong, and the fact that we're all pretending that it isn't happening is not facilitating the sharing of best practices.

Of course, contemplating the role of AI grading also requires facing the reality of human grading, which is often not pretty. Particularly the relationship between delay and utility in providing students with grading feedback. Rapid feedback enables learning and change, while once feedback is delayed too long, its utility falls to near zero. I suspect this curve actually goes to zero much more quickly than most people think. If AI can help educators get feedback returned to students more quickly, that may be a significant win, even if the feedback isn't quite as good. And reducing grading burden also opens up opportunities for students to directly respond to the critical feedback through resubmission, which is rare today on anything that is human-graded.

And of course, a lot of times university students get the worst of both worlds: feedback that is both unhelpful and delayed. I've been enrolling in English courses at my institution—which are free to me as a faculty member. I turned in a 4-page paper for the one I'm enrolled in now in mid-October. I received a few sentences of written feedback over a month later, and only two days before our next writing assignment was due. I feel lucky to have already learned how to write, somehow. And I hope that my fellow students in the course who are actual undergraduates are getting more useful feedback from the instructor. But in this case, AI would have provided better feedback, and much more quickly.

HDThoreaun5• 8 months ago

When I was in high school none of my teachers actually read any of the homework we turned in. They all skimmed it, maybe read the opening and closing paragraph if it was an essay. So I guess the question is if having an ai grade it is better than having a teacher look at it for 15 seconds, because that’s the real alternative.

whearyou• 8 months ago

“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.”

This was the plot to a recent South Park episode: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27035146/

ericmcer• 8 months ago

It is probably a good time to view the root goals of education instead of the markers of success that we have been shooting at for a long time now (worksheets, standardized tests, etc.).

A one hour lecture where students (especially <20 year old kids) need to proactively interject if they don't understand something is a pretty terrible format.

"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"

Good point, it is less like a threat and more like... "how do we shoehorn this into our current processes without adapting them at all? Oh cool now the LLM generates and grades the worksheets for me!".

We might need to adjust to more long term projects, group projects, and move away from lectures. A teacher has 5*60=300 minutes a week with a class of ~26. If you broke the class into groups of 4 - 5 you could spend a significant amount of time with each group and really get a feel for the students beyond what grade the computer gives to their worksheet.

gyulai2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

iteria2• 8 months ago

As a parent of a kid like this: start early with low stakes. You can increase your child's tolerance for pressure. I sometimes hear my kid saying sometimes after a deep breath, "There nothing to it, but to do it". And then work on focusing on what they did better versus how they did in absolute terms.

I see collapsing under pressure to be either a kind of anxiety or a fixation on perfect outcomes. Teaching a tolerance for some kinds of failure is the fix for both.

gyulai2• 8 months ago

Thanks!

swapnilt• 8 months ago

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?'

renegade-otter• 8 months ago

It's like a Meta interview - it's not "can you program", it's "can you make AI to program for you?". Basically, an AI operator.

CuriouslyC2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

CivBase• 8 months ago

the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments)

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 and monitor them all at the same time.

Bring back pencil and paper. Bring back calculators. Internet connected devices do not belong in the classroom.

danielvaughn• 8 months ago

At this point, I'd be happy to send my child to an entirely analog school. No computers, just books, pencils and paper.

Balgair• 8 months ago

Again, AI is not getting rid of degrees or learning or education.

It's getting rid of cheap methods.

Scantrons and bluebooks were always a way that made it cheap for institutions to produce results. Now those methods kinda seem silly, right?

500 person freshman lectures seem kinda absurd now, right?

Teaching via adjuncts that had 3 days notice for the class and are paid nothing is kinda scammy, right?

R1s professors whose tenure evals have nothing to do with teaching is kinda wrong, right?

The Oxbridge model of 5-10 person classes with a proctor is what the education with AI is going to be about. It's small, intimate, and expensive.

FuckButtons• 8 months ago

Hurray! We’ve just made education only viable for the wealthy! Good job everyone, I can see this technology revolution is already living up to its promise of distributing wealth and power more evenly throughout society.

tpdly• 8 months ago

I just looked up some numbers for UCLA as an example. <45k students (undergrad and grad) and >5k faculty (and another 30k on staff)— so thats a pessimistic ratio of 1 to 9.

If you imagine students take 4 classes per semester and faculty teach 4 per semester… it seems stunningly feasible.

disqard• 8 months ago

sama in 2023:

"We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models"

sama in 2024:

"using technology to create abundance--intelligence, energy, longevity, whatever--will not solve all problems and will not magically make everyone happy. but it is an unequivocally great thing to do, and expands our option space. to me, it feels like a moral imperative."

sama in 2025:

...proposals requiring AI developers to vet their systems before rolling them out would be 'disastrous' for the industry.

Nothing to see here.

thefaux• 8 months ago

If the value of human labor is going to zero, which some say ai will induce, wouldn't the oxbridge model become the most cost effective option?

aleph_minus_one5• 8 months ago

If the value of human labor is going to zero, which some say ai will induce

These "some" are founders of AI companies and investors who put a lot of money into such companies. Of course, the statements that these people "excrete" serve an agenda ...

tucnak• 8 months ago

Back in the day if you were studying in Cambridge under somebody like Russell, it would have been a class of 5, and all of you were poised to become professors. Now, well, now it's a different story. Say what you will about higher education, but it's not for everyone. Most people currently attending university have no business being there, frankly, but what else are they supposed to do?! The game is rigged so. I wish we had something better, but we don't.

Maybe all this social stuff that AI would bring to focus—may prove a catalyser for radical change?

Unlikely, but one can dream!

SamuelAdams• 8 months ago

The silver lining is the Demographic Cliff of 2025:

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cli...

PDF warning: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr73/nvsr73-02.pdf

Colleges will need to reduce class sizes, or close entirely, for the next decade at least. With smaller class sizes brings the opportunity for course instructors to provide more time per pupil so that things like in-person homework and project review is possible.

reinier• 8 months ago

to me this sounds like it means cheaper education. smaller classes could also be achieved more easily.

when we've just made personalized education viable for everybody. schools already have the computers, laptops, tablets and study spaces. only thing left is to put these AI education apps on them. classes could also just remain the same size. students will get personalized education through the app. students can still interact with the teacher when necessary or for class wide sessions with the teacher.

cgearhart• 8 months ago

It’s mind boggling that image generators can solve physics and chem problems like this—but I will note that there are a few slight mistakes in both. (An extra i term in LHS, a few of the chemical names look wrong, etc.) Unbelievable that we’re here, but it still remains an essential to check the work.

credit_guy• 8 months ago

One more thing: teachers should use LLMs for grading. Grading is a boring chore, the majority of teachers hate it. Many procrastinate, and return the graded tests or assignments with a significant delay, well beyond the window where the kids are curious to see how they did. This completely destroys the feedback purpose of grading. With an LLM, you feed the scanned tests, the LLMs gives you back the graded test, and the teacher can quickly do a bit of quality control to see the LLM did not make any mistakes. If the LLM makes mistakes, then wait 6 months, there will be new version that won't make those mistakes.

disambiguation• 8 months ago

The current education system is going to collapse. Teachers and students alike won't be able to resist the ultimate cheat code.

Schools need to become tech free zones. Education needs to reorient around more frequent standardized tests. Any "tech" involved needs to be exclusively applied towards solving the supply and demand issue - the number of "quality teachers" to "students per classroom."

I admire Karpathy for advocating common sense, but none of this will happen because SV is full of IQ realists who only see "education" as a business opportunity and the bureaucratic process is too dysfunctional for common sense decisions to prevail. The future is chrome books with GPT browsers for every student.

lucideng2• 8 months ago

To me the solution is: Ban homework. All projects, essays, tests, etc are done at school on air-gapped machines or written by hand. Work is monitored by the teacher with video surveillance in 'test halls'. Cell phones can be kept in a small locker. If the student needs to be reached, a parent or whomever can call the school. Internet research should be done in a separate environment, printed out, then taken to the 'work' location. Like how you used to photo-copy sections of a book. Printed text can be cataloged by the school and compared to completed work for plagiarism.

Take away the internet. Except in a research/library scenario. Give them a limited time to complete tasks. This would promote a stronger work ethic, memory/recall and more realistic to time management skills. They need to learn to rely on themselves, not technology. The only effective way is to remove tech from the equation, otherwise the temptation to cheat to compete/complete is too strong.

aleph_minus_one5• 8 months ago

To me the solution is: Ban homework. All projects, essays, tests, etc are done at school on air-gapped machines or written by hand.

Rather: don't grade homework. Make the homework rather the preparation that if you did it seriously will prepare you for the test (and if you didn't do it seriously, you won't have the skills that are necessary to pass the test).

lucideng2• 8 months ago

I would accept that as well

nkrisc3• 8 months ago

Assign homework that, if one actually does the work themselves, will help them hone the skills they'll need for the in-class assessment.

Then allow students who want their homework evaluated for feedback to turn it in, but no homework will be graded.

This relegates the use of AI to personal choice of learning style and any misuse of AI is only hurting the student.

georgebcrawford• 8 months ago

This relegates the use of AI to personal choice of learning style and any misuse of AI is only hurting the student.

I'm a teacher. Kids don't have the capacity to make this choice without guidance. There are so so many that don't (can't?) make the link between what we teach and how they grow as learners. And this is at a rich school with well-off parents who largely value education.

HDThoreaun5• 8 months ago

The problem with this strategy is that homework is mostly a tool for learning, not checking progress. Most teachers use homework as a way to get an extra hour or two of learning in each week for the students. If we remove it there will be less learning time available. So you’re gonna have to expand the school day or school year which means more teachers which is expensive.

eloisant5• 8 months ago

If homework is not used to check progress, then cheating on it is not a problem.

Don't grade homework. Only grade work done in school. Students who cheat on their homework are just deterring themselves and won't do as good at the in-class, graded exams.

biff1• 8 months ago

What is the point of learning after all? Is it to get a job? Is it human development? We have to answer this before pondering what ai means for schools. I don’t see much agreement to be arrived at. It’s a religious conundrum.

Implications of AI to schools

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