My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking • Hacker News Board

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#361

Post by MichaelZuo » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 11:51 PM UTC

throwaway314155 wrote: post #338

MichaelZuo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on their actual merit? For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.

You're talking about the way the world should be. Reality is different. For instance, having graduated from Harvard is going to get you a fairly good job _regardless_ of their GPA. Similarly, there is no objective way to measure "merit" that isn't unfair to _someone_ and also scales to dozens/hundreds/thousands of students. So people use GPA. Life isn't fair.

Why does it matter if there is an ‘objective way’ or not?

Clearly peers do evaluate each other in any ways they choose, pretty much every day at Harvard I imagine.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#362

Post by kaikai » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 11:54 PM UTC

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #275

dowager_dan99 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we flipped the lecture/homework system upside down it would first solve some of the major issues with how we deliver education, but as a side effect prevent the appearance of doing the work while really it's just the student mindlessly copying prompts and responses. Assign the material for outside the classroom. Use the in-person contact time to work through the problems, with a mix of small group, pairing and men…

This is good. I've never understood the value of watching a live lecture without interactivity. You might as well watch a video. It works on multiple levels: it mitigates the cheating, but also takes advantage of the vast array of learning options available to replace the traditional lecture. I cringe at the "small group" suggestion, although I acknowledge it's probably good to learn to coordinate with others. Rarely…

I went back to school as an adult and struggled with “flipped” classrooms, where we watched video lectures on our own time and worked through problems in class. I don’t process information well from video, and struggled to hold focus. In-person lectures worked much much better. I could read the text book for things I missed. Some of the flipped classes didn’t even have textbooks, so I resorted to finding other resources to try and learn the material.

It’s true that classes in giant lecture halls might as well be a video in some ways, but the delivery really does hit different for some people.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#363

Post by HaZeust » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 11:55 PM UTC

throwaway314155 wrote: post #344

insane_dreamer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper that's one of the better uses of ChatGPT I've heard of

Sounds highly unreliable to me. I would be very surprised if ChatGPT was ever confrontational enough to give out a lower grade like D or F. It also wouldn't surprise me if the grade-letter it chooses tends to be off by one or more grade-letters just due to natural variance/subjectivity of grading and hallucinations.

GPT is blunt, critical, and highly opinionated if you tell it to be.

That's what I don't get about people on this forum. GENERATIONS of STEM professionals who have it engraved in their head that a computer will only do what you tell it to - and nothing more, and they still don't think to simply just tell GPT what lens they want it to view content in, or give it accurate and necessary directives. They think it'll handle that for them. Why?

This should be the group getting the best outputs of this technology, bar-none. I've never encountered a more pragmatic group of people, haha! I don't get where the disconnect is.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#364

Post by dkkergoog » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 11:57 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #232

dcchambers wrote: post #219

I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least onc…

> Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them! I thought the "kids are il…

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Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#365

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

jjice wrote: post #232

dcchambers wrote: post #219

I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least onc…

> Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them! I thought the "kids are il…

> She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them!

Clearly, they aren't things that the parents are teaching or there wouldn't be an issue, and there is a clash of expectations between teacher (and maybe school more broadly) and the parents.

> Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore?

This was absolutely something that was taught in elementary schools when I was in school (I learned it from my parents, largely before starting, but not everyone did and it was absolutely taught as part of the curriculum; also, people who needed to know the time didn't usually have digital clocks on the wrist, in their pocket, and on their computer, plus voice assistants that will give a spoken report of the time in request, then, so it was a much more relevant skill. We started teaching our kids before they started school, but I can see why parents and schools would view it as less important today.)

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#366

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #331

stevemadere wrote: post #329

I guess this signals the end of focusing on testing to prove one's "rank" as a student and actually start focusing on educating students rather than evaluating them. The whole problem with factory mass-education is the almost exclusive focus on evaluation. A little bit of education happens as a side-effect of the unrelenting soul-crushing evaluation so we've put up with it and called it education for 100 years. ChatG…

In France the extreme majority of your grades comes from in-class exams that are essay-based or at least long format rather than multi-choice like in the US. Homeworks are just exercises to learn and aren't graded. This entirely solves ALL the problems introduced by LLMs. The US just needs to adapt their evaluation system.

At my high school, teachers were given a lot of freedom to decide their own grading, but had the rule that the final could not be more than 20% of your grade. Typically, homework ended up being 50%.

I failed my Geometry class despite getting 110% on the final (She had some hard extra-credit questions that went beyond what we learned) because I didn't do a single homework assignment.

Meanwhile, this high school made all sorts of claims about preparing students for college, and my first math class in college, homework was only 3% of your grade.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#367

Post by theamk » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 12:11 AM UTC

indrora wrote: post #246

theamk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you go to gym class, you are expected to perform without aids - you cannot ride a e-bike around the track when teacher tells you to run. Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you. Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions…

> When you go to gym class, you are expected to perform without aids - you cannot ride a e-bike around the track when teacher tells you to run. If you are expected to perform without assistance, then the instructor is failing to meet the needs of the students and doing them a disservice. If the goal is to get the students to exercise, an e-bike may well be the best tool to allow a student to get from a lower point to…

I am not sure I've got your point, nor if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me?

anyway, I don't think your "run a marathon" or "hour of sustained running" analogies are appropriate... OP mentions "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours", that's closer to "run a 100 meters at any pace", something that any student should do.

And even if teacher is giving unreasonable assignments, the right answer is not to cheat (by asking parent, or ChatGPT or something) - but rather do what you can, so hopefully teacher will see low performance and adjust assignments/expectations.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#368

Post by Terr_ » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 12:25 AM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #76

nottorp wrote: post #4

Waiting for those people who post the "how do you use LLMS for X" questions on HN to come here and explain how this is a good thing.

I see it more like calculators. Using a calculator isn't inherently good or bad in itself. If you're using a calculator to fake learning the intuitions and mechanics of division on your math homework then that's bad - regardless of how many other good use cases for calculators can be talked about in a separate context.

Here's a slightly different way they are analogized to calculators, along with some dissenting views. (Saw it later, remembered this comment.)

https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/2/calculator-for-words/

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#369

Post by atlantic » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 12:33 AM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #157

atlantic wrote: post #111

The most likely eventual outcome of ChatGPT (and similar software) will be the elimination of graded homework/coursework, and a renewed emphasis on traditional in-person tests and exams.

The people who created ChatGPT have very fancy educations. Do you think any of them didn’t have or didn’t do homework?

You can have homework for practice. That is obviously very useful. What I mean is that any unsupervised work will stop counting towards final grades.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#370

Post by Salgat » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 12:33 AM UTC

Pet_Ant wrote: post #313

bestouff wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rising 3 kids (in France, I don't know if it changes much). We have banned TV, very heavily restricted phones, and we closely follow homework. I'm persuaded it makes a difference wrt parents that don't do that, but somehow isn't a sure fire way of being a "great parent".

I don't know how that helps. Watching TV with my kid has been the best way to teach him I've found. There are great videos and shows that you can watch together and then discuss afterwords. Baking videos. Chemistry. Physics. History. Seeing something on TV is great way to fire up the imagination and inspiration for real world activities.

This is what we do. The kids don't get unlimited access to TV, but rather curated access to educational material, but we limit tv altogether on weekdays and they only get ipads at the restaurant. On the weekends they can watch a few fun movies in the afternoon.