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Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

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Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#61

Post by aaplok »

math_dandy wrote: post #28

I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams. Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge…

> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion.

Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but still.

They don't have a solution. As the main victims they are just frustrated by the situation, and at the "solutions" thrown at it by folks who aren't personally affected.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#62

Post by TimorousBestie »

nkrisc wrote: post #35
ai-christianson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't the jobs they'll get be expecting them to use AI?

If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans? Either AI will replace them or employers will realize that they prefer employees who can think. In either case, being a human who specializes in regurgitating AI output seems like a dead end.

“Prompt Engineer” as a serious job title is very strange to me. I don’t have an explanation as to why it would be a learnable skill—there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#63

Post by bosuanzi »

Different times have different teaching tasks, which is the sign of human progress.

Just like after the invention of computers, those methods of how to do manual calculations faster can be eliminated from teaching tasks. Education shifted towards teaching students how to use computational tools effectively. This allowed students to solve more complex problems and work on higher-level concepts that manual calculations couldn't easily address.

In the era of AI, what teachers need to think about is not to punitively prohibit students from using AI, but to adjust the teaching content to better help students master related subjects faster and better through AI.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#64

Post by [deleted] »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #62
nkrisc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans? Either AI will replace them or employers will realize that they prefer employees who can think. In either case, being a human who specializes in regurgitating AI output seems like a dead end.

“Prompt Engineer” as a serious job title is very strange to me. I don’t have an explanation as to why it would be a learnable skill—there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does.

[deleted]

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#65

Post by math_dandy »

paulorlando wrote: post #44
math_dandy wrote: post #28

I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams. Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge…

Business models rule us all. Have you tested what kind of pushback you'll receive if you happen to flout the remote rule?

Centralization and IT-ification has made flouting difficult. There’s one common course site on the institution’s learning management system for all sections where assignments are distributed and collected via upload dropbox, where grades are tabulated and communicated.

So far, it’s still possible to opt out of this coordinated model, and I have been. But I suspect the ability to opt out will soon come under attack (the pretext will be ‘uniformity == fairness’). I never used to be an academic freedom maximalists who viewed the notion in the widest sense, but I’m beginning to see my error.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#66

Post by lispisok »

overgard wrote: post #49

I think as a culture we've fetishized formal schooling way past its value. I mean, how much of what you "learned" in school do you actually use or remember? I'm not against education , education is very important, but I'm not sure that schooling is really the optimal route to being educated. They're related, but they're not the same. The reality is, if someone wants to learn something then there's very little need to…

The fetishizing enabled the massive explosion in what's basically a university industrial complex financed off the backs of student loans. To keep growing the industry needed more suckers...I mean students to extract student loans from. This meant watering down the material even in technical degrees like engineering, passing kids who should have failed, and lowering admission standards (masked by grade inflation). Many programs are really really bad now like what should be high school freshman level material. Criticizing the university system gets you called anti-intellectual and a redneck.

A lot of debate around the idea of student loan forgiveness but nobody is trying to address how the student loan problem got so bad in the first place.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#67

Post by math_dandy »

aaplok wrote: post #61
math_dandy wrote: post #28

I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams. Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge…

> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but…

We have an Accessible Testing Center that will administer and proctor exams under very flexible conditions (more time, breaks, quiet/privacy, …) to help students with various forms of neurodivergence. They’re very good and offer a valuable service without placing any significant additional burden on the instructor. Seems to work well, but I don’t have first hand knowledge about how these forms of accommodations are viewed by the neurodivergent student community. They certainly don’t address the problem of allowing « explorer » students to demonstrate their abilities.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#68

Post by el-berg »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #54
bee_rider wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grading homework has two reasonable objectives: Provide an incentive for students to do the thing they should be doing anyway. Give an opportunity to provide feedback on the assignment. It is totally useless as an evaluation mechanic, because of course the students that want to can just cheat. It’s usually pretty small, right? IIRC when I did tutoring we only gave like 10-20% for the aggregate homework grade.

The annoyance with 10-20% means that in order to be an "A" student you have to do all the homework instead of just ace the exams which is obnoxious if you actually know the material. Edge case, I know, but that last 20% is a ton of extra work.

I wish it was only 10-20%. I'm a non-trad student at a small state school and IMO they try to inflate grades via homework. This semester I aced my exams, but only had time/energy to complete ~60% of my homework. Since it was 30% (on average) of my final grade I ended up with a 3.0 for the semester.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#69

Post by sshine »

I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a good AI policy is.

On the one hand, I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot.

On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly.

Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible. Once they're past this hurdle, they can mind their own business again. To them, AI is not a tutor, but a homework solver.

I can't ask them to not use computers.

I can't ask them to write in a language I made the compiler for that doesn't exist anywhere, since I teach at a (pre-university) level where that kind of skill transfer doesn't reliably occur.

So far we do project work and oral exams: Project work because it relies on cooperation and the assignment and evaluation is open-ended: There's no singular task description that can be plotted into an LLM. Oral exams because it becomes obvious how skilled they are, how deep their knowledge is.

But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of life and won't lead them to a meaningful existence as a professional programmer.

Teaching Linux basics doesn't suffer the same because the exam-preparing exercise is typing things into a terminal, and LLMs still don't generally have API access to terminals.

Maybe providing the IDE online and observing copy-paste is a way forward. I just don't like the tendency that students can't run software on their own computers.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#70

Post by JadeNB »

mullingitover wrote: post #16
TimorousBestie wrote: post #2

I predict that asking students to hand-write assignments is not going to go well. Unfortunately, universities built on the consumer model (author teaches at Arizona State) are incentivized to listen to student feedback over the professor’s good intentions.

So don't accredit universities that want to turn into degree mills. Beat this game of prisoner's dilemma with a club at the accreditation level. Students can complain all they want, but if they want a diploma which certifies that they are able to perform the skills they learned, they will have to actually perform those skills.

> So don't accredit universities that want to turn into degree mills.

This is way outside the scope of something that a faculty member who is, as the article says, trying to teach has any hope of implementing within a reasonable time frame. Of course the ideal is that faculty, as major stakeholders in the educational institution, should ideally be active in all levels of university governance, but I think it is important to realize how much of a prerequisite there is for an individual professor even to get their voice heard by an accrediting body, let alone to change its accrediting procedures.

That's setting aside the fact that, even if faculty really mobilized to make such changes, in the absolute best case the changes would be slow to implement, and the effects would be slow to manifest, as universities are on multi-year accreditation cycles and there would need to be at least a few reputable universities that were disaccredited before others started taking the guidance seriously. Even if I were willing to throw everything into the politics of university governance, which would make my teaching suffer immensely, I'm not willing to say that we'll just have to wait a decade to see the effects.

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