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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

#251

Post by protocolture »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #229

My essay-writing process for my MBA was: - decide what I wanted to say about the subject, from the set of opinions I already possess - search for enough papers that could support that position. Don't read the papers, just scan the abstracts. - write the essay. Scan the reference papers for the specific bit of it that best supported the point I want to make. There was zero learning involved in this process. The produc…

I literally wrote a friends psychology paper when I had no idea of the subject and they got a HD for it.

All I did was follow the process you outlined.

My mother used to do it as a service for foreign language students. They would record their lectures, and she would write their papers for them.

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

#252

Post by enceladus06 »

LLMs is is here to stay and will change learning for the better (we will be full-scale disrupted 3-5yr from now in EDU), it is a self-guided tutor like never before and 100% Amazing, except for when it hallucinates.

I use it [Copilot / GPT / Khanmingo] all the time to figure out new tools and prototype workflows, check code for errors, and learn new stuff including those classes at universities which cost way too much.

If universities feel threatened by AI cry me a river.

No professor or TA was *EVER* able to explain calculus and differential equations to me, but Khanmingo and ChatGPT can. So the educational establishment can deal with this.

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

#253

Post by neom »

Aerroon wrote: post #142
nkrisc wrote: post #13

If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless. If students using AI to cheat on homework are graduating with a degree, then it has lost all value as a certificate that the holder has completed some minimum level of education and learning. Institutions that award such degrees will be no different than degree mills of the past. I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2…

At the same time though: if AI based cheating is so effective then is college itself useful?

https://innovationlabs.harvard.edu/events/your-network-is-yo...

^ Why many go to Harvard. Very nice club.

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

#254

Post by protocolture »

gchamonlive wrote: post #34
blitzar wrote: post #32

How did we solve this when calculators came along and ruined peoples ability to do mental arithmetic and use slide rulers?

The impact LLMs have on education is arguably orders of magnitude higher than calculators

Not really, its just calculators for all the other classes.

And tbh, lots of people historically would have loved a calculator that could write an essay about shakespeare or help code a simple game.

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

#255

Post by protocolture »

djoldman wrote: post #107

Basically it comes to this: a sufficiently large proportion of a student's grade must come from work impossible to generate with AI, e.g. in-person testing. Unfortunately, 18-year-olds generally can't be trusted to go a whole semester without succumbing to the siren call of easy GenAI A's. So even if you tell them that the final will be in-person, some significant chunk of them will still ChatGPT their way through an…

>Unfortunately, 18-year-olds generally can't be trusted to go a whole semester without succumbing to the siren call of easy GenAI A's. So even if you tell them that the final will be in-person, some significant chunk of them will still ChatGPT their way through and bomb the final.

I really think we need these policies to be developed by the opposite of misanthropists.

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

#256

Post by Brybry »

BrenBarn wrote: post #232
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…

I see that pressure as well. I find that a lot of the problems we have with AI are in fact AI exposing problems in other aspects of our society. In this case, one problem is that the people who do the teaching and know what needs to be learned are the faculty, but the decisions about how to teach are made by administrators. And another problem is that colleges are treating "make money" as a goal. These problems exist…

Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree.

So they know what students should be taught but I don't know that they necessarily know how any better than the administrators.

I've always found it weird that you need teaching certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but not to teach calculus to adults.

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

#257

Post by sireat »

const_cast wrote: post #81
HPsquared wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still better than the typical classroom experience. And you can always ask again, there's no need to avoid offending the person who has a lot of power over you.

Typical classroom experience works and has worked for thousands of years. Edutech is pretty new and virtually all of it has been a disaster. Sitting in a lecture and taking notes on paper is tried, tested, and research backed. It works. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people.

Actually, before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Amos_Comenius in 17th century much of education was route memorization.

Then it was corporal punishment if you did not learn quickly enough.

Comenius idea was of pansophia - knowledge for all. Also his Latin textbook - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janua_Linguarum_Reserata was quite revolutionary - in using relations to real world knowledge to learn a new language.

Even more ground breaking was his picture book for children - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbis_Pictus . We take hybrid approach to learning for granted these days.

Even then Comenius was mostly forgotten in the enlightenment of 18th century - probably ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau took over - with insufficient backing.

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

#258

Post by protocolture »

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…

>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.

Yeah its absolutely bonkers. I spent 9 months out of school traveling, and the provided homework actually set me ahead of my peers when I had returned.

No ones stopped and considered "What is a school for".

For some people it seems to be mandatory state sponsored childcare. For others its about food? Some people tell me it sucks but its the best way to get kids to socialise?

I feel like if it was an engineering project there would be a formal requirements study, but because its a social program what we get instead is just a big bucket of feelings and no defined scope.

During my time I have come to view schooling as an adversary. I am considering whether it might be prudent to instruct my now toddler that school is designed to break him, and that his role is actually to achieve in spite of it, and that some of his education will come in opposition to the institution.

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

#259

Post by sireat »

In my programming, algorithms and data structures courses the homework assignment completion has gone from roughly 50% before LLMs to 99% this year.

Making assignments harder would be unfair to those few students who would actually try to solve the problem without LLMs.

So what I do is require extensive comments and ahem - chain of thought reasoning in the comments - especially the WHY part.

Then I require oral defense of the code.

Sadly this is unfeasible for some of the large classes of 200, but works quite well when I have the luxury of teaching 20 students.

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

#260

Post by harvey9 »

coderatlarge wrote: post #217
grogenaut wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can. I did a remote proctored exam for the NREMT last year. They had me walk the camera around the room, under the desk, etc. All devices had to be in my backpack. No earbuds. They made me unplug the conference tv on the wall, lift picture frames etc. I had to keep my hands above the table the whole time, I couldn't look down if I was scratching an itch. They installed rootkit software and closed down all of the…

wow, that’s intense. i wonder how much actual cheating they must have caught to arrive at such a draconian model. it would be interesting if they published their statistics to make it clear whether all these things are truly necessary.

What stats would convince you? A woman was jailed in the UK last week for taking in person tests on behalf of others. She wore a variety of wigs to fool test centre staff. Where there's demand there's people who will try to supply it.
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