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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

#301

Post by paulluuk »

rKarpinski wrote: post #216
sshine wrote: post #69

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…

> 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 Wow.

Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're dumb", so motivational.

I guess this "tough love" attitude helps for some people? But I think mostly it's just that people think it works for _other_ people, but rarely people think that this works when applied to themselves.

Like, imagine the school administration walking up to this teacher and saying "hey dum dum, you're failing too many students and the time you've spent teaching them is a waste of life."

Many teachers seem to think that students go to school/university because they're genuinely interested in motivated. But more often then not, they're there because of societal pressure, because they know they need a degree to have any kind of decent living standard, and because their parents told them to. Yeah you can call them names, call them lazy or whatever, but that's kinda like pointing at poor people and saying they should invest more.

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

#302

Post by throwaway2037 »

california-og wrote: post #294
halgir wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal University should be? No, you should fail them for turning in bad theses, just like you would before AI.

That's probably what should happen, but it's not what happens in reality. In grading I have to follow a very detailed grading matrix (made by some higher-ups) and the requirements for passing and getting the lowest grade are so incredibly low that it's almost impossible to fail, if the text even somewhat resembles a thesis. The only way I could fail a student, is if they cheated, plagiarised or fabricated stuff. The…

    > The person who used the AI slop blog for sources
That phrase is so utterly dystopian. I am laughing, but not in a good way.

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

#303

Post by TrackerFF »

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…

To be honest, that's a problem on your part. It is completely possible to write a paper on anything, using the scientific method as your framework.

But the problem is that in many cases, the degrees (like MBA, which I too hold) are merely formalities to move up the corporate ladder, or pivot to something else. You don't get rewarded extra for actually doing science. And, yes, I've done the exact same thing you did, multiple times, in multiple different classes. Because I knew that if what I did just looked and sounded proper enough, I'd get my grade.

To be fair, one of the first things I noticed when entering the "professional" workforce, was that the methodology was the same: Find proof / data that supports your assumptions. And if you can't find any, find something close enough and just interpret / present it in a way that supports your assumptions.

No need for any fancy hypothesis testing, or having to conclude that your assumptions were wrong. Like it is not your opinion or assumption anyway, and you don't get rewarded for telling your boss or clients that they're wrong.

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

#304

Post by Ekaros »

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…

I wonder if culture has gone wrong where children or students simply cannot be failed anymore. Or sometimes even given less than perfect grades...

Maybe we should go back to times where failing students was seen more so fault of the student than the system. At least when majority of students pass and there is no proven fault by faculty.

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

#305

Post by stevage »

Brybry wrote: post #256
BrenBarn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is very different in France. Studying to be a teacher at university level is a big deal.

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

#306

Post by stevage »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #300
sien wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia Universities that have remote study have places where people can do proctored exams in large cities. The course is done remotely but the exam, which is often 50%+ of the final grade, is done in a place that has proctored exams as a service. Can't this be done in the US as well ?

Can you tell us: Is "remote study" a relatively recent phenom in AU -- COVID era, or much older? I am curious to learn more. And, what is the history behind it? Was it created/supported because AU is so vast and many people a state might not live near the campus? Also: I think your suggestion is excellent. We may see this happen in the US if AI cheating gets out of control (which it well).

It definitely existed before, particularly as a revenue stream for some of the smaller universities such as USQ. I think for the big ones it was a bit beneath them, then suddenly COVID came and we had lockdown for a long time in Melbourne. Now it's an expectation that students can access everything from home, but the flipside is everyone complains about how much campus life has declined. Students are paying more for a lower quality education and less amenity.

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

#307

Post by falcor84 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #295
Brybry wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree. I attended two universities to get my computer science degree. The first was somewhat famous/prestigious, and I found most of the professors very unapproachable and cared little about "teaching well". The second was a no-name second tier public uni, but I found…

That's been my experience too, and I think it actually makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective - if the students are smart enough to learn well regardless of the level of the instruction, then the professors don't face any pressure to improve.

Taking this to the extreme, I think that a top-tier university could do very well for itself by only providing a highly selective admission system, good facilities and a rigorous assessment process, while leaving the actual learning to the students.

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

#308

Post by presentation »

eru wrote: post #169
presentation wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally the system would encourage those dum-dums to realize they need to change their ways before they're screwed. Unless the system working is that people get screwed and cause problems for the rest of society.

I want to agree with your point, but also: someone who's middle-class enough to make it to uni in the first place won't cause much trouble for society. Paternalism in the sense of 'we know what's better for you than you do' is perhaps justified for those people who really don't know better. But I don't think we should overextend that notion.

Well given that the article is about young people in schools, a little paternalism isn’t a bad thing.

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

#309

Post by stevage »

sshine wrote: post #69

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…

> 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.

Huh, fighting my way through a Linux CLI is exactly the kind of thing I use Chatgpt for professionally.

I did study it in compsci, but those commands are inherently not memorable.

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

#310

Post by jobigoud »

jaza wrote: post #228
jamesgill wrote: post #114

The fundamental question that AI raises for me, but nobody seems to answer: In our competitive, profit-driven world--what is the value of a human being and having human experiences? AI is neither inevitable nor necessary--but it seems like the next inevitable step in reducing the value of a human life to its 'outputs'.

The "value of a human" - same in this age as it has always been - is our ability to be truly original and to think outside the box. (That's also what makes us actually quite smart, and what makes current cutting-edge "AI" actually quite dumb). AI is incapable of producing anything that's not basically a statistical average of its inputs. You'll never get an AI Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, Pythagoras, Tolstoy, Kubrick, M…

Have you tried image generation? It can easily apply high level concepts from one area to another area and produce something that hasn't been done before.

Unless you loosen the meaning of statistical average so much that it ends up including human creativity. At the end of the day it's basically the same process of applying an idea from one field to another.

Most humans are not Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, etc. Does that make them not valuable as humans?

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