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Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

solarshades.club

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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is that kids can just hand write an essay that an AI gave them. I teach at a university and I just scale my homework assignments until they reach or exceed sightly the amount of work I expect a student to be able to do with AI. Before I would give them a problem set. Next semester homeworks will be more like entire projects.

This claim is absurd and the comment is unserious. Would the teacher then grade the massive workload with AI also? There isn't really a limit to how much output an AI can generate and the more someone demands, the less likely it is that the final result will be looked at in any depth by a human.

The point is that I will expect more high level thinking and less rote coding.

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

#452
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Since the reform on University administration circa 2011, a big push was done towards 'evaluation continue' (basically regular tests), which now last until your third year in some Uni, to make public universities more like private schools, and against 'partiels' (two big batteries of standardized tests in person, with thousands in the same area, with only pen and papers, one early January, second in may, every year,…

Ah, that's interesting, thanks. I lived in France in 2001-2 and was friends with someone who was studying for his partiels to become a chemistry teacher.

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

#453
post #256

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…

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

I think this is partially due to the age of the students, by the time you hit college the expectation is you can do a lot of the learning yourself outside of the classroom and will seek out additional assistance through office hours, self study, or tutors/classmates if you aren't able to understand from the lecture alone.

It's also down to cost cutting, instead of having entirely distinct teaching and research faculty universities require all professors to teach at least one class a semester. Usually though the large freshman and sophomore classes do get taught by quasi dedicated 'teaching' professors instead of a researcher ticking a box.

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

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't the teachers use LLMs to grade?

In general – why I'd put my effort into visiting (and paying for) a school and learning in such case? That's not what schools are for. I can get any amount of grades I want from LLM myself.

Grading is already mechanical, it's just a human does it. I'm not sure what you're objecting to here.

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

#455

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 think you've identified the main issue here:

LLMs aren't destroying the University or the essay.

LLMs are destroying the cheap University or essay.

Cheap can mean a lot of things, like money or time or distance. But, if Universities want to maintain a standard, then they are going to have to work for it again.

No more 300+ person freshman lectures (where everyone cheated anyways). No more take-home zoom exams. No more professors checked out. No more grad students doing the real teaching.

I guess, I'm advocating for the Oxbridge/St. John's approach with under 10 class sizes where the proctor actually knows you and if you've done the work. And I know, that is not a cheap way to churn out degrees.

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

#456
There's a few comments here about how AI will revolutionize learning because it's personalized or lets users explore or whatever. That's fundamentally missing the point. College students who are using AI aren't using it to learn better, they're using it to learn _less_. The point of writing an essay isn't the essay itself, it's the process of writing the essay: research, organization, writing, etc. The point of doing math problems isn't to get the answer, it's to _do the work_ to find the answer. If you let AI do that, you're not learning better, you're learning worse.

Now, granted, AI can help with things students are passionate about. If you want to do gamedev you might be able to get an AI to walk you through making a game in Unity or Godot. But societally we've decided that school should be about instilling a wide variety of base knowledge that students may not care about: history, writing, calculus. The idea is that you don't know what you're going to need in your life, and it's best to have a broad foundation so that if you run into something that needs it you'll at least know where to start. 99% of the time developing CRUD apps you're not going to need to know that retrieving an item from an array is O(n), but when some sales manager goes in and adds 2 million items to the storefront and now loading a page takes 12 seconds and you can't remove all that junk because it's for an important sales meeting 30 minutes from now, it's helpful to know that you might be able to replace it with a hashmap that's O(1) instead. AI's fine for learning things you want to learn, but you _need_ to learn more than just what you _want_ to learn. If you passed your Data Structures and Algorithms class by copy/pasting all the homework questions into ChatGPT, are you going to remember what big-O notation even means in 5 years?

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

#457
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oral exams because it becomes obvious how skilled they are, how deep their knowledge is. Assuming you have access to a computer lab, have you considered requiring in-class programming exercises, regularly? Those could be a good way of checking actual skills. > 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 comput…

You can provide vscode, vim and emacs all in some web interface, and those are plenty good enough for those use cases. Choosing the plugin list for each would also be a good bikeshedding exercise for the department. Even IntelliJ has gateway

> Even IntelliJ has gateway

By IntelliJ's own (on-machine) standards, Gateway is crap. I use the vi emulation mode (using ideavim) and the damn thing gets out of sync unless you type at like 20wpm or something. Then it tries to rollback whatever you type until you restart it and retry. I can't believe it is made by the same Jetbrains known for their excellent software.

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is that kids can just hand write an essay that an AI gave them. I teach at a university and I just scale my homework assignments until they reach or exceed sightly the amount of work I expect a student to be able to do with AI. Before I would give them a problem set. Next semester homeworks will be more like entire projects.

then you're discriminating against students not using AI. I for sure know I really would be depressed to be asked for a huge pile of work I'll do myself when other will just cheat and have free time to do something else work on interesting projects or see friends whatever.

I don't consider the use of AI cheating. I think of it as a reasonable skill to be applied to work.

To be frank, a lot of programming is busywork, boilerplate, looking up information. Now that an AI can do that for my students I expect them to spend the time made up on developing higher level skills.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sorta depends on the material… I always thought paper programming tests were dumb: when I was taking them and when I was proctoring/grading them. It is not that similar to writing a program in an IDE where it will tell you if you make a little mistake, and often help you work your way through it. We made it. But, that’s survivorship bias, right? We can’t really know how much potential has wasted.

Hear, hear! Doing programming on paper seems to me like assessing someone's skills in acrobatics by watching them do the motions in a zero-gravity environment. Without the affordances given by the computer, it's just not the same activity.

I kinda had this sentiment until I actually started working - quite often an issue only manifests at an obscure customer system or is a race condition that it too rare to catch reliably, yet happens often enough so you can't just ignore it.

To solve those in a reasonable amount of time, you need to form a mental model of what is going on & how to fix it. Having access to a computer by itself won't really help for those.

In that context paper exams for computer science make much more sense to me now - they want you to understand the problem and provide a solution, with pen and paper being the output format.

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

#460

I think we (as in, the whole species) need to reflect on what the purpose of education is and what it should be, because in theory there's no reason why anybody should pay for a college tuition and then undermine their own mastery of the subject. Obviously 90% of the student body sees it as a ticket to being taken seriously by prospective employers and the other 10% definitely does not deserve to be taken seriously b…

You mean the 10% who really want to learn should give up and embrace the degree mill merry-go-round game? I’m as cynical as they come, but even that’s a bit too much for me.

i was actually trying to accuse the 10% of lying to themselves on a subconscious level, because the portion of undergraduates who actually came there to learn and not just because it's a roadblock in the way of gainful employment is a rounding error.

More to the point, the universities need to realize they're more like job certification centers and stop pretending their students aren't just there to take tests and get certified. Ideally they'd stop co-operating with employers that want to use them as a filter for their hiring process instead but even I'm not dumb enough to think that could ever happen, they'd be cutting off a massive source of revenue and putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Like I said I don't actually have a viable solution to any of this but as long we all lie to ourselves about education being some noble institution that it clearly isn't (i mean for undergrad and masters, it might actually still be that at the phd level) then nobody will ever solve anything.

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