211–220 of 368 posts
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I certainly hope that doctors, civil engineers & researchers aren't doing too much delegating in college.
Doctors are already running to ChatGPT. I went to an urgent care the other day and the PA regurgitated what the LLM told me in the waiting room.
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Back in the day we were writing code on paper (or on punched cards, using them as a paper substitute, as there were a lot of them left over from the Soviet times and they looked very "computer-y"), so even during computer classes you didn't necessarily need a computer. Not that I really think that it can still work in the year 2025 and beyond...
I was just talking to younger coworkers about this recently. Mid-90s to early 2000s: FORTRAN, COBOL, C, and C++ classes all had handwritten code parts for homework, handouts, exams, etc. This wasn't just pseudocode, you had to have full syntax, variable declarations, correct spelling of functions, etc. You frequently had to show code optimization, debugging, etc even on paper. Wild times!! * All of those classes also…
This was early 2000s, Java.
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As far as I can remember phones were not allowed in class and testing was generally done on paper. College was a lot more lax about this stuff than K-12 was. But colleges could and should proctor their exams more strictly.
No phones in class, at scale and enforced, feels like a last 5 years thing in K-12. And the trend was very much towards increased digital testing, pre-LLM. This is pivoting back to paper-based, but it's going to be as messy and slow of a transition as the no-mobile-device one was. Especially given how much money there is in "AI". And hamfistedly-handed, will likely leave another generation fucked over with regards to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No phones in class, at scale and enforced, feels like a last 5 years thing in K-12. And the trend was very much towards increased digital testing, pre-LLM. This is pivoting back to paper-based, but it's going to be as messy and slow of a transition as the no-mobile-device one was. Especially given how much money there is in "AI". And hamfistedly-handed, will likely leave another generation fucked over with regards to…
I attended high school in the US in the early 00’s and cell phones were absolutely banned from classrooms. You could keep them in your locker and use them between classes, but that was it. I attended college in the late 00’s, and I don’t think I took a single digital exam. Quizzes, sure, but for final exams even CS was pencil and paper (or a final project, which admittedly will have issues in the post-LLM era).
My college experience was similar to yours as well. All exams were paper (often blue books). Having a phone out would get you kicked out of the exam hall. But by the time I did med school, it was all digital.
Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes. Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet. Caught with a cellphone,…
One of my coworker's has their kids in a school where if you are caught with a cellphone, on the first offense you are suspended. Apparently it's working well.
It's weird. All of our attributes which we hold and value, and develop via a mix of genes and training - intelligence, but also strength, stamina, reflexes - we acquired, if you strip it all off to basics, to feed and to procreate. That's all evolution cares about. Now, we are social animals, and we grew to value these thing for their own right. Societies valued strength and bravery, as virtues, but I guess ultimatel…
It’s okay only if you’re okay deferring all power and agency to people who control the production and distribution of the tools.
An older analog is calculators. My college intro to stats course didn't allow them. We did simple arithmetic by hand and looked up things like roots and logs in tables. I still have my copy of this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0849306922 I just tutored my nephew through his college intro to stats course. Not only are calculators allowed, but they had a course web app so that all they did was select a dataset, select co…
What the surface level take about calculators misses is that the average person can't do arithmetic in their head because they don't need to, but they also don't pull out a calculator in the many times a day it would be useful, like at the grocery store. People make horrible decisions with everyday home economics math and are taken advantage of. The lesson isn't that we survived calculators, it's that they did dull u…
Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes. Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet. Caught with a cellphone,…
I'm surprised the answer of doing all exercises (including essay writing) in class is apparently not obvious. High school me was a moron and should not be trusted to do the real work and people who know better should force him to practice the skills lol Once he's grown and has a job he will one day realize and be thankful for the teachers that forced him to do the work. Obviously not true for all students but I don't…
So we're just dealing with what (some) students have always done: get someone else to write the report or do the math homework. Or have parents pay a tutor to help. Or use Cliff's Notes instead of reading the book. But now it's trivially easy and free. There are no obstacles to cheating other than knowing it's wrong and self-defeating, and those are things that young people don't really have a well-developed sense about.