A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

Continue to assign homework. Tie the homework to in class assessment such that if a student can do well on homework, without AI assistance, they are expected to do well on tests conducted in class, again without AI assistance.

Set homework grades to be a relatively small percentage of the final grade.

With the above framework, a student is incentivized to complete homework. If they cheat themselves and use AI, they'll do badly on the tests and badly in the class overall.

Tell the students about the above rationale. Tell them that they're not to use AI for homework, that you can't stop them from using AI, but that by using AI, all they get is a perfect score on homework and probably a bad overall grade.

The most advanced and best classes I had were small, Socratic, and had take home tests. We were able to get through a lot of material, in a lot of depth, because people did the reading, but a big reason people did the reading is everyone liked the class and the professor (granted, this was college).

When I ended up teaching during my PhD I mimicked his style as best I could. Made my course very project based, made homeworks easy to get good grades but also included ways every student could expand on and gave lots of feedback. I like to think the students really liked me, as they would frequently stop by my office just to say hi and a bunch would show up the next term either showing me how they expanded their project or wanting to talk about how to do more or just general advice. YET only half the kids ever attended lecture, a third of kids chose to do a final project not much more complicated than homework, a few didn't turn in their final project, and 2 grad students complained to the department when I failed them for not turning in their final (they ended up being given Cs). This wasn't long ago, early GPT and tail/just post covid days.

There's just a time problem with doing the grading in class. You cannot cover as much material. An ideal class is students do reading before lecture, you go through the material together and have a healthy dialogue about where there is confusion, and then the students build on the solid foundation you created. This certainly works for high school and college, though I suspect not as well for lower levels due to lower independence. The unfortunate truth is that when teaching you're also teaching students a lot of auxiliary skills too, like time management and self-reliance. If you aren't teaching students these skills, where do you think they are going to get them? Sure, some will be able to learn them themselves, but you can't look at their success and claim victory through survivor bias.

But I don't think this is the whole problem.

I'll be honest. My experience with students, the big reason for them cheating is grades. Covid and GPT exacerbated the problems[0] (and created some new ones), but a lot stems from what was already there. We place so much emphasis on grades that this is valued more than the education itself. I've seen bright students that cheat because they feel overwhelmed. Because they know to get into the top colleges and top grad programs they need straight As. Strike that, they need a >4.0 GPA. They have to navigate the unknowns of which professors even hand out A+s, will forgo a better teacher for a teacher that gives more As, and so on. *They are not optimizing their education, they are optimizing their GPA*. Not because they don't care about their education, but because they do. Because everyone knows that the next rung of education is more important, so it is wroth forgoing some now to get access to more later. No one will say it out loud, but we all know even pretty mediocore students can play catch-up even up in undergrad and good students can do that in grad school. I'm sure if you randomly selected kids with GPAs >3.5 from high school and dropped them into your top universities you wouldn't see a big difference in outcomes[1]. I believe this stress is part of why some students just check out. But there is some aspect that is simple here: if grades didn't matter, there's no reason to cheat. I'm not saying to abandon grades, but I think it is worth reevaluating the system. I don't think patchwork solutions are gonna solve things.

All of this misses the entire point of education. Honestly, there's a larger crisis that's going on and it is that our world has just embraced Goodhart's Law as a good thing, not a warning.

[0] For example, that it is actually really difficult to punish cheaters. Any serious accusation needs serious evidence. Even more so when departments measure the amount of cheating by how many cheaters are prosecuted. That same metric hacking is why those students got Cs, just as much as it was that the chair was empathetic towards them. Part of that empathy being back connected to the importance of grades...

[1] Legacy students make this complicated but that's a whole other long conversation that mainly deals with connections.

Idk man, I didn't say anything that radical. We live in a world where the most conservative people tend to worship people that say feed the poor. That seems pretty hypocritical to me. All humans are to some degree, but there's a difference between internal and external based concessions

I think this is easier said than done. It pretty much sounds like you're suggesting there are pop-quizes. We've seen that style of teaching before. IME it isn't as effective. Though I'm quite suspect that a big part of that is simply coordination with other classes. All it takes is one teacher who thinks their class is the most important and not give enough wiggle room so that there is room for triage and expected life events. Just because there's theoretically enough time does not mean there is enough time. Think of it like lifeboats. Do you want enough lifeboats so that each person has a spot or do you want extra lifeboats so that in case one gets destroyed or in case a person is unable to make it to the other lifeboat that they will still survive? Over optimization ignores the noise inherent to reality.

I truly believe you do not know how you instigated the aggression. So allow me to clarify: people do not like to be treated like children. Even children don't like being treated like children, so regardless of if you believe we all are, you're going to get nowhere with that attitude. I also want to clarify that you aren't being arrogant, you're being pretentious.

Also, you seem to have forgotten we're having a very different conversation in another thread. Here you're acknowledging that people have desires beyond their capabilities. There you accused me of only comprehending pop philosophy for stating such inconsistency. Maybe it is you who were so focused on winning arguments that you lost what the arguments were even about.

Yes, I want to solve world hunger. I have no problem understanding that feeding children in US schools does not solve world hunger. But I also have no problem understanding the existence of time, as problems can't be solved uniformly nor instantaneously. There's no magic in the real world. Nor do I have a problem with understanding that this isn't a binary situation. Ensuring kids in the US get fed results in more kids getting fed despite there still being kids globally not being fed.

Idk man, there's no inconsistency here. Just because I'd like a billion dollars doesn't mean I won't be happy to get a million. Sure, long way to go, but it's a lot closer than I was.

It's only a line in the sand if you stop. Otherwise we call that "progress" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯