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Implications of AI to schools

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Re: Implications of AI to schools

#21

Post by alariccole »

charcircuit wrote: post #13

This doesn't adress the point that AI can replace going to school. AI can be your perfect personal tutor to help you learn thing 1:1. Needing to have a teacher and prove to them that you know what they teached will become a legacy concept. That we have an issue of AI cheating at school is in my eyes a temporary issue.

ChatGPT just told me to put the turkey in my toaster oven legs facing the door, and you think it can replace school. Unless there is a massive architectural change that can be provably verified by third parties, this can never be. I’d hate for my unschooled surgeon to check an llm while I’m under.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#22

Post by phh »

vondur wrote: post #10
ubj wrote: post #7

One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment. Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the…

I agree. Most campuses use a product called Turnitin, which was originally designed to check for plagiarism. Now they claim it can detect AI-generated content with about 80% accuracy, but I don’t think anyone here believes that.

80% is catastrophic though. In a classroom of 30 all honest pupils, 6 will get a 0 mark because the software says its AI?

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#23

Post by tgv »

mark242 wrote: post #18

"You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI." That is just such a wildly cynical point of view, and it is incredibly depressing. There is a whole huge cohort of kids out there who genuinely want to learn and want to do the work, and feel like using AI is cheating. These are the kids who, ironically, AI will help the most, because they're the ones who will understand the fundamentals being tau…

> There is a whole huge cohort of kids out there

Well, it seems the vast majority doesn't care about cheating, and is using AI for everything. And this is from primary school to university.

It's not just that AI makes it simpler, so many pupils cannot concentrate anymore. Tiktok and others have fried their mind. So AI is a quick way out for them. Back to their addiction.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#24

Post by germinalphrase »

neom wrote: post #17
ubj wrote: post #7

One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment. Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the…

Doesn't google docs have fairly robust edit history? If I was a student these days I'd either record my screen of me doing my homework, or at least work in google docs and share the edit history.

Yes. When I was an educator, reviewing version history was an obvious way to clarify if/how much students plagiarized.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#25

Post by qingcharles »

charcircuit wrote: post #13

This doesn't adress the point that AI can replace going to school. AI can be your perfect personal tutor to help you learn thing 1:1. Needing to have a teacher and prove to them that you know what they teached will become a legacy concept. That we have an issue of AI cheating at school is in my eyes a temporary issue.

For someone that wants to learn, I agree with this 100%. AI has been great at teaching me about 100s of topics.

I don't yet know how we get AI to teach unruly kids, or kids with neurodivergencies. Perhaps, though, the AI can eventually be vastly superior to an adult because of the methods it can use to get through to the child, keep the child interested and how it presents the teaching in a much more interactive way.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#26

Post by mercacona »

ecshafer wrote: post #11

In my CS undergrad I had Doug Lea as a professor, really fantastic professor (best teacher I have ever had, bar none). He had a really novel way to handle homework hand ins, you had to demo the project. So you got him to sit down with you, you ran the code, he would ask you to put some inputs in (that were highly likely to be edge cases to break it). Once that was sufficient, he would ask you how you did different th…

Yep, it's easy to shortcut AI plagiarism, but you need time. In most of the universities around the world (online universities especially), the number of students is way too big, while professors get more and more pressure on publishing and bureaucracy.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#27

Post by hiddencost »

ubj wrote: post #7

One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment. Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the…

I seriously think the people selling AI detection tools to teachers should be sued into the ground by a coalition of state attorneys general, and that the tools should be banned in schools.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#28

Post by v9v »

phh wrote: post #22
vondur wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Most campuses use a product called Turnitin, which was originally designed to check for plagiarism. Now they claim it can detect AI-generated content with about 80% accuracy, but I don’t think anyone here believes that.

80% is catastrophic though. In a classroom of 30 all honest pupils, 6 will get a 0 mark because the software says its AI?

I suppose 80% means you don't give them a 0 mark because the software says it's AI, you only do so if you have other evidence reinforcing the possibility.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#29

Post by nradov »

wffurr wrote: post #4
trauco wrote: post #3

This is the correct take. To contrast the Terance Tao piece from earlier ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972 ), AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. You can't, however, become a Terence Tao by asking AI to solve your homework. So, in learning environments we might not have an option but to open the floodgates to AI use, but aba…

Yesterday's Doonesbury was on point here: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23 Andrej and Garry Trudeau are in agreement that "blue book exams" (I.e. the teacher gives you a blank exam booklet, traditionally blue) to fill out in person for the test, after confiscating devices, is the only way to assess students anymore. My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come…

Oh how I hated those as a student. Handwriting has always been a slow and uncomfortable process for me. Yes, I tried different techniques of printing and cursive as well as better pens. Nothing helped. Typing on a keyboard is just so much faster and more fluent.

It's a shame that some students will again be limited by how fast they can get their thoughts down on a piece of paper. This is such an artificial limitation and totally irrelevant to real world work now.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#30

Post by yoavm »

phh wrote: post #22
vondur wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Most campuses use a product called Turnitin, which was originally designed to check for plagiarism. Now they claim it can detect AI-generated content with about 80% accuracy, but I don’t think anyone here believes that.

80% is catastrophic though. In a classroom of 30 all honest pupils, 6 will get a 0 mark because the software says its AI?

The promise (not saying that it works) is probably that 20% of people who cheated will not get caught. Not that 20% of the work marked as AI is actually written by humans.
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