I’ve been following this approach since last school year. I focus on in-class work and home-time is for reading and memorization. My classmates still think classrooms are for lecturing, but it's coming. The paper-and-pen era is back to school!
Implications of AI to schools
41–50 of 447 posts
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Maybe this is a niche for those low distraction writing tools that pop up from time to time. Or a school managed Chromebook that’s locked to the exam page.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#43This 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.
It is considered valuable and worthwhile for a society to educate all of its children/citizens. This means we have to develop systems and techniques to educate all kinds of people, not just the ones who can be dropped off by themselves at a library when they turn five, and picked up again in fifteen years with a PHD.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#44Earlier 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?
80% accuracy could mean 0 false negatives and 20% false positives.
My point is that accuracy is a terrible metric here and sensitivity, specificity tell us much more relevant information to the task at hand. In that formulation, a specificity < 1 is going to have false positives and it isn't fair to those students to have to prove their innocence.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#45This couldn’t have happened at a better time. When I was young my parents found a schooling system that had minimal homework so I could play around and live my life. I’ve moved to a country with a lot less flexibility. Now when my kids will soon be going to school, compulsory homework will be obsolete. Zero homework grades will be ideal. Looking forward to this.
If AI gets us reliably to a flipped classroom (=research at home, work through work during class) then I'm here for it. Homework in the traditional sense is an anti pattern.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#46This 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.
What's the alternate if someone didn't know something during a procedure? Just wing it? Getting another data point from an LLM seems beneficial to me.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#47One 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…
Now imagine this but its a courtroom and you're facing 25 years
Family law judges, in my small experience, are so uninterested in the basic facts of a case that I would actually trust an LLM to do a better job. Not quite what you mean, but maybe there is a silver lining.
We are already (in the US) living in a system of soft social-credit scores administered by ad tech firms and non-profits. So “the algorithms says you’re guilty” has already been happening in less dramatic ways.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#48> The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. Learning how to prepare for in-class tests and writing exercises is a very particular skillset which I haven't really exercised a lot since I graduated. Never mind teaching the humanities, for which I think this is a genuine crisis, in class programming exams are basically the…
I use it every day.
Preparing for a test requires understanding what the instructor wants. concentrate on the wrong thing get marked down.
Same applies to working in a corporation. You need to understand what management wants. It’s a core requirement.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#49"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…
What possible solution could prevent this? The best students are learning on their own anyways, the school can't stop students using AI for their personal learning.
There was a reddit thread recently that asked the question, are all students really doing worse, and it basically said that, there are still top performers performing toply, but that the middle has been hollowed out.
So I think, I dunno, maybe depressing. Maybe cynical, but probably true. Why shy away from the truth?
And by the way, I would be both. Probably would have used AI to further my curiosity and to cheat. I hated school, would totally cheat to get ahead, and am now wildly curious and ambitious in the real world. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I don't find cheating in school to be all that unethical. I'm paying for it, who cares how I do it.
People aren't one thing.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just curious, not being a turkey SME, what's the downside to positioning the turkey that way?
Most turkeys of my acquaintance would not fit into a toaster oven without some percussive assistance.