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Implications of AI to schools

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Re: Implications of AI to schools

#61
post #4
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…

> My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.

This sounds as if you expect that it will become possible to access an LLM in class without a phone or other similar device. (Of course, using a laptop would be easily noticed.)

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#62
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…

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.…

AI is a boon to students who are intrinsically motivated. Most students aren't.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#63
I think legacy schooling just needs to be reworked. Kids should be doing way more projects that demonstrate the integration of knowledge and skills, rather than focusing so much energy on testing and memorization. There's probably a small core of things that really must be fully integrated and memorized, but for everything else you should just give kids harder projects which they're expected to solve by leveraging all the tools at their disposal. Focus on teaching kids how to become high-agency beings with good epistemics and a strong math core. Give them experiments and tools to play around and actually understand how things work. Bring back real chemistry labs and let kids blow stuff up.

The key issue with schools is that they crush your soul and turn you into a low-agency consumer of information within a strict hierarchy of mind-numbing rules, rather than helping you develop your curiosity hunter muscles to go out and explore. In an ideal world, we would have curated gardens of knowledge and information which the kids are encouraged to go out and explore. If they find some weird topic outside the garden that's of interest to them, figure out a way to integrate it.

I don't particularly blame the teachers for the failings of school though, since most of them have their hands tied by strict requirements from faceless bureaucrats.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#64
post #61
post #4

Earlier 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…

> My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step. This sounds as if you expect that it will become possible to access an LLM in class without a phone or other similar device. (Of course, using a laptop would be easily noticed.)

The phone ban certainly helps make such usage noticeable in class, but I'm not sure the academic structure is prepared to go to in-person assessments only. The whole thread is about homework / out of class work being useless now.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#65

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.

Snap out of it. This is the best advice I can give you.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#66
post #40
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.

I had Turn It In mark my work as plagiarism some years ago and I had to fight for it. It was clear the teacher wasn’t doing their job and blindly following the tool. What happened is that I did a Q&A worksheet but in each section of my report I reiterated the question in italics before answering it. The reiterated questions of course came up as 100% plagiarism because they were just copied from the worksheet.

Funny how it's the teachers that are plagiarizing the work of the tools.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#67
Having had some experience teaching and designing labs and evaluating students in my opinion there is basically no problem that can't be solved with more instructor work.

The problem is that the structure pushes for teaching productivity which basically directly opposes good pedagogy at this point in the optimization.

Some specifics:

1. Multiple choice sucks. It's obvious that written response better evaluates students and oral is even better. But multiple choice is graded instantly by a computer. Written response needs TAs. Oral is such a time sink and needs so many TAs and lots of space if you want to run them in parallel.

1.5 Similarly having students do things on computers is nice because you don't have to print things and even errors in the question can be fixed live and you can ask students to refresh the page. But if the chatbots let them cheat too easily on computers doing hand written assesments sucks cause you have to go arrange for printing and scanning.

2. Designing labs is a clear LLM tradeoff. Autograded labs with testbenches and fill in the middle style completetions or API completetions are incredibly easy to grade. You just pull the commit before some specific deadline and run some scripts.

You can do 200 students in the background when doing other work its so easy. But the problem is that LLMS are so good at fill in the middle and making testbenches pass.

I've actually tried some more open ended labs before and its actually very impressive how creative students are. They are obviously not LLMs there is this diversity in thought and simplicity of code that you do not get with ChatGPT.

But it is ridiculously time consuming to pull people's code and try to run open ended testbenches that they have created.

3. Having students do class presentations is great for evaluating them. But you can only do like 6 or 7 presentations in a 1 hr block. You will need to spend like a week even in a relatively small class.

4. What I will say LLMs are fun for are having students do open ended projects faster with faster iterations. You can scope creep them if you expect expect to use AI coding.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#68
I think part of the reason AI is having such a negative effect on schools in particular is because of how many education processes are reliant on an archaic, broken way of "learning." So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information (which AI is unmatched at doing).

School is packed with inefficiency and busywork that is completely divorced from the way people learn on their own. In fact, it's pretty safe to say you could learn something about 10x by typing it into an AI chat bot and having it tailor the experience to you.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#69
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…

There have always been problems like this. I had a classmate who wrote poems and short stories since age 6. No teacher believed she wrote those herself. She became a poet, translator and writer and admitted herself later in life that she wouldn't have believed it herself.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#70

This 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.

Most of what I learned in college was only because I did homework and struggled to figure it out myself. Classroom time was essentially just a heads up to what I'll actually be learning myself later.

Granted, this was much less the case in grade school - but if students are going to see homework for the first time in college, I can see problems coming up.

If you got rid of homework throughout all of the "standard" education path (grade school + undergrad), I would bet a lot of money that I'd be much dumber for it.

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