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Implications of AI to schools

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Re: Implications of AI to schools

#121

Post by ghaff »

mercacona wrote: post #26
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.

It's not even about plagiarism. But, sure, 1:1 or even 1:few instruction is great but even at elite schools is not really very practical. I went to what's considered a very good engineering school and classes with hundreds of students was pretty normal.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#122

Post by Fomite »

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…

In the process, we lose both the ability to accommodate students, or ask questions that take longer than the test period to answer.

All for a calculator that can lie.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#123

Post by cadamsdotcom »

AI can also generate questions of course.

So it is feasible (in principle) to give every student a different exam!

You’d use AI to generate lots of unique exams for your material, then ensure they’re all exactly the same difficulty (or extremely extremely close) by asking an LLM to reject any that are relatively too hard or too easy. Once you have generated enough individual exams, assign them to your students in your no-AI setting.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#124

Post by FloorEgg »

seg_lol wrote: post #107
FloorEgg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most learning curves in the education system today are very bumpy and don't adapt well to the specific student. Students get stuck on big bumps or get bored and demotivated at plateaus. AI has potential to smooth out all curves so that students can learn faster and maximize time in flow. I've spent literally thousands of hours thinking about this (and working on it). The future of education will be as different from…

There is a huge opportunity here to have the stick smacking be automated and timed to perfection.

The point is that the education system has come a long way in utilizing STEM to make education more efficient (helping students advance faster and further with less resources) and it will continue to go a long way further.

People thought the threat of physical violence was a good way to teach. We have learned better. What else is there for us to learn? What have we already learned but just don't have the resources to apply?

I've met many educators who have told me stories of ambitions learning goals for students that didn't work because there weren't the time or resources to facilitate them properly.

Often instructors are stuck trading off between inauthentic assessments that have scalable evaluation methods or authentic exercises that aren't feasible to evaluate at scale and so evaluation is sparse, incomplete or students only receive credit for completion.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#125

Post by respondo2134 »

huevosabio wrote: post #15
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…

When I was in college, there was a cheating scandal for the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam. The professor noticed it (presumably via seeing poor "show your work") and gave zero points on the question to everyone. And once you went to complain about your grade, she would ask you to explain the answer there in her office and work through the problem live. I thought i…

Except the power imbalance: position, experience, social, etc. meant that the vast majority just took the zero and never complained or challenged the prof. Sounds like your typical out-of-touch academic who thought they were super clever.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#126

Post by respondo2134 »

v9v wrote: post #28
phh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

no, you multiply their result by .8 to account for the "uncertainty"! /s

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#127

Post by solomonb »

In college I had a professor assign us to write a 100% plagiarized paper. You had to highlight every word in a color associated with the source. You couldn't plagiarize more then one sequential sentence from a single source.

It ended up being harder then writing an ordinary paper but taught us all a ton about citation and originality. It was a really cool exercise.

I imagine something similar could be done to teach students to use AI as a research tool rather then as a plagiarization machine.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#128

Post by respondo2134 »

j45 wrote: post #38
phh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think it means every time AI is used, it will detect it 80% of the time. Not that 20% of the class will marked as using AI.

you're missing out on the false positives though; catching 80% of cheaters might be acceptable but 20% false positives (not the same thing as 20% of the class) would not be acceptable. AI generated content and plagarism are completely different detection problems.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#129

Post by respondo2134 »

germinalphrase wrote: post #24
neom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

honest q: what would it look like from your perspective if someone worked in entirely different tools and then only moved their finished work to google docs at the end?

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#130

Post by FloorEgg »

darkwater wrote: post #110
FloorEgg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Detecting artificial typing patterns is a little more tricky, but also feasible. Keystroke dynamics can detect artificial typing patterns (copying another source by typing it out manually). If a student has to go way out of their way to make their behavior appear authentic then it's decreasing advantage of cheating and less students will do it. If the student is integrating answers from multiple AI responses then m…

It will take 0 time to have some (smarter?) student create an AI agent that mimick keystrokes.

Not 0 time, but yes, integrity preservation is an arms race.

The best solutions are in student motivations and optimal pedagogical design. Students who want to learn, and learning systems that are optimized for rate of learning.

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