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Implications of AI to schools

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Re: Implications of AI to schools

#151

Post by viraptor »

wisty wrote: post #137
fuzzythinker wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought it is a good idea at first, but can easily be defeated with typing out AI contents. One can add pauses/deletions/edits or true edits from joining ideas different AI outputs.

No, a genuine doc will have a drafting process. You'll edit and change weak parts, etc. I guess you could use AI to guide this, at which point it's basically a research tool and grammar checker.

Depends how you work. I've rarely (never?) drafted anything and almost all of the first approach ended up in the final result. It would look pretty close to "typed in the AI answer with very minor modifications after". I'm not saying that was a great way to do it, but I definitely wouldn't want to be failed for that.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#152

Post by kingstnap »

bjt wrote: post #132
kingstnap wrote: post #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 studen…

> Written response needs TAs. Can AI not grade written responses?

I tried that once. Specifically because I wanted to see if we could leverage some sort of productivity enhancements.

I was using a local LLM around 4B to 14B, I tried Phi, Gemma, Qwen, and LLama. The idea was to prompt the LLM with the question, the answer key/rubric, and the student answer. The student answer at the end did some prompt caching to make it much faster.

It was okay but not good, there were a lot of things I tried:

* Endlessly messing with the prompt. * A few examples of grading. * Messing with the rubric to give more specific instructions. * Average of K. * Think step by step then give a grade.

It was janky and I'll throw it up to local LLMs at the time being somewhat too stupid for this to be reasonable. They basically didn't follow the rubric very well. Qwen in particular was very strict giving zeros regardless of the part marks described in the answer key as I recall.

I'm sure with the correct type of question and correct prompt and a good GPU it could work but it wasn't as trivially easy as I had thought at the time.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#153

Post by Ancapistani »

johanam wrote: post #20
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…

edit history in Google docs is a good way to defend yourself from AI tool use accusations

I’m very tempted to write a tool that emulates human composition and types in assignments in a human-like way, just to force academia to deal with their issues sooner.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#154

Post by lumost »

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…

The new trick being used by some professors in college classes is to mandate a specific document editor with a history view. If the document has unusual copy/paste patterns or was written in unusual haste then they may flag it. That being said, they support use of ai in the class and have confidence the student is not able to one shot the assignment with ai.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#155

Post by FloorEgg »

viraptor wrote: post #151
wisty wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a genuine doc will have a drafting process. You'll edit and change weak parts, etc. I guess you could use AI to guide this, at which point it's basically a research tool and grammar checker.

Depends how you work. I've rarely (never?) drafted anything and almost all of the first approach ended up in the final result. It would look pretty close to "typed in the AI answer with very minor modifications after". I'm not saying that was a great way to do it, but I definitely wouldn't want to be failed for that.

There is a fractal pattern between authentic and inauthentic writing.

Crude tools (like Google docs revision history) can protect an honest student who engages in a typical editing process from false allegations, but it can also protect a dishonest student who fabricated the evidence, and fail to protect an honest student who didn't do any substantial editing.

More sophisticated tools can do a better job of untangling the fractal, but as with fractal shaped problems the layers of complexity keep going and there's no perfect solutions, just tools that help in some situations when used by competent users.

The higher Ed professors who really care about academic integrity are rare, but they are layering many technical and logistical solutions to fight back against the dishonest students.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#156

Post by BobbyJo »

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…

Maybe as a society we can take some of the productivity gains from AI and funnel them into moving teaching away from scantrons and formulaic essays. I want to be optimistic.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#157

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#158

Post by [deleted] »

lumost wrote: post #154
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…

The new trick being used by some professors in college classes is to mandate a specific document editor with a history view. If the document has unusual copy/paste patterns or was written in unusual haste then they may flag it. That being said, they support use of ai in the class and have confidence the student is not able to one shot the assignment with ai.

[deleted]

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#159

Post by dartharva »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #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 al…

But testing and paper assessments are cheap and feasible for mass education. There are only so many workshop projects you can have before you run out of budget.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#160

Post by dartharva »

I agree that focus should just shift to in-class work so that students are left free to do whatever they want once they are done for the day at school. Homework and at-home assignments are lazy handovers.

Also, all of these AI threats to public education can be mitigated if we just step 1-2 decades back and go the pen-and-paper way. I am yet to see any convincing argument in favor of digital/screen-based teaching methods being superior in any way than the traditional ones, on the contrary I have seen thousands of arguments against them.

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