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Implications of AI to schools

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Re: Implications of AI to schools

#191

Post by RealityVoid »

WalterBright wrote: post #146
mavhc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand. Tests were created to save money, more students per teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually useful, method of talking to people to see if they understand what they've been taught. You weren't asked to write an essay because someone wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've understood something

> Tests were created to save money I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.

Both can be true at the same time. You outlined the objective, the money is an extra constraint (and let's be honest, when isn't money an extra constraint?)

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#192

Post by ball_of_lint »

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…

The TL:DR of every "AI vs Schools, what should teachers do?" article boils down to exactly this: Talk with the students 1-1. You can fake an essay, you can't fake a conversation about the topic at hand.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#193

Post by icsa »

edwcross wrote: post #166
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…

Always stunned by how much teachers can accuse without proof and invert the "innocent until proven guilty". Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works" (or at least should work). So should the teachers. Student unions and similar entities should exist and be ready to intervene to help students in such situations. This is nothing new, AI will just make this happen more often, revealing ho…

In the United States, we all used to take a required course called Civics.

We learned how government and justice worked.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#194

Post by lll-o-lll »

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…

> My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material.

This sounds like, a good solution? It’s the exception case, so shouldn’t be constant (false positives), although I suppose this fails if everyone cheats and everyone wants to claim innocence.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#195

Post by Terr_ »

perihelions wrote: post #86
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine this but its a courtroom and you're facing 25 years

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238786 ( "Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms (nytimes.com)" ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14285116 ( 'Justice.exe: Bias in Algorithmic sentencing (justiceexe.com)" ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649811 ( "Louisiana prison board uses algorithms to determine eligility for parole (propublica.org)" ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753…

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11374696/

> language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of [African American English] be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death.

This one is just so extra insidious to me, because it can happen even when a well-meaning human has already "sanitized" overt references to race/ethnicity, because the model is just that good at learning (bad but real) signals in the source data.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#196

Post by throwaway31131 »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #194
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…

> My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. This sounds like, a good solution? It’s the exception case, so shouldn’t be constant (false positives), although I suppose this fails if everyone cheats and everyone wants to claim innocence.

You hinted to it but at what point are you basically giving individual oral exams to the entire class for every assignment? There are surveys where 80% of high school students self report using AI on assignments.

I guess we could go back to giving exams soviet Russia style where you get a couple of questions that you have to answer orally in front of the whole class and that’s your grade. Not fun…

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#197

Post by throwaway31131 »

ghaff wrote: post #121
mercacona wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For many of the “very good” engineering schools that I know of they got “very good” status because of their graduate programs. In graduate school a 1:few relation is almost certain. In undergraduate, not so much.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#198

Post by Huppie »

Oxide and Friends recently had a podcast episode [0] with Michael Littman about this topic for anyone who's curious about this topic.

This topic has been an interesting part of the discourse in a group of friends the past few weeks because one of us is a teacher who has to deal with this on an almost daily basis and is struggling to get her students to not cheat and the options available to her are limited (yes, physical monitoring would probably work but requires concessions from the school management etc. it's not something that has an easy or quick fix available.)

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-in-highe...

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#199

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

yannyu wrote: post #71
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…

As much as I hated schooling, I do want to say that there are parts of learning that are simply hard. There are parts that you can build enthusiasm for with project work and prioritizing for engagement. But there are many things that people should learn that will require drudgery to learn and won't excite all people. Doing derivatives, learning the periodic table, basic language and alphabet skills, playing an instru…

Yeah, I agree that there's some skills that require deliberate practice. I think LLMs will be a huge boon there as well, because you can get real-time feedback as you're solving problems. And if you get stuck you can get immediate help or clarification, which is closer to having a personal tutor. In college if I got stuck on a problem, I might end up having to wait multiple days to ask someone for help.

In software engineering we often come across build environments that make code iteration really difficult and slow, and speeding up that iteration cycle usually results in being able to experiment more and ship faster changes.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#200

Post by globalnode »

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…

its defamation. flimsy proof like that needs to be sued.
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