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Implications of AI to schools

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Re: Implications of AI to schools

#201

Post by reverius42 »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #47
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In what ways to ad tech firms or non-profits use algorithms to assign you any kind of score that matters for your life?

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#202

Post by reverius42 »

kingstnap wrote: post #152
bjt wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thi…

I would try it now with GPT-5.1.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#203

Post by somenameforme »

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…

I wouldn't mind seeing education return to its roots of being about learning instead of credentialization. In an age where having a degree is increasingly meaningless in part due to many places simply becoming thinly veiled diploma treadmills (which are somehow nonetheless accredited), this is probably more important than ever. This is doubly so if the AI impact extremists end up being correct.

So why is the issue you described an issue? Because it's about a grade. And the reason that's relevant is because that credential will then be used to determine where she can to to university which, in turn, is a credential that will determine her breadth of options for starting her career, and so on. But why is this all done by credentials instead of simple demonstrations of skill? What somebody scored in a high school writing class should matter far less than the output somebody is capable of producing when given a prompt and an hour in a closed setting. This is how you used to apply to colleges. Here [1], for instance, is Harvard's exam from 1869. If you pass it, you're in. Simple as that.

Obviously this creates a problem of institutions starting to 'teach the test', but with sufficiently broad testing I don't see this as a problem. If a writing class can teach somebody to write a compelling essay based on an arbitrary prompt, then that was simply a good writing class! As an aside this would also add a major selling point to all of the top universities that offer free educational courses online. Right now I think 'normal' people are mostly disinterested in those because of the lack of widely accepted credentials, which is just so backwards - people are actively seeking to maximize credentials over maximizing learning.

This is one of the very few places I think big tech in the US has done a great job. Coding interviews can be justifiably critiqued in many ways, but it's still a much better system than raw credentialization.

[1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#204

Post by Huppie »

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…

I know a teacher who basically only does open questions but since everything is digital nowadays students just use tools like Cluely [0] that run on the background and provide answers.

Since the testing tool they use does notice and register 'paste'-events they've resorted to simply assigning 0 points to every answer that was pasted.

A few of us have been telling her to move to in-class testing etc. but like you also notice everything in the school organization pushes for teaching productivity so this does require convincing management / school board etc. which is a slow(er) process.

[0] https://cluely.com/

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#205

Post by zkmon »

It's not the students. It's the teachers and school using AI first, and publicly. Why does he talk about only students using AI?

Also, just like how calculators are allowed in the exam halls, why not allow AI usage in exams? In real-life job you are not going to avoid use of calculator or AI. So why test people in a different context? I think the tests should focus on the skills in using calculator and AI.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#206

Post by lll-o-lll »

throwaway31131 wrote: post #196
lll-o-lll wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sounds good! Why not?

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#207

Post by intended »

Its really something to just casually say “all exams need to be in person”, reversing in a single move significant gains in education availability.

It may not be obvious in a country with smaller student to teacher ratios, but for a place like India, you never have enough teachers for students.

Being able to provide courses, and homework digitally, reduced the amount of work required to grade and review work.

Then to add insult to injury, AI is removing entry level roles, removing other chances for people to do work which is easy to verify, practice and learn from.

Yes, yes, eventually tool use will result in increases in GDP. Except our incentives are not to hire more teachers, build more schools, and improve educational outcomes. Those are all public goods, not private goods. We aren’t going to tax firms further, because commerce must be protected, yet we will socialize the costs to society.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#208

Post by intended »

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…

Increase spending on schools by an order of magnitude and it would be possible.

All of schooling breaks down to costs and society’s willingness and desire to invest in child nutrition, education, and training.

We simply do not even have the wherewithal to have the conversation about it, without getting blackholed by cultural minefields and assumptions of child rearing, parental responsibility, morality and religion.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#209

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

#210

Post by xboxnolifes »

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…

> At some point in education with most fields, you will have to move beyond concepts and do some rote memorization and repetition of principles in order to get to higher level concepts. You can't gamify your way out of education, despite our best attempts to do so.

I don't know if we'll ever be successful, but the entire point of gamification is to make the rote parts more palatable. A lot of gamification techniques try to model after MMO gaming for a reason, as that's a genre where people willingly subject themselves to a lot of rote tasks.

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