80-90% of the teachers are not equipped to handle AI in the classrooms. You can’t expect teachers to know the SOTA that’s rapidly changing. And at the same time punish students from using available tools. Especially in public schools, teaching quality has plummeted in the past decade. This also applies to lower tier colleges. The whole point of education is to learn. Not to weed out talent. If students want to use AI tools to take shortcuts then it’s entirely on them. It will catch up to them at some point.
Implications of AI to schools
221–230 of 447 posts
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#222It'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.
I real life if someone with an administrative job would jot 50 * 3,000 in a calculator and not notice the answer 1,500,000 is wrong (a typo) I will consider them most definitely at fault. Similarly I know some structural engineers who will notice something went wrong with the input if an answer is not within a given range. A calculator can be used to do things you know how to do _faster_ imho but in most jobs it stil…
> Maybe it would be possible to design labs with LLM's in such a way that you teach them how to evaluate the LLM's answer? This would require them to have knowledge of the underlying topic. That's probably possible with specialized tools / LLM prompts but is not going to help against them using a generic LLM like ChatGPT or a cheating tool that feeds into a generic model.
What you are desribing is that they should use LLM just after they know the topic. A dilemma.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#22380-90% of the teachers are not equipped to handle AI in the classrooms. You can’t expect teachers to know the SOTA that’s rapidly changing. And at the same time punish students from using available tools. Especially in public schools, teaching quality has plummeted in the past decade. This also applies to lower tier colleges. The whole point of education is to learn. Not to weed out talent. If students want to use AI…
We're almost at the point that CGP grey predicted over a decade ago with the "digital Aristotle" concept. Teachers will have to eventually transition into class babysitting roles, but the transition period will be ugly as long as tech stays at this level where it renders regular teaching impossible while also not yet being on a level where it can useably replace it.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#224It'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.
With calculators, you cannot replace the thinking process. LLM can do that and that is the problem.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#225I 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…
People have been saying that we "focus too much on memorization" for as long as I have been alive. To be honest, I don't really think that is true, if anything we don't focus enough on memorization nowadays since people leave school without knowing basic things about the world whether in science or in history. Knowing things allows one to make connections and see things in a different way that you simply cannot get if you rely on the internet or LLMs or whatever to look everything up.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#226One 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…
Yeah, this, but also as an adult; When you are a non-native speaker and you use AI to make things more concise and correct. The detector will go off. People may find some wording "AI-ish" (even though I replaced em-dashes with commas and told it to "avoid American waiter-like enthusiasm"). My reaction is: Ok. you want my original? Which is much harder to read and uses 2x the amount of words? Fine.
I mean, what is the problem? It's my report! I know all the ins and outs, I take full responsibility for it. I'm the one taking this to the board of directors who will grill me on all the details. I'm up for it. So why is this so "not done"? Why do you assume I let the AI do the "thinking"? I'm appalled by your lack of trust in me.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#227In 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 s…
Reminds me of that thing Olmo3 has in the web demo, where it shows you a trace for a selected sentence generated by the LLM and points you at the exact document in the training data it comes from verbatim. If they all had that it would be really trivial to verify sources, and more or less does that exact exercise for you at a press of a button.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#228One 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…
> Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works"
And to add to that, there should be a justice system there. The idea of due process is laughable in most educational settings.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#22980-90% of the teachers are not equipped to handle AI in the classrooms. You can’t expect teachers to know the SOTA that’s rapidly changing. And at the same time punish students from using available tools. Especially in public schools, teaching quality has plummeted in the past decade. This also applies to lower tier colleges. The whole point of education is to learn. Not to weed out talent. If students want to use AI…
At my school, long before AI, the work was of two kinds - homework type essays/problems that you could cheat on if you wanted but there was no point because the feedback was for your benefit and didn't count towards anything, and then proper exams where you were watched and couldn't cheat easily.
Not sure why they don't just do that? It worked fine and would be compatible with LLM use.