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College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

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Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#361

Post by balamatom »

sarchertech wrote: post #95
llbbdd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is a nice side effect sometimes but yeah, I don't know how you could reach any other conclusion. If you're motivated to learn for learning's sake, college is an annoying slog that you know you don't need post-millenium. I literally left college early and started making money instead of spending it, because I got tired of demonstrating to my professors that I already knew everything they were teaching and th…

Or maybe you chose to waste your time because you treated college as a way to get a piece paper instead of as the only time in your life when you are surrounded by experts who will spend an hour a week answering any questions you can think of.

>only time in your life when you are surrounded by experts who will spend an hour a week answering any questions you can think of.

Why is that a resource of "once-in-a-lifetime" scarcity in the first place?

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#362

Post by jodrellblank »

zoom6628 wrote: post #163
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #30

When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.

When I did tertiary studies in programming there wasn't AI but we did our programming exams in pencil and paper. The "beneficial" prep we had and I had since high school was using punch cards. And 24h turnaround time for compiles. That really makes you think. And you learn how to desk check even thousand line programs. Intense focus, structuring for readability (to catch typos) and simplicity (catch logic errors) hel…

24 hour turnaround for compiles, expected to change a hundred lines and it fail to compile, and you get 4-6 attempts, so up to 6 days to get a thousand line program working? Now you can compile and check a thousand line program in milliseconds. It seems so unarguably more productive, why do you call it a 'pretence' of being more productive?

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#363

Post by Aurornis »

nradov wrote: post #206
Aurornis wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI. They were more prone to cheating before AI, too. Cheating has always existed at some level, but from talking to my couple of friends who teach undergrad level courses the attitudes of students toward cheating have been changing even before AI was everywhere. They would complain about cohorts coming through where cheating was obvious and rampa…

Those students will go on to "cheat" in job interviews. And the sad thing is that many of them will never face any consequences because the majority of jobs at large companies don't require any actual competence. The college degree allows them to check a box on job applications but the jobs don't actually depend on anything learned in college.

> because the majority of jobs at large companies don't require any actual competence.

An interesting side effect of the AI gold rush is that companies are starting to look critically at these do-nothing email jobs where someone forwards emails around and makes slides and Notion pages.

I’ve worked with many who occupied jobs that didn’t contribute much other than organizing text and sharing it around, but they got a pass because it looked helpful enough. Now it’s a lot harder to justify those positions when management realizes that having the not-really-competent person summarize communications and documents isn’t much better than having ChatGPT do it.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#364

Post by kristjansson »

coffeefirst wrote: post #351

This line jumps out to me: > Everything slows down. It’s like back in the old days when you really did one thing at a time. Why did we turn computers into frenetic, distracted multitasking machines? What would it take to reverse course?

> Why did we turn computers into frenetic, distracted multitasking machines?

When we had to add another core to keep up with Moore’s Law?

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#365

Post by giancarlostoro »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #30

When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.

My local college used to have a test center you would physically go into. Now they no longer let teachers send their students there (idk if its just for programming or what) for whatever reason. I know they've wanted to cut down on wasted paper for years.

If my college is doing this, I cannot imagine how many others are also impeding on their entire goal: education.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#366

Post by chmod775 »

logicchains wrote: post #287
PunchyHamster wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Because using AI is the complete opposite of "I learned programming just to make tests easier". By learning how to program solver, you not only learned how to program but also learned the method well enough t…

>By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it. If you got AI to produce a working solution, you solved the problem. In the real world nobody who's paying you cares about the method as long as you deliver results. Students taught to solve easy problems by themselves will…

There's also no reason to learn to read and write! First graders could just point their phone at some text and have it read to them, or dictate to their phone to achieve the reverse. Why learn to swim, walk, run? Machines can do that for you too!

For now there's plenty of people who are significantly more capable than AI models. Someone who fully outscources to machines will never join that club.

You have to evaluate students on their own skills before you continue their education, because at some point AI models won't be able to help them. Anyone can use some LLM to pass the first few months of undergraduate engineering disciplines, but if you got through that and haven't learned a thing, you're completely fucked. Worse, you won't even notice the point at which AI starts to fail until you get your test results.

Once the above is not true anymore, education is pointless anyways. However for now AI can at best replace the worst performers and only in some areas.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#367

Post by s0rce »

In college I had to handwrite all my exams and the pure math courses didn't allow calculators. For the latter you could realize you were doing it wrong if the answer was too complicated to write down. As others said the final was something like 30% or more of your grade.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#368

Post by MengerSponge »

bawolff wrote: post #201
ransom1538 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every class. Teachers think: "We want a curve, not everyone is getting an A". This pushes the teacher to ask questions not covered in the material. If they stick to what is covered it is hard to get a decent curve. So, in the end, teachers just hand out grades based on IQ, and there isn't a point of grades.

Courses aren't supposed to be pure memorization. If you can only answer questions directly covered in the material but can't apply it to new situations, you should not get an A.

Many "straight A" high school students earn their first B (or C) with this misunderstanding.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#369

Post by rz2k »

Izkata wrote: post #143
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today just teachers walking around during an exam instead of browsing on their phone would do wonders…

Half related: reminds me of my physics teacher's test of how observant we were. The extra credit question on the test was "what is your teacher's favorite color?", which she had so far given no indication of. But while watching us she was walking all over the room in every possible direction, because the answer was on a piece of paper taped to her back.

My dad had a class in medical school where the professor dipped his finger in a beaker, talked about mechanisms for sugar in diabetic patients’ urine, and then proceeded to stick his finger in his mouth. He had all of the students do the same, who noted that the sugar was apparent.

He concluded the class by talking about the importance of observing patients, and pointed out that he had tasted a different finger than the one he had put in the beaker.

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