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AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

economist.com

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Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

#21

[flagged]

These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.

Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.

Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.

Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

#22
post #13

In my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.

Your career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.

Fortune cookie ass statement.

Your career is more akin to the totality of school than it is to any specific facet of it imo.

The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.

Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

#24
post #13

In my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.

Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.

You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")

Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

#26

[flagged]

The important thing is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.

If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).

Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

#28
post #13

In my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.

Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.

Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

#30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.

Fortune cookie ass statement. Your career is more akin to the totality of school than it is to any specific facet of it imo. The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.

> Fortune cookie ass statement.

> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.

To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.

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