Live data from Hacker News

AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

economist.com

61–70 of 409 posts

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

#62
Education sustem is not about the actual knowledge, but about training various aspects of the brain during kids development. So even memorizing literature have benefits, even though it doesn't bring any career use.

If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.

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

#63
post #29
post #18

abolish homework

This is the answer. Many (all?) European schools don’t give homework (this is partly because of the way the grad programs work). It’s on the students to study in order to pass the (difficult) exams.

[dead]

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

#64

[flagged]

Everytime a student says this—it's because they're procrastinating on their work. The hardest part about anything new is starting it. Once you build some momentum, interest and focus tends to build as well.There certainly are some homework assignments that are boring.

A child today can absolutely be successful at doing their homework if they have time to... sit down and write, or draw, or do crafts or things that require them to focus. It's not like Screens exist, therefore no attention span.

What's happening is people are only fixating on screens, and foregoing these slower forms of media. That's akin to saying all children will be obese now that fast food is around. Of course, obesity rates will sky rocket if all you eat is fast food. But if a kid grows up to have homecooked meals, and eat with their parent(s) then they won't. It's as simple as that.

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

#65
For some of the classes my kids were in, the lessons and homework time were reversed.

Learning the material (using the text book and videos) was what they had to do at night and class time was spent working through problems or applying the material in some way.

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

#66

Guess what this is probably fine. AI helps people do their work on a daily basis and probably makes them memorize less things. That’s how the world is moving. You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic. And we shouldn’t organize our society around memorizing things for exams.

A good analogy to caching and memory lookups. You store in your head only the most valuable immediately necessary information, the rest can be outsourced.

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

#67
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good). If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" w…

I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible. Let me explain. All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche. I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-r…

> I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible.

We should establish a single practice of care, MedicineGPT. It may be a rough start but over time the gene pool will adapt and the human race will live harmoniously with the machines (sorry, with the GPUs). Plus our insurance premiums should finally go down.

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

#68
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good). If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" w…

I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible. Let me explain. All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche. I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-r…

I am confused as to how this is an argument for a single source of truth. It seems like you've presented an argument for the opposite. If there were a single source of truth, there would be no point in seeking a second opinion - it would be the same as the first. If the first opinion was correct, excellent. But if the first opinion was incorrect (and no AI model is correct 100% of the time), then you're straight out of luck.

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

#70

Guess what this is probably fine. AI helps people do their work on a daily basis and probably makes them memorize less things. That’s how the world is moving. You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic. And we shouldn’t organize our society around memorizing things for exams.

This is not, in fact, fine. The point of education is to learn things, and these results show that kids are not learning things as effectively when they use LLMs.
Post reply on HN