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This is a pedagogical problem that AI merely exposed. Educators need to figure out How to make students choose the scenic route instead of having them optimize for the most efficient completion of a task.
Moneyshot: "The results are eye-opening. After six months, pupils using ai saw their average homework score rise by 18% across all subjects. The time they took to complete each assignment fell from an average of 64 minutes to 45. But come exam time, the same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not called on ai’s help. Homework scores once predicted exam performance; now those who score highest are, per…
> Homework scores once predicted exam performance As with most training the journey is the point, not the destination. That said, I think smart use of AI could help. It could explain concepts in a way that might help you understand better, it could probe your knowledge in a more dynamic way by tailoring questions, and so on. This requires the AI be restrained by some harness, not free to write down the answers for yo…
People say that all the time, but does anyone really think a lack of good explanations for things is a limiting factor in 2026? Or even 2010?
We need to restructure the system to treat failure as a signal instead of a disaster. Grades should come from hard randomized exams with unlimited retakes so one bad day won't hurt you. Homework should be optional material for self study, evaluated by teachers if you choose to do it but never forced.
Hold back students for individual classes instead of a whole grade so failing one can't ruin your social life and teachers are more willing to do it. F students will realize they have to study, start actually learning and then pass on the second time. No big deal. It happened to my friends in college, no reason they can't do it in high schools.
Discipline is a skill and it's one you have to get from experience. If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.
The kids who used AI and studied for a similar amount of time as the non-AI high performers apparently had similar (slightly higher) performance. The kids who used AI and did poorly used the AI to do the homework for them (this is what the article says). I believe AI is basically an amplifier of bad and good. I’m cynical about the world and assume it will be used more for bad than good, but I don’t doubt some of the…
We need to shift the incentives by adding ruinous penalties for things that are currently quite commonplace if they are done by large players. Some dude training his own AI on his own computer can scrape and train. The fine for OpenAI or Meta using a single copyrighted book without permission should be in the tens or hundreds of millions.
What we're seeing currently in our society is a "loophole inversion" where the rules have an effect mainly via their loopholes. The most profitable activity is to find loopholes and exploit them as frenetically as possible to gain as much advantage as you can before the loophole is closed, or get people hooked on the loophole so it's retroactively legalized. Entities that are big enough to do this are big enough because they have lots of money behind them. Entities doing the same kinds of things without lots of money are not really doing much harm. So the best approach is to adopt a "sliding scale" in which even tiny violations by wealthy actors result in penalties enormously greater than fairly large violations by small players.
If you structure learning in such a way that makes learning just a means to some end, and overindex on that end being the ultimate goal, that's what you get. This is a pedagogical problem that AI merely exposed. Educators need to figure out How to make students choose the scenic route instead of having them optimize for the most efficient completion of a task.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Memorizing stuff is good for understanding. Of course memorizing without understanding doesn't really help, which is what a lot of student last-minute "cramming" boils down to. But without concrete and memorized knowledge, any abstract reasoning skills become quickly impossible.
Wrong. Memorizing without understanding is pointless. And I'd argue that rote memorization does nothing to guide ones understanding. Because if you actually understand a subject deeply enough you can literally derive almost anything that would need to be memorized on the fly, and if you can't (say constants, or spec information, or anything else) you can simply surgically look it up online (or via an LLM).
"Wax on. Wax off" -- memorization and repetition are the basis for understanding.
How useful it is to remember useless information that one day turns out to not be so useless after all.
Then I stopped caring about tests too.
I did the same thing through college. The only reason they passed me and I got a degree is that I built the school’s website and I built personal ecommerce sites for the head of art and his wife to sell their paintings.
I haven’t done shit since like 7th grade.
Worked at Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, same behavior there - did basically nothing for them while making thousands off my games on App Store.
Fuck authority
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.
It is really a combination: you need to memorize a large corpus of information to operationalize knowledge — understanding a bunch of theorems in mathematics does not help much (even if you are able to prove them when you see them) if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.
Or having good understanding of foreign language grammar won't help you if you do not memorize words that you need to express your thoughts.
Good literature will show you some of life's challenges and potentially let you think through them in a non-stressful situation (other than "I've got to finish the last 200 pages by Monday" ;)).
If you structure learning in such a way that makes learning just a means to some end, and overindex on that end being the ultimate goal, that's what you get. This is a pedagogical problem that AI merely exposed. Educators need to figure out How to make students choose the scenic route instead of having them optimize for the most efficient completion of a task.
School has always been about creating compliant workers, not educating people. They will double down on "performing the right things" and "morals" while the economy will continue on its K shaped path as AI gets more capable.
All AI did here is exposed an old problem in education. Kids are expected to get everything perfectly for the first time but a lot of them don't so the class gets easier next year to keep up pass rates. We need to restructure the system to treat failure as a signal instead of a disaster. Grades should come from hard randomized exams with unlimited retakes so one bad day won't hurt you. Homework should be optional mat…
this rhetoric is pretending to be an alternative to coercion. IMO the ideas you are talking about are well trodden and are still coercion nonetheless.