Homework should just be practice tests, self scored.
AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
401–409 of 409 posts
Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homework is no longer useful in the era of AI. Options are: treat kids like they are able to make responsible choices, and accept that much more of them will fail; or, keep the charade of grading AI-"assisted" homework and push kids farther along the track, even though they definitely don't know enough. I much prefer the first. School shouldn't be impossible, but you shouldn't have a charade of schooling. Obviously,…
It's not necessarily useless. If you make assignments short, provide some time in school to work on it, and do not allow students to use devices with access to general-purpose "AI", then there is a good chance most students will do the work like they're supposed to. Some will still cheat, but it's foolish to reorganize everything around the few who stubbornly refuse to learn.
> provide some time in school to work on it
Assignments students do in class isn't "homework". It's just classwork. All my math classes had both.
Perhaps you mean study halls? Those were uncommon until highschool where I grew up. And most of the time people spent there was not studying.
Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not necessarily useless. If you make assignments short, provide some time in school to work on it, and do not allow students to use devices with access to general-purpose "AI", then there is a good chance most students will do the work like they're supposed to. Some will still cheat, but it's foolish to reorganize everything around the few who stubbornly refuse to learn.
> provide some time in school to work on it Assignments students do in class isn't "homework". It's just classwork. All my math classes had both. Perhaps you mean study halls? Those were uncommon until highschool where I grew up. And most of the time people spent there was not studying.
It's "homework" in the sense that it is not bound to the class. It is not due during class and if you can't finish it in class, you'll have to complete it out of class.
And I mean setting aside some time during the class itself, not a separate "study hall" period. Obviously class time is precious, so I don't expect there to always be enough in-class time to finish assignments. But even having a little in-class time for students to get started - and when the teacher is available for help those in need - would go a long way towards encouraging students to do the work themselves and not cheat.
And of course part of my strategy is to make "homework" shorter (5-15 min). That should also reduce the temptation to cheat and increase the likelihood students can even complete them in class.
Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not so clear that AI is an amplifier.. The paper has some fascinating analysis on this topic: "At the other end of the distribution, AI students who spend more than 65 minutes on their homework receive homework and exam scores similar to those of non-AI students, suggesting that these students do not use generative AI for homework assignments. However, this group consists entirely of students who adopted generat…
I'm curious what happened in the source, that a copy/paste exposed such odd artifacts. "e§ort" == effort "Öve" == not sure. Maybe "over five"?
PDF is a render-only format with optional hidden metadata for semantics.
The PDF file they created knows how to paint the ligatures they used, like "fi" and "ff", but doesn't contain the `/ToUnicode` metadata for what those symbols meant.
The generated PDF happened to put the "fi" ligature at an index that is normally used "Ö", and didn't provide more information.
Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flipped classroom was a popular method when I was teaching math. Some students found it very helpful. The trouble was getting the students to do the reading before class. If students came in unprepared they struggled to keep up.
It's especially hard when multiple subjects try to do it, because it can add enormous amounts of home-time expectations. And many families can't dedicate that much time. I do like it though, and I like that college generally leaned that way more (and was better balanced, as it had substantially less time in classrooms, so you could study during the day).
thanks for mentioning. this is a very important point !
Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember reading about people talking how writing and reading books leads to cognitive decline because people won't need to remember things anymore. Pretty sure the way social media is designed contributes more to short attention spans and atrophy of the cerebral cortex.
There was a decline in brain size that greatly predated widespread literacy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240517-the-human-brai...
Alternative view: the human brain did never decrease in size:
https://www.unlv.edu/news/release/unlv-research-no-human-bra...
I have no idea which position is correct, but both can't be true.
Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe. As the nature of assistive tools changes, so does pedagogy. Calculators are the easy example since most of us are (still) familiar. But there are others that were just as pronounced -- e.g. log tables and slide rules were transformational and instrumental at one time, and you've (probably) never used them. If you had used slide rules to solve your homework problems then were excluded from using them on exams,…
> As the nature of assistive tools changes I mean, does it? The way I see it, the best LLMs have to offer is infinite patience (until they inevitably and unpredictably start to confabulate, which should be a gigantic red flag, anyhow), I don't see how LLMs can be used to explore teaching paradigms that haven't been explored before. We know pretty well from centuries of empirical experimentation how children's brains…
"Does it?" - Yes? Did you learn arithmetic with log & exponent tables, or just calculators?
Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As the nature of assistive tools changes I mean, does it? The way I see it, the best LLMs have to offer is infinite patience (until they inevitably and unpredictably start to confabulate, which should be a gigantic red flag, anyhow), I don't see how LLMs can be used to explore teaching paradigms that haven't been explored before. We know pretty well from centuries of empirical experimentation how children's brains…
"Does it?" - Yes? Did you learn arithmetic with log & exponent tables, or just calculators?
That's not answering my question, what precisely do LLM enable in ways of educating children that hasn't been thoroughly studied before? What role do you want to give chatbots in the complex framework of child brain development? How do you back it up?
Re: AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
> provide some time in school to work on it Assignments students do in class isn't "homework". It's just classwork. All my math classes had both. Perhaps you mean study halls? Those were uncommon until highschool where I grew up. And most of the time people spent there was not studying.
It's "homework" in the sense that it is not bound to the class. It is not due during class and if you can't finish it in class, you'll have to complete it out of class. And I mean setting aside some time during the class itself, not a separate "study hall" period. Obviously class time is precious, so I don't expect there to always be enough in-class time to finish assignments. But even having a little in-class time f…
Thanks for elaborating. That does seem worthwhile.