The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

Most western countries have somehow decided over the last couple decades that small negative actions should mostly be free of negative consequences.

You can cheat on tests, shoplift in stores, and pretty much nothing will happen to you.

When teachers can’t give failing grades to students or kick them out of their class for blatantly breaking the rules, this is what happens.

Meanwhile I took a language exam in Japan last weekend where a bunch of people got kicked out of the room - instant fail - for using their phone during the break when it was expressly disallowed (we had to put it in a sealed envelope that we couldn’t open until the exam was over, break included). Given reports I’ve heard, I suspect at least a single digit percent of test takers failed the test this session simply for breaking this rule.

From the test takers who got kicked out of the room and tried to negotiate (unsuccessfully) with the proctors, it was instantly obvious who came from cultures where the consequences of rules are carried out and who didn’t.

They still do this. The difference is, in my experience, is that parents are totally cool with their kids cheating. I've overheard parents openly mention it at line-up at school.

Hate to say "back in my day" but even as a millennial raised by laid-back parents I'd have been in deep shit if I cheated.

Big swing and a miss by the author here.

The learning is the point. Learning by nature shouldn't be optimized for efficiency. You learn deeply when you have to read sources, draw conclusions, synthesize information, and connect it to your own experiences. I recall writing essays in grade school and what mattered wasn't the end product but the process to arrive at the end product. The hours of research and analysis... figuring out what was true and what was questionable. When you skip steps 1-10 and arrive at the final deliverable a la ChatGPT, you miss the entire point of the assignment. Unfortunately, students are only judged on the final deliverable.

Truly, I think the only way we get back to real learning is through paper and pencil. The problem is that we've optimized our systems for learning efficiency, not learning efficacy.

This article doesn’t really jive with me. Homework is more about spaced repetition and the discipline to do it. The notion that it is about writing an insightful essay with a novel interpretation of an already well trodden topic is overly dramatic. Maybe that’s truly what happens at Ivy Academy but most of the children around me are filling in the blanks to conjugate verbs, practicing cursive, or doing some other variation of 10 - catpaw = 7? drill*.

At some point these kids will be faced with a timed pen-and-paper exam. The earlier you can show them what that’s like and how one needs to prepare for it the better.

On the other hand, I taught high school CS that was assessed solely with terminal examination. If you’re managing pupils whose mark comes from papers they write at home I concede the article’s point entirely!

* catpaw = 3

> We had a mandatory home economics class that taught how to balance a check book, cook, do laundry, and even how taxes worked. Yet people still thought that class was bullshit and a waste of time.

Sounds about right. This author is talking about whether the kids think the material is important as if kids have good judgement and can be trusted. But that obviously is not the case. Kids are overconfident and ignorant and have no basis at all to determine what is and isn't good learning for them.