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Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

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Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#101

Post by yequalsx »

adamnemecek wrote: post #72
yequalsx wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried teaching calculus where everyone gets to use Wolfram Alpha and/or Mathematica? I did for three years. I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more importantly don't want to. They just want to mimic problem types. They don't want to understand the why. Plug and chug is their true desire. Using the computer exposes right away if a student understands the concepts. You can'…

> I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more importantly don't want to. The problem is that you are forcing people who don't care about it to learn it. Ofc they'll take shortcuts. > Plug and chug is their true desire. I mean, most tests are very plug and chug so it's no surprise. Also note that it might be unreasonable to expect students who never used these tools to use them for the…

Actually it's not a complicated tool with the free form input, integration with Wolfam Alpha, and templates for the commands used. Also during every test I would correct any command that didn't execute properly.

Your point originally was that it requires too much work on the part of teachers/administration to update the curriculum for 21st century. I'm pointing out that this view while true in some cases may not be true in the present situation. It's easy to ascribe to laziness why things are done in education the way they are to someone not involved in teaching.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#103

Post by Chris2048 »

vlasev wrote: post #73
Rjevski wrote: post #50

Wolfram Alpha isn't the issue. The issue is that we're grading students on an arbitrary and meaningless metric, instead of the end result. As an employer, if I hire you to do a task, let's say build a toaster, I couldn't care less about how you achieved that - as long as I've got my toaster and it can help me grow my toast-making business I'm happy. Education should work the same.

Plug and chug with Wolfram Alpha is very similar to plug and chug Stack Exchange answers in your code base.

SE can show you what specific incantation format the API requires, but math is a bit different.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#104

Post by jeremymcanally »

They may let you cheat (just like SparkNotes I guess), but these tools also let people like me who haven't had advanced calculus survive when we otherwise wouldn't. If you pay for the WA service (I don't remember what it's called), you can type complex math in and it will break down how to solve it out. This was invaluable to me in some CS classes where I knew how to implement the algorithms once the math had been detangled, but the mathematical notation was so opaque to me at the time that I would've had no hope of figuring it out.

Obviously, I learned a lot from having it broken down like that so I wouldn't be as dependent on the tool now, but at the time, it was a huge learning aid.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#105

Post by Rjevski »

vlasev wrote: post #73
Rjevski wrote: post #50

Wolfram Alpha isn't the issue. The issue is that we're grading students on an arbitrary and meaningless metric, instead of the end result. As an employer, if I hire you to do a task, let's say build a toaster, I couldn't care less about how you achieved that - as long as I've got my toaster and it can help me grow my toast-making business I'm happy. Education should work the same.

Plug and chug with Wolfram Alpha is very similar to plug and chug Stack Exchange answers in your code base.

Math and programming are a bit different though - to my knowledge in math you're not dealing with malicious users trying to give you incorrect input in hopes of exploiting bugs in your algorithm.

Edit: but to be honest if you needed to give the result Z for a set of inputs X and Y without worrying about invalid/malicious input, then a Stack Exchange copy/paste is totally fine by me.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#106

Post by williamstein »

Rjevski wrote: post #56
williamstein wrote: post #12

> “Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division...” What the heck kind of article is this...? I can’t read it seriously.

Even if this was true, what's the problem? He built a successful business that many people find useful, and that's good enough for me.

I respect the abilities and accomplishments of Wolfram. My problem with the statement I quoted from the article is that I suspect it is bullshit; I think Stephen can do long division, and much much more...

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#107

Post by Chris2048 »

A few issues:

1) applications rest on the shoulders of giants, it isn't efficient to learn too much more than you need to. If you only need to "understand" at a high level, you should just use tools that "do it for you" at lower levels - It's just a shame there are not better FLOSS competitors to Mathematica.

2) It should be clear what the "understanding dependencies" are - i.e. when some knowledge of the foundations can inform the higher levels, and when they don't. If I understand what 'sorted' means, I don't need to know the details of any specific sorting implementation to use it.

3) The way mathematics is split up into a million small, set-theoretically-abstract lemmas etc makes it so much harder to understand. It makes even familiar concepts hard.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#108

Post by JadeNB »

sp332 wrote: post #3
res0nat0r wrote: post #2

You may cheat all you want on your homework, but if calculus tests are like they were when I was in college, taking your exam with no notes or calculator, if you've only cut and pasted from Wolfram Alpha all semester is going to lead you to getting an F in the course.

But it might seem like good time management to have Wolfram Alpha do your homework sometimes. That means it's going to take longer for a teacher to notice that you're not getting a concept well, and that means a lot more painful surprise-F's on tests.

> That means it's going to take longer for a teacher to notice that you're not getting a concept well, and that means a lot more painful surprise-F's on tests.

I'm not sure how much to read into this, so forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the tone; but calling an F after not doing any of the work oneself a "surprise F" seems a lot like calling it a "surprise loss" when one hasn't shown up for any of the team practices. (If you were just observing that students are surprised by such F's, no matter how often it's pointed out to them, and no matter how often they've met such outcomes before, then I am forced reluctantly to agree.)

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#109

Post by jorgec »

I work training and cheating professionals. I used to be a project in chief (the guy that hired, fired and evaluated new personal).

I encourage to my students to do the, so called, cheat, because its what the people in the real world do, people don't need to memorize a lot of topics and people use calculator, computer and excel. Sheesh with the old and rust model of learning.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#110

Post by btilly »

adamnemecek wrote: post #93
btilly wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are true. Clearly we are more productive with the tools. However it is very, very easy for people to see the tools as magic. At some point we need to actually understand what it is that we are doing. For which those equations and symbols are essential. Yes, the computer can draw a pretty picture. Pretty pictures are helpful in conveying information. But they are a horrible way to understand inherently complex to…

> So no, we won't lose equations and symbols. Ever. They are essential, and there is no possibility of real understanding without them. I didn't say get rid of them. But I think that if you see a complex equation, you should be able to roughly imagine it in your head. Working only with symbols won't get you there.

But I think that if you see a complex equation, you should be able to roughly imagine it in your head. Working only with symbols won't get you there.

You're wrong. To take a real example, visualize G_{\mu \nu }+\Lambda g_{\mu \nu }={8\pi G \over c^{4}}T_{\mu \nu }. I dare you. That's Einstein's field equations for General Relativity. I don't visualize a system of 2nd order partial differential equations involving many dimensions at each point in a 4-dimensional coordinate system. Do you?

Furthermore people differ on how visual they are. If you're someone who has to visualize things to understand them, you're hardly alone. Lots of people are like that. But then again there are people like me whose thinking is almost entirely non-visual. If I'm dealing with something abstract, not only do I not think visually, but a purely visual explanation doesn't really help me much.

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