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Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

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Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#171

Post by zmgsabst »

Aeolun wrote: post #116
aaplok wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I think the issue is as much that open tasks make learning interesting and meaningful in a way that exams hardly can do. This is the core of the issue really. If we are in the business of teaching, as in making people learn, exams are a pretty blunt and ineffective instrument. However since our business is also assessing, proctoring is the best if not only trustworthy approach and exams are cheap in time, effort…

You can’t expect all students to learn without being forced to, no matter how much that’s literally the point of them being there. They’re kids, and they should be treated as such, in both good and bad ways. You might want to make exceptions for the good ones, but absolutely not for the average or bad ones.

How many people would work their current job if money wasn’t a thing?

People of all ages seek rewards — and assessments gate the payoffs. Like a boss fight in a video game gates the progress from your skill growth.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#172

Post by bongodongobob »

eru wrote: post #167
timr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not that old, and yet my university CS courses evaluated people with group projects, and in-person paper exams. We weren't allowed to bring computers or calculators into the exam room (or at least, not any calculators with programming or memory). It was fine. I don't see why this is so hard, other than the usual intergenerational whining / a heaping pile of student entitlement. If anything, the classes that requi…

> I don't see why this is so hard, other than the usual intergenerational whining / a heaping pile of student entitlement. You know that grading paper exams is a lot more hassle _for the teachers_? Your overall point might or might not still stand. I'm just responding to your 'I don't see why this is so hard'. Show some imagination for why other people hold their positions. (I'm sure there's lots of other factors tha…

Why can't the teachers use LLMs to grade?

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#173

Post by analog31 »

jumploops wrote: post #55

A bit off-topic, but I think AI has the potential to supercharge learning for the students of the future. Similar to Montessori, LLMs can help students who wander off in various directions. I remember often being “stuck” on some concept (usually in biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave something as truth, this dismissing my request for further depth. Of course, LLMs in the current educational land…

>>> Of course, LLMs in the current educational landscape (homework-heavy) only benefit the students who are truly curious

I think you hit on a major issue: Homework-heavy. What I think would benefit the truly curious is spare time. These things are at odds with one another. Present-day busy work could easily be replaced by occupying kids' attention with continual lessons that require a large quantity of low-quality engagement with the LLM. Or an addictive dopamine reward system that also rewards shallow engagement -- like social media.

I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play music, read, and learn electronics.

And there's something else I think might be missing, which is effort. For me, music and electronics were not easy. There was no exam, but I could measure my own progress -- either the circuit worked or it didn't. Without some kind of "external reference" I'm not sure that in-depth research through LLMs will result in any true understanding. I'm a physicist, and I've known a lot of people who believe that they understand physics because they read a bunch of popular books about it. "I finally understand quantum mechanics."

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#174

Post by cebert »

math_dandy wrote: post #28

I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams. Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge…

Thanks for sharing this anecdote. It’s easy to forget the revenue / business side of education and that universities are in a hard spot here.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#175

Post by QuarterReptile »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #92
aaplok wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but…

I think having one huge exam at the end is the problem. An exam and assessment every week would be best. Less stress at the end of the term, and the student can't leave everything to the last minute, they need to do a little work every week.

Too much proctoring and grading, not enough holding students' hands for stuff they should have learned from reading the textbook.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#176

Post by godelski »

aaplok wrote: post #61
math_dandy wrote: post #28

I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams. Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge…

> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but…

I don't think I understand, as a terrible test taker myself.

The solution I use when teaching is to let evaluation primarily depend on some larger demonstration of knowledge. Most often it is CS classes (e.g. Machine Learning), so I don't really give much care for homeworks and tests and instead be project driven. I don't care if they use GPT or not. The learning happens by them doing things.

This is definitely harder in other courses. In my undergrad (physics) our professors frequently gave takehome exams. Open book, open notes, open anything but your friends and classmates. This did require trust, but it was usually pretty obvious when people worked together. They cared more about trying to evaluate and push us if we cared than if we cheated. They required multiple days worth of work and you can bet every student was coming to office hours (we had much more access during that time too). The trust and understanding that effort mattered actually resulted in very little cheating. We felt respected, there was a mutual understanding, and tbh, it created healthy competition among us.

Students cheat because they know they need the grade and that at the end of the day they won't won't actually be evaluated on what they learned, but rather on what arbitrary score they got. Fundamentally, this requires a restructuring, but that's been a long time coming. The cheating literally happens because we just treated Goodhart's Law as a feature instead of a bug. AI is forcing us to contend with metric hacking, it didn't create it.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#177

Post by pkoird »

djoldman wrote: post #107

Basically it comes to this: a sufficiently large proportion of a student's grade must come from work impossible to generate with AI, e.g. in-person testing. Unfortunately, 18-year-olds generally can't be trusted to go a whole semester without succumbing to the siren call of easy GenAI A's. So even if you tell them that the final will be in-person, some significant chunk of them will still ChatGPT their way through an…

So they bomb their test. And? Isn't that the entire point of an exam? If you fail, you fail and presumably have to re-learn the contents.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#178

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #54
bee_rider wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grading homework has two reasonable objectives: Provide an incentive for students to do the thing they should be doing anyway. Give an opportunity to provide feedback on the assignment. It is totally useless as an evaluation mechanic, because of course the students that want to can just cheat. It’s usually pretty small, right? IIRC when I did tutoring we only gave like 10-20% for the aggregate homework grade.

The annoyance with 10-20% means that in order to be an "A" student you have to do all the homework instead of just ace the exams which is obnoxious if you actually know the material. Edge case, I know, but that last 20% is a ton of extra work.

The course could offer nonlinear grading where you get the maximum of [exam grade, 0.8 exam + 0.2 hw]

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#179

Post by viccis »

frelupin_ wrote: post #147
sshine wrote: post #69

I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a good AI policy is. On the one hand, I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly. Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible. Once they're past this hurdle, they can mind their own business again. To them, AI is not…

> it gets work done quickly and poorly This is only temporary. It will be able to code like anyone in time. The only way around this will be coding in-person, but only in elementary courses. Everyone in business will be using AI to code, so that will be the way in most university courses as well.

IMO no amount of AI should be used during an undergrad education, but I can see how people would react more strongly to its use in these intro to programming courses. I don't think there's as much of an issue with using it to churn out some C for an operating systems course or whatever. The main issue with it in programming education is when learning rudiments of programming IS the point of the course. Same with using to it crank out essays for freshman English courses. These courses are designed to introduce fundamental raw skills that everything else builds on. Someone's ability to write good code isn't as big a deal for classes in OS, algs, compilers, ML, etc., as the main concepts of those courses are.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#180

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

foxglacier wrote: post #138

Schools need to re-think what the purpose of essays was in the first place and re-invent homework to suit the existance of LLMs. If it's to understand the material, then skip the essay writing part and have them do a traditional test. If it's to be able to write, they probably don't need that skill anymore so skip the essay writing. If it's to get used to researching on their own, find a way to have them do that whic…

> "If it's to be able to write, they probably don't need that skill anymore..."

Any person who can't write coherently and in a well organized way isn't going to be able to prompt a LLM effectively either. Writing skills become _more_ important in the age of LLMs, not less.

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