I read that xcancel thread, the original one and now this hackernews thread and...
IS NO ONE GOING TO POINT OUT MULTIPLE OF THOSE DOODLES ARE WRONG???
Implications of AI to schools
171–180 of 447 posts
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#172I read that xcancel thread, the original one and now this hackernews thread and... IS NO ONE GOING TO POINT OUT MULTIPLE OF THOSE DOODLES ARE WRONG???
To be specific, it's the doodles that are, not the answers.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#173One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment. Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the…
It's not that hard to prove that you did the work and not an AI. Show your work. Explain to the teacher why you wrote what you did, why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to you and you chose that as the basis for your work. Show an outline on which the paper was based. Show rough drafts. Explain how you revised the work, where you found your references, and why you retained some sources in the paper and not others.
To wit, show the teacher that YOU did the work and not someone else. If the teacher is not willing to do this with every student they accuse of malfeasance, they need to find another job. They're lazy as hell and suck at teaching.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#174AI can also generate questions of course. So it is feasible (in principle) to give every student a different exam! You’d use AI to generate lots of unique exams for your material, then ensure they’re all exactly the same difficulty (or extremely extremely close) by asking an LLM to reject any that are relatively too hard or too easy. Once you have generated enough individual exams, assign them to your students in you…
Why the hell would you want to do that lol. Casually 20x the teachers' workload for what? Who are going to grade these unique exams? AI as well?
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#175One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment. Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the…
It's not that hard to prove that you did the work and not an AI. Show your work. Explain to the teacher why you wrote what you did, why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to you and you chose that as the basis for your work. Show an outline on which the paper was based. Show rough drafts. Explain how you revised the work, where you found your references, and why you retained some sources in the paper…
I agree, it isn't hard! Watch:
Computer, show "my" work and explain to the teacher why "I" wrote what "I" did, describe why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to "me" and "I" chose that as the basis of "my" work. Produce an outline on which the paper could have been based and possible rough drafts, then explain how I could have revised the work to produce the final result.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#176This is the correct take. To contrast the Terance Tao piece from earlier ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972 ), AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. You can't, however, become a Terence Tao by asking AI to solve your homework. So, in learning environments we might not have an option but to open the floodgates to AI use, but aba…
Yesterday's Doonesbury was on point here: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23 Andrej and Garry Trudeau are in agreement that "blue book exams" (I.e. the teacher gives you a blank exam booklet, traditionally blue) to fill out in person for the test, after confiscating devices, is the only way to assess students anymore. My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come…
That was how I took most of my school and university exams. I hated it then and I'd hate it now. For humanities, at least, it felt like a test of who could write the fastest (one which I fared well at, too, so it's not case of sour grapes).
I'd be much more in favour of oral examinations. Yes, they're more resource-intensive than grading written booklets, but it's not infeasible. Separately, I also hope it might go some way to lessening the attitude of "teaching to the test".
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in college, there was a cheating scandal for the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam. The professor noticed it (presumably via seeing poor "show your work") and gave zero points on the question to everyone. And once you went to complain about your grade, she would ask you to explain the answer there in her office and work through the problem live. I thought i…
I think this kind of approach is the root of (the US's) hustle culture. Instead of receiving a fair score, you get a zero and need to "hustle" and challenge your teacher. The teacher effectively filtered out the shy boys/girls who are not brave enough to "hustle." Gracefully.
I don't even think it is about shyness. Some professors do not respond well to being challenged on every possible exam question.
The time spent challenging exam grades is usually better spent studying for the next exam. I've never gotten a significant grade improvement from it.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#178I think part of the reason AI is having such a negative effect on schools in particular is because of how many education processes are reliant on an archaic, broken way of "learning." So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information (which AI is unmatched at doing). School is packed with inefficiency and busywork that is completely divorced from the way people learn on their own. In fact, i…
> So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information, which AI is unmatched at doing.
This applies both to education, and to what people need to know to do work. Knowing all the written stuff is less valuable. Automated tools can been able to look it up since the Google era. Now they can work with what they look up.
There was a time when programmers poured over Fundamental Algorithms. No one does that today. When needed, you find existing code that does that stuff. Probably better than you could write. Who codes a hash table today?
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol, in 3rd grade algebra, a teacher called 2 of us in for cheating. She had us take the test again, I got the same exact horribly failing score (a 38%) and the cheater got a better score, so the teacher then knew who the cheater was. He just chose the wrong classmate to cheat of of.
I don't get it. If she called you too it was because your results were good, no? Who cheats to get a bad result?
I assume that the cheating student didn't know that he was copying answers from someone who was doing poorly. It was third graders after all; one wouldn't necessarily expect them to be able to pick the best target every time.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#180One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment. Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the…
Doesn't google docs have fairly robust edit history? If I was a student these days I'd either record my screen of me doing my homework, or at least work in google docs and share the edit history.
this is a really flimsy method and it would be trivial to write something that works around this.