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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

#221

Post by kortilla »

dataflow wrote: post #220
rtkwe wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote proctoring programs at least are pretty rough these days. Their environment conditions are pretty exacting and then they expect you to just stare at the screen and think for basically the whole exam. Minor normal webcam problems can invalidate the entire exam through no fault of the examee or if you look around or fidget a lot it can trigger their cheat detection as well. I'm glad I finished my test taking tim…

What do they do if you don't have a webcam? Or if your webcam is broken? Or if you don't feel comfortable sharing your video?

They tell you to come back when you’re ready to take the test. This can’t be surprising…

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

#222

Post by paulorlando »

math_dandy wrote: post #65
paulorlando wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business models rule us all. Have you tested what kind of pushback you'll receive if you happen to flout the remote rule?

Centralization and IT-ification has made flouting difficult. There’s one common course site on the institution’s learning management system for all sections where assignments are distributed and collected via upload dropbox, where grades are tabulated and communicated. So far, it’s still possible to opt out of this coordinated model, and I have been. But I suspect the ability to opt out will soon come under attack (t…

Sorry to hear this. And thanks for sharing this warning to other educators. I hope you find a way through.

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

#223

Post by eru »

timr wrote: post #195
eru wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

...and yet, somehow we managed? > Show some imagination for why other people hold their positions. I say that as someone who has also graded piles of paper exams in graduate school (also not that long ago!) I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if the primary objection really is that teachers have to grade , then no, I don't have any sympathy.

> ...and yet, somehow we managed?

People in the past put up with all kinds of struggles. They had to.

> I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if the primary objection really is that teachers have to grade, then no, I don't have any sympathy.

I have no clue what the primary objection really is. I was responding to "I don't see why this is so hard", which just shows a lack of imagination.

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

#224

Post by grogenaut »

userbinator wrote: post #218
grogenaut wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree, but I did it at work in a conference room. And I was able to schedule a day out virtually instead of a month out for in person, and I didn't want them taking my fingerprint. I used a spare laptop I wipe.

Making them surveil your employer instead is not a bad idea either.

I'd pit my megacorp's security against theirs any day of the week, but as I said I just used and wiped a laptop just for the test.

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

#225

Post by eru »

bongodongobob wrote: post #172
eru wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Might be interesting. You can at least use modern AI to turn scans of hand-scrawled-on paper into something readable.

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

#226

Post by bee_rider »

kenjackson wrote: post #72
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.

In most of my classes the HW was far more valuable of a measure of ability -- assuming cheating didn't occur. For example, my compilers HW assignments much more greatly captured my learning. I just feel like a semester writing an optimizing compiler is just going to be better than the 90-120 minute final exam.

I’d probably label something that size a project rather than a homework, although I admit my definition is entirely arbitrary.

IMO the ideal class would be 4 or so students working together on a bespoke project, with weekly check-ins with some grad student teaching assistant. The goal would be to do something interesting and new. Of course nobody ever has enough teaching staff for that kind of thing.

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

#227

Post by Dwedit »

baby_souffle wrote: post #85
fn-mote wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Variations in this system are in active use in the US as well. Do you feel it is effective? It seems to me that there is a massive asymmetry in the war here: proctoring services have tiny incentives to catch cheaters. Cheaters have massive incentives to cheat. I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of the cheating that occurs.

> I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of the cheating that occurs. It'll depend a lot on who/where/how is doing the screening and what tools (if any) are permitted. Remember that bogus program for TI8{3,4} series calculators that would clear the screen and print "MEMORY CLEAR"? If the proctor was just looking for that string and not actually jumping through the hoops to _actually_ clear the memory th…

It's actually somewhat of a challenge to display "Mem cleared" without access to the lowercase font. You have access to any uppercase character, spaces, and BASIC functions. With stat vars, you also get lowercase "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" and "r". And you can display text at a specific row and column.

I ended up displaying "M" "e" "min(" "c" "log(" "e" "a" "r" "e" "d". Then covered up the "in(" with spaces.

Then you lower your contrast for the full effect.

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

#228

Post by jaza »

jamesgill wrote: post #114

The fundamental question that AI raises for me, but nobody seems to answer: In our competitive, profit-driven world--what is the value of a human being and having human experiences? AI is neither inevitable nor necessary--but it seems like the next inevitable step in reducing the value of a human life to its 'outputs'.

The "value of a human" - same in this age as it has always been - is our ability to be truly original and to think outside the box. (That's also what makes us actually quite smart, and what makes current cutting-edge "AI" actually quite dumb).

AI is incapable of producing anything that's not basically a statistical average of its inputs. You'll never get an AI Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, Pythagoras, Tolstoy, Kubrick, Mozart, Gaudi, Buddha, nor (most ironically?) Turing. Just to name a few historical humans whose respective contributions to the world are greater than the sum of the world's respective contributions to them.

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

#229

Post by marcus_holmes »

My essay-writing process for my MBA was:

- decide what I wanted to say about the subject, from the set of opinions I already possess

- search for enough papers that could support that position. Don't read the papers, just scan the abstracts.

- write the essay. Scan the reference papers for the specific bit of it that best supported the point I want to make.

There was zero learning involved in this process. The production of the essay was more about developing journal search skills than absorbing any knowledge about the subject. There are always enough papers to support any given point of view, the trick was finding them.

I don't see how making this process even more efficient by delegating the entire thing to an LLM is affecting any actual education here.

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

#230

Post by dyauspitr »

dataflow wrote: post #220
rtkwe wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote proctoring programs at least are pretty rough these days. Their environment conditions are pretty exacting and then they expect you to just stare at the screen and think for basically the whole exam. Minor normal webcam problems can invalidate the entire exam through no fault of the examee or if you look around or fidget a lot it can trigger their cheat detection as well. I'm glad I finished my test taking tim…

What do they do if you don't have a webcam? Or if your webcam is broken? Or if you don't feel comfortable sharing your video?

Webcam is broken is now pretty universally interpreted as I don’t want to be on video.
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