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Implications of AI to schools

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Re: Implications of AI to schools

#231

Post by amrocha »

throwaway31131 wrote: post #196
lll-o-lll wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. This sounds like, a good solution? It’s the exception case, so shouldn’t be constant (false positives), although I suppose this fails if everyone cheats and everyone wants to claim innocence.

You hinted to it but at what point are you basically giving individual oral exams to the entire class for every assignment? There are surveys where 80% of high school students self report using AI on assignments. I guess we could go back to giving exams soviet Russia style where you get a couple of questions that you have to answer orally in front of the whole class and that’s your grade. Not fun…

We did this in Italy, but not in front of the whole class. It was pretty fun, it’s worth a try.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#232

Post by sfdlkj3jk342a »

smileysteve wrote: post #89
huevosabio wrote: post #15

Earlier 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…

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 know the US has fallen behind in math, but where are you taking algebra in 3rd grade? We didn't get it until 8th..

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#233

Post by Huppie »

nicce wrote: post #222
Huppie wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I real life if someone with an administrative job would jot 50 * 3,000 in a calculator and not notice the answer 1,500,000 is wrong (a typo) I will consider them most definitely at fault. Similarly I know some structural engineers who will notice something went wrong with the input if an answer is not within a given range. A calculator can be used to do things you know how to do _faster_ imho but in most jobs it stil…

> Maybe it would be possible to design labs with LLM's in such a way that you teach them how to evaluate the LLM's answer? This would require them to have knowledge of the underlying topic. That's probably possible with specialized tools / LLM prompts but is not going to help against them using a generic LLM like ChatGPT or a cheating tool that feeds into a generic model. What you are desribing is that they should us…

Yeah, I kinda like the method siscia suggests downthread [0] where the teacher grades based on the question they ask the LLMs during the test.

I think you should be able to use the LMM at home to help you better understand the topic (they have endless patience and you can usually you can keep asking until you actually grok the topic) but during the test I think it's fair to expect that basic understanding to be there.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46043012

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#234

Post by muldvarp »

alexose wrote: post #93
ishtanbul wrote: post #91

Here is my proposal for AI in schools: raise the bar dramatically. Rather than trying to prevent kids from using AI, just raise the expectations of what they should accomplish with it. They should be setting really lofty goals rather than just doing the same work with less effort.

Absolutely. I'd love to see the same effect happen in the software industry. Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.

> Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.

This will _never_ happen. Output will increase and quality will decrease.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#235

Post by miki123211 »

onion2k wrote: post #109
j45 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nice approach. The students who know the material, or even who manually prepare before seeing the prof achieve the objective of learning.

It's not great for the teacher though. They're the ones who will truly suffer from the proliferation of AI - increased complexity of work around spotting cheating 'solved' by a huge increase in time pressure. Faced with that teachers will have three options: accept AI detection as gospel without appeals and be accused of unfairness or being bad at the job by parents, spend time on appeals to the detriment of other du…

Or option 4 (a lot more likely in my opinion), pretend nothing is happening.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#236

Post by jinzo »

ecshafer wrote: post #11

In my CS undergrad I had Doug Lea as a professor, really fantastic professor (best teacher I have ever had, bar none). He had a really novel way to handle homework hand ins, you had to demo the project. So you got him to sit down with you, you ran the code, he would ask you to put some inputs in (that were highly likely to be edge cases to break it). Once that was sufficient, he would ask you how you did different th…

15+ years ago I was doing a CS undergrad (or Bachelors? not sure how it translates) at the local uni in a small EU Country and this approach was the standard across all subjects as part of 'lab work'. There were people there to do that, not the prof himself, but approach was exactly the same. And after a few months they had a really good picture on what level everyone is ect.

On the other hand, I had a neighbour ask me if he can make his 1 month apprenticeship when he finished his 3rd year of CS High School (eg ~18 years old, 3 of 4 years of 'CS trade school') 6 months ago or so. I was totally gobsmacked by his lack of basic understanding of how computers work, I am confident that he did not confidentially know the difference between a file and a folder. But he was very confident in the AI slop he produced. I had a grand plan of giving him tasks that would show him the pitfalls of AI -> no need for that, he blindly copied whatever AI gave him (he did not figure out Claude Code exsists), even when the results were very visibly bad - even from afar. I tried explaining stuff to him to no avail. I know this is a sample size of 1, but damn, I did not expect it to be that bad.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#237

Post by muldvarp »

sothatsit wrote: post #139
oytis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality. Effect of AI applied to coding is precisely the opposite though?

Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue. You can absolutely write great code using AI. AI code review has unquestionably increased the quality of my code by helping me find bugs before they make it to production. AI coding tools give me speed to try out more options to land on a better solution. For example, I wrote a proxy, figured out problems with that approach, and so wrote…

> Code quality is still a culture and prioritisation issue more than a tool issue.

AI helps people more that "write" (i.e. generate) low-quality code than people who write high-quality code. This means AI will lead to a larger percentage of new code being low-quality.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#238

Post by darkwater »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #179
darkwater wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh. That would have never crossed my mind! So the cheater student was copying from GP who had worse results, and when they both redid it all by themselves the cheater answered correctly, and GP did not.

How the heck is that even possible? :o

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#239

Post by miki123211 »

FloorEgg wrote: post #99
fuzzythinker wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought it is a good idea at first, but can easily be defeated with typing out AI contents. One can add pauses/deletions/edits or true edits from joining ideas different AI outputs.

> Detecting artificial typing patterns is a little more tricky, but also feasible. Keystroke dynamics can detect artificial typing patterns (copying another source by typing it out manually). If a student has to go way out of their way to make their behavior appear authentic then it's decreasing advantage of cheating and less students will do it. If the student is integrating answers from multiple AI responses then m…

It's not just typing patterns though, it's also how much editing you do, what kinds of edits, where you pause and such.

Manually re-typing another source is something these tools were originally designed to detect. The original issue was "essay mills", not AI.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#240

Post by titanomachy »

jinzo wrote: post #236
ecshafer wrote: post #11

In my CS undergrad I had Doug Lea as a professor, really fantastic professor (best teacher I have ever had, bar none). He had a really novel way to handle homework hand ins, you had to demo the project. So you got him to sit down with you, you ran the code, he would ask you to put some inputs in (that were highly likely to be edge cases to break it). Once that was sufficient, he would ask you how you did different th…

15+ years ago I was doing a CS undergrad (or Bachelors? not sure how it translates) at the local uni in a small EU Country and this approach was the standard across all subjects as part of 'lab work'. There were people there to do that, not the prof himself, but approach was exactly the same. And after a few months they had a really good picture on what level everyone is ect. On the other hand, I had a neighbour ask…

“Undergrad” or “bachelor’s degree” are both correct and commonly used in US/Canada.
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