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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

#261

Post by NitpickLawyer »

timr wrote: post #140
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…

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…

> and in-person paper exams.

Yup. ~25 years ago competitions / NOI / leet_coding as they call it now were in a proctored room, computers with no internet access, just plain old borland c, a few problems and 3h of typing. All the uni exams were pen & paper. C++ OOP on paper was fun, but iirc the scoring was pretty lax (i.e. minor typos were usually ignored).

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

#262

Post by epiecs »

mcdeltat wrote: post #203
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…

> 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. This resonates with me a lot. I used to dismiss AI as useless hogwash, but have recently done a near total 180 as I realised it's quite useful for exploratory learning. Not sure about others but a lot of my learning comes from comparis…

Indeed. I never really used AI until recently but now I use it sometimes as a smarter search engine that can give me abstracts.

Eg. it's easy to ask copilot: can you give me a list of free, open source mqtt brokers and give me some statistics in the form of a table

And copilot (or any other ai) does this quite nicely. This is not something that you can ask a traditional search engine.

Offcourse you do need to know enough of the underlying material and double check what output you get for when the AI is hallucinating.

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

#263

Post by [deleted] »

timr wrote: post #140
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#264

Post by karn97 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #152
frelupin_ wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It already can. Im flabbergasted how people haven't still figured out how good gemini 2.5 is.

Comments like this are just delusional shit can't even do uni homework lmao

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

#265

Post by Super_Jambo »

Brybry wrote: post #256
BrenBarn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that pressure as well. I find that a lot of the problems we have with AI are in fact AI exposing problems in other aspects of our society. In this case, one problem is that the people who do the teaching and know what needs to be learned are the faculty, but the decisions about how to teach are made by administrators. And another problem is that colleges are treating "make money" as a goal. These problems exist…

Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree. So they know what students should be taught but I don't know that they necessarily know how any better than the administrators. I've always found it weird that you need teaching certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but not to teach calculus to…

Once you're an adult some of the best lessons come from having bad teachers.

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

#266

Post by california-og »

BrenBarn wrote: post #232
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…

I see that pressure as well. I find that a lot of the problems we have with AI are in fact AI exposing problems in other aspects of our society. In this case, one problem is that the people who do the teaching and know what needs to be learned are the faculty, but the decisions about how to teach are made by administrators. And another problem is that colleges are treating "make money" as a goal. These problems exist…

I totally agree. I think the neo-liberal university model is the real culprit. Where I live, Universities get money for each student who graduates. This is up to 100k euros for a new doctorate. This means that the University and its admin want as many students to graduate as possible. The (BA&MA) students also want to graduate in target time: if they do, they get a huge part of their student loans forgiven.

What has AI done? I teach a BA thesis seminar. Last year, when AI wasn't used as much, around 30% of the students failed to turn in their BA thesises. 30% drop-out rate was normal. This year: only 5% dropped out, while the amount of ChatGPT generated text has skyrocketed. I think there is a correlation: ChatGPT helps students write their thesises, so they're not as likely to drop out.

The University and the admins are probably very happy that so many students are graduating. But also, some colleagues are seeing an upside to this: if more graduate, the University gets more money, which means less cuts to teaching budgets, which means that the teachers can actually do their job and improve their courses, for those students who are actually there to learn. But personally, as a teacher, I'm at loss of what to do. Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal University should be? Nobody else seems to care. Or should I pass them, let them graduate, and reserve my energy to teach those who are motivated and are willing to engage?

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

#267

Post by Baeocystin »

rtkwe wrote: post #186
directevolve wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of the cheating that occurs. The main kind of cheating we need them to prevent is effective cheating - the kind that can meaningfully improve the cheater's score. Requiring cheaters to put their belongings in a locker, using proctor-provided resources, and being monitored in a proctor-provided room puts substantial limits on effective cheating. That's pretty much…

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…

I had to retake a multi-hour proctored test (and only got to do so after a ridiculous amount of back and forth with the school) because my cat jumped up on my computer table while I was taking it, and I looked over at her and gave her a few pets before looking back at the screen. Not joking in the least. It was maddening.

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

#268

Post by dr_dshiv »

Brybry wrote: post #256
BrenBarn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that pressure as well. I find that a lot of the problems we have with AI are in fact AI exposing problems in other aspects of our society. In this case, one problem is that the people who do the teaching and know what needs to be learned are the faculty, but the decisions about how to teach are made by administrators. And another problem is that colleges are treating "make money" as a goal. These problems exist…

Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree. So they know what students should be taught but I don't know that they necessarily know how any better than the administrators. I've always found it weird that you need teaching certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but not to teach calculus to…

Just watch out for who is certifying how things should be taught. It’s honestly one reason education is so bad and so slow to change.

Edit: and why perfectly capable professionals can’t be teachers without years of certification

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