Implications of AI to schools • Hacker News Board

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#321

Post by array_key_first » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

gonzobonzo wrote: post #253

respondo2134 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the power imbalance: position, experience, social, etc. meant that the vast majority just took the zero and never complained or challenged the prof. Sounds like your typical out-of-touch academic who thought they were super clever.

It's an incredible abuse of power to intentionally mark innocent students' answers wrong when they're correct. Just to solve your own problem, that you may very well be responsible for. Knowing the way a lot of professors act, I'm not surprised, but it's always disheartening to see how many behave like petty tyrants who are happy to throw around their power over the young.

If you cheat, you should get a zero. How is this controversial.

Since high school, the expectation is that you show your work. I remember my high school calculus teacher didn't even LOOK at the final answer - only the work.

The nice thing was that if you made a trivial mistake, like adding 2 + 2 = 5, you got 95% of the credit. It worked out to be massively beneficial for students.

The same thing continued in programming classes. We wrote our programs on paper. The teacher didn't compile anything. They didn't care much if you missed a semicolon, or called a library function by a wrong name. They cared if the overall structure and algorithms were correct. It was all analyzed statically.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#322

Post by ethmarks » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

nicce wrote: post #224

zkmon wrote: post #205

It's not the students. It's the teachers and school using AI first, and publicly. Why does he talk about only students using AI? Also, just like how calculators are allowed in the exam halls, why not allow AI usage in exams? In real-life job you are not going to avoid use of calculator or AI. So why test people in a different context? I think the tests should focus on the skills in using calculator and AI.

With calculators, you cannot replace the thinking process. LLM can do that and that is the problem.

I beg to differ. Tactical use of a scientific or graphing calculator can absolutely replace large parts of the thinking process. If you're testing for the ability to solve differential equations, a powerful enough calculator can trivialize it, so they aren't allowed in calculus exams. A 10-digit calculator cannot trivialize calculus, so they are allowed. That's the distinction. LLMs operate at the maximum level of "helpfulness" and there's no good way to dial them back.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#323

Post by sanjayjc » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

alpinisme wrote: post #293

somenameforme wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't mind seeing education return to its roots of being about learning instead of credentialization. In an age where having a degree is increasingly meaningless in part due to many places simply becoming thinly veiled diploma treadmills (which are somehow nonetheless accredited), this is probably more important than ever. This is doubly so if the AI impact extremists end up being correct. So why is the issue yo…

In a world where some but not all programs are “diploma treadmills,” you would expect that the reputation of the bad credentials would go down and the good credentials would go up. In some sense if the credentials were really being used (and not just as a perfunctory first pass elimination), you’d expect the most elite programs to have the highest signal to noise ratio. But the market doesn’t seem to respond to chang…

> you would expect that the reputation of the bad credentials would go down and the good credentials would go up.

We should expect this if employers can efficiently and objectively evaluate a candidate's skills without relying on credentials. When they're unable to, we should worry about this information asymmetry leading to a "market for lemons" [0]. I found an article [1] about how this could play out:

> This scenario leads to a clear case of information asymmetry since only the graduate knows whether their degree reflects real proficiency, while employers have no reliable way to verify this. This mirrors the classic “Market for Lemons” concept introduced by economist George Akerlof in 1970, where the presence of low-quality goods (or in this case, under-skilled graduates) drives down the perceived value of all goods, due to a lack of trustworthy signals.

[0] https://quickonomics.com/terms/market-for-lemons/

[1] https://competitiveness.in/how-ai-could-exacerbate-the-skill...

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#324

Post by cindyllm » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

array_key_first wrote: post #320

thfuran wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What somebody scored in a high school writing class should matter far less than the output somebody is capable of producing when given a prompt and an hour in a closed setting Sure, but it takes < 1 second to read a GPA.

Right, in an ideal world we'd peer into the minds of people and compute what they know. But if we did that, our eyes would probably catch on fire like that lady in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. We need some way to distill the unbelievable amount of data in human brains into something that can be processed in a reasonable amount of time. We need a measurement - a degree, a GPA, something. Imagine if in every job inter…

[dead]

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#325

Post by FuckButtons » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #311

Again, AI is not getting rid of degrees or learning or education. It's getting rid of cheap methods. Scantrons and bluebooks were always a way that made it cheap for institutions to produce results. Now those methods kinda seem silly, right? 500 person freshman lectures seem kinda absurd now, right? Teaching via adjuncts that had 3 days notice for the class and are paid nothing is kinda scammy, right? R1s professors…

Hurray! We’ve just made education only viable for the wealthy! Good job everyone, I can see this technology revolution is already living up to its promise of distributing wealth and power more evenly throughout society.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#326

Post by snickerbockers » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #203

ubj wrote: post #7

One 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…

I wouldn't mind seeing education return to its roots of being about learning instead of credentialization. In an age where having a degree is increasingly meaningless in part due to many places simply becoming thinly veiled diploma treadmills (which are somehow nonetheless accredited), this is probably more important than ever. This is doubly so if the AI impact extremists end up being correct. So why is the issue yo…

I still don't understand why standardized testing gets so much pushback. Having the students do their work in a controlled environment is the obvious solution to AI and many other problems related to academic integrity.

Its also the only way that students can actually be held to the same standards. When I was a freshman in college with a 3.4 highschool GPA, I was absolutely gobsmacked by how many kids with perfect >= 4.0 GPAs couldn't pass the simple algebra test that the university administered to all undergraduates as a prerequisite for taking any advanced mathematics course.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#327

Post by credit_guy » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

One more thing: teachers should use LLMs for grading. Grading is a boring chore, the majority of teachers hate it. Many procrastinate, and return the graded tests or assignments with a significant delay, well beyond the window where the kids are curious to see how they did. This completely destroys the feedback purpose of grading. With an LLM, you feed the scanned tests, the LLMs gives you back the graded test, and the teacher can quickly do a bit of quality control to see the LLM did not make any mistakes. If the LLM makes mistakes, then wait 6 months, there will be new version that won't make those mistakes.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#328

Post by sanjayjc » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #258

edwcross wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always stunned by how much teachers can accuse without proof and invert the "innocent until proven guilty". Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works" (or at least should work). So should the teachers. Student unions and similar entities should exist and be ready to intervene to help students in such situations. This is nothing new, AI will just make this happen more often, revealing ho…

It’s strange watching people put so much faith in these so called “AI detection tools”. Nobody really knows how they work yet they’re treated like flawless judges. In practice they’re black boxes that quietly decide who gets flagged for “fraud”, and because the tool said so everyone pretends it must be true. The result is a neat illusion that all the “cheaters” were caught, when in reality the system is mostly just p…

I hope this could be a "teachable moment" for all involved: have some students complete their assignments in person, then submit their "guaranteed to be not AI written" essays to said AI detection tool. Objectively measure how many false positives it reports.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#329

Post by stonemetal12 » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

huevosabio wrote: post #15

ubj wrote: post #7

One 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…

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…

Story doesn't make sense.

> the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam.

They got the question but not the answer so they had to work it out before the test. They couldn't explain it later?

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#330

Post by ghaff » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

array_key_first wrote: post #320

thfuran wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What somebody scored in a high school writing class should matter far less than the output somebody is capable of producing when given a prompt and an hour in a closed setting Sure, but it takes < 1 second to read a GPA.

Right, in an ideal world we'd peer into the minds of people and compute what they know. But if we did that, our eyes would probably catch on fire like that lady in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. We need some way to distill the unbelievable amount of data in human brains into something that can be processed in a reasonable amount of time. We need a measurement - a degree, a GPA, something. Imagine if in every job inter…

I did have interviews with a government agency many years ago that, among other things, involved a battery of tests including what I assume were foreign civil service exams. I got an offer though I didn't take it.

But assuming in-person day long batteries of tests for universities and companies is probably not very practical.

You can argue whether university is a very efficient use of time or money but it presumably does involve some learning and offers potential employers some level of a filter that roughly aligns with what they're looking for.