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Implications of AI to schools

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Re: Implications of AI to schools

#331

Post by skeeter2020 »

array_key_first wrote: post #321
gonzobonzo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 programm…

I understand both that this is valuable AND how many (most?) education environments are (supposed) to work, but 2 interesting things can happen with the best & brightest:

1. they skip what are to them the obvious steps (we all do as we achieve mastery) and then get penalized for not showing their work.

2. they inherently know and understand the task abut not the mechanized minutia. Think of learning a new language. A diligent student can work through the problem and complete an a->b translation, then go the other way, and repeat. Someone with mastery doesn't do this; they think within one language and then only pass the contextual meaning back and forth when explicitly required.

"showing your work" is really the same thing as "explain how you think" and may be great for basics in learning, but also faces levels of abstraction as you ascend towards mastery.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#332

Post by skeeter2020 »

miki123211 wrote: post #235
onion2k wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

option 4b: resolve the teacher from being the gatekeeper who has to "prove" knowledge has been imparted, accepted and consolidated? It's your idea, but with explicit candor and not a sly wink :)

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#333

Post by ghaff »

trashtester wrote: post #211
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…

Student unions tend to focus on all sorts of other issues, I wouldn't trust them to handle cases like this. The only way to reliably prevent the use of AI tools without punishing innocent students is to monitor the students while they work. Schools can either do that by having essays be written on premise, either by hand or by using computers managed by the school. But students that are worried that they will be targ…

It's also the case that even pre-Web and certainly pre-LLMs, different schools and even departments within schools had different rules about working with other students on problem sets. In some cases, that was pretty much the norm, in others strictly verboten.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#334

Post by theptip »

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…

Yeah, these AI detector tools are bad. (They also punish ESL as this tends to result in simpler language patterns that parse as LLM.)

The great thing about AI is that with a bit of imagination it can be used to amplify teachers too.

In this case, yes, you need to do a viva voce to convince the teacher (though I suspect they should be able to get fairly confident in 10-15 minutes).

But you could also have students convince an AI (probably in a proctored space?) if you need to scale this approach out.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#335

Post by SunshineTheCat »

raincole wrote: post #183
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #68

I 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…

It's the opposite. > focused upon memorization and regurgitation This is what is easy to test in-class. Teachers worry about AI because they do not just care about memorization. Before AI, being able to write cohesive essays about a subject is a good proxy to prove your understanding beyond simple memorization. Now it's gone. A lazy, irresponsible teacher who only cares about memorization will just grade students via…

Again, the essay you're talking about is the "regurgitation."

Who do you think will "learn" archery quicker? The kid writing an essay about it or the kid shooting a bow?

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#336

Post by theptip »

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…

My current idea for this is to have AI administer the 1:1 oral exam. I’m quite confident this would work through grade school at least.

For exams you’d need a proctored environment of some sort, say a row of conference booths so students can’t just bring notes.

You’d want to have some system for ephemeral recording so the teachers can do a risk-based audit and sample some %, eg one-two questions from each student.

Honestly for regular weekly assignments you might not even need the heavyweight proctoring and could maybe allow notes, since you can tell if someone knows what they are talking about in conversation , it’s impossible to crib-sheet your way to fluent conversational understanding.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#337

Post by ghaff »

throwaway31131 wrote: post #197
ghaff wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even about plagiarism. But, sure, 1:1 or even 1:few instruction is great but even at elite schools is not really very practical. I went to what's considered a very good engineering school and classes with hundreds of students was pretty normal.

For many of the “very good” engineering schools that I know of they got “very good” status because of their graduate programs. In graduate school a 1:few relation is almost certain. In undergraduate, not so much.

Probably generally true. There's some "trickle down" (sorry) especially for students who take direct advantage of it or from the institutional wealth generally. But, yes, students at such institutions who struggle aren't necessarily well-supported.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#338

Post by disambiguation »

The current education system is going to collapse. Teachers and students alike won't be able to resist the ultimate cheat code.

Schools need to become tech free zones. Education needs to reorient around more frequent standardized tests. Any "tech" involved needs to be exclusively applied towards solving the supply and demand issue - the number of "quality teachers" to "students per classroom."

I admire Karpathy for advocating common sense, but none of this will happen because SV is full of IQ realists who only see "education" as a business opportunity and the bureaucratic process is too dysfunctional for common sense decisions to prevail. The future is chrome books with GPT browsers for every student.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#339

Post by solomonb »

moffkalast wrote: post #227
solomonb wrote: post #127

In college I had a professor assign us to write a 100% plagiarized paper. You had to highlight every word in a color associated with the source. You couldn't plagiarize more then one sequential sentence from a single source. It ended up being harder then writing an ordinary paper but taught us all a ton about citation and originality. It was a really cool exercise. I imagine something similar could be done to teach s…

Reminds me of that thing Olmo3 has in the web demo, where it shows you a trace for a selected sentence generated by the LLM and points you at the exact document in the training data it comes from verbatim. If they all had that it would be really trivial to verify sources, and more or less does that exact exercise for you at a press of a button.

> more or less does that exact exercise for you at a press of a button.

Well it would give you a similar final artifact but it wouldn't be doing the exercise at all.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#340

Post by iteria »

graemep wrote: post #245
yannyu wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hated schooling, I do want to say that there are parts of learning that are simply hard. There are parts that you can build enthusiasm for with project work and prioritizing for engagement. But there are many things that people should learn that will require drudgery to learn and won't excite all people. Doing derivatives, learning the periodic table, basic language and alphabet skills, playing an instru…

> Doing derivatives Not something everyone learns. My kids seemed to enjoy it. My older daughter learned quite a lot of algebra etc. by doing physics. > learning the periodic table You do not need to rote learn all of it, and you remember enough by learning about particular elements etc. > basic language and alphabet skills My kids learned to read through firstly reading with me (or others) so enjoying the story and…

This depends on the kid. I tried for literal years to get my kid to read. Nothing works. It doesn't matter what games I picked. What context she has to read, books, comics, video games, real life. It was not happening.

You know what kick started my kid's ability to read? A reading teacher sitting with her every single day and teaching her explicitly the drudgery of what reading was. And then me doing the same at home.

Rote is for kids like this and a lot of kids have areas like this. No my kid doesn't need as much math facts practice as she gets. But her cousin? That kid isn't learning anything without doing lines about how to add.

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