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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

#341

Post by infecto »

falcor84 wrote: post #307
throwaway2037 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree. I attended two universities to get my computer science degree. The first was somewhat famous/prestigious, and I found most of the professors very unapproachable and cared little about "teaching well". The second was a no-name second tier public uni, but I found…

That's been my experience too, and I think it actually makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective - if the students are smart enough to learn well regardless of the level of the instruction, then the professors don't face any pressure to improve. Taking this to the extreme, I think that a top-tier university could do very well for itself by only providing a highly selective admission system, good facilities…

Sounds more like the unfortunate differences between teaching professors and research professors. Unfortunately some research schools force professors to teach N credits per semester even if that is not their speciality.

Your approach sounds too elitist for myself. I think you simply figure out the core skills of your professors. Maybe some teach undergrad well, others only advanced degrees. Maybe some should just be left to research with minimal classrooms etc.

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

#342

Post by gonzobonzo »

const_cast wrote: post #163
gonzobonzo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk is cheap; if you want to see what people really believe, ignore what they claim and look at what they actually do. And when you do that, you see that people generally don't find typical college classes to be worth it outside of the credentials they give. Almost no one with a CS degree goes back to college to take a college algorithm course when they want to get better at algorithms; they study on their own. You…

Conversely, if we're noticing what people actually do, you'll realize close to zero people who want to pursue computer science are doing it on their own. And not due to a lack of information. The draw of education hasn't been access, not since the internet anyway. Structure, pacing, curriculum, schedule, and measurement cannot be recreated. I've had many people tell me they're going to learn to program online. Almost…

> Conversely, if we're noticing what people actually do, you'll realize close to zero people who want to pursue computer science are doing it on their own.

That's not true though? Many people are trying to increase their CS skills through self-study. This topic even comes up a lot here, with people recommending the self-studying they've been doing in CS.

> I've had many people tell me they're going to learn to program online. Almost all of them fail.

Yet there are still a large number of self-taught programmers.

Of course, more people will have an incentive to learn through the university system than through self-education, but that's because the current system says that you only get the highest level credentials if you go through a university education. Naturally, a system that explicitly biases a certain form of education to a large degree is going to cause more people to do that. But that's for the credential, not the education. When the credentials are taken out, we see people do better with other forms of education.

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

#343

Post by lionkor »

doug_durham wrote: post #234
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…

Hand written essays are inherently ableist. I would be at a massive disadvantage. I grew up during the 60's, but handwriting was alway slow and error prone for me. As soon as I could use a word processor I blossomed. It's probably not as bad for mathematical derivations. I still do those by hand since they are more like drawing than expression.

Would you hire someone as a writer who is completely illiterate? Of course that's an extreme edge case, but at some point equality stops and the ability to do the work is actually important.

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

#344

Post by throwawayffffas »

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…

I'm not too old either and in my university, CS was my major, we did group projects and in person paper exams as well.

We wrote c++ on paper for some questions and were graded on it. Ofcourse the tutors were lenient on the syntax they cared about the algorithm and the data structures not so much for the code. They did test syntax knowledge as well but more in code reasoning segments, i.e questions like what's the value of a after these two statements or after this loop is run.

We also had exams in the lab with computers disconnected from the internet. I don't remember the details of the grading but essentially the teaching team was in the room and pretty much scored us then and there.

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

#345

Post by RHSeeger »

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…

Remote learning also opens up a lot of opportunities to people that would not otherwise be able to take advantage of them. So it's not _just_ the cash cow that benefits from it.

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

#346

Post by noitpmeder »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #51
TimorousBestie wrote: post #2

I predict that asking students to hand-write assignments is not going to go well. Unfortunately, universities built on the consumer model (author teaches at Arizona State) are incentivized to listen to student feedback over the professor’s good intentions.

I think a better approach might be to get students to use AI as a writing coach. Get them to commit to a short handwritten essay during class, then use AI give them feedback on the essay. Their interaction with the AI and how they respond to the feedback becomes the assessment material. That's not compatible with the authors "Butlerian Jihad" ideology, though.

This is insane to me. Why not title the class "how to use AI?" Why not make this the title of every class?

I see no future in education other than making homework completely ungraded, and putting 100% of the grade into airgapped exams. Sure, the pen and paper CS exam isn't reflective of a real world situation, but the universities need some way to objectively measure understanding once the pupil has been disconnected from his oracle.

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

#347

Post by throwawayffffas »

nprateem wrote: post #337
thresher wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach computer science / programming, and I know what a good AI policy is: No AI. (Dramatic. AI is fine for upper-division courses, maybe. Absolutely no use for it in introductory courses.) Our school converted a computer lab to a programming lab. Computers in the lab have editors/compilers/interpreters, and whitelist documentation, plus an internal server for grading and submission. No internet access otherwise. W…

Is it in a Faraday cage too or do you just confiscate their phones. Or do you naively believe they aren't just using AI on their phones?

I don't know what they do, but when we did it back in the 2000's there was a no phone policy and the exams were proctored.

People could try to cheat, but it would be pretty stupid to think they would not catch you.

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

#348

Post by RHSeeger »

directevolve wrote: post #131
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. 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…

But it also only catches cheating on exams. For homework/projects, you can't really have that be in person.

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

#349

Post by yazantapuz »

I teach on a small university. These are some of the measures we take:

- Hand written midterms and exams.

- The students should explain how they designed and how they coded their solutions to programming exercises (we have 15-20 students per class, with more students it become more difficult).

- Presentations of complex topics (after that the rest of the students should comment something, ask some question, anything related to the topic)

- Presentation of a handwritten one page hand written notes, diagram, mindmap, etc., about the content discussed.

- Last minute changes to more elaborated programming labs that should be resolved in-class (for example, "the client" changed its mind about some requirement or asked a new feature).

The real problem is that it is a (lot) more work for the teachers and not everyone is willing to "think outside of the box".

(edit: format)

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

#350

Post by motohagiography »

if I were teaching english today, i would ask students to write essays taking the positions that an AI is not allowed to. steelman something appalling. stand up in class and debate like your life or grade depends on it and fail anyone who doesn't, and if that excludes people, maybe they don't belong in a university.

in everything young people actually like, they train, spar, practice, compete, jam, scrimmage, solve, build, etc. the pedagogy needs to adapt and reframing it in these terms will help. calling it homework is the source of a flawed mental model that problematizes the work instead of incentivising it, and now that people have a tool to solve the problem, they're applying their intelligence to the problem.

arguably there's no there there for the assignments either, especially for a required english credit. the institution itself is a transaction that gets them a ticket to an administrative job. what's the homework assignment going to get them they value? well roundedness, polish, acculturation, insight, sensitivity, taste? these are not valuable or differentiating to kids in elite institutions who know they are competing globally for jobs that are 95% concrete political maneuvering, and most of them (especially in stem) probably think the class signifiers that english classes yield are essentially corrupt anyway.

maybe it's schadenfreude and an old class chip on my part, but what are they going to do, engage in the discourse and become public intellectuals? argue about rimbaud and voltaire over coffee, cigarettes and jazz? Some of them have higher follower counts than there were readers of the novels or articles being taught in their classes. More people read their tweets every day than have ever read a book by Chiang. AI isn't the problem, it's a forcing function and a solution. Instructors should reflect on what their institutions have really become.

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