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Implications of AI to schools

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Re: Implications of AI to schools

#341

Post by hamdingers »

snickerbockers wrote: post #326
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…

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 >=…

> I still don't understand why standardized testing gets so much pushback.

Goodhart's law.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#342

Post by iteria »

gyulai wrote: post #288

I was very much the kind of student who didn't perform well under exam-taking pressure. For marked work that I did outside of school, it was straight-As for me. For written exams performed under time pressure and oral examinations (administered without advance notice), it was very much hit-and-miss. If my son should grow up to run into the same kinds of cognitive limitations, I really don't know what I will tell him…

As a parent of a kid like this: start early with low stakes. You can increase your child's tolerance for pressure. I sometimes hear my kid saying sometimes after a deep breath, "There nothing to it, but to do it". And then work on focusing on what they did better versus how they did in absolute terms.

I see collapsing under pressure to be either a kind of anxiety or a fixation on perfect outcomes. Teaching a tolerance for some kinds of failure is the fix for both.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#343

Post by Maken »

bjt wrote: post #132
kingstnap wrote: post #67

Having had some experience teaching and designing labs and evaluating students in my opinion there is basically no problem that can't be solved with more instructor work. The problem is that the structure pushes for teaching productivity which basically directly opposes good pedagogy at this point in the optimization. Some specifics: 1. Multiple choice sucks. It's obvious that written response better evaluates studen…

> Written response needs TAs. Can AI not grade written responses?

You still need someone to check the grades. AI can and will totally misgrade.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#344

Post by thefaux »

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…

If the value of human labor is going to zero, which some say ai will induce, wouldn't the oxbridge model become the most cost effective option?

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#345

Post by swah »

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…

Vídeo of her typing the essay>?

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#346

Post by ecshafer »

Libidinalecon wrote: post #278
BobbyJo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe as a society we can take some of the productivity gains from AI and funnel them into moving teaching away from scantrons and formulaic essays. I want to be optimistic.

As someone who was incredibly lazy intellectually in high school, I can't imagine what would have got me motivated beyond time and growing up. I did nothing in high school and then by 19 for fun on Saturdays I was checking out 5 non-fiction books from the library and spending all Saturday reading. There was no inspiring teacher or anything like that for me that caused this. At 16 I only cared about girls and maneuver…

> The only thing I can think of that would have changed things for me is if the math club were the cool kids and the football team were the outcasts.

For background I grew up in the US, my wife grew up in China. And how she grew up (in a high tier Shanghai Highschool) she says that is kind of how it was. Top social order was basically Rich and politically connected (not different from anywhere I guess) but also really good students. Where the best students are looked up to. But also just everyone asks you how you do all in school all of the time. There are students who focus more on sports and go to sports schools, but unless they end up going to the Olympics or something, its really looked down upon compared to those who specialize in STEM or more difficult subjects.

In my high school, honors/AP students weren't outcasts, we were kind of just a separate set mostly our own clique with some being popular and some not independently of being AP students. Like I happened to be Football Team Captain and in AP classes, 3 other Captains weren't in AP. Academic success was just a non factor.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#347

Post by Fripplebubby »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #312
rrrobert wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with big tech has been the polar opposite - nobody has ever cared and I've never tried to hide it either. Which one was it if you don't mind me asking? I'm a drop out (didn't finish BSc) from a no name Northern European university and I've worked at or gotten offers from: - Meta - Amazon - Google - Microsoft - Uber - xAI + some unicorns that compete with FAANG+ locally. I didn't include some others that…

It was Meta but twas a long time ago, when they were known as Facebook. It seems to be a US role thing in my experience.

Hiring is still a pretty non-uniform thing despite attempts to make it less so - I'm sure there are some teams and orgs at all these large companies that do it well, and some that do it les well. I think it is pretty well accepted that university brand is not a good signal, but it is an easy signal and if the folks in the hiring process are a bit lazy and pressed for time, a bit overwhelmed by the number of inbound candidates, or don't really know how to evaluate for the role competencies, I think it's a tool that is still reached for today.

In a way, I think the hiring process at second-tier (not FAANG) companies is actually better because you have to "moneyball" a little bit - you know that you're going to lose the most-credentialed people to other companies that can beat you dollar for dollar, so you actually have to think a little more deeply about what a role really needs to find the right person.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#348

Post by calgoo »

snickerbockers wrote: post #326
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…

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 >=…

Well, for one thing, people learn differently and comparing a "standard" test result just measures how much crap someone has been able to cram into their brain. I compare it to people memorizing trivia for Jeopardy. Instead what needs to be tested and taught is critical thinking. Yes a general idea of history and others is important, but again its teaching people to think about those subject, not just memorizing a bunch of dates that will be forgotten the day after the test.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#349

Post by gchallen »

polyrand wrote: post #281

There is too much focus on students cheating with AI and not enough on the other side of the equation: teachers. I've seen assignments that were clearly graded by ChatGPT. The signs are obvious: suggestions that are unrelated to the topic or corrections for points the student actually included. But of course, you can't 100% prove it. It's creating a strange feedback loop: students use an LLM to write the essay, and t…

As a teacher, I agree. There's a ton of covert AI grading taking place on college campuses. Some of it by actual permanent faculty, but I suspect most of it by overworked adjuncts and graduate student teaching assistants. I've seen little reporting on this, so it seems to be largely flying under the radar. For now. But it's definitely happening.

Is using AI to support grading such a bad idea? I think that there are probably ways to use it effectively to make grading more efficient and more fair. I'm sure some people are using good AI-supported grading workflows today, and their students are benefiting. But of course there are plenty of ways to get it wrong, and the fact that we're all pretending that it isn't happening is not facilitating the sharing of best practices.

Of course, contemplating the role of AI grading also requires facing the reality of human grading, which is often not pretty. Particularly the relationship between delay and utility in providing students with grading feedback. Rapid feedback enables learning and change, while once feedback is delayed too long, its utility falls to near zero. I suspect this curve actually goes to zero much more quickly than most people think. If AI can help educators get feedback returned to students more quickly, that may be a significant win, even if the feedback isn't quite as good. And reducing grading burden also opens up opportunities for students to directly respond to the critical feedback through resubmission, which is rare today on anything that is human-graded.

And of course, a lot of times university students get the worst of both worlds: feedback that is both unhelpful and delayed. I've been enrolling in English courses at my institution—which are free to me as a faculty member. I turned in a 4-page paper for the one I'm enrolled in now in mid-October. I received a few sentences of written feedback over a month later, and only two days before our next writing assignment was due. I feel lucky to have already learned how to write, somehow. And I hope that my fellow students in the course who are actual undergraduates are getting more useful feedback from the instructor. But in this case, AI would have provided better feedback, and much more quickly.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#350

Post by bluefirebrand »

j45 wrote: post #297
bluefirebrand wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand Personally I don't believe that any of the problems caused by AI are going to be solved by "more AI"

Technology doesn't solve the problems created by technology on it's own. People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them.

> People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them

How is this working out in practice? Every piece of technology is absolutely adversarial nowadays and people are getting ground to bits by it.

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