341–350 of 451 posts
A typewriter is extreme. In school I used an AlphaSmart ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart , because my handwriting sucked). A laptop without internet would also work.
When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.
In Spain, the whole university system was like that until like 15ish years ago. Exams were king, in most courses they were worth 80%-90%, and of course always in person. Then we did a university reform, partly with the excuse of aligning with the rest of the EU within the Bologna process (and I say "excuse" because that's what it was, because the politicians introduced some things with that pretense that weren't like…
I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, an…
Back in college, my assembly class was in MIPS (incidentally taught by Professor Larus of SPIM fame). I remember slogging through writing the assembly to compute factorial and saving registers and then dealing the frame pointer and the stack pointer.
One of the other students had access to a DecStation, wrote the program in C, and ran gcc -S to get the MIPS assembly from it. However, the compiler realized the for loop (and tail call) optimizations and instead of making it a recursive function (and help us practice and understand $fp) write it with a jump instruction instead.
Aside from getting a 0 on that homework, they struggled with the next assignment that presupposed understanding of how write function calls.
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You could argue that learning C makes needing to learn assembly irrelevant (and MIPS is even less relevant today than back in the 90s). But for learning in school, it's not about the assignment but rather the journey that one takes to get to that assignment and learn from it.
Being able to check the answers that are provided to someone requires the understanding of what goes before and beneath the answer itself.
Writing the assignment in C when you're learning the before and beneath of "this is how assembly works" means that when you later take the complier class you won't be able to debug if your code generation is incorrect.
Working with an AI as the primary tool for learning problem solving keeps the person at the higher level. There is some foundational level that a person needs to learn without relying on an AI to do it for them.
The AI and other abstractions of the underlying problem do allow us to work with more complex problems. Would you trust a bridge built by an engineer who built it with AI and didn't understand the underlying math and physics themselves?
This is especially at issue in college where some students are taking classes to get the requirement out of the way, some are taking classes for that directly - an accountant is taking the math class to do math with the numbers, while the engineer is taking the math as a prerequisite for physics which is a prerequisite for a material science class which is a perquisite for a soil mechanics class.
If you don't understand the various foundational levels without using AI then trying to identify where the AI (or any other tool) got it wrong isn't something that you're necessarily able to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Because using AI is the complete opposite of "I learned programming just to make tests easier". By learning how to program solver, you not only learned how to program but also learned the method well enough t…
>By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it. If you got AI to produce a working solution, you solved the problem. In the real world nobody who's paying you cares about the method as long as you deliver results. Students taught to solve easy problems by themselves will…
What hard problems could students solve with AI that requires the students to be especially trained? It seems you are thinking of GPT-3 style "prompt engineering". That's a thing of the past. Students can just copy the assignment into the LLM. They don't need to be taught to do that.
I can't compose at a typewriter the way I do with a word processor. I would have to write it out by hand first. If the typing is just transcription, I could just as well be copying from an AI doc. If you're doing it in class anyway, and providing typewriters, you might as well provide a locked down Chromebook. Cheaper and better for composition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your worldview sucks. Essentially claiming that in order to receive information, you must also receive garbage useless information to brainwash you.
No, complaining about something offered for free because of a minor pop up is what sucks. It's a bizarre sense of entitlement. If you don't like the website, simply don't use it. Especially when you're making no contribution to it.
Then, for the final exam, drop the bomb: in person, handwritten, no outside references, mostly the same assignments we’ve done before. If you fail, it’s over for you. If you stayed true and studied, it should be easy for you to pass. If you used AI all semester, you did it to yourself. Those who complain will have their past assignments audited and if AI was used they are reported for plagiarism. This will be the most valuable lesson.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always preferred the "you get some grades along the way to gauge your progress but the lion's share of the weight went to the proctored exams" method unless the lion's share of the normal work was also proctored anyways (at which point it doesn't really matter how it's done). The reason was less for myself and more because anything group related suddenly shot up in quality when the other individual work classmates…
The things I don’t like about putting too much weight in the exams are: * It’s sort of unnecessarily high stakes for the students; a couple hours to determine your grade for many hours of studying. * It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. This puts a pretty low ceiling on the level of complexity you can actually throw at them.
If you, on the other hand, attend meetings, you will need both deep knowledge (requires many hours of styding) and fast thinking, and the questions will make you realize you know little about many things. You need to have general knowledge of many things, not just whatever you are building at the moment. If you are successful on these meetings, your salary can and will grow.
Also, some meetings will make you realize that college and/or university are life in easy mode. Very few things you consider hard in college will be work-level hard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Because using AI is the complete opposite of "I learned programming just to make tests easier". By learning how to program solver, you not only learned how to program but also learned the method well enough t…
>By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it. If you got AI to produce a working solution, you solved the problem. In the real world nobody who's paying you cares about the method as long as you deliver results. Students taught to solve easy problems by themselves will…