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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

#351

Post by [deleted] »

rKarpinski wrote: post #216
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…

> But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of life Wow.

[deleted]

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

#352

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

lionkor wrote: post #343
doug_durham wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people would be happy to hire a writer with no consideration of how good their handwriting was.

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

#353

Post by intended »

california-og wrote: post #266
BrenBarn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that pressure as well. I find that a lot of the problems we have with AI are in fact AI exposing problems in other aspects of our society. In this case, one problem is that the people who do the teaching and know what needs to be learned are the faculty, but the decisions about how to teach are made by administrators. And another problem is that colleges are treating "make money" as a goal. These problems exist…

I totally agree. I think the neo-liberal university model is the real culprit. Where I live, Universities get money for each student who graduates. This is up to 100k euros for a new doctorate. This means that the University and its admin want as many students to graduate as possible. The (BA&MA) students also want to graduate in target time: if they do, they get a huge part of their student loans forgiven. What has…

You should fail them.

The larger work that the intellectual and academic forces of a liberal democracy is that of “verification”.

Part of the core part of the output, is showing that the output is actually what it claims to be.

The reproducibility crisis is a problem Precisely because a standard was missed.

In a larger perspective, we have mispriced facts and verification processes.

They are treated as public goods, when they are hard to produce and uphold.

Yet they compete with entertainment and “good enough” output, that is cheaper to produce.

The choice to fail or pass someone doesn’t address the mispricing of the output. We need new ways to address that issue.

Yet a major part of the job you do. is to hold up the result to a standard.

You and the institutions we depend on will continue to be crushed by these forces. Dealing with that is a separate discussion from the pass or fail discussion.

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

#354

Post by blackbear_ »

datahack wrote: post #146

There is a tremendous lack of understandings between the genx and millennial teachers and the way they see and use AI, and how younger people are using it. Kids use AI like an operating system, seamlessly integrated into their workflows, their thinking, their lives. It’s not a tool they pick up and put down; it’s the environment they navigate, as natural as air. To them, AI isn’t cheating—it’s just how you get things…

How do you test "real creativity" and "critical thinking" in a way that is both scalable and reliably tells apart those who get it and those who don't?

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

#355

Post by datadrivenangel »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #338
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…

This is universal. I’ve had largely the same experience. There’s several reasons for this. 1. Stupider people are better teachers. Smart people are too smart to have any empathic experience on what it’s like to not get something. They assume the world is smart like them so they glaze over topics they found trivial but most people found confusing. 2. They don’t need to teach. If the student body is so smart then the s…

I did once have a Physics lecturer say " When I took Quantum Mechanics back in my undergrad, I got an A but didn't actually understand anything" and then in the same lecture 20 minutes later: "What part of this do you not understand?" when the entire class was just blankly looking at the whiteboard.

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

#356

Post by falcor84 »

timr wrote: post #323
falcor84 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear, hear! Doing programming on paper seems to me like assessing someone's skills in acrobatics by watching them do the motions in a zero-gravity environment. Without the affordances given by the computer, it's just not the same activity.

Computer science, the academic discipline, is to programming as mechanics is to bowling. You can very easily test CS concepts on paper, and programming is demonstrated via group projects.

Absolutely. It makes good sense to describe algorithms on paper via pseudo-code and diagrams, but they shouldn't be expected to write working code on paper.

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

#357

Post by jaza »

jobigoud wrote: post #310
jaza wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "value of a human" - same in this age as it has always been - is our ability to be truly original and to think outside the box. (That's also what makes us actually quite smart, and what makes current cutting-edge "AI" actually quite dumb). AI is incapable of producing anything that's not basically a statistical average of its inputs. You'll never get an AI Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, Pythagoras, Tolstoy, Kubrick, M…

Have you tried image generation? It can easily apply high level concepts from one area to another area and produce something that hasn't been done before. Unless you loosen the meaning of statistical average so much that it ends up including human creativity. At the end of the day it's basically the same process of applying an idea from one field to another. Most humans are not Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, etc. Does tha…

Yes, I've tried AI image generation, and while it's impressive, it's also - at the end of the day - just as bland and unoriginal a mashup of existing material as AI text generation is.

All humans (I believe!) have the potential to be that amazing. And all humans come up with amazing ideas and produce amazing works in their life, just that 99% of us aren't appreciated as much as the famous 1% are. We're all valuable.

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

#358

Post by throwaway290 »

neom wrote: post #158
nkrisc wrote: post #13

If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless. If students using AI to cheat on homework are graduating with a degree, then it has lost all value as a certificate that the holder has completed some minimum level of education and learning. Institutions that award such degrees will be no different than degree mills of the past. I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2…

I've been hiring people for the better part for 15 years and I never considered them to be valuable outside of the fact that it appears you're able to do one project for a sustained period of time. My impressions was unless your degree confers something such that you are in a job that human risk can be involved, most degrees are worth very little and most serious people know that.

It doesn't matter if your boss's policy is to require a degree.

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

#359

Post by throwaway290 »

nkrisc wrote: post #35
ai-christianson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't the jobs they'll get be expecting them to use AI?

If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans? Either AI will replace them or employers will realize that they prefer employees who can think. In either case, being a human who specializes in regurgitating AI output seems like a dead end.

> If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans

You hire humans to help train AI and when done you fire humans.

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

#360

Post by throwaway290 »

Ekaros wrote: post #334
myaccountonhn wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you just use AI, you need to know the right prompts to ask.

And how to verify the output and think through it. I hear time after time that someone asked something from AI. It came up with something and then when corrected apologized and printed out it was wrong... But how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong...

> how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong...

You keep human employees and require them to use LLM so that it gets corrected all the time from their input. Then you fire them.

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