What is the point of learning after all? Is it to get a job? Is it human development? We have to answer this before pondering what ai means for schools. I don’t see much agreement to be arrived at. It’s a religious conundrum.
Implications of AI to schools
411–420 of 447 posts
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tests were created to save money I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.
Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized. The lesson of how to swim sometimes only comes in applying the learning.
> Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized.
Some tests require memorized knowledge, like what is the stall speed of your airplane. Some tests require reasoning skills, like what is the stress in this beam.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention there'd be at least a few students too timid to challenge the teacher, even if they knew they got it right.
That's a valid and useful lesson, especially for the shy students. Arguably, it's probably more important than whatever the question on the test was. The world at large rarely accommodates shy people. Coping skills are essential, even if they are unpleasant.
Only if she advertised it somehow. The dick version is, of course, to tell the class that “you know, until now, if you had come in to challenge your grade I would have let you fix it. Too late now!”
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I still don't understand why standardized testing gets so much pushback. Goodhart's law.
Nah. Goodhart's law is literally just "if you play a matrix game don't announce your pick in advance". It is not a real law, or not different from common sense. (By matrix game I mean what wiki calls "Normal form game[0]", e.g. rock-paper-scissors or prisoner's dilemma.) In education, regarding exams, Goodhart's law just means that you should randomize your test questions instead of telling the students the questions…
They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores
And they predictin' prison population by who scoring the lowestRe: Implications of AI to schools
#415One 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…
How is that a dilemma for the students? What are their supposed options?
Accept to be unjustly marked as a cheater, or submit to a 30-60 minutes interrogation where the teacher think you're guilty and you need to prove that you're innocent.
It's only an obvious choice if you have total faith that your teacher will be fair, which you might doubt if the situation starts with "You're a cheater unless you prove me otherwise". In the worse case scenario you'll be grilled for one hour and still be marked as a cheater because you didn't convince the teacher.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Further, what's to stop anyone from pumping text into an LLM and then re-writing it's output to match their own style, etc.?
I wonder if doing this would actually be a step closer to learning (from not doing anything at all). To put it in your own style, you are forced to read the output and probably understand the basic concepts of what the LLM provides
Probably so, assuming that what it spits out is actually real and not some hallucination, but that's not at all a given. And I also assume that the people most inclined to regurgitating what an LLM spits out are also heavily overlapped with the people who are least likely to verify that the information is correct, or verify primary sources, or even think to ask for sources in the first place.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#417To me the solution is: Ban homework. All projects, essays, tests, etc are done at school on air-gapped machines or written by hand. Work is monitored by the teacher with video surveillance in 'test halls'. Cell phones can be kept in a small locker. If the student needs to be reached, a parent or whomever can call the school. Internet research should be done in a separate environment, printed out, then taken to the 'w…
The problem with this strategy is that homework is mostly a tool for learning, not checking progress. Most teachers use homework as a way to get an extra hour or two of learning in each week for the students. If we remove it there will be less learning time available. So you’re gonna have to expand the school day or school year which means more teachers which is expensive.
If homework is not used to check progress, then cheating on it is not a problem.
Don't grade homework. Only grade work done in school. Students who cheat on their homework are just deterring themselves and won't do as good at the in-class, graded exams.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Further, what's to stop anyone from pumping text into an LLM and then re-writing it's output to match their own style, etc.?
Nothing. Word is getting around about how to do this. I anticipate that in another couple of years it'll have diffused to everyone, except the constant crew of new younglings who have to find out and be told about it from their older siblings and such. "AI detection" wasn't even a solution in the short term and it won't be going forward. Take-home essays are dead, the teachers are collectively just hoping some superh…
Yes. The ship has sailed and in fact it sailed away many, many years ago. Modernity now has to reckon with Brandolini's law at the scale of these AI systems, which, depending on the system you're inside of, can vary from "this is easy to refute" to "don't bother, assume it's all bullshit."
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's like with the justice system: if you have to choose between the risk of jailing an innocent and the risk letting a guilty person go free, you choose to let a guilty person go free. All the time. Unless you're 100% sure that a student cheated, you don't punish them. And you don't ask them to prove they're innocent.
It's extremely reasonable to ask student to show their work because tests are testing understanding. The understanding IS the work.
Re: Implications of AI to schools
#420To me the solution is: Ban homework. All projects, essays, tests, etc are done at school on air-gapped machines or written by hand. Work is monitored by the teacher with video surveillance in 'test halls'. Cell phones can be kept in a small locker. If the student needs to be reached, a parent or whomever can call the school. Internet research should be done in a separate environment, printed out, then taken to the 'w…
> To me the solution is: Ban homework. All projects, essays, tests, etc are done at school on air-gapped machines or written by hand. Rather: don't grade homework. Make the homework rather the preparation that if you did it seriously will prepare you for the test (and if you didn't do it seriously, you won't have the skills that are necessary to pass the test).
I would accept that as well