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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

#461

Post by tschumacher »

ranger207 wrote: post #456

There's a few comments here about how AI will revolutionize learning because it's personalized or lets users explore or whatever. That's fundamentally missing the point. College students who are using AI aren't using it to learn better, they're using it to learn _less_. The point of writing an essay isn't the essay itself, it's the process of writing the essay: research, organization, writing, etc. The point of doing…

I'm kind of happy that I did my maths courses just about before LLMs did become available. The math homework was the only thing in my CS studies where I sat sometimes 6+ hours on the weekly exercises and I always allocated one day for them. I sometimes felt really tempted to look stuff up and also rarely found an answer on Metroid Mathplanet forums. But it's really hard to Google math exercises and if the teachers are motivated enough to write new slightly altered questions each year they are practically impossible to Google. With LLMs I'm sure that I would have looked up a lot more. In the end getting 90% of the points and really struggling for it was rewarding and taught me a lot - although I'll probably never need these skills.

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

#462

Post by nathan_compton »

fn-mote wrote: post #5
nathan_compton wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is that kids can just hand write an essay that an AI gave them. I teach at a university and I just scale my homework assignments until they reach or exceed sightly the amount of work I expect a student to be able to do with AI. Before I would give them a problem set. Next semester homeworks will be more like entire projects.

> I just scale my homework assignments until they reach or exceed sightly the amount of work I expect a student to be able to do with AI. 1. Absurd. The measurement should be learning not “work”. My students move rocks with a forklift… so I give them more rocks to move? 2. From the university I’m looking for intellectual leadership. Professors thinking critically about what learning means and how to discuss it with s…

The goal isn't work - its simply that I acknowledge that AI can perform a lot of labor that students previously had to spend a lot of time on. Because they have more time, my ambitions for what they can accomplish are higher.

I teach data science, which involves a lot of relatively unimportant glueing together of libraries. Yes, I want the students to know how to program, but the key skills are actually coming to grips with data, applying methods correctly, etc. The AI can make writing out the actual code substantially more efficient for them and I expect them to use that saved time to understand higher level skills.

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

#463

Post by freezePeach2958 »

intended wrote: post #393
california-og wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably what should happen, but it's not what happens in reality. In grading I have to follow a very detailed grading matrix (made by some higher-ups) and the requirements for passing and getting the lowest grade are so incredibly low that it's almost impossible to fail, if the text even somewhat resembles a thesis. The only way I could fail a student, is if they cheated, plagiarised or fabricated stuff. The…

Yeah, our information and training systems are kinda failing at dealing with the reality of our actual information environment. Take law for example and free speech - a central tenet to a functional democracy is effective ways to trade ideas. A core response in our structure to falsehoods and rhetoric is counter speech. But I can show you that counter speech fails. We have realms upon realms of data inside tech firms…

> A core response in our structure to falsehoods and rhetoric is counter speech.

> But I can show you that counter speech fails

Could you show me that? What's your definition of failure?

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

#464

Post by nothercastle »

Balgair wrote: post #455
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…

I think you've identified the main issue here: LLMs aren't destroying the University or the essay. LLMs are destroying the cheap University or essay. Cheap can mean a lot of things, like money or time or distance. But, if Universities want to maintain a standard, then they are going to have to work for it again. No more 300+ person freshman lectures (where everyone cheated anyways). No more take-home zoom exams. No m…

All degrees are basically the same though and of 95% of the value is signaling nobody really cares about the education part

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

#465

Post by noisy_boy »

paulluuk wrote: post #301
rKarpinski wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're dumb", so motivational. I guess this "tough love" attitude helps for some people? But I think mostly it's just that people think it works for _other_ people, but rarely people think that this works when applied to themselves. Like, imagine the school administration walking up to this teacher and sa…

> Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're dumb", so motivational.

I'm sure GP isn't calling them dum-dum to their face. If they can't even do basic stuff, which seems to be their criteria here for the name calling, maybe a politely given reality-check isn't that bad. Some will wake up to the gravity of their situation and put in the hard work and surprise their teacher.

> Yeah you can call them names, call them lazy or whatever, but that's kinda like pointing at poor people and saying they should invest more.

They _should_ invest more because in this case, the "investment' is something that the curriculum simply demands - dedication and effort. I mean unless one is a genius, since when that demand is unreasonable? You want to work with people who got their degree without knowing their shit? (not saying that everyone who doesn't have a degree isn't knowledgeable - I've worked with very smart self-taught people).

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

#466

Post by timemct »

thresher wrote: post #322
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 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…

>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. We've used it for one course so far with good results, and extending it to more courses in the fall.

As an higher education (university) IT admin who is responsible for the CS program's computer labs and is also enrolled in this CS program, I would love to hear more about this setup, please & thank you. As recently as last semester, CS professors have been doing pen'n paper exams and group projects. This setup sounds great!

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

#467

Post by agrippanux »

I use AI to help my high-school age son with his AP Lang class. Crucially, I cleared all of this with his teacher beforehand. The deal was that he would do all his own work, but he'd be able to use AI the help him edit it.

What we do is he first completes an essay by himself, then we put it into a Claude chat window, along with the grading rubric and supporting documents. We instruct Claude to not change his structure or tone but edit for repetitive sentences, word count, correct grammar, spelling, and make sure his thesis is sound and pulled throughout the piece. He then takes that output and compares it against his original essay paragraph-by-paragraph, and he looks to see what changes were made and why, and crucially, if he thinks its better than what he originally had.

This process is repeated until he arrives at an essay that he's happy with. He spends more time doing things this way than he did when he just rattled off essays and tried to edit on his own. As a result, he's become a much better writer, and it's helped him in his other classes as well. He took the AP test a few weeks ago and I think he's going to pass.

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

#468

Post by Aurornis »

mrweasel wrote: post #436
ghusto wrote: post #374

I've always though that the education system was broken and next to worthless. I've never felt that teachers ever tried to _teach_ me anything, certainly not how to think. In fact I saw most attempts at thought squashed because they didn't fit neatly into the syllabus (and so couldn't be graded). The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much your homework is worth. Teaching and learning are collabora…

> The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much your homework is worth. Homework is there to help you practise these things and have help you progress, find the areas where you're in need of help and more practise. It is collaborative, it's you, your fellow students and your teachers/professors. I'm sorry that you had bad teachers, or had needs that wasn't being meet by the education system. That is…

These conversations are always eye-opening for the number of people who don’t understand homework. You’re exactly right that it’s practice. The test is the test (obviously) and the homework is practice with a feedback loop (the grade).

Giving people credit for homework helps because it gives students a chance to earn points outside of high pressure test times and it also encourages people to do the homework. A lot of people need the latter.

My friends who teach university classes have experimented with grading structures where homework is optional and only exam scores count. Inevitably, a lot of the class fails the exams because they didn’t do any practice on their own. They come begging for opportunities to make it up. So then they circle back to making the homework required and graded as a way to get the students to practice.

ChatGPT short circuits this once again. Students ChatGPT their homework then fail the first exam. This time there is little to do, other than let those students learn the consequences of their actions.

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

#469

Post by joering2 »

The AI tools should be helping more than hurting. But take my example: I am in 3 year long litigation with soon to be ex-wife, she recently fired her attorneys and for 2 weeks used chatGPT to write very well worded, very strong and very logically appealing motions practically almost destroying my attorney on multiple occasions and he had to work overtime costing me extra $80,000 in litigation costs. And finally once we got in front of the judge, the ex could not combine two logical sentences together. The paper can defend itself on its face but it also turned out that not a single citation she cited had anything to do with the case at hand, which chatGPT is known for in legal circles. She admit using the tool and only got a verbal reprimand. The judge told majority of that "work" was legal and she cannot stop her from exercising her first amendment right, be it written by AI she had to form questions, edit responses, etc. And I wasn't able to recover a single dime since on its face her motions did make sense, although judge denied majority of her ridiculous pleadings.

Its really frightening! Its like handling over the smartest brain possible to someone who is dumb, but also giving them very simple GUI that they actually can operate and ask good enough questions/prompts to get smart answers. Once the public at large figure this one out, I can only imagine courts being flooded with all kinds of absurd pleadings. Being the judge in the near future will most likely be the least wanted job.

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

#470

Post by xtracto »

squigz wrote: post #416
yazantapuz wrote: post #349

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…

I hope by 'handwritten' you don't literally mean pen and paper?

Back when I was doing my BSc in Software Engineering, we had a teacher who did her Data Structure and Algorithms exams with pen and paper. On one of them, she basically wrote 4 coding problems (which would be solved in 4 short ~30 LOC).

We had to write the answer with pen and paper, writing the whole program in C. And the teacher would score it by transcribing the verbatim text in her computer, and if it had one single error (missed semicolon) or didn't compile for some reason, the whole thing was considered wrong (each question was 25% of the exam score)

I remember I got 1 wrong (missed semicolon :( ) and got a 75% (1-100 pointing system). It's crazy how we were able to do that sort of thing in the old days.

We definitely exercised our attention to detail and concentration muscles with that teacher.

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