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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

#491

Post by seniorThrowaway »

lamename wrote: post #419
ninetyninenine wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's simpler than that. "Prestigious" universities emphasize research prestige over all else on faculty. Faculty optimize for it and some even delight in being "hard" (bad) teachers because they see it as beneath them. Less "prestigious" universities apply less of that pressure.

It can also be different within the same university, by department. I graduated from a university with a highly ranked and research oriented engineering department. I started in computer engineering which was in the college of engineering but ended up switching to computer science which was in the college of arts and sciences. The difference in the teachers and classroom experience was remarkable. It definitely seemed like the professors in the CS department actually wanted to teach and actually enjoyed teaching as compared to the engineering professors who treated it like it was wasting their time and expected you to learn everything from the book and their half-assed bullet point one way lectures. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your view, it also meant having to take more traditional liberal arts type electives in order to graduate.

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

#492

Post by throwaway290 »

seb1204 wrote: post #427
throwaway290 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful? What's your answer? Surely it was proven to be "not useful"? I don't think I ever met a person who benefitted from knowing math now that everyone has a calculator in pocket. Other than maybe playing some games where if you do calculation on the fly you win

Well, if you don't know math because the calculator does it you would also have no understanding of the concepts e.g. addition, subtraction, whole numbers or fraction etc. so you would not know how to in use or what to do with a calculator. It's a tool that is useful to do something you know how it works faster.

But that's very different with LLMs and that stuff. You don't need to know how to write an essay or write a song. That's kind of the point.

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

#493

Post by fakeBeerDrinker »

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…

After a short stint as a faculty member at a McU institution, I agree with much of this.

Provide machine problems and homework as exercises for students to learn, but assign a very low weight to these as part of an overall grade. Butt in seat assessments should be the majority of a course assessment for many courses.

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

#494

Post by thatfrenchguy »

aaplok wrote: post #61
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…

> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but…

> Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions

I mean, for every neurodivergent person who does miserably in exam conditions you have one that does miserably in homework essays because of absence of clear time boundaries.

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

#495

Post by nkrisc »

Aerroon wrote: post #142
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…

At the same time though: if AI based cheating is so effective then is college itself useful?

It was (to some degree), and could still be. The status quo was more effective, relatively speaking, before the AI boom. The status quo appears to be trending towards ineffective, post-AI boom.

So in order to remain useful, the status quo of higher education will probably have to change in order to adapt to the ubiquity of AI, and LLMs currently.

Just because you can cheat at something doesn't mean doing it legitimately isn't useful.

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

#496

Post by plantwallshoe »

danielhep wrote: post #482
plantwallshoe wrote: post #477

I’m enrolled in an undergraduate CS program as an experienced (10 year) dev. I find AI incredibly useful as a tutor. I usually ask it to grade my homework for me before I turn it in. I usually find I didn’t really understand some topic and the AI highlights this and helps set my understanding straight. Without it I would have just continued on with an incorrect understanding of the topic for 2-3 weeks while I wait fo…

I’m wondering how the undergrad CS course is as an experienced dev and why you decided to do that? I have been a software developer for 5 years with an EE degree, and as I do more software engineering and less EE I feel like I am missing some CS concepts that my colleagues have. Is this your situation too or did you have another reason? And why not a masters?

A mix of feeling I’m “missing” some CS concepts and just general intellectual curiosity.

I am planning on doing a masters but I need some undergrad CS credits to be a qualified candidate. I don’t think I’m going to do the whole undergrad.

Overall my experience has been positive. I’ve really enjoyed Discrete Math and coming to understand how I’ve been using set theory without really understanding it for years. I’m really looking forward to my classes on assembly/computer architecture, operating systems, and networks. They did make me take CS 101-102 as prereqs which was a total waste of time and money, but I think those are the only two mandatory classes with no value to me.

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

#497

Post by nkrisc »

throwaway290 wrote: post #362
Aurornis wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful? It’s the same old story with a new set of technology.

> If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful? What's your answer? Surely it was proven to be "not useful"? I don't think I ever met a person who benefitted from knowing math now that everyone has a calculator in pocket. Other than maybe playing some games where if you do calculation on the fly you win

> Surely it was proven to be "not useful"?

I don't think we're living in the same world. I have met plenty of people who, despite having a calculator, can't solve their own problems because they don't know what to do with it in order to solve their problem.

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

#498

Post by seniorThrowaway »

falcor84 wrote: post #316
stevage wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teaching Linux basics doesn't suffer the same because the exam-preparing exercise is typing things into a terminal, and LLMs still don't generally have API access to terminals. Huh, fighting my way through a Linux CLI is exactly the kind of thing I use Chatgpt for professionally. I did study it in compsci, but those commands are inherently not memorable.

Yes, LLMs have had API access to terminals for quite a while now. I've been using Windsurf and Claude Code to type terminal commands for me for a long while (and `gh copilot suggest` before that) and couldn't be happier. I still manually review most of them before approving, but I've seen that the chances of the AI getting an advanced incantation right on the first try are much higher than mine, and I haven't yet onc…

>and I haven't yet once had it make a disastrous one

I've had it make some pretty bad ones. Not directly hooked in to my terminal, just copy and paste. A couple of git doozies that lost my work, but I've done those too. Others more subtle, one of note is a ZFS ZPOOL creation script it gave me used classic linux style /dev/sda style drive identifiers instead of proper /dev/by-id paths which led to the disks being marked as failed every time I rebooted. Sure, that's on me for not verifying, but I was a little out of my depth with ZFS on Linux and thought that ZFS' own internal uuid scheme was handling it.

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

#499

Post by josephcsible »

grogenaut wrote: post #155
wisty wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't stop people hiring someone who looks similar from sitting the exam, or messages in morse code via Bluetooth. It's hard to stop a palm card. But it stops a casual cheater from having ChatGTP on a second device.

You can. I did a remote proctored exam for the NREMT last year. They had me walk the camera around the room, under the desk, etc. All devices had to be in my backpack. No earbuds. They made me unplug the conference tv on the wall, lift picture frames etc. I had to keep my hands above the table the whole time, I couldn't look down if I was scratching an itch. They installed rootkit software and closed down all of the…

The remote proctored exam is a major invasion of privacy, but nevertheless, there's at least a dozen ways you could cheat despite all of that.

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

#500

Post by pacoWebConsult »

squigz wrote: post #472
xtracto wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sing…

Yeah, this is absurd. And if you have poor handwriting, the chances of "syntax errors" goes up. My above comment is getting downvoted, and it's honestly a bit baffling. I'd be furious if I were paying tens of thousands of dollars to receive a university-level education in software engineering in 2025... and I had to write programs with pen and paper. It is so far detached from the reality of, not only the industry, b…

I graduated in 2018 from a university where writing exams by hand was standard practice. We weren't punished if syntax wasn't correct character-by-character, only if the ideas we were attempting to convey in the message were fundamentally incorrect.

I have incredibly terrible handwriting and recall of specific syntax was difficult, but I wasn't punished terribly for either of those faults.

Already in 2018, almost everyone was cheating on typed assignments, "helping" each other with homeworks, and a significant portion of kids were abusing stimulants to get by. Exams were typically 70-80% of your grade. Now, when I speak with current students at that university and as I observed first-hand in 2020, when they went remote and generally relaxed standards and processes, how the quality of the instruction and the quality of the resulting "educated" students has fallen off the face of a cliff.

I'd be furious if I were paying tens of thousands of dollars to receive a university-level education in software engineering in 2025 and I had no educator willing to put their foot down and stop myself and my peers from faking the fact that we know anything indicating that we deserve the degree. What's a degree worth when nobody is willing to do the work required and lay down the tough love necessary to actually educate you?

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