My dad said to me that knowledge isn't what you remember, it's what you can remember or look up relatively quickly.
Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
51–60 of 158 posts
Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homework's largely supposed to be about reinforcing the lesson for math courses. For other courses it's largely about reading which shouldn't be done in class. Tests/essays are for assessment.
Then why should homework be factored into grades at all?
1. Homework should absolutely be graded to provide students with feedback, assess learning progress, and tailor instruction to strengths/weaknesses of students in the current iteration of the course. Once all the work goes into grading, it's hard for teachers to throw out that data when assigning grades.
2. It mimics the real world where sitting your butt in a chair and turning in useless reports is valued -- perhaps not as much as actual outcomes, but still valued. Perhaps that's stupid, but in most jobs it's a reality. IMO this isn't a great motivator, but it's one a lot of teachers cite.
3. Helps pad the grades of students who are terrible test takers / have anxiety issues.
4. Students are... students. They don't always know what's best for themselves. Making homework worth a portion of the grade communicates to students that they need to practice. Patronizing? Maybe. But also a reality.
5. It's the easiest way to inflate grades without explicitly lowering standards.
Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
#53Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
#54When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign. I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of s…
> we need to learn 'the basics' and survive without tools to some degree This is the wrong approach. There's no way you wouldn't understand math much better with these tools. I'm hoping that in the future, math will be less about equations and symbols and more about graphing and being able to move around in the spaces described by the equations. I would draw an analogy with a compiler. After using it for some time, y…
I would claim that most folks who have a reasonable understanding of fundamental computer architecture and assembly are those who actively learned it. Folks who have just used a compiler for everything, in my experience, rarely actually develop the understanding innately. Compilers still have this "magic" element associated with them.
Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
#55When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign. I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of s…
To add another point, my A-Level teacher always said anything the calculator can do, you can do, and just as fast.
And then she chose a question from the book, had one of us start typing, and she started at the board solving the same thing.
She finished first. Not by much, and obviously the calculator is the faster choice more often, but she finished first.
Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
#56> “Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division...” What the heck kind of article is this...? I can’t read it seriously.
Even if this was true, what's the problem? He built a successful business that many people find useful, and that's good enough for me.
Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
#57If a computer can easily answer the question, it is not worth asking it to a human (this also applies in the real sense that it won't be valued by the marketplace and translate to higher wages). How about challenging students with problems that are difficult even when modern technology is used to its fullest extend? Or teaching students how to build tools that solve their homework?
> teaching students how to build tools that solve their homework?
This would give them not only a thorough understanding of the problem they are solving, but teach them a very valuable life skill of finding ways to automate your work, and finding ways to package your expertise into software that can be run by a person without your expertise.
This would amazing!
Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
#58Playing the world's saddest song on the world's smallest violin there Denise Garcia. How about maybe updating your curriculum for the 3rd millennium. Nah, that would be to much work, complaining in wired is much more productive. The best part is that people in the school administration might do something like blacklisting Wolfram Alpha on computers in the school library and feel like they've dealt successfully with t…
Have you tried teaching calculus where everyone gets to use Wolfram Alpha and/or Mathematica? I did for three years.
I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more importantly don't want to. They just want to mimic problem types. They don't want to understand the why. Plug and chug is their true desire.
Using the computer exposes right away if a student understands the concepts. You can't get started on a problem if you don't know what to tell the computer to do or why. I went back to the old paradigm. A few students got it but most never understood.
Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
#59I find it an awesome tool to advance knowledge. I recently had to take calc again after 10 years, and it helped me get back up to speed super fast. I would do the work, check the answer in the back of the book, and if I got it wrong, I would use Wolfram Alpha to do step by step to see where I got it wrong.
I can see some people saying that is cheating, but it is a learning tool to me. The class was 90% tests/ quizes. HW was a participation grade. Meaning a tool like that gives no one an advantage. Unless they are using it during the test.
Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
#60Since when has wolfram alpha an AI? I always thought it was simply calls to Mathematica. Maybe when you ask general questions it uses an AI, but with functions and maths I think it only uses Mathematica.
AI gets clicks in 2017: a story about students giving an artificial intelligence their homework to finish sells better as a story than talking about students punching formulas into a web-based calculator.