Live data from Hacker News

Implications of AI to schools

twitter.com

51–60 of 447 posts

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#51

This doesn't adress the point that AI can replace going to school. AI can be your perfect personal tutor to help you learn thing 1:1. Needing to have a teacher and prove to them that you know what they teached will become a legacy concept. That we have an issue of AI cheating at school is in my eyes a temporary issue.

It is considered valuable and worthwhile for a society to educate all of its children/citizens. This means we have to develop systems and techniques to educate all kinds of people, not just the ones who can be dropped off by themselves at a library when they turn five, and picked up again in fifteen years with a PHD.

Sure. People who are self motivated are who will benefit the earliest. If a society values ensuring every single citizen gets a baseline education they can figure out how to get an AI to persuade or trick people into learning better than a human could.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#52
post #17
post #7

One 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…

Doesn't google docs have fairly robust edit history? If I was a student these days I'd either record my screen of me doing my homework, or at least work in google docs and share the edit history.

This still leaves many options open for plagiarism (for example a second, seperate device)

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#54

In my CS undergrad I had Doug Lea as a professor, really fantastic professor (best teacher I have ever had, bar none). He had a really novel way to handle homework hand ins, you had to demo the project. So you got him to sit down with you, you ran the code, he would ask you to put some inputs in (that were highly likely to be edge cases to break it). Once that was sufficient, he would ask you how you did different th…

Yep, it's easy to shortcut AI plagiarism, but you need time. In most of the universities around the world (online universities especially), the number of students is way too big, while professors get more and more pressure on publishing and bureaucracy.

I did my masters in GaTech OMSCS (Chatgpt came out at the very end of my last semester). Tests were done with cameras on and it was recorded and then they were watched I think by TAs. Homework was done with automated checking and a plagiarism checker. Do you need to have in person proctoring via test centers or libraries? Video chats with professors? I am not sure. Projects are importants, but maybe they need to become a minority of grades and more being based on theory to circumvent AI?

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#55

It seems like a good path forward is to somewhat try to replicate the idea of "once you can do it yourself, feel free to use it going forward" (knowing how various calculator operations work before you let it do it for you). I'm curious if we instead gave students an AI tool, but one that would intentionally throw in wrong things that the student had to catch. Instead of the student using LLMs, they would have one pa…

I agree, I think schools and universities need to adapt, just like calculators, these things aren't going away. Let students leverage AI as tools and come out of Uni more capable than we did.

AI _do_ currently throw in an occasional wrong thing. Sometimes a lot. A students job needs to be verifying and fact checking the information the AI is telling them.

The student's job becomes asking the right questions and verifying the results.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#56
post #40
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Most campuses use a product called Turnitin, which was originally designed to check for plagiarism. Now they claim it can detect AI-generated content with about 80% accuracy, but I don’t think anyone here believes that.

I had Turn It In mark my work as plagiarism some years ago and I had to fight for it. It was clear the teacher wasn’t doing their job and blindly following the tool. What happened is that I did a Q&A worksheet but in each section of my report I reiterated the question in italics before answering it. The reiterated questions of course came up as 100% plagiarism because they were just copied from the worksheet.

This matches my experience pretty well. My high school was using it 15 years ago and it was a spotty, inconsistent morass even back then. Our papers were turned in over the course of the semester, and late into the year you’d get flagged for “plagiarizing” your own earlier paper.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#57
post #29
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday's Doonesbury was on point here: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23 Andrej and Garry Trudeau are in agreement that "blue book exams" (I.e. the teacher gives you a blank exam booklet, traditionally blue) to fill out in person for the test, after confiscating devices, is the only way to assess students anymore. My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come…

Oh how I hated those as a student. Handwriting has always been a slow and uncomfortable process for me. Yes, I tried different techniques of printing and cursive as well as better pens. Nothing helped. Typing on a keyboard is just so much faster and more fluent. It's a shame that some students will again be limited by how fast they can get their thoughts down on a piece of paper. This is such an artificial limitation…

Obviously the solution is to bring back manual typewriters.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT just told me to put the turkey in my toaster oven legs facing the door, and you think it can replace school. Unless there is a massive architectural change that can be provably verified by third parties, this can never be. I’d hate for my unschooled surgeon to check an llm while I’m under.

What's the alternate if someone didn't know something during a procedure? Just wing it? Getting another data point from an LLM seems beneficial to me.

Ask a human who does. If there are no competent humans on-call before the procedure starts, reschedule the procedure.

Re: Implications of AI to schools

#60

> The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. Learning how to prepare for in-class tests and writing exercises is a very particular skillset which I haven't really exercised a lot since I graduated. Never mind teaching the humanities, for which I think this is a genuine crisis, in class programming exams are basically the…

> in class programming exams are basically the same thing as leetcode job interviews, and we all know what a bad proxy those are for "real" development work.

Confusing university learning for "real industry work" is a mistake and we've known it's a mistake for a while. We can have classes which teach what life in industry is like, but assuming that the role of university is to teach people how to fit directly into industry is mistaking the purpose of university and K-12 education as a whole.

Writing long-form prose and essays isn't something I've done in a long time, but I wouldn't say it was wasted effort. Long-form prose forces you to do things that you don't always do when writing emails and powerpoints, and I rely on those skills every day.

Post reply on HN