Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#51

Post by MrDarcy » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

Unearned5161 wrote: post #38

zahlman wrote: post #23

I object to the idea that the LLM writing that these students are trying to distinguish themselves from, is actually good in the first place. Although students might well end up writing worse because people are trusting the detection of LLM content to other LLMs. (And really, it's bizarre that these massively complex systems required to produce roughly human-like output, apparently offer such simplistic reasoning for…

The point has always been the act of writing itself. What you write about is almost irrelevant; it’s that you spent the time writing, that you had ideas in your head, and that you squeezed them onto the page.

Is that not pointless now? The point of writing was previously to communicate our thoughts and ideas to other people. Now and going forward that is unnecessary. The most efficient and effective way for us to communicate our thoughts and ideas is to have an agent organize and write them down for us.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#52

Post by ghurtado » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #30

Buttons840 wrote: post #22

Tangent: I've noticed I write a lot different because of combative online arguments. I have a problem. So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me. So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand. I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me. It's hard to find ot…

One thing that helps: remember that there are many people reading your response, one of them possibly being the person you replied to. Write for the audience, not specifically for the person you're responding to. It's a rare thing for someone to change their mind; it's a much more common thing for others to read your comment and gain something from it.

I just wanted to tell you that I read your comment immediately after writing mine and it's almost eerie how similar they are. There's the proof, if we needed any!

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#53

Post by abathur » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #40

Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They ca…

I don't disagree with you that a reasonable way to cope with the current problems is to ensure everything that "counts" is done in a controlled environment, but pedagogy and its goals are vast.

There are things you learn from spending several days structuring a 20-page argument that you will not learn (and cannot assess) from oral examination or a 5-paragraph essay written in a blue book.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#54

Post by kayo_20211030 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

j-bos wrote: post #44

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #40

Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They ca…

Throw in some oratory presentations as well and that sounds like a curriculum.

Yes. That's fair. Students should know, up front, what they're supposed to learn.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#55

Post by eudamoniac » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #40

Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They ca…

Schools stopped doing that because students largely refuse to prepare. Testing throughout the year is like a CI pipeline and is shown to work better for the median student.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#56

Post by ritlo » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #22

Tangent: I've noticed I write a lot different because of combative online arguments. I have a problem. So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me. So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand. I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me. It's hard to find ot…

One of the worst habits distinctive to online discussion-board writing (especially the sorts of places with lots and lots of people and where it's fairly hard to get permanently kicked out—like here) is too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers. It's all over forum posts, and it's poor writing, but without moderation that slaps down responses based on plain mis-reading you have to write that way, or your post will spawn all kinds of really stupid tangent strings of posts (and they still do anyway, sometimes). And, yes, the excessive and too-close-together repetitiveness you mention is part of that.

The result is that a ton of web forum/social-media posting would, in any other context, be fairly poor writing (even if it's otherwise got no problems) simply because of the the extra crap and contortions required to minimize garbage posts by poor readers who are, themselves, allowed to post to the same medium.

This is in addition to, though not wholly separate from, the tendency toward combativeness in online posting.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#57

Post by etempleton » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:52 PM UTC

When I was in high school I was a better writer when I had time (versus in class) and generally a better writer than I was a student. The net result was fairly often being accused of plagiarism. Not because the teacher had proof(I never plagiarized), but because the teacher couldn’t believe I could write to the level I sometimes wrote at on take home assignments. Admittedly, I was a wildly inconsistent student.

This reminds me a bit of that. AI writing is—in many ways—objectively very good, but that doesn’t matter if no one thinks you wrote it. AI writing is boring exactly because it is consistent and like any art form people want to see something original.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#58

Post by georgebcrawford » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:55 PM UTC

throw73838 wrote: post #34

> The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excel Did not this self censorship process started decades ago? There are certain answers expected in academia, arguing for anything else would get you in troubles. Not using “devoid” seems pretty minor inconvenience. For me biggest wtf is why studen…

An essay is a good gauge of how one can organise their thoughts, argue a position, respond to a stimulus.

In short it’s a good way measure thinking.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#59

Post by ghaff » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:55 PM UTC

carcabob wrote: post #36

A few times in some Discord communities, I've been accused of being A.I. because of how I write. Kind of sad and a bit annoying. I also quite like em dashes, but have felt the need to reduce how much I use them. Glad to see some schools and teachers teach how to use them well, rather than ban them outright.

em-dashes have been house style for where I've worked for over a couple decades. If people don't like it, F them. I'm not going to change how I write because people may think it make me more AI-like.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#60

Post by kayo_20211030 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

eudamoniac wrote: post #55

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #40

Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They ca…

Schools stopped doing that because students largely refuse to prepare. Testing throughout the year is like a CI pipeline and is shown to work better for the median student.

Students are neither generally stupid nor constitutionally lazy. I sense that when expectations are clear they'll often surprise you with diligence. We should trust them to do the right thing. If they do, it's an A; and if not, it's less than that.