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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

#551

Post by SoftTalker »

keiferski wrote: post #380
falcor84 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been my experience too, and I think it actually makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective - if the students are smart enough to learn well regardless of the level of the instruction, then the professors don't face any pressure to improve. Taking this to the extreme, I think that a top-tier university could do very well for itself by only providing a highly selective admission system, good facilities…

Universities don’t pick professors because they are good teachers, they pick them for their research publications. The fact that some professors end up being good teachers is almost coincidental.

This is true for research universities. There are many excellent teaching colleges where professors are hired to teach, and don't do research.

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

#552

Post by SoftTalker »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #355
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…

I did once have a Physics lecturer say " When I took Quantum Mechanics back in my undergrad, I got an A but didn't actually understand anything" and then in the same lecture 20 minutes later: "What part of this do you not understand?" when the entire class was just blankly looking at the whiteboard.

At least at the undergrad level, it's not impossible to get an "A" without actually learning anything. Especially Freshman/Sophomore level classes. You just cram for the exams and regurgitate what you memorized. Within a few months time it's mostly gone.

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

#553

Post by chasd00 »

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…

I have a hard time sympathizing with a student who cheated for 3 semesters then hit a brick wall when they finally can’t cheat. A student struggling with the material is one thing but a student finally getting caught after cheating through three semesters is another. “Dum dum” is being kind IMO.

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

#554

Post by acc_297 »

One of the last courses I took during my CS degree we had one on one 10 minute zoom calls with TAs who would ask a series of random detailed questions about any line of code in any file of our term project. It was easy to complete if you wrote the code by hand and I imagine would have been difficult for students who extensively cheated.

In terms of creative writing I think we need to accept that any proper assessment will require a short essay to be written in person. Especially at the high school level there's no reason why a 12th grade student should be passing english class if they can't write something half-decent in 90 minutes. And it doesn't need to be pen and paper - I'm sure there are ways to lock a chromebook into some kind of notepad software that lacks writing assistance.

Education should not be thought of as solely a pathway to employment it's about making sure people are competent enough to interface with most of society and to participate in our broader culture. It's literally an exercise in enlightenment - we want students to have original insights about history, culture, science, and art. It is crucial to produce people who are pleasant to be around and who are interesting to talk to - otherwise what's the point?

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

#555

Post by DaSHacka »

baq wrote: post #428
razakel wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>taking tests is a skill that must be learned "I had to suffer so you must too."

"I'm hiring and want to see if his resume checks out"

A one-on-one interview is completely different from a paper-and-pencil exam though.

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

#556

Post by rwyinuse »

I think AI is the perfect final ingredient to ruin the higher education system, which is already in ruins (at least over here in Finland).

Even before AI, our governments have long wanted more grads to make statistics look good and to suppress wages, but don't want to pay for it. So what you get are more students, lower quality of education, lower standards to make students graduate faster. Thanks to AI, now students don't have to really meet even those low standards to pass the courses. What is left is just a huge waste of young people's time and tax payer's money.

There are very few degrees I'm going to recommend to my children. Most just don't provide good value for one's time anymore.

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

#557

Post by h2zizzle »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #501
jacobolus wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are excellent 1000-student lecture courses and shitty 15-student lecture courses. There are excellent take-home exams and shitty in-class exams. There are excellent grad student teaching assistants and shitty tenured credentialed professors. You can't boil quality down to a checklist.

No but you can observe and react to trends. Remote courses for me have me sitting directly at the Distraction 9000 (my computer) and rely entirely on "self discipline" in order for me to get anything out of it. This is fine for annual training that's utterly braindead and requires nothing from me but completing a basic quiz I get unlimited attempts for so my employer can tell whatever government agency I did the thin…

On the edit: maybe two-way remote. One-way (read: remoting into conferences, music festivals, etc.) has been a revelation, and no more difficult to access than any other streaming service. I'm going to be sad to see YouTube's coverage of Coachella go away in a few years; losing SXSW was already quite painful.

I gather that that's not necessarily what you were referring to, but with the way that people tend to lump all remote experiences in the "inferior" basket together, I just wanted to point out that, in many cases, that kind of accessibility is better than the actual alternative: missing out.

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

#558

Post by SoftTalker »

california-og wrote: post #294
halgir wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal University should be? No, you should fail them for turning in bad theses, just like you would before AI.

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…

I've talked with professors at a major US research university. For Master's students, they are all paying a lot of money to get a credential. That's the transaction. They don't really care about cheating as long as they go through the motions of completing the assigned work. It's just a given, and like you say it takes more time than they have to go through the acacdemic dishonesty process for all the students who are getting outside help or (now) using AI.

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

#559

Post by boringg »

rwyinuse wrote: post #556

I think AI is the perfect final ingredient to ruin the higher education system, which is already in ruins (at least over here in Finland). Even before AI, our governments have long wanted more grads to make statistics look good and to suppress wages, but don't want to pay for it. So what you get are more students, lower quality of education, lower standards to make students graduate faster. Thanks to AI, now students…

What you then say is a good value for ones time instead?

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

#560

Post by rwyinuse »

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…

Over here in Finland, higher education is state funded, and the funding is allocated to universities mostly based on how many degrees they churn out yearly. Whether the grads actually find employment or know anything is irrelevant.

So, it's pretty hard for universities over here to maintain standards in this GenAI world, when the paying customer only cares about quantity, and not quality. I'm feeling bad for the students, not so much for foolish politicians.

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