Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by sshine » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:26 PM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #553

paulluuk wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not using the word dum-dum to their face.

And when you see them several times a week for a semester, the sympathy grows on me at least. The people who don't show up before the exam and fail miserably, they're a little harder to sympathise with.

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

#592

Post by sshine » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:28 PM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #570

sshine wrote: post #69

I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a good AI policy is. On the one hand, I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly. Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible. Once they're past this hurdle, they can mind their own business again. To them, AI is not…

Programming with AI is the job now. That’s what you need to be teaching if you want your graduates to get a job programming. What’s changed is that “some working code” is no longer proof that a student understands the material. You’re going to need a new way to identify students that understand the material.

There really are two opposite policies at play:

  - Just say no to AI
  - Just embrace AI

I ran one semester embracing AI, and... I don't know, I don't have enough to compare with, but clearly it leaves a lot of holes in people's understanding. They generate stuff that they don't understand. Maybe it's fine. But they're certainly worse programmers than I was after having spent the same time without LLMs.

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

#593

Post by sshine » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:31 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #536

sshine wrote: post #69

I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a good AI policy is. On the one hand, I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly. Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible. Once they're past this hurdle, they can mind their own business again. To them, AI is not…

Do you find that thinking of your students as dum-dums makes you a better teacher?

Neither better nor worse.

Some of my students are naturally talented.

Others achieve great results through hard work.

Some half-assedly make it.

And some don't even try.

Those are the dum-dums.

They just play games and think everything is going to work out without effort.

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

#594

Post by protocolture » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:33 PM UTC

munksbeer wrote: post #425

protocolture wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally wrote a friends psychology paper when I had no idea of the subject and they got a HD for it. All I did was follow the process you outlined. My mother used to do it as a service for foreign language students. They would record their lectures, and she would write their papers for them.

Confession. I became disillusioned with a teacher of a subject in school, who I was certain had taken a disliking to me. I tested it by getting hold of a paper which had received an A from another school on the same subject, copying it verbatim and submitting it for my assignment. I received a low grade. Despite confirming what I suspected, it somehow still wasn't a good feeling.

I attended a catholic high school for several years, and I noticed a pattern. If I submitted an assignment to certain teachers and the subject related to a non catholic religion, I would get a pass, at the lowest score possible, regardless of the quality of the content.

So I just kept submitting assignments on the wrong religions. Write up about a saint? Pick a russian orthodox saint. Write up on marriage customs? Use islam. That way I could never fail.

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

#595

Post by sshine » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:36 PM UTC

zer00eyz wrote: post #141

sshine wrote: post #69

I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a good AI policy is. On the one hand, I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly. Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible. Once they're past this hurdle, they can mind their own business again. To them, AI is not…

> I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly. > small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them ... won't lead them to a meaningful existence I don't see a problem, the system is working. The same group of people that are going to loose their job to an LLM arent getting sm…

> The same group of people that are going to loose their job to an LLM arent getting smarter because of how they are using LLM's.

Students who use LLMs and professional programmers who use LLMs: I wouldn't say it's necessarily the same group of people.

Sure, their incentives are the same, and they're equally unlikely to maintain jobs in the future.

But students can be told that their approach to become AI secretaries isn't going to pan out. They're not actively sacrificing a career because they're out of options. They can still learn valuable skills, because what they were taught has not been made redundant yet, unlike mediocre programmers who can only just compete with LLM gunk.

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

#596

Post by sshine » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:38 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #340

presentation wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well given that the article is about young people in schools, a little paternalism isn’t a bad thing.

Well, they also have actual parents. I have to apologise, I was under this impression this thread was about university students, who should be old enough to fend for themselves (and enjoy respectively suffer from the consequences of their own actions). But I don't think anyone actually mentioned that age in the thread. I mixed it up with another one.

The students I teach are pre-university. It's called business school, and if a BSc is level 7, MSc is level 8 and PhD is level 9, then this is level 5. So they can become good programmers, but there's no math in the whole study programme.

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

#597

Post by msgodel » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:40 PM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #574

armchairhacker wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap "universities" are fine for accreditation. Exams can be administered via in-person proctoring services, which test the bare minimum. The real test would be when students are hired, in the probationary period. While entry-level hires may be unreliable, and even in the best case not help the company much, this is already a problem (perhaps it can be solved by the government or some other outside organization payi…

> Real universities should continue to exist for their cutting-edge research and tutoring from very talented people, because that can't be commodified. At least until/if AI reaches expert competence (in not just knowledge but application), but then we don't need jobs either. Okay, woah, I hadn't thought of that. I'm sitting here thinking that education for it's own sake is one of the reasons that we're trying to get…

I'm an autodidact. I've found leaked copies of university degree plans, pirated and read textbooks on all kinds of subjects, talk to experts for fun when I can etc.

American universities mostly get in the way of doing this sort of thing. You need a degree to be credentialed so you can get your "3 years of experience" that lets you apply for jobs. That's pretty much all its for these days.

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

#598

Post by blibble » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

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…

Oxbridge supervisinons/tutorials are typically two students, and at a push three (rarely)

certainly not anywhere close to ten!

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

#599

Post by sshine » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

anal_reactor wrote: post #411

sshine wrote: post #69

I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a good AI policy is. On the one hand, I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly. Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible. Once they're past this hurdle, they can mind their own business again. To them, AI is not…

> their bullshit is a waste of life and won't lead them to a meaningful existence as a professional programmer That's where you're wrong. Being a professional programmer is 10% programming, 40% office politics, and 50% project management. If your student managed to get halfway through college without any actual programming skills, they're perfect candidate, because they clearly own the 90% of skills needed to be a pr…

In my experience, it's 70% programming, 20% office politics, and 10% project management. People who realize late they're no good at programming, or don't enjoy it, will pivot towards other kinds of work, like project management. But people who think they'll have luck managing people without having any grasp of the skill set of the people they manage, they either need really good people skills, or they're obnoxiously incompetent in both humans and computers.

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

#600

Post by marcus_holmes » Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #409

marcus_holmes wrote: post #229

My essay-writing process for my MBA was: - decide what I wanted to say about the subject, from the set of opinions I already possess - search for enough papers that could support that position. Don't read the papers, just scan the abstracts. - write the essay. Scan the reference papers for the specific bit of it that best supported the point I want to make. There was zero learning involved in this process. The produc…

I’m sorry for that. May I ask a different question, why didn’t, or what stoped, you from engaging with the material itself ?

To be honest, I found "the material" irrelevant, mostly. There's vast swathes of papers written about obscure and tiny parts of the overall subject. Any given paper is probably correct, but covering such a tiny part of the subject that spending the time reading all of them is inefficient (if not impossible).

Also, given that the subject in question is "business", and the practice of business was being changed (as it is again now) by the application of new technology, so a lot of what I was reading was only borderline applicable any more.

MBAs are weird. To qualify to do one you need to have years of practical experience managing in actual business. But then all of that knowledge and experience is disregarded, and you're expected to defer to papers written by people who have only ever worked in academia and have no practical experience of what they're studying. I know this is the scientific process, and I respect that. But how applicable is the scientific process to management? Is there even a "science" of management?

So, like all my colleagues, I jumped through the hoops set in front of me as efficiently as possible in order to get the qualification.

I'm not saying it was worthless. I did learn a lot. The class discussions, hearing about other people's experiences, talking about specific problems and situations, this was all good solid learning. But the essays were not.