Maybe AI is going to save education, but the next few years are going to be very rough. I built a plugin for Chrome that helps detect cheating [1] so I've been talking to a bunch of teachers lately and pretty much everyone acknowledges that ChatGPT is a game changer for how schools will need to run. Plagiarism, tutors and parent help have been around for a while, but they still required most students to put in some e…
Is the cheat detection searching for "as a virtual chat bot assistant" text students don't bother to remove ? Otherwise seems like snake oil thing.
No. There’s no “AI detection”, just a way to look at the history of revisions and let teachers decide for themselves
The “small classes are better” idea has been disproven. You may be right about one-on-one tutoring though.
Source? There are teaching methods possible in a small class that just aren’t doable in a large class.
Scott E Page - The Model thinker. He talks about school size rather than class size, my mistake. He says “Failure to take sample size into account and inferring causality from outliers can lead to incorrect policy actions. For this reason, Howard Wainer refers to the formula for the standard deviation of the mean the “most dangerous equation in the world.” For example, in the 1990s the Gates Foundation and other nonprofits advocated breaking up schools into smaller schools based on evidence that the best schools were small. To see the flawed reasoning, imagine that schools come in two sizes—small schools with 100 students and large schools with 1,600 students—and that student scores at both types of schools are drawn from the same distribution with a mean score of 100 and a standard deviation of 80. At small schools, the standard deviation of the mean equals 8 (the standard deviation of the student scores, 80, divided by 10, the square root of the number of students). At large schools, the standard deviation of the mean equals 2. If we assign the label “high-performing” to schools with means above 110 and the label “exceptional” to schools with means above 120, then only small schools will meet either threshold. For the small schools, an average score of 110 is 1.25 standard deviations above the mean; such events occur about 10% of the time. A mean score of 120 is 2.5 standard deviations above the mean; an event of that size should occur about once in 150 schools. When we do these same calculations for large schools, we find that the “high-performing” threshold lies five standard deviations above the mean and the “exceptional” threshold lies ten standard deviations above the mean. Such events would, in practice, never occur. Thus, the fact that the very best schools are small is not evidence that smaller schools perform better. The very best schools will be small even if size has no effect solely because of the square root rules.”
> Why would humans even have the drive to learn stuff Because someone still has to make decisions . Much as the educational-industrial complex would have you believe otherwise, living the good life does not equate with getting the right answers on standardized tests. One of the unfortunate aspects of the education system we've built over the last several hundred years is that it conceals this from most people. This i…
Until we decide that decisions can also be made by AI, that is.
The problem is that decisions can only be made with respect to some quality metric, and deciding what that should be cannot be delegated. Only you can know what you want.
Maybe AI is going to save education, but the next few years are going to be very rough. I built a plugin for Chrome that helps detect cheating [1] so I've been talking to a bunch of teachers lately and pretty much everyone acknowledges that ChatGPT is a game changer for how schools will need to run. Plagiarism, tutors and parent help have been around for a while, but they still required most students to put in some e…
Current education system is broken. You can't learn anything. Learning need feedback loop, but this do not exist. In school, you hand in your homework, get the feedback only after Christmas. Because human cannot evaluate 100 students' homework efficiently. Majority of academic textbook are trash. Some author even say "we have 300 new exercises in this edition" proudly, while the solution is often either nonexistent,…
>In school, you hand in your homework, get the feedback only after Christmas.
Until we decide that decisions can also be made by AI, that is.
Plenty of people have already made the decision to delegate decisions to AI. We generally hear about this under headlines like "man attempts to drive into ocean while following satnav" or "flash crash in stock market caused by algorithmic traders" or https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/smallbusiness/keep-calm-and...
> Plenty of people have already made the decision to delegate decisions to AI.
Until we decide that decisions can also be made by AI, that is.
The problem is that decisions can only be made with respect to some quality metric, and deciding what that should be cannot be delegated. Only you can know what you want.
You are either being dishonest or you're in for a major disappointment. There's a lot more involved in that "opportunity" than a mechanism for low cost feedback. One's material circumstances predominates their ability to take advantage of such mechanisms, hence why strictly increasing school budgets or teacher quality has never succeeded in significantly improving overall outcomes for children living in poverty. I su…
I think ultimately it just comes down to the ability to ask a question. Googling did a lot for this, but LLM agents are on a whole other level. When someone can just endlessly ask questions and have them answered directly and comprehensibly, they can get past that initial stage of confusion in learning much quicker. It used to be you needed a human tutor to do this. But now an AI system can track and manage your know…
That is so incredibly naive. When you and your family is distracted with trauma and turmoil at every turn, there is no precedent for curiosity about anything except how to survive the current state of affairs. This is extremely basic stuff. It's literally just rational prioritization of concerns. If you can't grasp that, you have other problems that aren't being discussed in this discussion.
Children living in poverty will surely use LLMs, but they will continue to lack the capacity for curiosity and intentional learning. They will use LLMs to assist with the same things they invest their energy in without LLMs, which is their immediate life challenges and psychological escapism. And insufferable people like you will blame them when your ignorant plan inevitably fails.
Until we decide that decisions can also be made by AI, that is.
The problem is that decisions can only be made with respect to some quality metric, and deciding what that should be cannot be delegated. Only you can know what you want.
The other problem is we often say "it's common sense!" as a result of someone (or something) else following our metrics in a technically correct way that's totally not what we meant.
> I hope it will force the current system which favours a specific subset of learners to change. I hope it will evolve towards a collaborative system where learners are not tested as specimens in a vacuum. That will also favor a specific subset of learners.
Perhaps, but learners that are good in the current system will do well regardless imo. They are good at self directed, isolated learning which I think is the minority.
Those same 'independent' learners end up carrying the groups they're placed in. In the best case they're essentially drafted as unpaid tutors for the rest of the group, but often they end doing most of the work themselves while sharing the credit with the others. In either case they end up overworked, but particularly in the later case it becomes a system for gaming statistics to make the whole class look like it's performing better than it really is. Teachers like setting up this kind of system when their compensation/advancement is tied to student performance, a manifestation of Goodhart's Law. The sort of equality that you can achieve by giving student the average grade of a group is just a trick with numbers. Why not grade the whole class as one single group? Average every test score together and give every student that average score. Now you have excellent equality as the whole class performs adequately... but only on paper.
Anyway, there's no "one size fits all" in education, any scheme will favor some students more than others.