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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

#601

Post by marcus_holmes »

hyperbovine wrote: post #324
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…

> - search for enough papers that could support that position. Don't read the papers, just scan the abstracts. Wrote wrote those papers? How did they learn to write them? At some point, somebody along the chain had to, you know, produce an actual independent thought.

Interesting question. It seems to me that the entire business academia could be following the method I've outlined and no-one would notice. Or care.

It's not like the hard sciences - no-one is able to refute anything, because you can't conduct experiments. You can always find some evidence for any given hypothesis, as the endless stream of self-help (and often contradictory) business books show.

None of the academics I was reading had actually run a business or had any practical experience of business. They were all lifelong academics who were writing about it from an academic perspective, referencing other academics.

Business is not short of actual independent thought. Verification is the thing it's missing. How does anyone know that the brilliant idea they just had is actually brilliant? The only way is to go and build a business around it and see if it works. Academics don't do that. How is this science then?

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

#602

Post by lispisok »

plantwallshoe wrote: post #496
danielhep wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m wondering how the undergrad CS course is as an experienced dev and why you decided to do that? I have been a software developer for 5 years with an EE degree, and as I do more software engineering and less EE I feel like I am missing some CS concepts that my colleagues have. Is this your situation too or did you have another reason? And why not a masters?

A mix of feeling I’m “missing” some CS concepts and just general intellectual curiosity. I am planning on doing a masters but I need some undergrad CS credits to be a qualified candidate. I don’t think I’m going to do the whole undergrad. Overall my experience has been positive. I’ve really enjoyed Discrete Math and coming to understand how I’ve been using set theory without really understanding it for years. I’m rea…

Computer architecture and operating systems are really important classes imo. Maybe you dont touch the material again in your career but do you really want the thing you're supposed to be programming to be a black box? Personally I'm not ok working with black boxes.

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

#603

Post by robotnikman »

mystraline wrote: post #378
exhilaration wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local LLMs are almost here, no Internet needed!

Almost? I've been running a programming LLM locally, with a 200k context length with using system ram. Its also an abliterated model, so I get none of the moralizing or forced ethics either. I ask, and it answers. I even have it hooked up to my HomeAssistant, and can trigger complex actions from there.

What model are you using and what kind of hardware are you running it on?

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

#604

Post by voilavilla »

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…

>> (where everyone cheated anyways)

This is depressing. I'm late GenX, I didn't cheat in college (engineering, RPI), nor did my peers. Of course, there was very little writing of essays so that's probably why, not to mention all of our exams were in person paper-and-pencil (and this was 1986-1990, so no phones). Literally impossible to cheat. We did have study groups where people explained the homework to each other, which I guess could be called "cheating", but since we all shared, we tended to oust anyone who didn't bring anything to the table. Is cheating through college a common millenial / gen z thing?

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

#606

Post by squigz »

xandrius wrote: post #547
squigz wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is absurd. And if you have poor handwriting, the chances of "syntax errors" goes up. My above comment is getting downvoted, and it's honestly a bit baffling. I'd be furious if I were paying tens of thousands of dollars to receive a university-level education in software engineering in 2025... and I had to write programs with pen and paper. It is so far detached from the reality of, not only the industry, b…

The professor is not actually compiling your code, the idea is to know whether you can pseudo code a solution, of course.

> if it had one single error (missed semicolon) or didn't compile for some reason, the whole thing was considered wrong

From GP

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

#607

Post by simoncion »

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…

In response to the statement

> ...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

you said:

> Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life"...

You'd do well to slow down and re-read more carefully whenever you find something that offends you. You've failed to correctly identify the target of the "waste of life" commentary.

Moreover, were I paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for a self-improvement product, I'd be furious if the folks operating that product failed to notify me until three years into a four year program that I'd been getting next-to-nothing from the program. That's the sort of information you need right away, rather than thirty, sixty, (or more) thousand dollars in.

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

#608

Post by karaterobot »

ghusto wrote: post #374

I've always though that the education system was broken and next to worthless. I've never felt that teachers ever tried to _teach_ me anything, certainly not how to think. In fact I saw most attempts at thought squashed because they didn't fit neatly into the syllabus (and so couldn't be graded). The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much your homework is worth. Teaching and learning are collabora…

> The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much your homework is worth.

I mean... if you removed the substring "home" from that sentence, is it still true in your opinion?

That is, do you believe that because AI can perform some task, that task must not have any value? If there's a difference, help me understand it better please.

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

#609

Post by hackable_sand »

throwaway290 wrote: post #492
seb1204 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you don't know math because the calculator does it you would also have no understanding of the concepts e.g. addition, subtraction, whole numbers or fraction etc. so you would not know how to in use or what to do with a calculator. It's a tool that is useful to do something you know how it works faster.

But that's very different with LLMs and that stuff. You don't need to know how to write an essay or write a song. That's kind of the point.

LLMs don't know how to write an essay or a song.

To be able to direct an LLM you would need to know how to do those things yourself.

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

#610

Post by mrctte »

intended wrote: post #503
freezePeach2958 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A core response in our structure to falsehoods and rhetoric is counter speech. > But I can show you that counter speech fails Could you show me that? What's your definition of failure?

I get the feeling that you aren’t asking for the short version, because most people wouldn’t latch onto that point and create an account for it. Hmmm. An example - the inefficacy of Fact checking efforts. Fact checking is quintessentially counter speech, and we know that it has failed to stop the uptake and popularity of falsehoods. And I say this after speaking to people who work at fact checking orgs. However, this…

The book "Nexus" by Yuval Noah Harari essentially makes this same point. The way he phrases it is that information's primary role throughout history hasn't necessarily been to convey objective truth but to connect people and enable large scale cooperation. So more information is not necessarily better.

Worth a read or you can check out one of his recent podcast appearances for a quicker download.

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