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Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

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Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#81

Post by Adrock »

SteveCoast wrote: post #27

When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign. I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of s…

I also interned at Wolfram in 2000. I spent the summer writing coverage tests, which meant getting to run Mathematica through gcov and seeing what lines weren't being hit by the test suite. Writing coverage tests for most things would have been incredibly boring, but this was anything but. There were lines of code that required me to spend two days in the Wolfram library reading up on branches of math I had never heard of before (wtf is a Gröbner basis?!). My favorite discovery was a line of code in the integer factoring function that I could only hit if I constructed a number by multiplying several Carmichael numbers IN A CERTAIN ORDER. If you like math and computer science, it's hard to imagine a better place to intern.

Sorry to hear about the rest of your undergrad experience. I was really fortunate that I never had a professor complain about me using Mathematica for everything. Even just typesetting math in Mathematica instead of LaTeX was a huge benefit for me.

One of my favorite classes was Computational Algebra taught by Dana Scott. He did the entire class in Mathematica. Each lecture was just him walking through a notebook and the problem sets were all about writing Mathematica code to solve interesting problems. I think I still have them somewhere...

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#82

Post by throwawayjava »

rflrob wrote: post #79
throwawayjava wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field. This is not even remotely true. I think you seriously under-estimate the value of parents/tutors. Students with tutors/parents will not just get the right answer. They will also be led to the right answer, over and over, and told what they need to practice in order to improve. Explanations will be tailored to their learning style. So they get direct help on assi…

While W|A doesn't come close to making the field level, I think there's an argument to be made that it makes the field more level than it was. The perfect being the enemy of the good...

That's true. Especially the answers that tell you the process for deriving the solution instead of just giving the solution. Then you can see where you got stuck/went astray.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#83

Post by jtraffic »

williamstein wrote: post #12

> “Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division...” What the heck kind of article is this...? I can’t read it seriously.

I agree. I got hung up on this: "Wolfram|Alpha uses natural language processing technology, part of the AI family, to provide students with an academic shortcut"

WA uses NLP for some things, but not for solving equations.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#85

Post by WorldMaker »

adamnemecek wrote: post #68
roumenguha wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add another point, my A-Level teacher always said anything the calculator can do, you can do, and just as fast. And then she chose a question from the book, had one of us start typing, and she started at the board solving the same thing. She finished first. Not by much, and obviously the calculator is the faster choice more often, but she finished first.

> She finished first. Not by much, and obviously the calculator is the faster choice more often, but she finished first. This is more of an interface problem I believe.

It's a low level magic trick: she chose the problem. Even supposing she didn't have the answer memorized, she knew exactly what to min/max to favor herself in the challenge.

(A real magician would also work to make sure that the kids thought they chose the problem, but the choice had already been primed for them.)

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#86

Post by Stranger43 »

vlasev wrote: post #73
Rjevski wrote: post #50

Wolfram Alpha isn't the issue. The issue is that we're grading students on an arbitrary and meaningless metric, instead of the end result. As an employer, if I hire you to do a task, let's say build a toaster, I couldn't care less about how you achieved that - as long as I've got my toaster and it can help me grow my toast-making business I'm happy. Education should work the same.

Plug and chug with Wolfram Alpha is very similar to plug and chug Stack Exchange answers in your code base.

Or passing an exam thats easy/cheap for the teachers/school to grade for that matter.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#87

Post by theonemind »

joelrunyon wrote: post #17

Am I the only one here that would program their TI-83 in high school to run equations for me so I didn't have to solve them by hand? I wasn't even that dev-savvy (and still am not), but it was super easy and was a huge time-saver on timed tests. I obviously had to learn the concept in order to program the equation, but once I did - why should I have to go through everything manually every single time?

I had a high school math teacher who actually had a policy that you could use any program on your calculator you wrote yourself, including on tests.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#89

Post by btilly »

adamnemecek wrote: post #33
SteveCoast wrote: post #27

When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign. I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of s…

> we need to learn 'the basics' and survive without tools to some degree This is the wrong approach. There's no way you wouldn't understand math much better with these tools. I'm hoping that in the future, math will be less about equations and symbols and more about graphing and being able to move around in the spaces described by the equations. I would draw an analogy with a compiler. After using it for some time, y…

Both are true.

Clearly we are more productive with the tools. However it is very, very easy for people to see the tools as magic. At some point we need to actually understand what it is that we are doing. For which those equations and symbols are essential.

Yes, the computer can draw a pretty picture. Pretty pictures are helpful in conveying information. But they are a horrible way to understand inherently complex topics.

For example pictures are essential for conveying basic concepts in in multi-variable calculus. But you won't make much sense of the topic until you actually understand the three basic mathematical representations of a surface embedded in a higher dimensional space (function, level surface, and parametrized coordinates), how each connects to the tangent to the surface at a point (whether that tangent is a line, plane, or something higher dimensional). And you need to understand this in an n-dimensional way because that comes up, a lot.

So no, we won't lose equations and symbols. Ever. They are essential, and there is no possibility of real understanding without them.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#90

Post by HillaryBriss »

SteveCoast wrote: post #27

When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign. I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of s…

> ... why don't you use spoons instead?

reminds me of one of the arguments against minimum wage hike theory: if raising the minimum wage makes workers better off and has absolutely no drawbacks for anyone, why raise it to a mere $15/hour? why don't we do some real good and crank it all the way up to $100/hour?

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