The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat • Hacker News Board

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#91

Post by red-iron-pine » Wed, Dec 10, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC

smegger001 wrote: post #83

ludston wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USA must have the highest proportion of 4 year graduates in the world and look where it's got us It doesn't. > look where it's got us Richest nation on earth. To be fair that's as much tied to population size, resources, colonial-style capitalist exploitation as it is to American Exceptionalism and a good education system. And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going…

Well that and decades of being the only industrialized nation not carpet bombed in a world war we have been riding on that and being issuer the global reserve currency for decades.

more than just carpet bombing -- the nukes, the genocides, the Communist purges before (USSR) and after (Red China)

all advanced countries basically got slaughtered to varying degrees and the US saw no real systemic damage and comparatively light levels of dead.

it's like if all of NATO and the Asian Tigers collapsed today except for China -- already a dominant player they jump to superpower status

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#92

Post by tim333 » Wed, Dec 10, 2025, 9:22 PM UTC

Not sure about kids these days but as an adult I find the LLMs very good for education - you can ask pretty much anything and get a good answer, often with links to youtube lectures.

Re stopping cheating, just give them proper exams like we've had since time immemorial.

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#93

Post by array_key_first » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:49 AM UTC

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #21

sgarland wrote: post #4

First of all, the entire post reads like it was written by AI. Secondly, the author / prompter misses the point entirely with this closing paragraph: > The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters. You learn fundamentals because they are necessary f…

I was allowed to use a scientific calculator in all my high school math exams. My parents were shocked by this because it would've been considered cheating when they were in school. Homework, exams, essays, assignments and so on are all tools designed to help students achieve learning outcomes. Those tools are becoming less effective due to the technology to which the students now have access. Making adjustments to t…

No, we should ban the technology, at least until we can somewhat verify the students understand the underlying concepts.

Like, yes, we allow calculators for highschoolers. But we'd never give a calculator to a 3rd grader learning their times tables. Because then they'd never learn that 9 * 9 is 49, and now they're permanently handicapped in math. And now, when they are in high school, the calculator doesn't even matter, because they can't do math at a basic level.

Or, consider reading. Certainly high schoolers can use audio books. But imagine if we didn't teach reading at all, and just used audio books, from kindergarten. Would anyone know how to read? I doubt it.

Learning is unique in that it builds on lower-level stuff. If you just skip that stuff, sure, it might look efficient - but it's not. You actually learn much less if you do that. It's not like me at my job, where if I use AI I finish a project in half the time and I'm better off. No, if I learn in half the time, I've learned less!

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#94

Post by em-bee » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:53 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #23

> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student? The purpose of an assignment is to give the student problems that can be solved by applying the knowledge and techniques they were taught in class, so that the student can gain experience using that knowledge and those techniques and demonstrate that they have done so to th…

before you can work on unique problems, you need to learn to solve problems that have already been solved. the problem then is that if a problem has already been solved, AI has been trained with the solution and is able to reproduce it.

think about it this way: any question or task you give to a student that is similar to a question or task that you gave students a year earlier, can be solved by applying the solutions collected from the previous year. and if that is the case, then a machine can solve those tasks too.

the amount of effort needed to design questions and tasks so that a machine can not solve them is way to big to be realistic for any subjects that are not novel. which is everything you learn in school.

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#95

Post by em-bee » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:56 AM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #61

There seems to be a tacit premise here, that anything an LLM can do is meaningless as an exercise for a student, but that is simply not true, and if it were, it would likely be the case that we would soon run out of pedagogically-‘meaningful’ (by this standard) tasks (the author has no practical suggestions for how we could avoid this situation.)

exactly, i just explained this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226251

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#96

Post by em-bee » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:12 AM UTC

yieldcrv wrote: post #51

neo_doom wrote: post #15

Big swing and a miss by the author here. The learning is the point. Learning by nature shouldn't be optimized for efficiency. You learn deeply when you have to read sources, draw conclusions, synthesize information, and connect it to your own experiences. I recall writing essays in grade school and what mattered wasn't the end product but the process to arrive at the end product. The hours of research and analysis...…

> The learning is the point. Execution is the point for the vast majority of the population, and academia has always been tone deaf to the raison d'etre of their enrollment base. people are there for jobs, academia is aware they are there for jobs, academia pretends they are the elite socioeconomic class there for knowledge and networking or on the path to be. they are not, they are an underclass in a world where it…

academia is for research, not for jobs. our obsession with academic degrees is an abuse of the academic system. it is used as a tool to filter candidates, but in my opinion it should actually be illegal to require an academic degree for any job that isn't about research. that's not what academic degrees were designed for. academia isn't tone deaf, it's the industry that is misguided.

germany introduced the concept of fachhochschule, which is specifically designed to fill that gap. fachhochschule is not academia, but it is designed to teach skills for jobs. the US could do something similar by designating colleges for jobs and limiting universities to research. an institution could offer both on the same campus, and there could be overlap in the classes. it just should be clear what is a job qualification and what is a research qualification.

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#97

Post by yieldcrv » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 2:22 AM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #96

yieldcrv wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The learning is the point. Execution is the point for the vast majority of the population, and academia has always been tone deaf to the raison d'etre of their enrollment base. people are there for jobs, academia is aware they are there for jobs, academia pretends they are the elite socioeconomic class there for knowledge and networking or on the path to be. they are not, they are an underclass in a world where it…

academia is for research, not for jobs. our obsession with academic degrees is an abuse of the academic system. it is used as a tool to filter candidates, but in my opinion it should actually be illegal to require an academic degree for any job that isn't about research. that's not what academic degrees were designed for. academia isn't tone deaf, it's the industry that is misguided. germany introduced the concept of…

my comment about apprenticeships was modeled on Germany's system too

I agree that the industry is misguided, but academia knew what it was gatekeeping and that their admitted population was not there for research, but for the industry

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#98

Post by em-bee » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

yieldcrv wrote: post #97

em-bee wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

academia is for research, not for jobs. our obsession with academic degrees is an abuse of the academic system. it is used as a tool to filter candidates, but in my opinion it should actually be illegal to require an academic degree for any job that isn't about research. that's not what academic degrees were designed for. academia isn't tone deaf, it's the industry that is misguided. germany introduced the concept of…

my comment about apprenticeships was modeled on Germany's system too I agree that the industry is misguided, but academia knew what it was gatekeeping and that their admitted population was not there for research, but for the industry

that's true, but it's not reasonable to expect them to change that. we need academia for research. i don't want universities to change. if people don't want research then we should build other institutions for that.

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#99

Post by ytoawwhra92 » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 11:59 PM UTC

array_key_first wrote: post #93

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was allowed to use a scientific calculator in all my high school math exams. My parents were shocked by this because it would've been considered cheating when they were in school. Homework, exams, essays, assignments and so on are all tools designed to help students achieve learning outcomes. Those tools are becoming less effective due to the technology to which the students now have access. Making adjustments to t…

No, we should ban the technology, at least until we can somewhat verify the students understand the underlying concepts. Like, yes, we allow calculators for highschoolers. But we'd never give a calculator to a 3rd grader learning their times tables. Because then they'd never learn that 9 * 9 is 49, and now they're permanently handicapped in math. And now, when they are in high school, the calculator doesn't even matt…

> No, we should ban the technology, at least until we can somewhat verify the students understand the underlying concepts.

I didn't learn how to prove addition until advanced math in late high school, so obviously there's a point at which we're comfortable glossing over the underlying concepts with young students and skipping to the parts that are actually meaningful to the learning outcomes that we've decided are appropriate for their age.

> Like, yes, we allow calculators for highschoolers. But we'd never give a calculator to a 3rd grader learning their times tables. Because then they'd never learn that 9 * 9 is 49, and now they're permanently handicapped in math. And now, when they are in high school, the calculator doesn't even matter, because they can't do math at a basic level.

Research doesn't support this.

> Or, consider reading. Certainly high schoolers can use audio books. But imagine if we didn't teach reading at all, and just used audio books, from kindergarten. Would anyone know how to read? I doubt it.

Right, so if the learning outcome is "the student knows how to read" we'd judge that teaching method a failure.

I'm saying that our focus should be on helping students achieve learning outcomes, not on the tools we use to evaluate whether or not they've reached those learning outcomes.

The point of education is the learning, not the evaluation, so when the tools used to complete the evaluations become useless due to technology we should be replacing those tools rather than clinging to them desperately.

Re: The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

#100

Post by array_key_first » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 5:29 AM UTC

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #99

array_key_first wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we should ban the technology, at least until we can somewhat verify the students understand the underlying concepts. Like, yes, we allow calculators for highschoolers. But we'd never give a calculator to a 3rd grader learning their times tables. Because then they'd never learn that 9 * 9 is 49, and now they're permanently handicapped in math. And now, when they are in high school, the calculator doesn't even matt…

> No, we should ban the technology, at least until we can somewhat verify the students understand the underlying concepts. I didn't learn how to prove addition until advanced math in late high school, so obviously there's a point at which we're comfortable glossing over the underlying concepts with young students and skipping to the parts that are actually meaningful to the learning outcomes that we've decided are ap…

Evaluation is a proxy for learning, because we haven't yet invented mind reading to find out what people know.

I can get on board with OUR CURRENT tests being obsolescenced, yes. I cannot get on board with testing, as a concept, going away.

If you just let people do whatever and hope for the best you're gonna get shit results. Most kids would eat so much candy they need their stomachs pumped, if you let them.

No, we need structure and some well-formed method of assessment. Yes, that might require a controlled artificial environment, one without calculators or AI. That's not perfect, but we have no alternative.

Ultimately, school is not intended to make you successful in a capitalist system. Because you can be dumb as rocks and evil to your bones and successful. We don't want to optimize for that.