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AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

bbc.co.uk

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Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#4

Post by meristohm »

Can "educated machines" reproduce on their own yet? How do they fit into the food web, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, etc? Can they make meaning, towards a purpose in life? What role do they serve other than human ingenuity ego-stroking and for a few to further extract money from the many?

Can AI love, yet?

To what degree are we just avoiding dealing with existential threats by churning through resources to play god and make robots in our image? (Albeit a subset of humanity, and not without bias)

I'm not yet convinced this AI work isn't a waste of time and other resources. I'd far rather we put our efforts into land/water stewardship and a "new" vision for human existence based on many of the old ways that got us this far, so that we might go another several hundred thousand years.

In an unbroken oral tradition, what stories might those future people tell about this time?

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#5

Post by bee_rider »

Worrying that AI might make exams obsolete is kind of odd, I mean, it is a symptom I guess but only at the very end of a long stupid cascading failure.

Students cheat because they want the degree but don’t care to learn the material. Or maybe they want to learn the material, but see employment at the end as requiring better grades than they can get naturally. Either one is the result of bullshit credentialism. (Bullshit credentialism probably comes in part as a result of bullshit jobs where work-product can’t be evaluated because it’s all useless).

Hopefully students manage to cheat on so many tests that grades can become completely useless for employers. Then, they can become something useful for the students, a way to evaluate their progress and get feedback.

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#7

Post by prrrywinkle »

bee_rider wrote: post #5

Worrying that AI might make exams obsolete is kind of odd, I mean, it is a symptom I guess but only at the very end of a long stupid cascading failure. Students cheat because they want the degree but don’t care to learn the material. Or maybe they want to learn the material, but see employment at the end as requiring better grades than they can get naturally. Either one is the result of bullshit credentialism. (Bulls…

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Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#8

Post by a_bonobo »

This fits well with what we know about AI and Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning, which goes from 'remembering' on the lowest step to 'creating' on the top step (remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create).

Undergrad exams are usually somewhere around 'remembering', simple fact or definition regurgitation. Most of these facts should be in chatGPT's training data. As the degree proceeds things get harder and we move up the taxonomy, and that's where we know LLMs fail: there's nothing in there that can really 'understand', let alone 'create'.

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#9

Post by shinycode »

quantum_state wrote: post #6

This says more about the exams than the AI or the students…

For a time teachers resisted calculators because they learned the hard way. But learning with a calculator doesn’t mean we suck at math, we can still learn what’s behind it. AI have to be a tool for learning better and faster and expand our reasoning abilities. It’s of no sense to be stuck in the past and resist it. We have to develop a more critical thinking, use AI in schools and criticize the output and make something better out of it.

And we have to change the way knowledge is assessed. Teachers have to work hard to make better exams.

I hope it will destroy the stupid tests where students have to learn like parrots for a set date then forget everything after. It’s so stupid.

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