A lot of the purposes in education for which the use of AI would be considered "cheating" involve writing assignments of one sort or another, so I don't know why most of these education scenarios don't simply redirect the incentive.
For example, in an English class with a lot of essay-writing assignments, the assignments could simply be worth 0% of the final mark. There would still be deadlines as usual, and they would be marked as usual, but the students would be free to do them or not as they pleased. The catch would be that the *proctored, for-credit* exams would demand that they write similar essays, which would then be graded based on the knowledge/skills the students would have been expected to gain if they'd done the assignments.
Advantages:
- No more issues with cheating.
- Students get to manage (or learn to manage) their own time and priorities, as is expected of adults, without being whipped as much with the cane of class grades.
- The advanced students who can already write clearly, concisely and convincingly (or whatever the objectives are of the writing exercises) don't have to waste time with unneeded assignments.
- If students skip the assignments, learn to write on their own time using ChatGPT and friends, and can demonstrate their skills in exam conditions, then it's a win-win.
This all requires that whoever is in charge of the class have clear and testable learning goals in mind -- which, alas, they all-too-often do not.
A lot of students, even at the college level, don't think that far ahead and make bad decisions because of short term thinking.
Look at any list of advice for new college students and almost every one of them includes "go to class". Simply attending class is way easier than homework and yet, when there's no short term consequences for not doing it, plenty of students will just not do it.
Cheating is another great example. Cheating in college is rampant because kids don't want to do the work they're assigned. I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway. They're already choosing to ignore the long term benefits of homework even when there are short term consequences, so I don't see how removing those short term consequences will make things better.
If you tell kids there are no immediate consequences for not doing homework, many of them just won't do it and they will fail because they haven't learned anything.
Maybe you're okay with that. Honestly, I'm not actually trying to convince you that it's a bad idea. I just think if your proposal is based on the idea that kids will choose to something boring that they don't have to do in the short term because it benefits them in the long term you're overestimating a lot of kids (and adults for that matter).
There's a section in Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) where Persig takes this all the way to the final conclusion that there should be no grades at University, and no degree at the end, and then and only then will everyone who goes there actually be learning-motivated.
So. I teach at a university and I do give an "assignment" exactly like this.
In a few of my classes, I have final projects that teams work on. I also have presentations. I used to require them of all students; and quickly learned this is a good way to waste valuable time.
Now, all my presentations are completely optional for NO CREDIT. You don't get penalized if you don't do them, and perhaps more importantly, I give ZERO EXTRA CREDIT for doing them.
As you can imagine, every single presentation I've gotten from this has been absolutely worth it.
I do the same in my classes, and it´s common practice in many courses my dept which may help, as the students know what is expected of them. I don´t think it's wasting time. It motivates the students to know that they have to present in front of their peers, helps the shy ones get practice, and yes the quality varies, but it´s a very good way to share information within the class about different projects, even with a not so good presentation.
Hmm, I mean been doing this for years. Some were interesting because they DIDN'T accomplish much and things went bad but then we could kind of post-mortem in the class.
Others had some pretty cool things that ended up in real life; I believe the official timers for the Florida Supreme Court testimony things came from one of my classes.
The problem is that the motivation from above (i.e., administration, state legislatures, employers, etc.) is no longer really about learning. We could have an entirely learning-motivated university right now and it would be considered a bad thing by many powerful people because it's not aimed at "preparing people for the workforce" (in part simply by providing that degree).
You can take that one step further. What kind of signal does “I can afford to go to University and not worry about credentials” send? I’d argue that’s realistic only for people who are willing to admit that they belong to a leisure class. In the US at least, we like to flatter the leisure class with the pretense that they worked hard to get there.
I learned recently that most universities in Switzerland have open admissions where entry to the program is pretty easy. However they do not hold anybody's hand and you have to pass your classes or can get kicked out quite easily. I am not sure if what I am saying is completely accurate feel like this is one model that would weed out people who are serious from who aren't.
The Open University in the UK (which has been running for decades) doesn’t have any entry requirements for the first year of its undergrad courses and the early modules definitely include a focus on getting people up to speed on academic writing, use of library tools, etc. I don’t know how many people make it to reach the year 2 modules (which require passing year 1)
There are institutions like that. For example, the Collège de France started in 1530, still active, doesn't administer tests nor grants degrees. It's purely about learning.
I went to a state school, and didn't get much prestige or many connections. I did learn how to be an engineer, and more importantly I learned how to be an adult. I think my time there was worth it.
Maybe this is true of liberal arts or business degrees? I don't know, but I don't think this is the opinion of anyone who went to engineering school.
If you missed “practice space to learn how to learn and to work with other people”, your understanding is too flawed to forgive the obvious so-edge take.
> I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway.
I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it.
Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating.
The big issue of exam-only approach is that a one-hour exam is not enough to evaluate a student's performance, unless your educational goal is just to make students memorize stuff by rote. I'd consider a 3-hour open-book exam bare minimal. But if every class does that it'll be too exhausting.
They will not choose to write it. Would you work on something consistently if nobody cared about it?
There needs to be a reward for doing essays. That reward can be emotional eg. "the teacher I respect liked my essay" or "my essay was read in class" or "the teacher gives feedback that makes me feel a sense of growth". In that case, maybe kids will do it.
However, I think it's hard for a teacher to inspire respect to a classroom and the difficulty scales with the number of people in the class, so grades are used as a hack.
> Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating.
I am 100% certain quite a lot of people cheat because they procrastinated and don't have time to learn. Or because they indeed were lazy to learn. Or because they cant learn, because they course is too hard for them.
When I read this suggestion it sticks out that un-spoonfed, people with deficits in thier study skills, executive function, and institutional literacy would be most disadvantaged.
So, you have 2 kids who are equally bright, and you tell one "you don't have to do these assignments but there is a test at the end" and the other "you have an 80% chance if failing if you don't do these assignments. Analyse each assignments and feedback for shiboleths like the way they ask you to structure your introduction and optimize for demonstrating you know these shiboleths over everything else"
University is a wonderful petri dish for growing into who you want to be. You have access to expertise and resources abs a certain kind of institutional credibility. Few students actually use these fully and the ones who do were told to. You need some idea who you want to be and why, and this is developed in you by other people. Children don't just know stuff.
I think these are positive changes if and only if we accompany them with systematic study skills and self management courses and bridge this gap.
Do Universities no longer do that? All of my finals were 3hrs. There was a special schedule during finals week with 3 slots per day. The time of your final exam was based on when the first lecture session of a class took place. Really sucked to get an 8-11 AM slot when your classes never started before 11.
Fun prank: set all of the clocks in your dorm neighbor’s room to different wrong times. Guy across the hall knew we were messing with him, trusted his watch - which had the correct time, but wrong alarm time. Realized he had a problem when he had hot water in the shower and no one was around. He was only 45 min late to the exam. Good times.
I'm a little confused so I could use some clarification: where did the "fun" in the fun prank kick in? You caused him to be late and risk his exam. Could you break down the fun for me?
We had the alarms going off early. Like every half hour from 6:00 AM. We knocked on his door and his roommate told him when he was leaving for breakfast.
He did fine in his exam. 3 hrs was overkill. Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy.
It was the 80’s. I guess kids these days are soft.
Well, agreed, but nobody said anything about 60min exams x) In fact I don't remember ever having an exam at uni that was less than 2h.
I agree that open-book exams, or at least a closed-book portion followed by an open-book portion, is important to actually gauge the student's abilities rather than his/her capability to cram.
Exactly. In school I only did the stuff teachers told me isn't important and I don't need to do.
You want me to don't know something? I better make sure to get to know everything about that. You push me to do stuff? Why should I care, if you already do.
During my undergrad in Germany, the CS department was in the process of switching from optional homework to various forms of mandatory homework (either directly counting towards the final grade, or requiring a minimum score on the homework before allowing registration for the exam). AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result.
I think optional homework works for classes that are obscure enough only somewhat intrinsically motivated students would consider taking them, but in mandatory classes or trendy majors, there's going to be many people who need a bit more external motivation to study.
I studied math, and all our exams were oral exams. The professor had to actively accept you for the exam, which was usually a given, if you did your homework. (But you could probably get into the exam without doing the homework, too, if you convinced them.)
I have been teaching CS at German universities for close to two decades now.
> AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result.
True. That's the real Dunning-Kruger problem: incompetent people do not know how much help they need to get competent. It is our job to show them their weaknesses as early as possible so that they can effectively work on them.
(I believe that state-funded universities (as in Germany) have some obligation to not only educate the self-motivated top 1% but also offer a solid education even for less perfect students - at least if there is a societal need for their competences.)
Another, more important, reason is that written exams are not good tests of programming competence - especially as tasks and frameworks get more complex. We want to assign good grades to students who are competent at developing software in realistic settings, not in highly artificial exam settings.
Huh - what do you mean? I just checked again, and this is IMHO exactly what Kruger and Dunning reported:
From the abstract:
"Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities."
> Relation between average self-perceived performance and average actual performance on a college exam.[1] The red area shows the tendency of low performers to overestimate their abilities. Nevertheless, low performers' self-assessment is lower than that of high performers.
So regression towards the mean explain the entire effect.
Thanks a lot for the explanation and link. I had read the original papers a long time ago, and was not aware of the more recent discussions. That said, I just read a few of the critical papers, and it seems that even Gignac and others do not dispute that the effect is observable.
They just don't believe that unskilled people are inherently worse than skilled people in estimating their own skill but that all people overestimate their skill (better-than-average effect).
This is still very much compatible with my claim that unskilled people profit from being reminded (repeatedly, not just in the exam at the end of the semester) that they know less than they think.
I will avoid conflating this with the Dunning-Kruger effect in the future (Thanks!).
An recent study found that medical students' estimate of their own intelligence gets lower right after taking an IQ test (confirming the better-than-average effect). But one week later, their self-estimated intelligence returns back to their pre-test levels. To me this suggests that students (and all others) will overestimate their abilities - and invest less time in learning - if they are not constantly given feedback.
This, in general, seems like a great thing. The goal of a university should be to produce premium students, and nothing's better than a trial by fire.
We actually had this exact thing at my university. One sophomore level weed out class was a "self paced" electrical engineering class. It was called self paced because you were given a textbook and were free to work through it at your own pace. But to finish the class by the end of the semester you had to average 2 chapters completed per week, and completing a chapter not only included finishing a problem set and taking a test which you had to score 90%+ on (and were required to finish another problem set and retake it otherwise), but on occasion also demoing some skill in the lab.
It was brutal, but one of the most educational classes I've ever taken - and obviously not just because of what I learned about electrical engineering. Of course it seems modern universities have just become profit-driven degree treadmills. Weeding out students? That's reducing profit! And yeah looking back at my uni's page it seems this class is no longer self paced. Lol. And that's at a top 10 school. The enshittification of education.
Part of the issue is with the purpose as you describe it. Sure, at top 10 schools, a trial by fire would result in much needed “growing up” as the gifted but undisciplined (speaking for myself and many users of this site) students find their way to more durable motivations. But at the vast majority of schools, a trial by fire would end with a lot of students burned.
Perhaps that begs the question, if those kids can’t handle self-directed education, why are we putting them there in the first place, but that’s definitely a grey area, and there are hundreds of thousands of students who are smart enough to do well in higher education and skilled work, but weren’t disciplined enough to handle what you’re describing as freshmen.
Many employers pay a premium for predictably elite cadres of students. The schools want to try to pass off mediocre graduates as having some of the elite special sauce even though only a small number of students have what it takes. We know exactly what to do to produce elite cadres by aggressive sorting. But the incentives created by the federal government encourage the institutions to extrude mediocre students like a chicken nugget machine produces processed meat product. Every hot student-nugget is worth a tens of thousands of dollars a year in freshly printed loan money directed towards administrators and rent on dorms and apartments irrespective of quality; so the incentive is to stuff the students with filler.
Weeding out as I've seen it is a class that requires a certain level of commitment and ability to either plan your work or tough it out that a high school just can't really prepare anyone for. So in a way the student isn't a "weed" but their motivation or maturity might be and they're free to retake the class once they know that university will require them to put in more work than high school.
If they can't put in the work then completing a thesis and graduating is going to be very hard and that happens the last year of uni so better to set the expectations early with a "weed out" class.
Ideally it's not weeding out but distributing into education paths which fit every student.
From my experience studying electrical and computer engineering, I definitely prefer that they chose to put hard electrical engineering courses in the first semesters because I knew immediately not to focus on them because I didn't like them.
I think the problem is that no teacher has the time to babysit a student. If they just don't care about their education or can't put the time in, they shouldn't be wasting their time and money.
Some students also just don't have the aptitude for an Engineering or Computer Science degree. It's better for everyone if this is figured out early. I know plenty of people that dropped out of a Computer Science degree because they hated it or thought it would be a great way to make money and were in over their head.
We had classes that were for 'weeding out' students in Computer Science. They involved calculus because if you couldn't pass this class, you wouldn't be able to handle the 5 or so classes after this class that required it.
I studied computer science and have been working as a programmer for about 20 years. The downside is that you're filtering a lot of people who would actually potentially be great programmers but are for whatever reason not good at calculus.
Either the unfit and uninterested get weeded out at the education stage or they get weeded out by no employer being willing to hire them; the former seems kinder than the latter.
my kid attends a school in which they’ve given up on lectures. each “class” is basically a proctored mini self learning test from a booklet that’s a mix of content and exercises to work through individually. a teacher is around to answer questions and grade the booklets.
many kids fail to make the transition from spoon-feeding to self-learning, but those who do then begin to realize that they can go as fast as they are able and need not follow the herd. they also develop a strong sense of whether they’ve understood each booklet or not. it leads to a competition for learning fast AND well because there are also traditional proctored checkpoint exams from time to time plus kids do the ordinary standardized tests to calibrate.
i feel it’s an excellent system that prioritizes learning over conformity though it is obviously not a candidate for mass adoption because many kids wash out after making no progress for a while.
Dealing with untreated ADHD through college, "do the ungraded homework and spend time with the TAs" was way more valuable than "go to class". lectures for me were borderline useless. Fortunately this was something that I figured out on high school.
On the class topic, I suspect that attendance was more impactful for students pre-internet as the alternative was to wade through the library piecing together material.
With lecture notes/slides available online, well prepared books and study forums readily available - in-person attendance can feel archaic.
We may be experiencing a similar dynamic in education with AI. In a world where we can create individualized curriculum’s for each student encompassing the entire tree of knowledge - Perhaps it’s time to rethink how we educate students rather than push them into lecture halls designed for the Middle Ages.
People thrive under regularity, and young people (especially) tend not to understand that. Similarly, being able to focus on a single thing is a kind of super-power, while multi-tasking generally hurts performance on tasks.
Going to class (and paying attention) means that you've got a regular period of focus on the class topic. That combination of regularity and focus translates into long-term learning and better performance.
personally, id resent paying thousands of dollars a year to be given textbook sums to complete... i could have downloaded that myself, wheres the actual value these educators bring?
This would mean moving to 100% weighted exams, and there's good reasons why there has been a general trend away from that over recent decades. For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others, independent of their preparedness and knowledge of the material.
Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions.
> Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions.
This is thing.
If this choice is between:
1. A gameable system that will be gamed by most students.
2. An ungameable system that will unfairly punish those bad under pressure and time constraints.
There isn't really a choice at all.
One option would be a school-provided proctoring system, allowing teachers to outsource the actual test-taking times. It could be done outside of class time, at the student's convenience, and they could have 3-4 hours if they chose.
"Can they do this under pressure?" might in fact be a good question to test for and train for. A lot of real-life activity after graduation will involve some pressure.
But we could do what I'll call a "monastic exam".
You've got a week, not an hour, but it's in a little monastery and you don't have your phone or other unapproved tools.
One of my freshman professors accidentally did nearly that. The final exam was 3 hours. This was normal at my school although many students finish in 1-2 house. After realizing nobody was close to finishing after 2 hours and he had greatly underestimated the difficulty, he expanded the time limit to 6 hours!
I will say it's not practical to have exams that long. In this case, the dorm required me to move out immediately after the exam and my parents were waiting to pick me up, so I decided to leave after 4 hours to avoid unnecessary panic or having to drive overnight. In hindsight, the professor probably would have let me make a phone call, but that didn't occur to me at the time.
Fair point, but the solution I propose would only apply to those parts of the assessment involving solo writing assignments -- so excluding class participation, group assignments, etc. (Which is not to say that students can't use AI to cheat on these, but they have other solutions.)
I mean, the real answer is that the other students were cheating on their assignments. It's that simple. We keep making up excuses for all of this shit. Some people don't "test well". Turns out those people don't know shit.
Let's get real here. I know why these nonsensical memes keep propagating but dear god. People will just believe anything these days, including that gas stoves cause asthma or whatever other bullshit is being peddled.
This isn't true. I'm one of those people who tested remarkably well, and back in college would do fine on exams despite frantically copying all of my own (non-comp Sci) assignments. Better than my peers who knew more and helped me cram. Test anxiety is real.
I was a great test taker, I used to make a sort of game out finishing tests in half the time as almost everybody else and acing it at the same time. I also never crammed, never attended pre-test study groups, and sometimes made a show of drinking beers right before the test just to annoy the people cramming in the last minute.
But I'm not particularly brilliant, in fact I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I have undiagnosed ADHD. My test taking performance trick, which I freely told everybody to their annoyance, was very simple. I knew the material! Read the assigned texts, do the optional homework, pay attention in class. If you know the material you don't have to try to cram it into your brain in the last half hour before the test. If you know the material you don't have to try to reason it out from first principles during the test. You just go in, fill out the easy answers straight away, go back and do a second pass for the tricky questions, and that's it. If you have to sit there wracking your brain for 30 minutes on a single problem it's because you already fucked up with how you approached the course weeks ago.
Again, I'm not special for this. There were a handful of other students who were as fast as me. We'd sit in the hall waiting for our friends, look at each other and say "you knew all this stuff too, huh?""yeah of course"
It is definitely not the case that if student A performs better on a timed high-stakes test than student B, that means A must have worked harder / prepared better / know the material better / etc. than B. Some people are very skilled at bullshitting their way through stupid school tests, and others are not. Very few school tests are well enough designed that they can effectively measure the intended target of how well someone understands the topic, content, and course-specific skills which are being intentionally trained in the course.
Bullshitting though tests is a learnable / trainable skill, but schools generally do not teach it very coherently or well and most students do not deliberately practice it. It generally doesn't have that much to do with the content or other skills intentionally taught by any particular course or by schools in general (there's decent overlap with the skills involved in competitive debate and extemporaneous speech, which some students participate in as an extracurricular activity). Rating students on how good they are at bullshitting their way through exams is sadly a significant part of the way our education system is focused and organized, but in my opinion it is not a valuable or particularly valid approach. There are certain professional contexts/tasks where this kind of skill is useful, but developing it per se shouldn't be the focus of the education system.
Sometimes this and related skills are summarized as "intelligence" ("oh she aced the test without studying, she must just be really smart", etc.), but in my opinion it's quite a misleading use of the word.
This is an example of a very limited social darwinism. Basically the idea is to remove a lot of enforcement and rules in some activity, or maybe even all, and then "free market" will regulate itself, with "deserving" students managing to manage themselves, and "undeserving" ones lets behind.
But the point of the university is not only teach English grammar and math operations, but also to work in teams, manage yourself, etc. The social stuff. And I suspect a significant number of students benefit from it. And I also suspect that by doing this at scale, the whole society benefits on average.
Removing all control and only checking the knowledge during the exam would lead to a lot of students never catching up. It is likely that it will also lead to the top students being more and more lax and eventually also falling behind.
The whole idea hinges on the base motivation - why do we need primary/secondary etc. education at all? To produce a dozen elite self motivated geniuses per year per country? Then your proposal would work perfectly. Or maybe motivation is different?..
> the assignments could simply be worth 0% [..] that the proctored, for-credit exams would demand that they write similar essays.
We run university programs at my company, and arrived at this bit of insight as well. That said, some of your points are incorrect or incomplete:
- You can't build systems assuming responsible individuals. These systems are guaranteed to fail. Instead, assume individuals are mould-able, and build a system which nurtures discipline towards goals. This works.
- There are still issues with cheating, but it's more of an older way of thinking, that we developed methods to reset.
- Advanced students need to be given more challenging assignments - quantum of assignments should be the same no matter the capability of students. This solution was unworkable until GenAI came about.
Looked from a pure individual skill-building perspective your ideas are alluring, but if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%), then one understands why physical cohort-led education system can work.
Happy to chat with anyone who'd like to delve deeper on this.
if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%)
As someone with a 96+% 'failure' rate on Udemy/Coursera I honestly don't see the relevance of this statistic. Most people going to University are there primarily because they want/need the degree. That piece of paper is really valuable, perhaps even more so than the knowledge gained. The piece of 'paper' offered by Coursera/Udemy etc. has basically zero value, so the people taking those courses are doing it almost exclusively for the knowledge they offer. Once you've learned what you wanted to learn from the course there is very little incentive to go the extra mile and go for the 'completion'.
The piece of paper is valuable because it represents a sustained effort of learning over an extended period of time.
I understand how from an individual's pov what you said makes sense. Similarly I hope you understand why from the system's perspective: it's the effort that's mandated and not just the proficiency.
Employers and others (higher education orgs, etc) care a lot about sustained effort, alongside proficiency. Only proficiency-focused systems (like Udemy/Coursera/Youtube) are not respected as credentials, since they do not showcase this.
I give university courses in United States. Many of us have certainly down-weighted homework substantially.
However, when some colleagues tried homework as 0% for introductory courses, most students omitted the homework, then failed the exams. Modern students seem to require explicit incentive to work, otherwise the usual: scrolling upon flat screen devices, hedonism, and so forth.
In this case, who has failed: the student, or the professor?
In my experience (about 2 decades ago) in a group of 20-30 students only 2 or 3 are able and willing to do homework. Most students just find someone else and copy from them. The real learning happens when preparing for a big exam.
And to pass an exam students have to prepare for the exam. Homework will only help there if it is similar to the exam.
One time I had to evaluate a written exam where the professor had set up a trap. There was a question that looked like a standard question from homework, but if you used the standard-techniques from the course your calculations didn't work - it was a nasty special case. Most people that started with that question just burned 30 minutes without getting anywhere... a lot of students failed, but at least they learned something about life...
And Oral exams are different. Giving a quick well prepared answer and being able to solve difficult tasks over a few days are completely different skills. Students there prepare for the professor. There are transcripts of previous oral exams. And professors change over the years - the final tough question of an excellent student will a few years later become a starting question. People that didn't know that game and didn't have access to any transcripts were in serious trouble... None of the Homework would have helped in the oral exam.
"In my experience (about 2 decades ago) in a group of 20-30 students only 2 or 3 are able and willing to do homework. Most students just find someone else and copy from them. The real learning happens when preparing for a big exam.
And to pass an exam students have to prepare for the exam. Homework will only help there if it is similar to the exam."
That's not learning really. I can confidently say that because I was the one who unfortunately regressed to this during the uni, and the same story with my peers. One simply can't prepare to the multiple exams sufficiently in a few weeks time (or less). So the only path left is hysterical rote memorization of as much material as possible to squeeze in at a passing grade, and then immediately forget all of the materials in a few months time. Burst of "learning" twice a year for a short time doesn't translate into real learning.
And that's for some simple courses during first few years. Specialist courses later in the program sometimes are impossible to rush "learn". When I tried to pull this off for Probability Theory course, I've failed spectacularly to get even lowest passing mark at first try. And others failed the same way.
Rushing is not good. Some People with good results started early and spent a lot of time reading transcripts of oral exams - and copied homework from other people. Some of them are professors now.
If good results are important, it's most important to know what happens in the exam - and adapt professionally. Learning is fun. I myself always did a lot of homework. But I wish I had been more professional - constant challenges are fun, but most of it is not very time-efficient.
This exactly how one of my English professors structured his class. The students would have to do the research beforehand and come in on test day with their works cited page completed. The actual paper would be written by hand during class time. You were only allowed the blank green book and a couple of pages of notes with direct quotes to incorporate into your paper.
He wasn’t worried about llms, they were not around, but plagiarism. It worked well.
That's pretty much how I teach my programming classes. Assignments are worth zero, or sometimes very little.
The difference I notice with AI is that the bell curve is nearly inverted. You have the good students, who use AI to support their learning. You have the students who let AI do their assignments, and then fail miserably on the exam. And there is hardly anyone left in the middle.
In my (limited) experience, programming classes, especially intro level, often end up with a binomial-ish distribution anyway. I was casually assisting some research on why this is when I was helping teach labs and such so was interested. I'm sure more research happened after I wasn't doing that any more, but I remember the best way of removing this at the time was catchup classes.
A lot of intro programming builds directly on previous lessons, much more so than, e.g., maths. If you missed how variables work (off sick, just didn't get it, whatever), you're still stuck when it comes to functions and anything else following and then you're going to fail - it was quite predictable. We studied other university courses and nothing came close to the pattern we were seeing, except "computing for chemistry" or something, which was basically the same sort of course just in a different department.
So we added explicit catch-up classes a few days after a topic was covered so if you missed it, you could get quite personal help on getting back up to speed. This really shifted the distribution to the right, then the people who failed were either those who just didn't care, or those under more extreme circumstances where this couldn't help (or those who just could not learn programming for love nor money but that was rare ime.)
It used to be like that, and I'm old enough to remember why they changed: not every student handles exam stress well. And it has nothing to do with their competency in that subject matter.
For example, in the UK, it was shown that biasing course results towards exam marks caused woman to perform worse than men. But when results included assignments, women generally performed better.
This is obviously a generalisation but it is one of the reasons why so many courses now take assignments into account for their final grade.
In my undergrad, a few decades ago, it was typically the case that assignments and exams both were a part of your final score. Often it was something like 40% exam/60% assignments, but this could change.
However what you mention about different people being better in different circumstances reminds of what our maths courses typically did, it was called "plussage" IIRC. Basically, the scores were calculated, and you got the best score from a 40% exam/60% assignment weighting or a 60%/40% (or something, the exact values are lost to time.) So if you were bad at exams but had done the work through the semester, you got a boost. Or if you were bad at deadlines but had still studied, you weren't (too) penalised.
- People need to learn how to write. The quality of student writing was one of the biggest criticisms of students when I was in university, and that was 30 years ago. Writing will only improve with practice and someone to evaluate it. Very few people will be able to learn how to write properly by reading about it, and even fewer people will even realize that you can learn how to write by reading the work of other people (which is important for learning about style in a particular field). For most students, even well meaning ones, no grade means no work done.
- A certain segment of the student population will find ways to cheat anyhow. All you have done is raised the bar so that, hopefully, fewer people will cheat. Quite frankly, I don't know how helpful that is if the "top" of the class moves on since the top of the class tends to be defined by their GPA.
- Test anxiety is a real thing. Different people go to school for different reasons, not all of which lead to high pressure careers. Do we really want to limit who can effectively access an education because of that?
There is no easy solution to this problem. Likely the best solution would be to remove traditional assignments and exams from the loop altogether and having students work directly with their instructors. Yet this has it's own set of problems (it assumes both parties are honest, it is difficult to ensure consistency in the delivery of curriculum, etc.).
It's impossible to design a system which is perfect for everyone. People with attention disorders might feel the opposite and will do better with the pressure of a test.
I hated all my proctored essays for the simple reason there's no ability to research things so it feels like the only arguments you can present are rhetorical or using made up statistics.
I had to do these for a couple college classes (The original OpenAI GPTs were just released around when I graduated, I remember reading about them and then avoiding pytorch because the wheels were a pain to build.)
You have to get a special blue book with a couple blank pages and then write an essay with the prompt that's given at exam time. Then you turn in the book at the end of the exam. I think it's a great idea and was surprised more classes didn't work that way but I guess it's like you say: grading written assignments like this is a lot of work.
This is a very sensible proposal, however it falls flat when considering that many students who have paid for a university "education" feel entitled to a degree at the end of it, regardless of how much effort they've put in and whether they have learned enough skills to justify one.
writing classs should probably be transformed into prompting class lol. Train students to prompt with clarity and be able to prompt AI to write high quality essays
And then have AI summarize those high quality essays for grading! It's like the inverse of compression!
In all seriousness, I don't see the value in this at all. Why would I want to know a statistically likely essay? Wouldn't I rather know what the student thinks?
> There are valid reasons why college students in particular might prefer that AI do their writing for them: most students are overcommitted;
Tangentially: I've helped out some college students with mentoring and advice from time to time. One common theme I've noticed is that their class load virtually doesn't matter. They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with.
We all like to imagine the poor, overburdened college student working 2 jobs and attending classes to make ends meet when reading statements like that. But to be completely honest, the students like that usually have their time management on point. The hardest ones to coach were the students who had no real responsibilities outside of classes, yet who found their free time slipping through their fingers no matter what they did.
Among all of the other problems with easy AI cheating, I wonder how much the availability of these tools will encourage even more procrastination. Feeling like you always have the fallback option of having ChatGPT write the homework for you leaves the door open to procrastinating even longer
> I asked my students to complete a baseline survey registering their agreement with several statements, including “It is unethical to use a calculator in a math class”
Unless there was more to this survey, this wording seems misleading. In a college-level math class, using a calculator is a common expectation depending on the type of class and the problem. The students would probably think of their TI-89, not a magical AI calculator that could solve every freeform problem for them.
I've gone back to university as an adult to study econometrics, already with a software background.
It has been quite an adjustment, the hardest part isn't really the content, there have just been assessment tasks that are more demanding in time than cognition. I think a big part has been these are introductory subjects.
You have much less agency over your schedule outside university itself than you would have when you're working as well, which has been a massive PITA having previously worked as a software engineer for quite a while. As an institution it just doesn't respect peoples time, which is fine when you're much younger and you're just coming out of school (another institution that doesn't care for your time outside of it).
I think my problems have been compounded by the fact this is a undergraduate degree not a masters. There was only a masters for applied Econ in my area (which is much less data and math focused than econometrics), I've had this conversation 100 times, not looking to repeat that, trust me the moment I see an option to change to a masters in my area of interest in the city I live in, I would jump at it. But my choice to go back to uni to some extent is an as much an act of consumption as it is getting a piece of paper to saying "you can trust this man with econ".
Anyways in these first year subjects, you'll have assessment tasks like "make a recording of you demonstrating your understanding of <basic function in excel>, explain the value of <basic function in excel>". They are easy subjects but they are also really time consuming so to some extent it feels degrading. I would take steps to skip the subject based on my prior experience but the focus of these subjects isn't even Excel, its just thrown in there because they anticipate you have little experience with these things and it'll be useful in later subjects when it becomes assumed knowledge.
> They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with
Despite how much I wish it weren't, this is exactly me. I seem to be able to only work under pressure, so as I got later into my degree I would start my work later and later, until it was standard that I'd start at 4am on the day it was due. A terrible way to function or to learn
the fact is that this is a terrible feedback loop, because every time you started late, but manage to finish on time, it is reinforcing the idea that you're "good" and can manage it even if you start late! This self-reinforcing condition makes you later next time, but because of your capability, you still make it on time.
But at some point, you either stop procrastinating as you find the absolute limit, or fail outright (which is why survivorship bias exists if you look at the student body and see the amount of procrastination).
The good part of it is that you learn to ... actually be faster. Because inverse side is that you start well in advance and then slowly use all the available time for the thing you are doing. Essentially, getting the same result, but in exchange of massive amount of time.
Yes you're right, I didn't have the self-insight to understand or accept this until a decade after I graduated. It's still surprising to me that it's so obvious to outsiders but was so unclear to me.
>They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with
IMO you’re observing Parkinson’s law, “work expands to fill the allotted time”. The students who take a million classes look like they have time management in check, and I’m sure some do, but they also are benefiting from the inverse of Parkinson’s law — if they can _only_ allot X hours a week to a task, they’re going to make the most of those X hours. This practically holds regardless of the student’s time management skills. I should know, I have horrible time management, and only succeed by overcommitting and rising to the challenge.
> One common theme I've noticed is that their class load virtually doesn't matter. They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with.
12 credits is normally a minimum. That's roughly 12 hours a week in classroom, give or take. You need 3x that number of hours out of the classroom--that's 36 hours.
So, you're at 48 hours of academic work every single week. A 15 credit load means a 60 hour week.
Most people working jobs would start to complain about burnout at 50+ hours per week for 4 years running. They would almost certainly complain at 60 hours per week.
Most 3 credit hour classes are really 2.5 hours. And almost no one spends 36 hours hours outside of class on a 12 credit schedule unless they messed up and signed up for 4 difficult classes in the same semester. You definitely aren’t spending that much time outside of class all semester long.
You also have to consider that a semester is 16 weeks. The first week or 2 of each semester is very light.
So we’re talking 30/52 weeks a year for most people.
For most people, you’ll never have that much free time again in your life.
College feels like a lot of work because you aren’t good at time management yet. And you remember the last few weeks of each semester where you are actually extremely busy.
> The first week or 2 of each semester is very light.
Please tell that to the undergrad STEM professors, please. Almost all of mine had an assignment first class that was due by the third class.
Freshman engineering is generally Calc I, Physics I, Chem I, and English Composition/Writing and often some random engineering/computer thing. I assure you that schedule sucks even harder that it looks like it sucks, and it gets more time consuming as the years progress.
While there were lots of Party Hardy(tm) types in the College of Arts, the ones I knew who were taking their degrees seriously were working every bit as hard as the STEM folks. Possibly, they were working harder as they needed a lot more extracurricular work and achievement since what they were doing didn't have nice, clean objective measures like STEM does. They spent a lot of time being unpaid labor at functions and networking like crazy.
By contrast, no matter how many hours they worked me at my summer internship, it simply never compared to the grind at school.
I have a CS degree. My wife has an engineering degree and then went to medschool. Both of us had 4.0s.
We both agree that we had far more time in undergrad than at anytime since.
We frequently had small assignments the first week, but they were universally not worth much because many people aren’t even in the class yet since drop/add ran through the whole first week. They were also not very much work.
The point is there is no way you were spending 12-16 hours per class the first week.
I never spent that much time in Physics I, Calculus I or any English Class. The only classes I spent that much time on or more were higher level project based CS classes.
And even then I wasn’t spending that much time on them till closer to midway through the semester.
Then you get nearly the whole month of December off—Spring Break, Thanksgiving, and Summer.
No one expects anything from you at a summer internship. Companies don’t expect anything from experienced employees in the first couple months. Harder than a summer internship doesn’t say much.
On top of that you’ll never have fewer responsibilities than when you were at school.
It just seems like you had no free time because it’s the time in your life when you haven’t learned time management yet, and you remember the last few weeks leading up to final exams and semester project due dates.
You are so far removed from the ability of the average student that your personal observations about college simply don't generalize.
> I never spent that much time in Physics I, Calculus I or any English Class.
Do you understand just how far out of the norm that is?
Not everybody is coming from elite high schools and can blow through a college 101 class. The vast majority of engineers fight through all three of those--especially an English composition class. I had friends who did poorly in Calc I, dropped it but stayed in the class just so they plowed through it next semester. These aren't people "fooling around" with bad "time management". They were bog standard state school students who needed to get through, get out, and start making money. They were first college generation who didn't have rich parents backing them. They were motivated and got out in 4 years--something that most college students regard as difficult.
> No one expects anything from you at a summer internship.
Seriously? As a summer intern I always had deliverables. When I became a manager instead, we always had deliverables for co-ops and interns.
I didn’t go to an elite high school or college (my wife did though) my high school was awful. My parents got divorced my junior year and we were on food stamps after that. I went to a state school. And not even a flagship state school.
I dropped out the first time—2 years into a history degree—because I was working full time.
Eventually I moved home, and started over with CS. Despite CS being a lot harder, I had plenty of free time to work on a startup, build side projects, and play video games.
The reason was because a few years of experience made me much better at time management and prioritization.
I’m not saying you or anyone else was bad at time management as an insult. It’s just that college the time in your adult life when you have the absolute least experience at time management, so most people are very bad at it.
But also when you average it over the whole semester, none of my friends, even the ones who were bad at their classes spent 3 hours per credit hour outside of class. The ones who were bad at it tended to just skate by with Cs.
> As a summer intern I always had deliverables.
No one cares about those deliverables though. They aren’t trusting summer interns to do anything that really needs to get done.
Imo those numbers are pretty inflated unless you’re taking a full load of the hardest classes offered. Usually you pair some GE requirements or electives with heavier material. I really don’t want do some sort of humble brag here, so I’ll just say that if I followed your math it would come out to like 90+ hours. I promise, I was not that diligent.
Different tools in different years as expectations have changed. The TI-89 is incredibly powerful, but has to give way to MATLAB and Wolfram Alpha. It used to be productive to “google” your problems. Going further, there’s now LLMs writing python code to do calculations. Hard to say what’s next, but I’m sure what is considered ethically questionable today will be acceptable and the new thing will be the new questionable tool.
To be clear; there are plenty of contexts where having a TI-89 is 100% unambiguously cheating. There are even more places where MATLAB and Wolfram Alpha are cheating.
A times table test like we all took in grade school. A test applying Newton's method. Any test where the calculator can do the work instead of you, and a TI-89 can do quite a bit of work.
And more trivially/procedurally, the numerous tests I had to take in high school and university which explicitly said "no graphing calculators" (and the occasional test that said "no calculators" outright).
I was thinking of exams rather than day to day learning of basics, seeing tests as teaching rather than assessing. Point being you can't cheat at learning.
The calculator can't fake that you understand e.g. how to differentiate. The working is the bulk of available exam marks but the calculator only gives answers.
The working is the bulk of available exam marks but the calculator only gives answers
Knowing what the answer is supposed to be makes it much easier to reverse engineer the workings, and it lets you double check that your workings are correct. Also many of the more advanced graphing calculators (don't know the TI-89 specifically) have build in CAS systems and can do symbolic differentiation and as such help with showing your workings as well.
Plus the fact that these calculators let you store arbitrary data, so you can have your entire textbook stored in memory if you wanted.
I want to say something like "who learns advanced calculator functions solo but not the taught subject?" but of course shortcuts-by-rote spread like lice. I suppose that's the thrust of the problem with AI in schools
From memory it (and the 83/84) was banned from all math and physics exams during first year or two of our uni. There was a list of approved less powerful models. Nothing that could store programs.
All forms/structures in society that think that a TI-89 is cheating deserve to have as many people as possible use TI-89 and similar CAS's.
Ludditism is the human death drive externalized for the modern age. Reject it in all of its incarnations.
There's objectively no value with learning how to perform calculations by hand that CAS's can perform better automatically.
We have well over the number of human beings on earth amounts of calculator capable calculating devices. I will not "be in a situation where I don't have a calculator".
Time spent not teaching folks how to use computational aids of math and teaching them to do it the "hard way" is time robbed from them.
Those who invent systems which subvert or short circuit the attempts to enslave individuals into doing hard work for hard works sake are ontologically good. Those who try to defend work for works sake are ontologically evil and I hope that they reincarnate into a durian fruit in the next life.
> I will not "be in a situation where I don't have a calculator". [...] Those who invent systems which subvert or short circuit the attempts to enslave individuals into doing hard work for hard works sake are ontologically good. Those who try to defend work for works sake are ontologically evil and I hope that they reincarnate into a durian fruit in the next life.
By that logic, you must also permit students another extremely well-established labor-saving technique: Hiring someone else do the homework/exams on their behalf!
After all, for students from certain families, forcing them to use the calculator personally would likewise be "robbing time from them", denying them valuable experience honing their skills in managing and subcontracting. They'll never be in a situation where they don't have a calc^H^H^H^H lackey.
I trust we can agree that (A) permitting outsourcing is absurd, (B) that cheating is not "ontologically good" even when reduces the total human labor, and (C) prohibiting the practice should not put a teacher into a state of stinky-fruit damnation.
I submit that we do care about how students do it and which skills they use, even if we disagree on what those are. It is not as simple as saying that good education means spurring them to supply Valid Answers By Any Contemporary Efficient Means.
You take these classes in order to internalize the intuition for the subject. That's the point of the class. Getting the right answers is only important insofar as it serves that goal.
Your attitude makes sense in engineering but not in a math class for example.
We were not permitted to use a TI-89 in math courses since we were expected to learn the underlying concepts, which is much more than learning how to use a tool.
The reasoning was similar in physics. The instructors couldn't care less whether we used the CAS functionality of the TI-89 because that wasn't a part of their curriculum, but they were concerned about students downloading solver programs. (Most of the instructors would agree that creating our own programs to solve problems would be a valuable learning tool, but they had no way to determine whether we created those programs or someone else.)
Academic courses tend to be biased towards laying the foundations so that we can build upon our own knowledge. There are other types of courses that are purely concerned about applications and the use of tools.
> There's objectively no value with learning how to perform calculations by hand that CAS's can perform better automatically.
You're not learning how to perform calculations in most calculus courses. Perhaps not even most algebra courses.
A given expression can be simplified/factored in multiple ways. That TI-89 is going to do it only one way. When working with a typical physics/engineering problem, the way you decide to arrange the terms can help tremendously in understanding the physics of the situation.
I hear this take only from people who've not gone ahead and done advanced (graduate) level work.
Frankly, I'm quite glad to be able to do basic arithmetic in my head -- having to pick up a calculator every time I need to multiply two numbers would burn through far more time over the course of my life than what I spent in Kindergarten (or whenever) learning to do it myself.
All you want is for people to be better slaves for your capitalist machine. Never learning how to do things themselves: only consuming, buying what could otherwise have been achieved by the simple (but non-GDP-increasing) exercise of their own mind. Your rhetoric betrays your own class.
Try reading more than one leftist book: Fischer is great, but he doesn't try to talk praxis. So I'm talking about pragmatics here: just pretending that "we can abolish work by automating it" is pure ideology, totally ignorant of the centuries of historical examples to the contrary. Any time you get back will immediately be seized. What matters are your personal capabilities, what the working class is capable of doing with their own hands. You advocate waiting on the bourgeoisie to hand over control (what, out of good will?), but Fischer could tell you that only by seizing power for themselves can the working class ever become free.
> Any time you get back will immediately be seized.
I imagine some guy several thousand years ago: "Once we finish teaching this animal to pull the plough for us, descendants of The Tribe Between The Two Rivers shall have lives of pure leisure!"
I feel like you're glossing over the contexts of "acceptable" and "questionable".
The tool itself is not questionable or acceptable, it becomes questionable or acceptable depending on the usage. A pencil and paper can be questionable if the test is designed and expected to be completed without it.
You can design tests where an LLM spitting out python is an expected tool, but what are you testing for then? I doubt there are classes that teach whatever that test would be for yet.
I think this is covered in Micheal Easter’s notion that as societies become more comfortable, our brains lower the threshold of what constitutes a “problem” in our lives. We’re wired not only to be great at problem solving but also discovering new ones. Think this is based on prevalence theory related research in psychology.
Being one of those students and with a career under my belt of process analysis and coaching, I have an interesting observation: I harness free time as an explicit part of my writing process, rather than something that interferes with it.
I write at about 1200 words per day and I considered each fo the major multi-week assignments in my entry-level English courses to be worth no more than one day of my time apiece. For the finals, I gave them two days apiece, because I wanted an extra day to define the scaffolding for my argument.
My mother indicates that this is how she went through college too; very occasionally, a serious paper would require more effort than this, but for the most part it was “load assignment into brain, study assignment mentally until T-2d, write assignment, submit”. If several essays are due, then they have to be staged at various days numbered T-2d through T-5d for example — and it’s really important to not depend on T-1d existing at all due to courseware/internet/power outages.
I could technically write a worse essay the day it was assigned, but ultimately, I’m turning in A-tier work by this method. The hardest lesson was that I have to try not to wait until T-1d, because there’s a lot of risk encoded in that and it outweighs the value derived from having an extra day to think about it while I do other things.
But it wasn’t about “free time slipping away” — it’s just that I’m writing crap throwaway work that doesn’t matter after it’s done, and so I can barely motivate to care relative to literally anything else in my life that matters. Thus the T-2d compromise: I’m not about to give them precedence over literally anything, but I will concede that I do need to do so one day early, however boring it feels, because I’d rather have a crap day at T-2d than the same crap day at T-1d with the unproductive anxiety of risking a class-retake if my internet drops out.
Notably, when I actually genuinely care about what I’m writing, I’ll spend weeks researching sources and studying arguments and selecting quotes and then assembling it all over a couple days into a work of art — but assembly day is still always as late as possible in the time window assigned, because by then I’m most able to think and write about it efficiently and with a minimum of frustration. Not a zero of frustration, that is — I am a grouchy writer — but I’m healthy-grouchy on T-2d and bitter-grouchy on T-1d, so I do make the effort to put in my writing that day early now.
So: for your coaching efforts, try working with students to construct a working calendar that has non-writing activities in the leadup and then writing activities at the end. ie assuming a 7-day window,
T-7d: Assignment given: Read the assignment. (Seems obvious; is not obvious!)
T-6d: Think about your argument during your free time, while playing games or out at coffee or whatever.
T-5d: Try to construct a very halfass outline on a piece of paper. One sentence per argument you’d like to make, draw arrows to rearrange them. Not complete sentences, not punctuated, doesn’t have any structure at all. Point is that trying will help brain coalesce.
T-4d: Research references for fun. End up with far too many. Start highlighting quotes to yourself using highlighter or digital tools. If you’re going to experiment with a new tool, get it working and productive in 2 hours or discard it and do something shittier.
T-3d: Bind quotes to your argument phrases from that halfass outline. This may force reorg of outline; cool. Compile Works Cited from whatever you end up using so that you don’t have to fuck around with it tomorrow.
T-2d: Write paper, referring to outline / phrases handwritten note. Do one paragraph at a time. Plan to spend your entire day on this with 1 hour away from desk handling bio/sanity needs for every 2 hours at desk. Enforce that upon yourself.
T-1d: Finish whatever writing you didn’t feel like you were prepared to write on T-2d. Ideally try to do this earlier in the day than later, since that every hour you let this slip towards midnight l measurably increases your chances of a life outage causing you to fail the class.
The point of this schedule is to bake in the daydreaming / slow cooker aspect of the creative process but to keep it on the rails. I play video games extensively when I’m thinking about a paper because I can feed my literary brain the assignment to simmer and then go occupy my reflex brain with the game. I usually end up having to use some T-1d time but I’m getting better at managing my life’s dependencies ie. Food and Water and Sleep so that I’m more reliably at T-2d completion :)
Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial
Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes. Then only four function calculators, then graphing calculators. But still today, programmable calculators are prohibited in many academic contexts.
The point that you're (and everyone is) glossing over here is relative positions on the skill gradient.
A first grader probably would be prohibited from using any kind of calculator on arithmetic tests, 4-fn or not. But 8th graders are usually permitted scientific (non-programmable) calculators.
As you go up in grade level, you "get access to" calculators capable of functionality at the level below you. Because the point is that when we're educating students we want them to actually learn the subject matter, but once we've deemed them to have understood it and we have them move onto the next goal, we give them the tools to make that prior goal easier. We lessen the burden of the little mechanical concepts they already know so that they have an easier time becoming familiar with the next more advanced concepts.
AI systems are so much more advanced than what's capable on a TI programmable calculator. It's hard to draw clean boundaries around the tiers and enforce them by telling the model "help the user with tasks of tier 1-4 but not 5+". That's the issue, that it's really infeasible to strictly use them strictly as learning tools. You can almost do it with a lot of self-discipline and self-reflection to analyze your own workflow, but it's not generalizable across domains.
I mentioned the continued ban on programmable calculators in many academic contexts. Those contexts still include some portions of undergraduate education. This is fifty years after the introduction of programmable calculators.
Realistically, the answers the students gave the teacher were probably motivated by the practical benefits that come with giving teachers the answers they want to hear…bullshit questions are likely to produce bullshit answers. It’s not like first year college students haven’t had twelve years of academic standards moralizing talked at them.
> Realistically, the answers the students gave the teacher were probably motivated by the practical benefits that come with giving teachers the answers they want to hear…bullshit questions are likely to produce bullshit answers.
Like I said to you in another comment, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the article.
At least one of the polls was anonymous, too. There were no punishments in the class for using AI, in fact at least a couple of the students later revealed they had been using AI for everything.
This wasn't a "bullshit inducing poll", it was an experiment in perception vs reality, and how they modified those perceptions after the experiment had run its course.
It’s easy to do at the syntactic level by controlling the sampling. For example, it’s easy and common to restrict output to be valid JSON but just not allowing any tokens that would make it not valid JSON.
But reliably restricting output at the semantic level is very much an open problem.
>>> imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable
It didn't.
I was in math class when calculators were introduced. At least for high school level and beyond, the curricula were designed to make problems solvable without calculators, and they weren't of much use. This was still the case when I taught an undergrad college math class in 1997. Graphing calculators were allowed, and the kids who tried to use them just screwed themselves up.
I would have gladly changed the curriculum to use calculators and computers from the very beginning. As tools, and not just to administer the same old exercises and quizzes. Give them Jupyter Notebook. Math education has never been a success story.
Education faces a dilemma, which is that it has always used heuristics to guide study and assess performance. Exercises such as the "three paragraph essay" had no use in the real world, even long before AI could generate them on demand. When one of those heuristics is broken, another one has to be found. Even word processing forced teachers to grade papers on content, rather than mechanics.
> Exercises such as the "three paragraph essay" had no use in the real world
The rigid formatting imposed by graded assignments may not have any use. But on the other hand, having completed a liberal arts/"soft" science degree before my CS degree I've greatly benefited in the workplace from the writing experience it provided. I had to write so many papers that it became more or less effortless to produce long form, well structured writing and those written communication skills have helped me distinguish myself far more than my technical ability at work.
The generic ChatGPT overly formal corporate tone has no nuance or subtlety and is a poor substitute for well crafted, deliberate communication. I am always conscious of how my exact words and phrasing would be perceived by the intended audience, frequently requiring a balancing act between competing interests while maintaining clarity. Due to that I manage to avoid stepping on toes or sabotaging relationships due to inartful phrasing. It's frustrating to receive emails consisting of LLM boilerplate because it has such low information density and is so much more difficult to infer tone and emotion from the other side .
I'm very grateful I completed my education without the temptation to just churn out low effort writing or code and depriving myself of that experience. I'm not confident at all I would have been able to maintain that self-discipline.
I'm with you there. Though I have a technical degree, I went to a liberal arts college, and preferentially took courses that had a heavy writing component. I was a good typist thanks to coding, and one of the first students to use word processing. Today, I still use those skills to my advantage.
As a teen in the late 80's I had an HP calculator that I programmed to compute molecular weights given an input string like "H2SO4". It felt like having a secret superpower, especially when I participated in competitive exams. I was a very straightlaced kid and would not have used the program if it such things were explicitly forbidden, but as far as I could tell, they never were.
Reminds me of when I write a j2me app for matrix diagonalization because we could use the old feature phones as calculators. Nobody thought we'd be mad enough to use those to cheat...
Do you still have the source code for the j2me app?
I hadn’t yet learned to program back when I was still using a feature phone, but I have a lot of fond memories of J2ME applications that I installed on my phones. Mostly games, of course.
I encourage anyone that wrote J2ME games and utilities, no matter how small or big, to upload the source to GitHub :)
But normally it depends on the subject and if the automation/machine solves the primary skill being teached or if its just a "secondary/tertiary" skill. Are you in a Calculus 101 class? Calculators like TI-89 are likely to be prohibited when examining for deriving analytical solutions for derivatives and integrals.
Statistics, Physics or any other subjects that needs applied maths? Such a calculator is probably a minimum requirement to take the course.
My HP-49g+ was definitely load-bearing going through EE. I was never much good at memorizing big sheets of formulas but I was pretty good at memorizing a couple of simple differential equations (e.g. I(t) = C dv(t)/dt was easy, v(t) = v_s * e^(-t/RC) wouldn't stick). So I'd just... derive all of the "special case" formulas from scratch during the exam. Usually they were simple enough that I could just get them into the right form but I'd lean on my calculator doing the symbolic integration for me when they weren't.
The other thing it was awesome for was solving systems of linear equations. I could do the nodal or loop analysis just fine, I'd write down the matrix that represented the system of equations and then just punch that matrix in and invert it.
I was on pretty good terms with my chemistry teacher, so...maybe? It's been a while, but I don't remember either showing it off or taking pains to keep it secret. To adults, that is; my nerdy friends and I delighted in showing off the cool stuff we did with our calculators.
I vaguely remember thinking that one likely reason shortcuts like mine were not prohibited was because no one in charge suspected that such things were even possible with current technology, or if they were, that a child would be able to exploit it. But as long as I kept to the letter of the rules, I considered myself ethically in the clear.
> But as long as I kept to the letter of the rules, I considered myself ethically in the clear.
Yeah, totally, just to be clear I'm not judging.
In fact, if you programmed it to handle those operations, one could argue you had already learned a big chunk of what was going to be measured in the exams.
Kind of similar to the paradox of creating and using cheat sheets, is highly likely you're accidentally learning about the subject matter in the process of writing the sheet, sometimes up to a point where the cheat sheet is not necessary anymore.
> Kind of similar to the paradox of creating and using cheat sheets, is highly likely you're accidentally learning about the subject matter in the process of writing the sheet, sometimes up to a point where the cheat sheet is not necessary anymore.
The problem is (example from mathematics): even if you are capable of deriving some formula (you thus understood the topic well), it takes a lot of time in the exam. Looking at the cheat sheet is much faster - in particular when the time is somewhat precious in the exam.
A related personal story: During my statistics course in high school, we discovered that the TI-89 had some statistical functions that the TI-83 didn't have. So, the rule was that if we wanted to use the TI-89 ones, you had to write an application for the TI-83 one. It was a great way to really learn the algorithms.
I always felt (and my maths teachers agreed) that if I understood something sufficiently to automate it, I’d proved my point and didn’t need to do the rest of the exercises.
Edit: Automate in the sense of coding it myself, not in the sense of downloading some software.
I could do it correctly from the get-go. The program just saved me from drudgery many times over. Probably enough times to recoup my time investment to create the program, but in any case I enjoyed coding for its own sake.
It's also an extremely misleading comparison. Basic calculator functions do not in the slightest replace anything taught in a maths class. Using ChatGPT not just to write entire paragraphs (replacing composition), or even providing the writer with ideas (replacing the creative aspects of writing) isn't comparable to adding two large numbers together.
The equivalent in maths would be if you handed students a theorem prover or have Wolfram Alpha give you step-by-step solutions and obviously nobody to this day allows this, because like ChatGPT for writing it'd defeat the point, that students think.
When I was in uni we were allowed basic but not programmable calculators during exams and a lot of CS classes even were pen&paper, if the prof was a bit hardcore
The concepts of adding machines and calculators were also slowly phased in over the span of a century. The first commercially successfully adding machines hit the market in the 1890's, and pocket calculators took off in the 1980's. AI went from theory to answering hand written math homework questions from a photograph in a few years.
I only had a calculator (at a technical university) starting in the mid-1970s. Prices were dropping like a stone in about that period. In high school it was pretty much slide rules.
Turns out education done right is vaguely a speed-run of how the knowledge was developed. Adding calculating tools makes sense as you advance the the corresponding point in the process. Honestly, I think there should be a chunk of precal and calc where they use slide rules only, then calculators of increasing complexity (or just increasingly complex features of one calculator).
"When will I use this in real life" is a declaration that you have no expectations of learning the next lesson that builds upon this one.
>> Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial
> Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes.
The author of TFA means specifically for his cohort of students, not in general. He polled his students, and the result was that they thought calculators weren't seen as unethical but they were more skeptical/uncertain about AI. By his current students, now, not in general.
LLM’s have been widely available for approximately five years.
Five years into the availability of a calculator with an arbitrary advanced feature, it was controversial in academic contexts. Some of the author’s students could be grand-children of students from the early days of consumer calculators.
The author is comparing a new technology with an old one. And ignoring programable calculators which are still sometimes banned after fifty years…and many of the author’s students probably have used LLM’s for homework despite their statements that please the author.
Among other things, he's analyzing his students attitudes' re: AI and cheating with AI, and also comparing what they claim to feel vs what they actually do! It's mostly a reflection of what his students feel about the use of AI in English writing, not about calculators vs AI.
It seems as if you're responding to the line you quoted (out of context) through your preconceptions of what the article is about instead of actually reading the article!
> and many of the author’s students probably have used LLM’s for homework despite their statements that please the author.
"Probably have used LLM's"!? Don't take this the wrong way, but it seems you didn't read past the line you quoted, am I right? Because this is explicitly addressed multiple times, and the answer may surprise you.
> The teacher is asking a rhetorical question and getting an et cum spiritu tuo response.
He wasn't asking a rhetorical question! It was two polls, at least one of which was anonymous! Followed by several experiments!
I mean, you completely missed the point of the article and are making comments that are immediately refuted by simply reading it. You are making factually incorrect statements about the article, what am I to think? That you read it, but decided to ignore its contents to make some irrelevant remark about calculators vs LLMs?
The article is all about the tension of what his students initially believe (or claimed to believe, anyway) about AI-assisted writing, and what they come to realize at the end of the class. They also discuss authenticity vs formulaic writing, and are surprised by the results as well! They also discuss the tropes that show up in AI-writing, speculate on what may cause it, and are surprised about some of the results they get. They also discuss AI-assisted teaching. At the end, they revisit whether to be pro or anti AI, and the future of English classes, with or without AI.
All of it has very little to do with how recent LLMs vs calculators are. You focused on an out of context comment which doesn't inform the bulk of the article, and doesn't say what you claimed it said.
Totally correct. In the 90's as a kid in school using a calculator was highly debated amongst teachers and the ability to bring one out on your desk depended on the teacher.
In grade 2 i had a teacher who would say "I don't believe in erasers", you know, the things that "undo" pencil. As a ~6 yr old i actually didn't understand this phrase: "Well I have one, they're real!"
Yeah I don't believe you, especially because you have an axe to grind about AI singularity bullshit. No one in their right mind should allow a graphing calculator to be used on an algebra exam, might as well let them bring a laptop and open Wolfram alpha.
Maybe my teachers didn’t know you could program equation solvers into it. Either way it helped me understand that those in authority didn’t understand the nature of the world changing beneath them, which prepared me for how many people would end up misunderstanding AI and under-appreciating it despite how much it is evidently changing the world.
> Reflecting on the fact that 3 credits at UVA costs me $5000+ and 2100+ minutes,” Drew wrote, “I do not believe I grew enough through this course for it to be worth it.” Having noticed only “incremental improvements in [his] writing and thinking,” he concluded that “I would rather have spent this large sum of money and time on a course that interests me and teaches me about my career aspirations, like the finances of real estate. If I need to learn to write, I believe AI can serve me well for MY purpose at a fraction of the cost
A monopoly on certificates (degrees) is causing it. It's ridiculous that an English course costs 5000$. A lot of people can do a better job teaching this material for 500$ or less but they don't have a right to issue a prestigious certificates.
I just hope "free market fails" people realise one day that the most overpriced industries (healthcare and education) are the ones free competition is not allowed in.
We used to have no regulations on healthcare. It was terrible.
Other countries don’t have populations chomping at the bit to allow Amazon to dropship healthcare. They aren’t perfect, but the US system is singularly broken.
UVA is a heavily Liberal Arts college. (or at least, it was when I was looking a generation ago). That means that there are a lot of distribution requirements and you're going to be doing the soft fuzzy useless sounding things like English rather than going through blindered to things that will be in your major/make you money right out of college. But learning to write means that you need to learn to think critically of what to write.
It's not a Technically oriented college, though it does teach the sciences, but I wouldn't go there (and didn't) for Engineering. That's what VA Tech is for, though the weather is worse, the campus not as nice, and not quite as prestigious.
The generally Liberal Arts system in the US is a strong contrast to the European system, where you often start focusing on a few subjects at the high school level, and then apply to a degree program where you have very few "outside the major" choices. My wife didn't take math or science after she was 12 (but she took languages), Oldest 2 kids are down to 3 or 4 subjects at the high school level (One is doing the Bio/Chem/Physics A levels, one did Phys/Math/Further Math/Geography). The last incidence of anything not STEMish was GCSE/Junior Cert/~15yr old level.
>My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point.
This instantly paints the author as someone out of touch with their students. For the record, it comes from streamers/Twitch a la "Chat, is this real?"
I'm not saying everyone needs to know every meme, but starting off with this does taint the rest of the piece a little.
My first reflex at this was revulsion, similar to my reaction to “crypto” becoming a term for both cryptography and everything bitcoin-adjacent. But now I think the conflation is pretty cute and apt. LLM chatbots, for better or worse. are aiming to replace actual human chat, so might as well use language that makes it explicit
Huh, everyone I know appends -gpt to the end of things to designate AI. Probably because "chat" is already taken. I suppose there are multiple usages though.
Nah, it's just inconvenient to say "Chat-G-P-T". Particularly in voice mode. If it had officially been GoogleMGL people would have still say "Google it" despite the lack of live streaming reference.
This essay resonated with me because it highlighted the similarity between AI-written texts, describing the result as a word salad. And this also reminded me about some words from my teacher of Russian Literature: that the "bright future" themed novels of the pre-WW2 Soviet writers — works produced under strict political control — read like one big novel without a beginning and an end, and not as separate works.
And this grayness and sameness is what happens when people are forced to "think" as a chorus, either by the authorities or their censorship, or voluntarily by using the same AI's help.
Really enjoyed that. Shows the "messy middle" that people are caught in during this current wave of AI tech. I think one undeniable positive outcome has been the like collective introspection AI has sparked among so many people. With a tool challenging what it means to be "human" or "creative" (more so than prior technological advances), I've been seeing a lot of wonderful discussions, articles, videos, etc. with people wrestling with those questions and also just affirming their own singular voice and unique creative essence. It's been cool to see.
I think one undeniable positive outcome has been the like collective introspection AI has sparked among so many people.
Has it sparked that? I'm doubtful but I'd be very interested if anyone has a references about such introspection.
I grew up reading Douglas Hofstadter back in the 70s and what I appreciated with his ideas was using AI to illuminate what is human. His wave of AI failed, of course. But still, it's disheartening how little of that kind of inquiry seems missing from the current wave of AI.
> most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce.
Yeah. Overcommitted to partying and skipping class.
Has this author ever been to an average American university?
Let's rephrase it to "most of even the best students" then.
I went to about the cheapest US school that had a decent math program. It costs $17,500/yr between tuition, rent, books, and rice and beans.
That's a lot of money. It's over $10/hr in pre-tax income, even if you work full-time all year, which isn't an easy bar to clear in the sort of towns with cheaper universities. Wages don't scale well enough with more expensive tuition for there to be substantially better options.
Classes are another 22+ hours each week (you could complete school in 3-4 yrs instead, but that makes it even harder to afford and doesn't really reduce the workload enough to make a difference, however I'll also factor in a 15-hour workload later).
The rule of thumb is that you should study 3 hours for every hour of class. I found that approximately correct. Some classes took a lot less. Some took a little more. Combined with the self study you need in adjacent topics, 3hrs is a fair bit low.
During the school year then, you have something that looks like a 128hr/week schedule, or 100hr if you're finishing in 4yrs, and still 60hr/week even if you're finishing in 4yrs and racking up $70k in debt.
Don't get me wrong; I had free time (I worked more during the summer, less during the school year, allowing loans to cover the slack, which bought extra time here and there), but it wasn't exactly a party either. When I skipped class it was because I had to work, had to study for some other more pressing class, or found it more efficient to study the book than to try to understand that particular lecturer.
This matched my experience 30 years ago. Work 20 hours a week, but tuition and living expenses were a lot cheaper back then ($215-$330/month for a room! $900/quarter tuition). The 3 hour for every 1 hour of class is especially true for computer science, and skipping class in favor of self study worked well if the lecturer was really bad. Lectures were pretty much bonus reinforcement if useful at all, a lot of what you learned relied on self study.
A lot of students didn't do what I did, and they washed out pretty quickly (I had a lot of classmates from HS that didn't last the first quarter). My first quarter was pretty harsh (only got one 4.0, and a 2.7 in a chemistry class I had no reason being in), but I wised up quickly. It was hard going from High school where I could do all my homework in the time between classes, to college where I had to do real actual studying.
My experience was only 7 years ago. I don't think it's a generational difference so much as the fact that a university is a big place, enough so that even if you engage actively with 100+ people you won't see the whole picture.
It has gotten a lot more expensive and competitive. I’m almost embarrassed to mention how crazy cheap my school was in 1995 compared to 2025. Also, I doubt I would have gotten in with my high school achievements even though I graduated in a fairly decent cum laude position. Life for kids these days is a lot tougher.
The numbers I quoted were current prices for the school/city I attended (UND, if anyone wants to cross check). When I attended prices were lower, but so were wages and a number of other things, roughly proportionally AFAICT.
I could maybe see your point about admittance (I had something like a D average, maybe C- or C+ or something, in high school), but I think my financial estimates were about correct. Is something majorly incorrect?
Even if so, there are a dozen cheaper states in the country with halfway decent programs (if any future internet denizen is reading this, Fayetteville Arkansas is actually great for math right now, both in quality and in cost/jobs). I doubt my observations are too far off-base for a typical student trying to go to school economically.
> The rule of thumb is that you should study 3 hours for every hour of class. I found that approximately correct. Some classes took a lot less. Some took a little more.
lol stop the cap.
Its more like 0.5 hours of grand total work for every hour of scheduled class, since most kids are skipping 50% of the classes and using "chat" (a really fetch name for a new digital drug btw) to make up the rest.
What people are telling you in the comments is that your perspective is not universal. I've personally only ever skipped one class in my time in undergrad (as an American at an American university), and not for a party. I'm not a special case or anything, those classes are very expensive!
Isn't it basically a remedial class, or rather a class for people who did the minimum of HS math? I would expect it to be filled with more partiers than studiers, and also that plenty of the people in it would already know a lot of the material that's covered (so why not ditch?)
In 2012 I took my first course in undergrad. The teacher asked everyone to introduce themselves and say something they liked to do. Every single student, except myself, said they like to party. That was shocking to me. Most students weren’t skipping classes though.
Their writing skills were also abysmal. Frankly if they were that bad by college they didn’t seem likely to improve in my opinion.
I've been taking one class at a time for the last six years at what I think is an average American university. The twenty somethings that your comment is aimed at have been my lab partners and such. You're describing maybe 10% of them. As a group they're all over the map.
As learning goes, I'd say anybody taking more than two classes at a time is overcommitted. They might manage to get A's but I speak with these students about the courses we took together a year or two after the fact and it's clear to me that taking four or five classes at once is an awful strategy for retention.
I recently did a short stint teaching English to university students. This is English as a second language (possibly unnecessary context) but the level is fairly high. The course was hastily rearranged to prevent the students using llms. They had to hand write their essays under supervision, which made them a real pain to grade btw.
Then I was asked to review the questions for the final exam and I noticed some pretty weird constructions in the sample texts and sentences. Nothing completely grammatically wrong just unusual or semantically off. The example I recall was "... disproportionately affects men and women" but there were other worse examples. You can guess where this is going. But I knew that another native speaker had written the listening texts so I didn't want to directly criticise these, and I thought they might have been pulled from magazines or some corpus. But, of course, the course leader had generated them with chatgpt.
What's the issue with "… disproportionately affects …"? It seems to be a correct English construction (even though the frequency in COCA is relatively low; 72).
Some examples:
> Indeed, the recent cases of hyperinflation in Brazil, Argentina, and Poland illustrate that although hyperinflation is harmful to savers and disproportionately affects the poor (The Independent Review)
> A hearing is set Thursday on the new version of a legislative bill to eliminate scheduled pay increases for state employees that nixes a section that disproportionately affects rural legislative information offices (USA Today)
> Suicide is a key mental health issue which disproportionately affects men. (london.gov.uk)
Regarding the phrase "imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable" in the text, I'm old enough to know what has changed.
Today, many university students struggle with basic calculations. I'm not talking about long division of 8-digit numbers. I'm talking about things like expressing 2/10 as a percentage or knowing how many zeros to use when writing 1/1000 in decimal form. Many very bright students, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, struggle with such things. It's heartbreaking.
I'm from the post-calculator era, and those examples are definitely not problematic for me or even a single one of my peers. So apparently calculators don't automatically lead to that skill atrophying.
In my opinion the comparison to calculators is flawed. At least for simpler calculators as someone might imagine.
In its application that would mean for a LLM you define a sentence with one blank, restructure the sentence so the blank gets extracted and then enter it into the LLM to get exactly one word for your blank.
On the oppoisite you wouldn't use the calculator for solving equations, but to also formulate them based on a abstract definition.
Furthermore "math" and "text" are two fundamentaly distinct categories. In math we express mathematical observations/context, which can be proven in its correctnes. We can conclude that 1 Apple + 2 Apples won't result in 5 Apples, but 3.
Text may express emotions, toughts, directives, information or observations in context of its author. Not in every case it may be proven as math and we may attribute other values to it. Like honesty, authenticity, information and effort.
If it was only for the information, you could filter out hallucinations and call it a day. But for other values you literally can not outsource the work to a tool. Except you live in a South Park episode.
> imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable
I was there. We had been given slide rules, and a decent chunk of my 11-yr-old maths classes were devoted to teaching us how to use them. Calculators were banned because they "didn't teach us anything" (but somehow slide rules did? It didn't make any sense at the time either).
Over the course of the next few years, calculators became more acceptable, and by my 18-yr-old Maths A-level class, we were being advised on which scientific calculators to buy.
This essay is SO well written. I find myself smiling and laughing along. Is great writing a must for communication? No. Would I wish that all writing was like this? Most definitely YES!
What a lovely essay. Reminds me of the way I loved the liberal arts growing up. I missed having classes like that in college (AP'd and ACT'd my way out of most requirements).
English teachers seem especially prone to that friendly and sporting demeanor the author has. Professors from the engineering schools are far more prescriptive, probably due to the nature of the material.
All the best writers that I know in the sense that you mean (communicating information precisely), including non-native speakers, are also avid fiction readers. Many also write fiction or prose for fun. Familiarity and fluency with the details of usage and vocabulary are what let one employ these things precisely for whatever purpose, fictional or not.
That is not my experience at all. To the contrary, those who write fiction read mostly fiction, and those who write non-fiction read mostly non-fiction.
They're incredibly different skill sets. One is all about argumentation, convincing, facts, and citations. The other is all about imagination, beauty, evocation, flavor.
Obviously they both require assembling nouns and verbs and other parts of speech in sentences, but they seem to be virtually entirely different capabilities at the end of the day.
Writing excellent short stories doesn't really help with crafting effective business communications, design documents, etc. And vice-versa. In fact, I think they can sometimes even be harmful -- the kind of clarity required for non-fiction can constrain imagination in fiction, while the creativity celebrated in fiction can be quite counterproductive when it comes to functional communication -- what is intended to be clever or unique often gets misunderstood.
To back up your point, I kind of hated English class until my senior year of high school when I took AP English Language (nonfiction), after which I started drinking books from a firehose.
> I had to become a middle aged adult and learn this for myself.
This is a cliche.
You can’t write precisely without an understanding of how language becomes imprecise, of its fundamental instability. Precision and delicate use is an accident when it does happen, and its happening can never be proven. We must have faith in the accident.
I disagree strongly with this, it's like saying you must understand the subtleties of calligraphy or typography in order to be proficient at writing in your notebook with a pencil. I have no doubt you will be more purposeful and deft with your handwriting having this knowledge but they're two completely different skills.
You can be taught to and be proficient in "writing with your pencil" by learning the rules [1]. Efficient, practical, immediately useful and applicable. No subtlety required nor desired. It's the same as all practical skills or trades.
I just used that as an example because it's free, high quality, a good reference, and goes beyond what you would expect out of a style guide and is closer to a textbook on technical writing. So just replace it with your preferred technical writing manual—although a lot of them tend to call themselves style guides or manuals of style.
Either way, it's an avenue of learning to write that ignores, I would say, all the artistic aspects of writing. Inasmuch as you can say anything "isn't an art."
I agree that it's a good distinction to make. Personally I haven't thought about it till I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. In the book he specifically teaches writing nonfiction and even shares an anecdote where he was a guest on a radio show promoting a writing conference and was annoyed with the host because he conflated writing with literary works.
So yeah, I recommend the book to people interested in writing.
More traditionally you'd study "rhetoric", the art of making your arguments appealing. It doesn't really matter whether the things you say are true or false.
Rhetoric is valuable in any writing endeavor; clarity is only valuable sometimes.
For a funny take on the whole "rhetoric" is the use and abuse of logic some people might enjoy How to Win Every Argument by Madsen Pirie which also happens to be where I plucked the tagline regarding rhetoric from. It's a pretty easy book to go through in toilet break sized increments, the author goes through different fallacies and how they're employed one by one along with various rhetorical devices.
Though a few years ago when I searched for a book on rhetoric and making convincing arguments Office Of Assertion by Scott Crider also popped up, but it's aimed more at written rhetoric instead of what most people have in mind.
> For a funny take on the whole "rhetoric" is the use and abuse of logic
But it's much broader than that. You can make true arguments. You can make confusing arguments. And you can use tools that have nothing to do with logic at all. Rhetoric has a lot to say about rhythm, alliteration, and linguistic structure. And a lot more to say about your personal bearing and your tone of voice.
I understand why much of the discussion about AI and university education has focused on first-year writing classes in the U.S. Some of my own first experiments with ChatGPT in December 2022 were having it write school-like essays [1].
Over the past few months, I cotaught a university class in which we also had first-year students use and reflect on their use of AI in their classwork. But the context was different: the class was a seminar on science communication (how to make science engaging to children and the general public), and most of the time was spent with the students doing group projects. Also, the class was at a university in Tokyo, and we taught it in Japanese.
We have just started analyzing the feedback from the students, but my impression is that they were less conflicted about the use of AI for their group work than they might have been if they had been doing their projects as individuals.
Meanwhile, as the semester progressed, agentic frameworks started to mature. I spent a lot of time on my own experimenting with Claude Code and Gemini CLI. While none of the students in that class seemed to use them, it became clear to me that such higher-level cognitive tools will pose an even greater challenge to higher education than essay-writing chatbots do now.
AIs grading AI-generated essays looks like a recipe for model collapse. That's why we certainly need people who go after the "diminishing returns" of improving their writing skills beyond the "good enough" that AI delivers.
Should education systems aim for that for all of their students? Certainly, because AI alone is not sufficient to raise the bar. As impressive an AI is when it seems to invent a new molecule, it is still only possible because of the original works of many people.
I find this a strange criticism. If you look at all of human written stories, the number of stories is quite limited too. There's a lot of retelling of "classic" stories (except in classical times they were probably retelling them too). This even applies to religious stories:
The kings/men who fight over a beauty (which can be a land/crown, or a woman) overcoming a monster/evil opponent or a series of opponents (The Illiad/Troy, Beowulf, King Arthur, ...)
The orphan/abandoned kid/extremely poor that conquers the kingdom, either through marriage or by conquering a (series of) challenges (Moses, Aladdin, Oedipus, Theseus, Heracles, Cinderella, the foundation story of islam/mohamed, ...)
The vizier/prime minister who decides he'll be king and becomes incredibly evil to achieve it. (robin hood, paradise lost (ie. the story of lucifer/the devil), queen esther, aladdin, MacBeth, ...)
The not-evil-but-quite-evil mother who sees her king/husband make a child, either with another woman or sees/fears she or her child will be put aside because of the other child and ... (Hera, Snow White, Medea, biblical story of Abraham, ...)
And then there's stories like Game of Thrones that are in large part a combination and integration of a lot of such stories: Circe and her children. John Snow, after being rejected, climbing up and up and up. Bran becoming king. Arya living through a sort of Herculanean heroic epic. And the kings fighting constantly.
Humans are clearly still a big step up even from state-of-the-art AI, but we are not infinitely creative like we like to think we are. It's a difference in scale, not a fundamental difference.
Assignments should in total be worth ten percent of the total mark. Not too much to cheat over and waste your chance of valuable feedback. Not too little to ignore, so giving some short term incentive to actually work on them.
I think the most interesting detail was that students started recognizing AI by its tics (obsessive em-dashes, always exactly three examples) and turned detection into a game. Accidentally became better readers.
I'm wondering if the usage of an em-dash in the article (somewhere towards the middle) is self-aware trolling, or just the result of excessive ai use...
> includes both a human and a computer—and “surprisingly,
Thinking back, I have had some woderfull professors that had expertise beyond just published work and knew how to convey it.
Then I have had many bland curriculum reciters matching a semi decent youtube lecture, and some bad communicators where you were better of just reading the book they tried to teach.
There was also a few that couldn't really teach, but whose class was more like a standup comedy performance.
I'd say with the exception of the first and last group, ChatGPT would probably be a good if not better replacement for day to day teaching and mentoring.
Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud:
[...]
I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.
But that's what it has been trained on - almost all academic writing is bland flavorless word salad, and this is extremely noticeable in title fads. I have a nearly decade-long game running with my friend where me make up absolutely bullshit concepts that could nevertheless be plausibly published in a journal, and the process has been going on long before that.
'Verbing the noun: towards a genericization theory of expressivity in high-entropy counter-heterogeneity' describes an ongoing problem in academic writing where novelty is deprioritized in favor of acceptability by an evermore tightly circumscribed set of peer professionals whose socioeconomic interests favor the establishment of intellectual stasis that maximally conserves positionality in a quais-Simmelian network space parameterized by income, tenure proximity, and citation count.
Or put more clearly, the more academics write to impress each other instead of to reach the public, the more generic their titles and language will be. Being able to parse and regurgitate wordy titles and abstracts constitutes table stakes in academia, so the incentives tilt toward burying the lede any original proposals as deeply as possible so as the minimize the career-damaging possibility of rejection on technical/syntactical grounds.
chat originates from streamers calling twitch chat chat like a singular entity which has transferred into the common persons vernacular, not chat as in chatgpt
> several statements, including “It is unethical to use a calculator in a math class”
That's too broad to be of any use, if the math class is teaching you to calculate in your head, then using any calculator is cheating. If the math class is teaching some algebra equation solving skills, then using a programmable calculator that auto solves them is cheating.
That's the similar issue with such experiments - they unfortunately aren't rigorous to provide any insight into education
The calculator comparison is so tired and misleading. It's embarrassing to think that rote computation like calculators serve in most math classes is comparable to the "formulate an insightful answer to a prompt and express it clearly through writing" role an LLM fills in (especially early) humanities coursework.
What a great application of AI in college course. The processor made them critically think about how AI may impact their writing, the value of it vs human writing. That's exactly what college should be doing, producing critical thinkers to navigate tomorrow's world.
From the title I thought this was going to be about a student using AI to take their place in class. I imagined a modern version of the montage in Real Genius (1985) where students leave tape recorders on their seats in the lecture hall.
I guess nobody tried to adjust the temperature via the API then...
You can make something really unbland then!
Eg. "Write a 3 sentence story" Temperature=1
The old cat, Bartholomew, stretched languidly in a patch of afternoon sun, his purr a rumbling motor. A mischievous bluebird, emboldened by the cat's sleepy demeanor, swooped down to steal a whisker for its nest. Bartholomew's eyes snapped open, a silent promise that their game was far from over.
Temperature=2:
The old clockmaker found a gear he didn't recognize, its teeth shimmering with an otherworldly light. He fitted it into the grand clock tower, and as the hands struck midnight, the town square was bathed in a soft, silver glow. From that day on, no one in the town ever seemed to age.
Hand written essays in class. Short and longer form discussions, questions and answers in class. End of unit, term, semester, year. Interview on topic in spoken form.
That doesn't mesh with the $5000 per credit hour ,get students in and out and degree'd ASAP. No 100 level outside of Marlboro college are you going to find a graduate sized class cohort meeting with professors 1 on 1 and debating philosophy and doing stand up rhetorical studies.
It occurs to me that writing by those in STEM fields and those in the humanities is entirely different and each group dislikes the other’s writing. When I was in college, my professors in technical classes had no problems with my writing. After I graduated and I wrote some technical articles, my writing received praise from readers. However, when I took two semesters of mandatory English writing classes in college, my professors hated my writing and nothing I did made them happy with it.
When LLMs became widely usable, I was one of the people who really liked much of the writing that they did. I found it was relatively close to my writing style, which I consider to be good, despite the disagreement from those in the humanities. It was close enough to my own writing that I have even had people on Discord accuse me of using LLMs to write my messages for me, when I had not.
The linked article was clearly written by an English teacher. He criticizes AI-generated texts as “a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad“. Now, there are many cases where LLMs output nonsense, but in cases where the writing logically flows, does not self-contradict in any way and avoids unnecessary repetition, “bland” and “flavorless” are good. The goal of writing is to convey information across space-time; writing that is “bland” and “flavorless” is the best way of conveying information.
I can see a number of things he did in his writing to avoid being “bland” and “flavorless”, and I consider them to be examples of poor writing:
He used dozens of idioms that make the text difficult for non-native speakers and unpleasant for native readers. He used a number of colloquialisms, including some that are inappropriate in professional contexts (although I will not repeat them since I refuse to write them). He used a word whose only definition is provided by Urban Dictionary and therefore is not even an official word:
He also brought politics into an apolitical topic. The injection of politics is a great way to derail any form of productive dialogue and should be avoided.
He used a story format of the kind that has infected journalism. It is very rare that the process by which something was learned is useful to readers and presenting it for dramatics wastes their time. That is with the exception of stories on the topic of security, where hearing the process is often genuinely informative. My aversion to this writing style is so severe that I have a standing policy to stop reading a news article the moment that I see that it uses this style for a topic that is not security-related. After reading his article, I will extend my policy to apply to essays by academics in the humanities too.
He made numerous attempts to evoke emotional responses to elicit agreement, rather than to make clear arguments based on facts. This is great for propaganda, but not so great for making points. Every one of these appeals to emotions is poor writing.
Beyond those things, he also did not properly cite sources in multiple places. To name a few, the quotes from Sam Altman and Annalee Newitz are uncited. As an academic, he should know better.
Some of these things might actually have places in certain types of writing. They certainly have places in propaganda. They also have places in fictional literature. However, they do not have places in attempts to argue a point.
I imagine if he corrected all of my criticisms, he would find the result to be “bland” and “flavorless”. That is how an attempt to argue a point should be.
Usually the goal of the student is not aligned with that of the school. The student wants money from a job. The degree helps him find a job. The essay itself or understanding the coursework does not help him find a job directly. If he can bypass understanding to get a degree, he will do it.
The school thinks that the student joined to learn and the school acts this way up to a certain extent. But in the end grading a failing student isn't helping him learn. The school ends up fostering competition and stress internally and uses GPA as a ranking system.
Why a school does all this to a student when the student pays them? Like why give students bad grades when the student gives them money? Because of integrity. Jobs trust the school if the school has prestige and integrity. In order to maintain that prestige and integrity the school needs to pressure and rank the students. Then when the school is sufficiently prestigious companies know and students pay tuition to get the integrity and thus get the job.
The more prestigious the school the more is invested into "ranking". Only at schools with lower prestige do you get more of a "learning environment". But companies prefer candidates who can make it through a ranking system over ones that have to be coddled in an environment that fosters learning.
It is not an illogical concept. Students that make it into these prestigious schools generally have much higher IQ. This is a data driven fact along with the fact that entrance to many schools involves the equivalent of an IQ test. People with higher IQ perform better. So it's the most rational choice for companies to want to pick students from schools that are bad at teaching and better at ranking.
Some students go to higher ed for learning. Most go to run the gauntlet of a ranking system and end up with a degree that bestows prestige and excellence.
There's my ultra real take on your "why don't students want to learn" bs. But it's not like I said anything you didn't already know.
A lot of the purposes in education for which the use of AI would be considered "cheating" involve writing assignments of one sort or another, so I don't know why most of these education scenarios don't simply redirect the incentive.
For example, in an English class with a lot of essay-writing assignments, the assignments could simply be worth 0% of the final mark. There would still be deadlines as usual, and they would be marked as usual, but the students would be free to do them or not as they pleased. The catch would be that the *proctored, for-credit* exams would demand that they write similar essays, which would then be graded based on the knowledge/skills the students would have been expected to gain if they'd done the assignments.
Advantages:
- No more issues with cheating.
- Students get to manage (or learn to manage) their own time and priorities, as is expected of adults, without being whipped as much with the cane of class grades.
- The advanced students who can already write clearly, concisely and convincingly (or whatever the objectives are of the writing exercises) don't have to waste time with unneeded assignments.
- If students skip the assignments, learn to write on their own time using ChatGPT and friends, and can demonstrate their skills in exam conditions, then it's a win-win.
This all requires that whoever is in charge of the class have clear and testable learning goals in mind -- which, alas, they all-too-often do not.
A lot of students, even at the college level, don't think that far ahead and make bad decisions because of short term thinking.
Look at any list of advice for new college students and almost every one of them includes "go to class". Simply attending class is way easier than homework and yet, when there's no short term consequences for not doing it, plenty of students will just not do it.
Cheating is another great example. Cheating in college is rampant because kids don't want to do the work they're assigned. I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway. They're already choosing to ignore the long term benefits of homework even when there are short term consequences, so I don't see how removing those short term consequences will make things better.
If you tell kids there are no immediate consequences for not doing homework, many of them just won't do it and they will fail because they haven't learned anything.
Maybe you're okay with that. Honestly, I'm not actually trying to convince you that it's a bad idea. I just think if your proposal is based on the idea that kids will choose to something boring that they don't have to do in the short term because it benefits them in the long term you're overestimating a lot of kids (and adults for that matter).
There's a section in Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) where Persig takes this all the way to the final conclusion that there should be no grades at University, and no degree at the end, and then and only then will everyone who goes there actually be learning-motivated.
So. I teach at a university and I do give an "assignment" exactly like this.
In a few of my classes, I have final projects that teams work on. I also have presentations. I used to require them of all students; and quickly learned this is a good way to waste valuable time.
Now, all my presentations are completely optional for NO CREDIT. You don't get penalized if you don't do them, and perhaps more importantly, I give ZERO EXTRA CREDIT for doing them.
As you can imagine, every single presentation I've gotten from this has been absolutely worth it.
I do the same in my classes, and it´s common practice in many courses my dept which may help, as the students know what is expected of them. I don´t think it's wasting time. It motivates the students to know that they have to present in front of their peers, helps the shy ones get practice, and yes the quality varies, but it´s a very good way to share information within the class about different projects, even with a not so good presentation.
What proportion of students bother?
It seems to go in waves? Rarely is it one or two, I imagine there's some peer pressure thing going on. Something like all or nothing.
What were the best three?
Hmm, I mean been doing this for years. Some were interesting because they DIDN'T accomplish much and things went bad but then we could kind of post-mortem in the class.
Others had some pretty cool things that ended up in real life; I believe the official timers for the Florida Supreme Court testimony things came from one of my classes.
which students fail your class?
I get very few failures, but that's a selection thing; it's a junior senior "big picture" IT class.
understood thanks - but in those few cases how do you even determine who fails?
The problem is that the motivation from above (i.e., administration, state legislatures, employers, etc.) is no longer really about learning. We could have an entirely learning-motivated university right now and it would be considered a bad thing by many powerful people because it's not aimed at "preparing people for the workforce" (in part simply by providing that degree).
The students also want a certificate for their efforts. It's impossible to avoid signalling.
> It's impossible to avoid signalling
You can take that one step further. What kind of signal does “I can afford to go to University and not worry about credentials” send? I’d argue that’s realistic only for people who are willing to admit that they belong to a leisure class. In the US at least, we like to flatter the leisure class with the pretense that they worked hard to get there.
I learned recently that most universities in Switzerland have open admissions where entry to the program is pretty easy. However they do not hold anybody's hand and you have to pass your classes or can get kicked out quite easily. I am not sure if what I am saying is completely accurate feel like this is one model that would weed out people who are serious from who aren't.
The Open University in the UK (which has been running for decades) doesn’t have any entry requirements for the first year of its undergrad courses and the early modules definitely include a focus on getting people up to speed on academic writing, use of library tools, etc. I don’t know how many people make it to reach the year 2 modules (which require passing year 1)
There are institutions like that. For example, the Collège de France started in 1530, still active, doesn't administer tests nor grants degrees. It's purely about learning.
https://www.college-de-france.fr/en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collège_de_France
I was recommended that book many years ago, when I was far too young to appreciate it. Maybe it's time to give it another go...
This is great, but is incompatible with charging people a year's income for it.
university provides in the following order: prestige, connections, knowledge in exchange for money
I went to a state school, and didn't get much prestige or many connections. I did learn how to be an engineer, and more importantly I learned how to be an adult. I think my time there was worth it.
Maybe this is true of liberal arts or business degrees? I don't know, but I don't think this is the opinion of anyone who went to engineering school.
If you missed “practice space to learn how to learn and to work with other people”, your understanding is too flawed to forgive the obvious so-edge take.
I assume that would fall under the listed "knowledge" category.
Perhaps, but to my mind knowledge and skills are qualitatively different.
> I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway.
I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it.
Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating.
The big issue of exam-only approach is that a one-hour exam is not enough to evaluate a student's performance, unless your educational goal is just to make students memorize stuff by rote. I'd consider a 3-hour open-book exam bare minimal. But if every class does that it'll be too exhausting.
They will not choose to write it. Would you work on something consistently if nobody cared about it?
There needs to be a reward for doing essays. That reward can be emotional eg. "the teacher I respect liked my essay" or "my essay was read in class" or "the teacher gives feedback that makes me feel a sense of growth". In that case, maybe kids will do it.
However, I think it's hard for a teacher to inspire respect to a classroom and the difficulty scales with the number of people in the class, so grades are used as a hack.
> Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating.
I am 100% certain quite a lot of people cheat because they procrastinated and don't have time to learn. Or because they indeed were lazy to learn. Or because they cant learn, because they course is too hard for them.
Or because video games and youtube are more fun.
When I read this suggestion it sticks out that un-spoonfed, people with deficits in thier study skills, executive function, and institutional literacy would be most disadvantaged.
So, you have 2 kids who are equally bright, and you tell one "you don't have to do these assignments but there is a test at the end" and the other "you have an 80% chance if failing if you don't do these assignments. Analyse each assignments and feedback for shiboleths like the way they ask you to structure your introduction and optimize for demonstrating you know these shiboleths over everything else"
University is a wonderful petri dish for growing into who you want to be. You have access to expertise and resources abs a certain kind of institutional credibility. Few students actually use these fully and the ones who do were told to. You need some idea who you want to be and why, and this is developed in you by other people. Children don't just know stuff.
I think these are positive changes if and only if we accompany them with systematic study skills and self management courses and bridge this gap.
Do Universities no longer do that? All of my finals were 3hrs. There was a special schedule during finals week with 3 slots per day. The time of your final exam was based on when the first lecture session of a class took place. Really sucked to get an 8-11 AM slot when your classes never started before 11.
Fun prank: set all of the clocks in your dorm neighbor’s room to different wrong times. Guy across the hall knew we were messing with him, trusted his watch - which had the correct time, but wrong alarm time. Realized he had a problem when he had hot water in the shower and no one was around. He was only 45 min late to the exam. Good times.
Different groups have different standards of course, but that prank seems pretty cruel.
I'm a little confused so I could use some clarification: where did the "fun" in the fun prank kick in? You caused him to be late and risk his exam. Could you break down the fun for me?
Unfortunately English "fun" is used both for good wholesome fun and for the cruel fun that is "making fun of" people (laughing at their misfortune).
I don't see how potentially ruining someone's exam classifies as fun
We had the alarms going off early. Like every half hour from 6:00 AM. We knocked on his door and his roommate told him when he was leaving for breakfast.
He did fine in his exam. 3 hrs was overkill. Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy.
It was the 80’s. I guess kids these days are soft.
This is sociopathy, not a fun prank.
Well, agreed, but nobody said anything about 60min exams x) In fact I don't remember ever having an exam at uni that was less than 2h.
I agree that open-book exams, or at least a closed-book portion followed by an open-book portion, is important to actually gauge the student's abilities rather than his/her capability to cram.
> I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it.
I seriously doubt that. In my experience many students won't do anything that doesn't directly contribute to their grade.
Exactly. In school I only did the stuff teachers told me isn't important and I don't need to do.
You want me to don't know something? I better make sure to get to know everything about that. You push me to do stuff? Why should I care, if you already do.
I’d expect that a lower proportion of those who wrote it would have cheated, but certainly not that more would write it.
Well, neither in school nor in university did homework count for grades for me (growing up in Germany, and with some very rare exceptions).
So this isn't all that crazy.
During my undergrad in Germany, the CS department was in the process of switching from optional homework to various forms of mandatory homework (either directly counting towards the final grade, or requiring a minimum score on the homework before allowing registration for the exam). AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result.
I think optional homework works for classes that are obscure enough only somewhat intrinsically motivated students would consider taking them, but in mandatory classes or trendy majors, there's going to be many people who need a bit more external motivation to study.
I studied math, and all our exams were oral exams. The professor had to actively accept you for the exam, which was usually a given, if you did your homework. (But you could probably get into the exam without doing the homework, too, if you convinced them.)
I have been teaching CS at German universities for close to two decades now.
> AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result.
True. That's the real Dunning-Kruger problem: incompetent people do not know how much help they need to get competent. It is our job to show them their weaknesses as early as possible so that they can effectively work on them.
(I believe that state-funded universities (as in Germany) have some obligation to not only educate the self-motivated top 1% but also offer a solid education even for less perfect students - at least if there is a societal need for their competences.)
Another, more important, reason is that written exams are not good tests of programming competence - especially as tasks and frameworks get more complex. We want to assign good grades to students who are competent at developing software in realistic settings, not in highly artificial exam settings.
> That's the real Dunning-Kruger problem: incompetent people do not know how much help they need to get competent.
Of course, the paper by 'Dunning-Kruger' never showed anything like that.
Huh - what do you mean? I just checked again, and this is IMHO exactly what Kruger and Dunning reported:
From the abstract:
"Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities."
https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1999-kruger.pdf
Oh, that's what they say in the abstract. But have a look at the actual experiment and analysis.
All they found was a statistical artefact.
You can just have a look at the big picture at the top of the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
> Relation between average self-perceived performance and average actual performance on a college exam.[1] The red area shows the tendency of low performers to overestimate their abilities. Nevertheless, low performers' self-assessment is lower than that of high performers.
So regression towards the mean explain the entire effect.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#...
Thanks a lot for the explanation and link. I had read the original papers a long time ago, and was not aware of the more recent discussions. That said, I just read a few of the critical papers, and it seems that even Gignac and others do not dispute that the effect is observable. They just don't believe that unskilled people are inherently worse than skilled people in estimating their own skill but that all people overestimate their skill (better-than-average effect).
This is still very much compatible with my claim that unskilled people profit from being reminded (repeatedly, not just in the exam at the end of the semester) that they know less than they think. I will avoid conflating this with the Dunning-Kruger effect in the future (Thanks!).
An recent study found that medical students' estimate of their own intelligence gets lower right after taking an IQ test (confirming the better-than-average effect). But one week later, their self-estimated intelligence returns back to their pre-test levels. To me this suggests that students (and all others) will overestimate their abilities - and invest less time in learning - if they are not constantly given feedback.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
Right - for me each year of university (in UK) was a year of learning with exams at the end, that was it, and it was normal.
This, in general, seems like a great thing. The goal of a university should be to produce premium students, and nothing's better than a trial by fire.
We actually had this exact thing at my university. One sophomore level weed out class was a "self paced" electrical engineering class. It was called self paced because you were given a textbook and were free to work through it at your own pace. But to finish the class by the end of the semester you had to average 2 chapters completed per week, and completing a chapter not only included finishing a problem set and taking a test which you had to score 90%+ on (and were required to finish another problem set and retake it otherwise), but on occasion also demoing some skill in the lab.
It was brutal, but one of the most educational classes I've ever taken - and obviously not just because of what I learned about electrical engineering. Of course it seems modern universities have just become profit-driven degree treadmills. Weeding out students? That's reducing profit! And yeah looking back at my uni's page it seems this class is no longer self paced. Lol. And that's at a top 10 school. The enshittification of education.
Part of the issue is with the purpose as you describe it. Sure, at top 10 schools, a trial by fire would result in much needed “growing up” as the gifted but undisciplined (speaking for myself and many users of this site) students find their way to more durable motivations. But at the vast majority of schools, a trial by fire would end with a lot of students burned.
Perhaps that begs the question, if those kids can’t handle self-directed education, why are we putting them there in the first place, but that’s definitely a grey area, and there are hundreds of thousands of students who are smart enough to do well in higher education and skilled work, but weren’t disciplined enough to handle what you’re describing as freshmen.
Many employers pay a premium for predictably elite cadres of students. The schools want to try to pass off mediocre graduates as having some of the elite special sauce even though only a small number of students have what it takes. We know exactly what to do to produce elite cadres by aggressive sorting. But the incentives created by the federal government encourage the institutions to extrude mediocre students like a chicken nugget machine produces processed meat product. Every hot student-nugget is worth a tens of thousands of dollars a year in freshly printed loan money directed towards administrators and rent on dorms and apartments irrespective of quality; so the incentive is to stuff the students with filler.
The idea of "weeding out" students implies that many students are "weeds" who need to be uprooted and thrown away rather than grown.
A teacher who thinks this way is probably in the wrong profession. A university that operates this way is failing to educate the students it admitted.
Weeding out as I've seen it is a class that requires a certain level of commitment and ability to either plan your work or tough it out that a high school just can't really prepare anyone for. So in a way the student isn't a "weed" but their motivation or maturity might be and they're free to retake the class once they know that university will require them to put in more work than high school. If they can't put in the work then completing a thesis and graduating is going to be very hard and that happens the last year of uni so better to set the expectations early with a "weed out" class.
Ideally it's not weeding out but distributing into education paths which fit every student.
From my experience studying electrical and computer engineering, I definitely prefer that they chose to put hard electrical engineering courses in the first semesters because I knew immediately not to focus on them because I didn't like them.
I think there should be a better onramp to EE, as there often is in CS.
I think the problem is that no teacher has the time to babysit a student. If they just don't care about their education or can't put the time in, they shouldn't be wasting their time and money.
Some students also just don't have the aptitude for an Engineering or Computer Science degree. It's better for everyone if this is figured out early. I know plenty of people that dropped out of a Computer Science degree because they hated it or thought it would be a great way to make money and were in over their head.
We had classes that were for 'weeding out' students in Computer Science. They involved calculus because if you couldn't pass this class, you wouldn't be able to handle the 5 or so classes after this class that required it.
I studied computer science and have been working as a programmer for about 20 years. The downside is that you're filtering a lot of people who would actually potentially be great programmers but are for whatever reason not good at calculus.
We have too many university graduates that can't get jobs in their fields, in a time where there is a growing deficit of people in trades.
Either the unfit and uninterested get weeded out at the education stage or they get weeded out by no employer being willing to hire them; the former seems kinder than the latter.
Who are the "unfit" students? Why were they admitted and what do you think should happen to them?
my kid attends a school in which they’ve given up on lectures. each “class” is basically a proctored mini self learning test from a booklet that’s a mix of content and exercises to work through individually. a teacher is around to answer questions and grade the booklets.
many kids fail to make the transition from spoon-feeding to self-learning, but those who do then begin to realize that they can go as fast as they are able and need not follow the herd. they also develop a strong sense of whether they’ve understood each booklet or not. it leads to a competition for learning fast AND well because there are also traditional proctored checkpoint exams from time to time plus kids do the ordinary standardized tests to calibrate.
i feel it’s an excellent system that prioritizes learning over conformity though it is obviously not a candidate for mass adoption because many kids wash out after making no progress for a while.
Dealing with untreated ADHD through college, "do the ungraded homework and spend time with the TAs" was way more valuable than "go to class". lectures for me were borderline useless. Fortunately this was something that I figured out on high school.
On the class topic, I suspect that attendance was more impactful for students pre-internet as the alternative was to wade through the library piecing together material.
With lecture notes/slides available online, well prepared books and study forums readily available - in-person attendance can feel archaic.
We may be experiencing a similar dynamic in education with AI. In a world where we can create individualized curriculum’s for each student encompassing the entire tree of knowledge - Perhaps it’s time to rethink how we educate students rather than push them into lecture halls designed for the Middle Ages.
Here's an alternative hypothesis...
People thrive under regularity, and young people (especially) tend not to understand that. Similarly, being able to focus on a single thing is a kind of super-power, while multi-tasking generally hurts performance on tasks.
Going to class (and paying attention) means that you've got a regular period of focus on the class topic. That combination of regularity and focus translates into long-term learning and better performance.
personally, id resent paying thousands of dollars a year to be given textbook sums to complete... i could have downloaded that myself, wheres the actual value these educators bring?
This would mean moving to 100% weighted exams, and there's good reasons why there has been a general trend away from that over recent decades. For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others, independent of their preparedness and knowledge of the material.
Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions.
> Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions.
This is thing.
If this choice is between:
1. A gameable system that will be gamed by most students.
2. An ungameable system that will unfairly punish those bad under pressure and time constraints.
There isn't really a choice at all.
One option would be a school-provided proctoring system, allowing teachers to outsource the actual test-taking times. It could be done outside of class time, at the student's convenience, and they could have 3-4 hours if they chose.
> An ungameable system that will unfairly punish those bad under pressure and time constraints.
Given modern communication technology it’s still gameable
With a proctored in-person exam, we're talking about the difference between gaming the SAT, say, and gaming a take home English essay.
And rates of cheating of "well under 1%" vs "well over 50%".
Even if we allow for less rigorous proctoring standards, we're still probably talking about "2-3%" vs "well over 50%".
"Can they do this under pressure?" might in fact be a good question to test for and train for. A lot of real-life activity after graduation will involve some pressure.
But we could do what I'll call a "monastic exam".
You've got a week, not an hour, but it's in a little monastery and you don't have your phone or other unapproved tools.
One of my freshman professors accidentally did nearly that. The final exam was 3 hours. This was normal at my school although many students finish in 1-2 house. After realizing nobody was close to finishing after 2 hours and he had greatly underestimated the difficulty, he expanded the time limit to 6 hours!
I will say it's not practical to have exams that long. In this case, the dorm required me to move out immediately after the exam and my parents were waiting to pick me up, so I decided to leave after 4 hours to avoid unnecessary panic or having to drive overnight. In hindsight, the professor probably would have let me make a phone call, but that didn't occur to me at the time.
Oh I'd love to be able to assign Walden exams.
Fair point, but the solution I propose would only apply to those parts of the assessment involving solo writing assignments -- so excluding class participation, group assignments, etc. (Which is not to say that students can't use AI to cheat on these, but they have other solutions.)
I mean, the real answer is that the other students were cheating on their assignments. It's that simple. We keep making up excuses for all of this shit. Some people don't "test well". Turns out those people don't know shit.
Let's get real here. I know why these nonsensical memes keep propagating but dear god. People will just believe anything these days, including that gas stoves cause asthma or whatever other bullshit is being peddled.
This isn't true. I'm one of those people who tested remarkably well, and back in college would do fine on exams despite frantically copying all of my own (non-comp Sci) assignments. Better than my peers who knew more and helped me cram. Test anxiety is real.
I was a great test taker, I used to make a sort of game out finishing tests in half the time as almost everybody else and acing it at the same time. I also never crammed, never attended pre-test study groups, and sometimes made a show of drinking beers right before the test just to annoy the people cramming in the last minute.
But I'm not particularly brilliant, in fact I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I have undiagnosed ADHD. My test taking performance trick, which I freely told everybody to their annoyance, was very simple. I knew the material! Read the assigned texts, do the optional homework, pay attention in class. If you know the material you don't have to try to cram it into your brain in the last half hour before the test. If you know the material you don't have to try to reason it out from first principles during the test. You just go in, fill out the easy answers straight away, go back and do a second pass for the tricky questions, and that's it. If you have to sit there wracking your brain for 30 minutes on a single problem it's because you already fucked up with how you approached the course weeks ago.
Again, I'm not special for this. There were a handful of other students who were as fast as me. We'd sit in the hall waiting for our friends, look at each other and say "you knew all this stuff too, huh?" "yeah of course"
It is definitely not the case that if student A performs better on a timed high-stakes test than student B, that means A must have worked harder / prepared better / know the material better / etc. than B. Some people are very skilled at bullshitting their way through stupid school tests, and others are not. Very few school tests are well enough designed that they can effectively measure the intended target of how well someone understands the topic, content, and course-specific skills which are being intentionally trained in the course.
Bullshitting though tests is a learnable / trainable skill, but schools generally do not teach it very coherently or well and most students do not deliberately practice it. It generally doesn't have that much to do with the content or other skills intentionally taught by any particular course or by schools in general (there's decent overlap with the skills involved in competitive debate and extemporaneous speech, which some students participate in as an extracurricular activity). Rating students on how good they are at bullshitting their way through exams is sadly a significant part of the way our education system is focused and organized, but in my opinion it is not a valuable or particularly valid approach. There are certain professional contexts/tasks where this kind of skill is useful, but developing it per se shouldn't be the focus of the education system.
Sometimes this and related skills are summarized as "intelligence" ("oh she aced the test without studying, she must just be really smart", etc.), but in my opinion it's quite a misleading use of the word.
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> For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others
Learning to perform under pressure is the main purpose of attending college.
This is an example of a very limited social darwinism. Basically the idea is to remove a lot of enforcement and rules in some activity, or maybe even all, and then "free market" will regulate itself, with "deserving" students managing to manage themselves, and "undeserving" ones lets behind.
But the point of the university is not only teach English grammar and math operations, but also to work in teams, manage yourself, etc. The social stuff. And I suspect a significant number of students benefit from it. And I also suspect that by doing this at scale, the whole society benefits on average.
Removing all control and only checking the knowledge during the exam would lead to a lot of students never catching up. It is likely that it will also lead to the top students being more and more lax and eventually also falling behind.
The whole idea hinges on the base motivation - why do we need primary/secondary etc. education at all? To produce a dozen elite self motivated geniuses per year per country? Then your proposal would work perfectly. Or maybe motivation is different?..
> the assignments could simply be worth 0% [..] that the proctored, for-credit exams would demand that they write similar essays.
We run university programs at my company, and arrived at this bit of insight as well. That said, some of your points are incorrect or incomplete:
- You can't build systems assuming responsible individuals. These systems are guaranteed to fail. Instead, assume individuals are mould-able, and build a system which nurtures discipline towards goals. This works. - There are still issues with cheating, but it's more of an older way of thinking, that we developed methods to reset. - Advanced students need to be given more challenging assignments - quantum of assignments should be the same no matter the capability of students. This solution was unworkable until GenAI came about.
Looked from a pure individual skill-building perspective your ideas are alluring, but if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%), then one understands why physical cohort-led education system can work.
Happy to chat with anyone who'd like to delve deeper on this.
if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%)
As someone with a 96+% 'failure' rate on Udemy/Coursera I honestly don't see the relevance of this statistic. Most people going to University are there primarily because they want/need the degree. That piece of paper is really valuable, perhaps even more so than the knowledge gained. The piece of 'paper' offered by Coursera/Udemy etc. has basically zero value, so the people taking those courses are doing it almost exclusively for the knowledge they offer. Once you've learned what you wanted to learn from the course there is very little incentive to go the extra mile and go for the 'completion'.
The piece of paper is valuable because it represents a sustained effort of learning over an extended period of time.
I understand how from an individual's pov what you said makes sense. Similarly I hope you understand why from the system's perspective: it's the effort that's mandated and not just the proficiency.
Employers and others (higher education orgs, etc) care a lot about sustained effort, alongside proficiency. Only proficiency-focused systems (like Udemy/Coursera/Youtube) are not respected as credentials, since they do not showcase this.
I give university courses in United States. Many of us have certainly down-weighted homework substantially.
However, when some colleagues tried homework as 0% for introductory courses, most students omitted the homework, then failed the exams. Modern students seem to require explicit incentive to work, otherwise the usual: scrolling upon flat screen devices, hedonism, and so forth.
In this case, who has failed: the student, or the professor?
In my experience (about 2 decades ago) in a group of 20-30 students only 2 or 3 are able and willing to do homework. Most students just find someone else and copy from them. The real learning happens when preparing for a big exam.
And to pass an exam students have to prepare for the exam. Homework will only help there if it is similar to the exam.
One time I had to evaluate a written exam where the professor had set up a trap. There was a question that looked like a standard question from homework, but if you used the standard-techniques from the course your calculations didn't work - it was a nasty special case. Most people that started with that question just burned 30 minutes without getting anywhere... a lot of students failed, but at least they learned something about life...
And Oral exams are different. Giving a quick well prepared answer and being able to solve difficult tasks over a few days are completely different skills. Students there prepare for the professor. There are transcripts of previous oral exams. And professors change over the years - the final tough question of an excellent student will a few years later become a starting question. People that didn't know that game and didn't have access to any transcripts were in serious trouble... None of the Homework would have helped in the oral exam.
"In my experience (about 2 decades ago) in a group of 20-30 students only 2 or 3 are able and willing to do homework. Most students just find someone else and copy from them. The real learning happens when preparing for a big exam.
And to pass an exam students have to prepare for the exam. Homework will only help there if it is similar to the exam."
That's not learning really. I can confidently say that because I was the one who unfortunately regressed to this during the uni, and the same story with my peers. One simply can't prepare to the multiple exams sufficiently in a few weeks time (or less). So the only path left is hysterical rote memorization of as much material as possible to squeeze in at a passing grade, and then immediately forget all of the materials in a few months time. Burst of "learning" twice a year for a short time doesn't translate into real learning.
And that's for some simple courses during first few years. Specialist courses later in the program sometimes are impossible to rush "learn". When I tried to pull this off for Probability Theory course, I've failed spectacularly to get even lowest passing mark at first try. And others failed the same way.
Rushing is not good. Some People with good results started early and spent a lot of time reading transcripts of oral exams - and copied homework from other people. Some of them are professors now.
If good results are important, it's most important to know what happens in the exam - and adapt professionally. Learning is fun. I myself always did a lot of homework. But I wish I had been more professional - constant challenges are fun, but most of it is not very time-efficient.
This exactly how one of my English professors structured his class. The students would have to do the research beforehand and come in on test day with their works cited page completed. The actual paper would be written by hand during class time. You were only allowed the blank green book and a couple of pages of notes with direct quotes to incorporate into your paper.
He wasn’t worried about llms, they were not around, but plagiarism. It worked well.
That's pretty much how I teach my programming classes. Assignments are worth zero, or sometimes very little.
The difference I notice with AI is that the bell curve is nearly inverted. You have the good students, who use AI to support their learning. You have the students who let AI do their assignments, and then fail miserably on the exam. And there is hardly anyone left in the middle.
In my (limited) experience, programming classes, especially intro level, often end up with a binomial-ish distribution anyway. I was casually assisting some research on why this is when I was helping teach labs and such so was interested. I'm sure more research happened after I wasn't doing that any more, but I remember the best way of removing this at the time was catchup classes.
A lot of intro programming builds directly on previous lessons, much more so than, e.g., maths. If you missed how variables work (off sick, just didn't get it, whatever), you're still stuck when it comes to functions and anything else following and then you're going to fail - it was quite predictable. We studied other university courses and nothing came close to the pattern we were seeing, except "computing for chemistry" or something, which was basically the same sort of course just in a different department.
So we added explicit catch-up classes a few days after a topic was covered so if you missed it, you could get quite personal help on getting back up to speed. This really shifted the distribution to the right, then the people who failed were either those who just didn't care, or those under more extreme circumstances where this couldn't help (or those who just could not learn programming for love nor money but that was rare ime.)
> often end up with a binomial-ish distribution anyway
I think you meant "bimodal", not "binomial". They mean roughly opposite things here. :)
You are right! Bimodal indeed, thanks
It used to be like that, and I'm old enough to remember why they changed: not every student handles exam stress well. And it has nothing to do with their competency in that subject matter.
For example, in the UK, it was shown that biasing course results towards exam marks caused woman to perform worse than men. But when results included assignments, women generally performed better.
This is obviously a generalisation but it is one of the reasons why so many courses now take assignments into account for their final grade.
In my undergrad, a few decades ago, it was typically the case that assignments and exams both were a part of your final score. Often it was something like 40% exam/60% assignments, but this could change.
However what you mention about different people being better in different circumstances reminds of what our maths courses typically did, it was called "plussage" IIRC. Basically, the scores were calculated, and you got the best score from a 40% exam/60% assignment weighting or a 60%/40% (or something, the exact values are lost to time.) So if you were bad at exams but had done the work through the semester, you got a boost. Or if you were bad at deadlines but had still studied, you weren't (too) penalised.
A couple of points here:
- People need to learn how to write. The quality of student writing was one of the biggest criticisms of students when I was in university, and that was 30 years ago. Writing will only improve with practice and someone to evaluate it. Very few people will be able to learn how to write properly by reading about it, and even fewer people will even realize that you can learn how to write by reading the work of other people (which is important for learning about style in a particular field). For most students, even well meaning ones, no grade means no work done.
- A certain segment of the student population will find ways to cheat anyhow. All you have done is raised the bar so that, hopefully, fewer people will cheat. Quite frankly, I don't know how helpful that is if the "top" of the class moves on since the top of the class tends to be defined by their GPA.
- Test anxiety is a real thing. Different people go to school for different reasons, not all of which lead to high pressure careers. Do we really want to limit who can effectively access an education because of that?
There is no easy solution to this problem. Likely the best solution would be to remove traditional assignments and exams from the loop altogether and having students work directly with their instructors. Yet this has it's own set of problems (it assumes both parties are honest, it is difficult to ensure consistency in the delivery of curriculum, etc.).
So one bad day can ruin your marks.
It’s also a disadvantage for people with test anxiety.
You can have multiple tests throughout the term to bring down variance. Personally I love tests, and I think everyone can learn how to perform well.
It's impossible to design a system which is perfect for everyone. People with attention disorders might feel the opposite and will do better with the pressure of a test.
That’s why the current system has both.
I hated all my proctored essays for the simple reason there's no ability to research things so it feels like the only arguments you can present are rhetorical or using made up statistics.
I had to do these for a couple college classes (The original OpenAI GPTs were just released around when I graduated, I remember reading about them and then avoiding pytorch because the wheels were a pain to build.)
You have to get a special blue book with a couple blank pages and then write an essay with the prompt that's given at exam time. Then you turn in the book at the end of the exam. I think it's a great idea and was surprised more classes didn't work that way but I guess it's like you say: grading written assignments like this is a lot of work.
This is a very sensible proposal, however it falls flat when considering that many students who have paid for a university "education" feel entitled to a degree at the end of it, regardless of how much effort they've put in and whether they have learned enough skills to justify one.
I don’t see the issue with those people not getting what they want.
Nor do I, but the university administration might see things differently to us.
Due to my ADHD, I would try to learn 12-72 hours before the exams. I would fail quickly, hopefully someone could help me recognize why.
writing classs should probably be transformed into prompting class lol. Train students to prompt with clarity and be able to prompt AI to write high quality essays
And then have AI summarize those high quality essays for grading! It's like the inverse of compression!
In all seriousness, I don't see the value in this at all. Why would I want to know a statistically likely essay? Wouldn't I rather know what the student thinks?
> There are valid reasons why college students in particular might prefer that AI do their writing for them: most students are overcommitted;
Tangentially: I've helped out some college students with mentoring and advice from time to time. One common theme I've noticed is that their class load virtually doesn't matter. They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with.
We all like to imagine the poor, overburdened college student working 2 jobs and attending classes to make ends meet when reading statements like that. But to be completely honest, the students like that usually have their time management on point. The hardest ones to coach were the students who had no real responsibilities outside of classes, yet who found their free time slipping through their fingers no matter what they did.
Among all of the other problems with easy AI cheating, I wonder how much the availability of these tools will encourage even more procrastination. Feeling like you always have the fallback option of having ChatGPT write the homework for you leaves the door open to procrastinating even longer
> I asked my students to complete a baseline survey registering their agreement with several statements, including “It is unethical to use a calculator in a math class”
Unless there was more to this survey, this wording seems misleading. In a college-level math class, using a calculator is a common expectation depending on the type of class and the problem. The students would probably think of their TI-89, not a magical AI calculator that could solve every freeform problem for them.
I've gone back to university as an adult to study econometrics, already with a software background.
It has been quite an adjustment, the hardest part isn't really the content, there have just been assessment tasks that are more demanding in time than cognition. I think a big part has been these are introductory subjects.
You have much less agency over your schedule outside university itself than you would have when you're working as well, which has been a massive PITA having previously worked as a software engineer for quite a while. As an institution it just doesn't respect peoples time, which is fine when you're much younger and you're just coming out of school (another institution that doesn't care for your time outside of it).
I think my problems have been compounded by the fact this is a undergraduate degree not a masters. There was only a masters for applied Econ in my area (which is much less data and math focused than econometrics), I've had this conversation 100 times, not looking to repeat that, trust me the moment I see an option to change to a masters in my area of interest in the city I live in, I would jump at it. But my choice to go back to uni to some extent is an as much an act of consumption as it is getting a piece of paper to saying "you can trust this man with econ".
Anyways in these first year subjects, you'll have assessment tasks like "make a recording of you demonstrating your understanding of <basic function in excel>, explain the value of <basic function in excel>". They are easy subjects but they are also really time consuming so to some extent it feels degrading. I would take steps to skip the subject based on my prior experience but the focus of these subjects isn't even Excel, its just thrown in there because they anticipate you have little experience with these things and it'll be useful in later subjects when it becomes assumed knowledge.
Edit: phrasing
> They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with
Despite how much I wish it weren't, this is exactly me. I seem to be able to only work under pressure, so as I got later into my degree I would start my work later and later, until it was standard that I'd start at 4am on the day it was due. A terrible way to function or to learn
the fact is that this is a terrible feedback loop, because every time you started late, but manage to finish on time, it is reinforcing the idea that you're "good" and can manage it even if you start late! This self-reinforcing condition makes you later next time, but because of your capability, you still make it on time.
But at some point, you either stop procrastinating as you find the absolute limit, or fail outright (which is why survivorship bias exists if you look at the student body and see the amount of procrastination).
The good part of it is that you learn to ... actually be faster. Because inverse side is that you start well in advance and then slowly use all the available time for the thing you are doing. Essentially, getting the same result, but in exchange of massive amount of time.
Only being able to work under pressure is textbook ADHD.
Yes you're right, I didn't have the self-insight to understand or accept this until a decade after I graduated. It's still surprising to me that it's so obvious to outsiders but was so unclear to me.
>They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with
IMO you’re observing Parkinson’s law, “work expands to fill the allotted time”. The students who take a million classes look like they have time management in check, and I’m sure some do, but they also are benefiting from the inverse of Parkinson’s law — if they can _only_ allot X hours a week to a task, they’re going to make the most of those X hours. This practically holds regardless of the student’s time management skills. I should know, I have horrible time management, and only succeed by overcommitting and rising to the challenge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law?wprov=sfti1
> One common theme I've noticed is that their class load virtually doesn't matter. They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with.
12 credits is normally a minimum. That's roughly 12 hours a week in classroom, give or take. You need 3x that number of hours out of the classroom--that's 36 hours.
So, you're at 48 hours of academic work every single week. A 15 credit load means a 60 hour week.
Most people working jobs would start to complain about burnout at 50+ hours per week for 4 years running. They would almost certainly complain at 60 hours per week.
Most 3 credit hour classes are really 2.5 hours. And almost no one spends 36 hours hours outside of class on a 12 credit schedule unless they messed up and signed up for 4 difficult classes in the same semester. You definitely aren’t spending that much time outside of class all semester long.
You also have to consider that a semester is 16 weeks. The first week or 2 of each semester is very light.
So we’re talking 30/52 weeks a year for most people.
For most people, you’ll never have that much free time again in your life.
College feels like a lot of work because you aren’t good at time management yet. And you remember the last few weeks of each semester where you are actually extremely busy.
> The first week or 2 of each semester is very light.
Please tell that to the undergrad STEM professors, please. Almost all of mine had an assignment first class that was due by the third class.
Freshman engineering is generally Calc I, Physics I, Chem I, and English Composition/Writing and often some random engineering/computer thing. I assure you that schedule sucks even harder that it looks like it sucks, and it gets more time consuming as the years progress.
While there were lots of Party Hardy(tm) types in the College of Arts, the ones I knew who were taking their degrees seriously were working every bit as hard as the STEM folks. Possibly, they were working harder as they needed a lot more extracurricular work and achievement since what they were doing didn't have nice, clean objective measures like STEM does. They spent a lot of time being unpaid labor at functions and networking like crazy.
By contrast, no matter how many hours they worked me at my summer internship, it simply never compared to the grind at school.
I have a CS degree. My wife has an engineering degree and then went to medschool. Both of us had 4.0s.
We both agree that we had far more time in undergrad than at anytime since.
We frequently had small assignments the first week, but they were universally not worth much because many people aren’t even in the class yet since drop/add ran through the whole first week. They were also not very much work.
The point is there is no way you were spending 12-16 hours per class the first week.
I never spent that much time in Physics I, Calculus I or any English Class. The only classes I spent that much time on or more were higher level project based CS classes.
And even then I wasn’t spending that much time on them till closer to midway through the semester.
Then you get nearly the whole month of December off—Spring Break, Thanksgiving, and Summer.
No one expects anything from you at a summer internship. Companies don’t expect anything from experienced employees in the first couple months. Harder than a summer internship doesn’t say much.
On top of that you’ll never have fewer responsibilities than when you were at school.
It just seems like you had no free time because it’s the time in your life when you haven’t learned time management yet, and you remember the last few weeks leading up to final exams and semester project due dates.
> Both of us had 4.0s.
You are so far removed from the ability of the average student that your personal observations about college simply don't generalize.
> I never spent that much time in Physics I, Calculus I or any English Class.
Do you understand just how far out of the norm that is?
Not everybody is coming from elite high schools and can blow through a college 101 class. The vast majority of engineers fight through all three of those--especially an English composition class. I had friends who did poorly in Calc I, dropped it but stayed in the class just so they plowed through it next semester. These aren't people "fooling around" with bad "time management". They were bog standard state school students who needed to get through, get out, and start making money. They were first college generation who didn't have rich parents backing them. They were motivated and got out in 4 years--something that most college students regard as difficult.
> No one expects anything from you at a summer internship.
Seriously? As a summer intern I always had deliverables. When I became a manager instead, we always had deliverables for co-ops and interns.
I didn’t go to an elite high school or college (my wife did though) my high school was awful. My parents got divorced my junior year and we were on food stamps after that. I went to a state school. And not even a flagship state school.
I dropped out the first time—2 years into a history degree—because I was working full time.
Eventually I moved home, and started over with CS. Despite CS being a lot harder, I had plenty of free time to work on a startup, build side projects, and play video games.
The reason was because a few years of experience made me much better at time management and prioritization.
I’m not saying you or anyone else was bad at time management as an insult. It’s just that college the time in your adult life when you have the absolute least experience at time management, so most people are very bad at it.
But also when you average it over the whole semester, none of my friends, even the ones who were bad at their classes spent 3 hours per credit hour outside of class. The ones who were bad at it tended to just skate by with Cs.
> As a summer intern I always had deliverables.
No one cares about those deliverables though. They aren’t trusting summer interns to do anything that really needs to get done.
Imo those numbers are pretty inflated unless you’re taking a full load of the hardest classes offered. Usually you pair some GE requirements or electives with heavier material. I really don’t want do some sort of humble brag here, so I’ll just say that if I followed your math it would come out to like 90+ hours. I promise, I was not that diligent.
Different tools in different years as expectations have changed. The TI-89 is incredibly powerful, but has to give way to MATLAB and Wolfram Alpha. It used to be productive to “google” your problems. Going further, there’s now LLMs writing python code to do calculations. Hard to say what’s next, but I’m sure what is considered ethically questionable today will be acceptable and the new thing will be the new questionable tool.
To be clear; there are plenty of contexts where having a TI-89 is 100% unambiguously cheating. There are even more places where MATLAB and Wolfram Alpha are cheating.
Please share examples of contexts where TI-89 is cheating
A times table test like we all took in grade school. A test applying Newton's method. Any test where the calculator can do the work instead of you, and a TI-89 can do quite a bit of work.
And more trivially/procedurally, the numerous tests I had to take in high school and university which explicitly said "no graphing calculators" (and the occasional test that said "no calculators" outright).
Thanks
I was thinking of exams rather than day to day learning of basics, seeing tests as teaching rather than assessing. Point being you can't cheat at learning.
The calculator can't fake that you understand e.g. how to differentiate. The working is the bulk of available exam marks but the calculator only gives answers.
Is it unambiguous cheating if it doesn't help?
The working is the bulk of available exam marks but the calculator only gives answers
Knowing what the answer is supposed to be makes it much easier to reverse engineer the workings, and it lets you double check that your workings are correct. Also many of the more advanced graphing calculators (don't know the TI-89 specifically) have build in CAS systems and can do symbolic differentiation and as such help with showing your workings as well.
Plus the fact that these calculators let you store arbitrary data, so you can have your entire textbook stored in memory if you wanted.
Good points, thanks.
I want to say something like "who learns advanced calculator functions solo but not the taught subject?" but of course shortcuts-by-rote spread like lice. I suppose that's the thrust of the problem with AI in schools
My Calc 1 class forbade all calculators. Grades were also completely based on quizes and exams. Homework assignments were all optional and un-graded.
From memory it (and the 83/84) was banned from all math and physics exams during first year or two of our uni. There was a list of approved less powerful models. Nothing that could store programs.
All forms/structures in society that think that a TI-89 is cheating deserve to have as many people as possible use TI-89 and similar CAS's.
Ludditism is the human death drive externalized for the modern age. Reject it in all of its incarnations.
There's objectively no value with learning how to perform calculations by hand that CAS's can perform better automatically.
We have well over the number of human beings on earth amounts of calculator capable calculating devices. I will not "be in a situation where I don't have a calculator".
Time spent not teaching folks how to use computational aids of math and teaching them to do it the "hard way" is time robbed from them.
Those who invent systems which subvert or short circuit the attempts to enslave individuals into doing hard work for hard works sake are ontologically good. Those who try to defend work for works sake are ontologically evil and I hope that they reincarnate into a durian fruit in the next life.
> I will not "be in a situation where I don't have a calculator". [...] Those who invent systems which subvert or short circuit the attempts to enslave individuals into doing hard work for hard works sake are ontologically good. Those who try to defend work for works sake are ontologically evil and I hope that they reincarnate into a durian fruit in the next life.
By that logic, you must also permit students another extremely well-established labor-saving technique: Hiring someone else do the homework/exams on their behalf!
After all, for students from certain families, forcing them to use the calculator personally would likewise be "robbing time from them", denying them valuable experience honing their skills in managing and subcontracting. They'll never be in a situation where they don't have a calc^H^H^H^H lackey.
I trust we can agree that (A) permitting outsourcing is absurd, (B) that cheating is not "ontologically good" even when reduces the total human labor, and (C) prohibiting the practice should not put a teacher into a state of stinky-fruit damnation.
I submit that we do care about how students do it and which skills they use, even if we disagree on what those are. It is not as simple as saying that good education means spurring them to supply Valid Answers By Any Contemporary Efficient Means.
Hiring someone else do the homework/exams on their behalf!
We definitely should allow that for MBA students, since that will most closely mirror what they'll be doing once they get into the work force.
You take these classes in order to internalize the intuition for the subject. That's the point of the class. Getting the right answers is only important insofar as it serves that goal.
Your attitude makes sense in engineering but not in a math class for example.
They're building a different (entirely more concrete) suite of intuition than mathematicians, but engineers need to internalize their intuition too!
From my experience:
We were not permitted to use a TI-89 in math courses since we were expected to learn the underlying concepts, which is much more than learning how to use a tool.
The reasoning was similar in physics. The instructors couldn't care less whether we used the CAS functionality of the TI-89 because that wasn't a part of their curriculum, but they were concerned about students downloading solver programs. (Most of the instructors would agree that creating our own programs to solve problems would be a valuable learning tool, but they had no way to determine whether we created those programs or someone else.)
Academic courses tend to be biased towards laying the foundations so that we can build upon our own knowledge. There are other types of courses that are purely concerned about applications and the use of tools.
> There's objectively no value with learning how to perform calculations by hand that CAS's can perform better automatically.
You're not learning how to perform calculations in most calculus courses. Perhaps not even most algebra courses.
A given expression can be simplified/factored in multiple ways. That TI-89 is going to do it only one way. When working with a typical physics/engineering problem, the way you decide to arrange the terms can help tremendously in understanding the physics of the situation.
I hear this take only from people who've not gone ahead and done advanced (graduate) level work.
What about work for learnings sake?
Frankly, I'm quite glad to be able to do basic arithmetic in my head -- having to pick up a calculator every time I need to multiply two numbers would burn through far more time over the course of my life than what I spent in Kindergarten (or whenever) learning to do it myself.
All you want is for people to be better slaves for your capitalist machine. Never learning how to do things themselves: only consuming, buying what could otherwise have been achieved by the simple (but non-GDP-increasing) exercise of their own mind. Your rhetoric betrays your own class.
The idea of work abolitionism / being anti-work is somehow turned into an accusation of wanting to enslave folks for capitalist ends.
You can't even imagine a reality any different than "Capitalist Realism"
Go read Mark Fischer.
Try reading more than one leftist book: Fischer is great, but he doesn't try to talk praxis. So I'm talking about pragmatics here: just pretending that "we can abolish work by automating it" is pure ideology, totally ignorant of the centuries of historical examples to the contrary. Any time you get back will immediately be seized. What matters are your personal capabilities, what the working class is capable of doing with their own hands. You advocate waiting on the bourgeoisie to hand over control (what, out of good will?), but Fischer could tell you that only by seizing power for themselves can the working class ever become free.
> Any time you get back will immediately be seized.
I imagine some guy several thousand years ago: "Once we finish teaching this animal to pull the plough for us, descendants of The Tribe Between The Two Rivers shall have lives of pure leisure!"
I feel like you're glossing over the contexts of "acceptable" and "questionable".
The tool itself is not questionable or acceptable, it becomes questionable or acceptable depending on the usage. A pencil and paper can be questionable if the test is designed and expected to be completed without it.
You can design tests where an LLM spitting out python is an expected tool, but what are you testing for then? I doubt there are classes that teach whatever that test would be for yet.
I think this is covered in Micheal Easter’s notion that as societies become more comfortable, our brains lower the threshold of what constitutes a “problem” in our lives. We’re wired not only to be great at problem solving but also discovering new ones. Think this is based on prevalence theory related research in psychology.
Being one of those students and with a career under my belt of process analysis and coaching, I have an interesting observation: I harness free time as an explicit part of my writing process, rather than something that interferes with it.
I write at about 1200 words per day and I considered each fo the major multi-week assignments in my entry-level English courses to be worth no more than one day of my time apiece. For the finals, I gave them two days apiece, because I wanted an extra day to define the scaffolding for my argument.
My mother indicates that this is how she went through college too; very occasionally, a serious paper would require more effort than this, but for the most part it was “load assignment into brain, study assignment mentally until T-2d, write assignment, submit”. If several essays are due, then they have to be staged at various days numbered T-2d through T-5d for example — and it’s really important to not depend on T-1d existing at all due to courseware/internet/power outages.
I could technically write a worse essay the day it was assigned, but ultimately, I’m turning in A-tier work by this method. The hardest lesson was that I have to try not to wait until T-1d, because there’s a lot of risk encoded in that and it outweighs the value derived from having an extra day to think about it while I do other things.
But it wasn’t about “free time slipping away” — it’s just that I’m writing crap throwaway work that doesn’t matter after it’s done, and so I can barely motivate to care relative to literally anything else in my life that matters. Thus the T-2d compromise: I’m not about to give them precedence over literally anything, but I will concede that I do need to do so one day early, however boring it feels, because I’d rather have a crap day at T-2d than the same crap day at T-1d with the unproductive anxiety of risking a class-retake if my internet drops out.
Notably, when I actually genuinely care about what I’m writing, I’ll spend weeks researching sources and studying arguments and selecting quotes and then assembling it all over a couple days into a work of art — but assembly day is still always as late as possible in the time window assigned, because by then I’m most able to think and write about it efficiently and with a minimum of frustration. Not a zero of frustration, that is — I am a grouchy writer — but I’m healthy-grouchy on T-2d and bitter-grouchy on T-1d, so I do make the effort to put in my writing that day early now.
So: for your coaching efforts, try working with students to construct a working calendar that has non-writing activities in the leadup and then writing activities at the end. ie assuming a 7-day window,
T-7d: Assignment given: Read the assignment. (Seems obvious; is not obvious!)
T-6d: Think about your argument during your free time, while playing games or out at coffee or whatever.
T-5d: Try to construct a very halfass outline on a piece of paper. One sentence per argument you’d like to make, draw arrows to rearrange them. Not complete sentences, not punctuated, doesn’t have any structure at all. Point is that trying will help brain coalesce.
T-4d: Research references for fun. End up with far too many. Start highlighting quotes to yourself using highlighter or digital tools. If you’re going to experiment with a new tool, get it working and productive in 2 hours or discard it and do something shittier.
T-3d: Bind quotes to your argument phrases from that halfass outline. This may force reorg of outline; cool. Compile Works Cited from whatever you end up using so that you don’t have to fuck around with it tomorrow.
T-2d: Write paper, referring to outline / phrases handwritten note. Do one paragraph at a time. Plan to spend your entire day on this with 1 hour away from desk handling bio/sanity needs for every 2 hours at desk. Enforce that upon yourself.
T-1d: Finish whatever writing you didn’t feel like you were prepared to write on T-2d. Ideally try to do this earlier in the day than later, since that every hour you let this slip towards midnight l measurably increases your chances of a life outage causing you to fail the class.
The point of this schedule is to bake in the daydreaming / slow cooker aspect of the creative process but to keep it on the rails. I play video games extensively when I’m thinking about a paper because I can feed my literary brain the assignment to simmer and then go occupy my reflex brain with the game. I usually end up having to use some T-1d time but I’m getting better at managing my life’s dependencies ie. Food and Water and Sleep so that I’m more reliably at T-2d completion :)
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Please don't do this here.
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Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial
Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes. Then only four function calculators, then graphing calculators. But still today, programmable calculators are prohibited in many academic contexts.
The point that you're (and everyone is) glossing over here is relative positions on the skill gradient.
A first grader probably would be prohibited from using any kind of calculator on arithmetic tests, 4-fn or not. But 8th graders are usually permitted scientific (non-programmable) calculators.
As you go up in grade level, you "get access to" calculators capable of functionality at the level below you. Because the point is that when we're educating students we want them to actually learn the subject matter, but once we've deemed them to have understood it and we have them move onto the next goal, we give them the tools to make that prior goal easier. We lessen the burden of the little mechanical concepts they already know so that they have an easier time becoming familiar with the next more advanced concepts.
AI systems are so much more advanced than what's capable on a TI programmable calculator. It's hard to draw clean boundaries around the tiers and enforce them by telling the model "help the user with tasks of tier 1-4 but not 5+". That's the issue, that it's really infeasible to strictly use them strictly as learning tools. You can almost do it with a lot of self-discipline and self-reflection to analyze your own workflow, but it's not generalizable across domains.
I mentioned the continued ban on programmable calculators in many academic contexts. Those contexts still include some portions of undergraduate education. This is fifty years after the introduction of programmable calculators.
Realistically, the answers the students gave the teacher were probably motivated by the practical benefits that come with giving teachers the answers they want to hear…bullshit questions are likely to produce bullshit answers. It’s not like first year college students haven’t had twelve years of academic standards moralizing talked at them.
> Realistically, the answers the students gave the teacher were probably motivated by the practical benefits that come with giving teachers the answers they want to hear…bullshit questions are likely to produce bullshit answers.
Like I said to you in another comment, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the article.
At least one of the polls was anonymous, too. There were no punishments in the class for using AI, in fact at least a couple of the students later revealed they had been using AI for everything.
This wasn't a "bullshit inducing poll", it was an experiment in perception vs reality, and how they modified those perceptions after the experiment had run its course.
Why can't they be restricted to produce only the concepts of a grade below you? It sounds doable and is actually a great idea.
Can LLMs be reliably restricted to produce any specific subset of content? AFAICT they're still consistently jailbroken.
It’s easy to do at the syntactic level by controlling the sampling. For example, it’s easy and common to restrict output to be valid JSON but just not allowing any tokens that would make it not valid JSON.
But reliably restricting output at the semantic level is very much an open problem.
How are you going to ensure that it is impossible for the student to work around whatever measures you take?
>>> imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable
It didn't.
I was in math class when calculators were introduced. At least for high school level and beyond, the curricula were designed to make problems solvable without calculators, and they weren't of much use. This was still the case when I taught an undergrad college math class in 1997. Graphing calculators were allowed, and the kids who tried to use them just screwed themselves up.
I would have gladly changed the curriculum to use calculators and computers from the very beginning. As tools, and not just to administer the same old exercises and quizzes. Give them Jupyter Notebook. Math education has never been a success story.
Education faces a dilemma, which is that it has always used heuristics to guide study and assess performance. Exercises such as the "three paragraph essay" had no use in the real world, even long before AI could generate them on demand. When one of those heuristics is broken, another one has to be found. Even word processing forced teachers to grade papers on content, rather than mechanics.
> Exercises such as the "three paragraph essay" had no use in the real world
The rigid formatting imposed by graded assignments may not have any use. But on the other hand, having completed a liberal arts/"soft" science degree before my CS degree I've greatly benefited in the workplace from the writing experience it provided. I had to write so many papers that it became more or less effortless to produce long form, well structured writing and those written communication skills have helped me distinguish myself far more than my technical ability at work.
The generic ChatGPT overly formal corporate tone has no nuance or subtlety and is a poor substitute for well crafted, deliberate communication. I am always conscious of how my exact words and phrasing would be perceived by the intended audience, frequently requiring a balancing act between competing interests while maintaining clarity. Due to that I manage to avoid stepping on toes or sabotaging relationships due to inartful phrasing. It's frustrating to receive emails consisting of LLM boilerplate because it has such low information density and is so much more difficult to infer tone and emotion from the other side .
I'm very grateful I completed my education without the temptation to just churn out low effort writing or code and depriving myself of that experience. I'm not confident at all I would have been able to maintain that self-discipline.
I'm with you there. Though I have a technical degree, I went to a liberal arts college, and preferentially took courses that had a heavy writing component. I was a good typist thanks to coding, and one of the first students to use word processing. Today, I still use those skills to my advantage.
As a teen in the late 80's I had an HP calculator that I programmed to compute molecular weights given an input string like "H2SO4". It felt like having a secret superpower, especially when I participated in competitive exams. I was a very straightlaced kid and would not have used the program if it such things were explicitly forbidden, but as far as I could tell, they never were.
Reminds me of when I write a j2me app for matrix diagonalization because we could use the old feature phones as calculators. Nobody thought we'd be mad enough to use those to cheat...
Do you still have the source code for the j2me app?
I hadn’t yet learned to program back when I was still using a feature phone, but I have a lot of fond memories of J2ME applications that I installed on my phones. Mostly games, of course.
I encourage anyone that wrote J2ME games and utilities, no matter how small or big, to upload the source to GitHub :)
That one would be definitely lost to time...
Yeah makes sense. I have very little left of my early stuff too, heh
well a lot of bio info stuff are still using java.
But surely not so much J2ME for feature phones stuff right? Those bio info stuff are probably rather desktop applications.
Did you tell your teachers about your superpower?
But normally it depends on the subject and if the automation/machine solves the primary skill being teached or if its just a "secondary/tertiary" skill. Are you in a Calculus 101 class? Calculators like TI-89 are likely to be prohibited when examining for deriving analytical solutions for derivatives and integrals.
Statistics, Physics or any other subjects that needs applied maths? Such a calculator is probably a minimum requirement to take the course.
My HP-49g+ was definitely load-bearing going through EE. I was never much good at memorizing big sheets of formulas but I was pretty good at memorizing a couple of simple differential equations (e.g. I(t) = C dv(t)/dt was easy, v(t) = v_s * e^(-t/RC) wouldn't stick). So I'd just... derive all of the "special case" formulas from scratch during the exam. Usually they were simple enough that I could just get them into the right form but I'd lean on my calculator doing the symbolic integration for me when they weren't.
The other thing it was awesome for was solving systems of linear equations. I could do the nodal or loop analysis just fine, I'd write down the matrix that represented the system of equations and then just punch that matrix in and invert it.
You did the capacitor DE in your head? The analytical solution requires a “trick” (integrating factor) usually taught in an intro DE class.
It became second nature pretty quickly! Dunno what to tell you, my brain's wired funny :D
The day when the relationship between s in a Laplace transform and d/dt finally clicked was also a really excellent day :D
I was on pretty good terms with my chemistry teacher, so...maybe? It's been a while, but I don't remember either showing it off or taking pains to keep it secret. To adults, that is; my nerdy friends and I delighted in showing off the cool stuff we did with our calculators.
I vaguely remember thinking that one likely reason shortcuts like mine were not prohibited was because no one in charge suspected that such things were even possible with current technology, or if they were, that a child would be able to exploit it. But as long as I kept to the letter of the rules, I considered myself ethically in the clear.
> But as long as I kept to the letter of the rules, I considered myself ethically in the clear.
Yeah, totally, just to be clear I'm not judging.
In fact, if you programmed it to handle those operations, one could argue you had already learned a big chunk of what was going to be measured in the exams.
Kind of similar to the paradox of creating and using cheat sheets, is highly likely you're accidentally learning about the subject matter in the process of writing the sheet, sometimes up to a point where the cheat sheet is not necessary anymore.
> Kind of similar to the paradox of creating and using cheat sheets, is highly likely you're accidentally learning about the subject matter in the process of writing the sheet, sometimes up to a point where the cheat sheet is not necessary anymore.
The problem is (example from mathematics): even if you are capable of deriving some formula (you thus understood the topic well), it takes a lot of time in the exam. Looking at the cheat sheet is much faster - in particular when the time is somewhat precious in the exam.
A related personal story: During my statistics course in high school, we discovered that the TI-89 had some statistical functions that the TI-83 didn't have. So, the rule was that if we wanted to use the TI-89 ones, you had to write an application for the TI-83 one. It was a great way to really learn the algorithms.
Stuff like that seems harder to do than learning the damn thing correctly
I always felt (and my maths teachers agreed) that if I understood something sufficiently to automate it, I’d proved my point and didn’t need to do the rest of the exercises.
Edit: Automate in the sense of coding it myself, not in the sense of downloading some software.
I could do it correctly from the get-go. The program just saved me from drudgery many times over. Probably enough times to recoup my time investment to create the program, but in any case I enjoyed coding for its own sake.
I you like Chemistry, then yes. If you like programming but dislike chemistry, then no.
The calculator tricked them into studying. Same trick as the "one note card, front back" but in this case accidental.
It's also an extremely misleading comparison. Basic calculator functions do not in the slightest replace anything taught in a maths class. Using ChatGPT not just to write entire paragraphs (replacing composition), or even providing the writer with ideas (replacing the creative aspects of writing) isn't comparable to adding two large numbers together.
The equivalent in maths would be if you handed students a theorem prover or have Wolfram Alpha give you step-by-step solutions and obviously nobody to this day allows this, because like ChatGPT for writing it'd defeat the point, that students think.
When I was in uni we were allowed basic but not programmable calculators during exams and a lot of CS classes even were pen&paper, if the prof was a bit hardcore
The concepts of adding machines and calculators were also slowly phased in over the span of a century. The first commercially successfully adding machines hit the market in the 1890's, and pocket calculators took off in the 1980's. AI went from theory to answering hand written math homework questions from a photograph in a few years.
I only had a calculator (at a technical university) starting in the mid-1970s. Prices were dropping like a stone in about that period. In high school it was pretty much slide rules.
Turns out education done right is vaguely a speed-run of how the knowledge was developed. Adding calculating tools makes sense as you advance the the corresponding point in the process. Honestly, I think there should be a chunk of precal and calc where they use slide rules only, then calculators of increasing complexity (or just increasingly complex features of one calculator).
"When will I use this in real life" is a declaration that you have no expectations of learning the next lesson that builds upon this one.
>> Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial
> Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes.
The author of TFA means specifically for his cohort of students, not in general. He polled his students, and the result was that they thought calculators weren't seen as unethical but they were more skeptical/uncertain about AI. By his current students, now, not in general.
LLM’s have been widely available for approximately five years.
Five years into the availability of a calculator with an arbitrary advanced feature, it was controversial in academic contexts. Some of the author’s students could be grand-children of students from the early days of consumer calculators.
The author is comparing a new technology with an old one. And ignoring programable calculators which are still sometimes banned after fifty years…and many of the author’s students probably have used LLM’s for homework despite their statements that please the author.
The author is doing nothing of the sort.
Among other things, he's analyzing his students attitudes' re: AI and cheating with AI, and also comparing what they claim to feel vs what they actually do! It's mostly a reflection of what his students feel about the use of AI in English writing, not about calculators vs AI.
It seems as if you're responding to the line you quoted (out of context) through your preconceptions of what the article is about instead of actually reading the article!
> and many of the author’s students probably have used LLM’s for homework despite their statements that please the author.
"Probably have used LLM's"!? Don't take this the wrong way, but it seems you didn't read past the line you quoted, am I right? Because this is explicitly addressed multiple times, and the answer may surprise you.
The teacher is asking a rhetorical question and getting an et cum spiritu tuo response.
am I right?
Of course not...and did-you-read-the-article comments are contrary to HN community standards. Such comments wallow in lameness.
> Of course not
Of course yes. My comment was rhetorical!
> The teacher is asking a rhetorical question and getting an et cum spiritu tuo response.
He wasn't asking a rhetorical question! It was two polls, at least one of which was anonymous! Followed by several experiments!
I mean, you completely missed the point of the article and are making comments that are immediately refuted by simply reading it. You are making factually incorrect statements about the article, what am I to think? That you read it, but decided to ignore its contents to make some irrelevant remark about calculators vs LLMs?
The article is all about the tension of what his students initially believe (or claimed to believe, anyway) about AI-assisted writing, and what they come to realize at the end of the class. They also discuss authenticity vs formulaic writing, and are surprised by the results as well! They also discuss the tropes that show up in AI-writing, speculate on what may cause it, and are surprised about some of the results they get. They also discuss AI-assisted teaching. At the end, they revisit whether to be pro or anti AI, and the future of English classes, with or without AI.
All of it has very little to do with how recent LLMs vs calculators are. You focused on an out of context comment which doesn't inform the bulk of the article, and doesn't say what you claimed it said.
Totally correct. In the 90's as a kid in school using a calculator was highly debated amongst teachers and the ability to bring one out on your desk depended on the teacher.
In grade 2 i had a teacher who would say "I don't believe in erasers", you know, the things that "undo" pencil. As a ~6 yr old i actually didn't understand this phrase: "Well I have one, they're real!"
> Calculators are uncontroversial now.
Yes, they are uncontroversially bad. Schools that don't use them have higher scores.
Unfortunately, even SAT/ACT have calculator slop now.
No middle schooler is using a graphing calculator on their algebra exam
I literally used a graphing calculator on my algebra exams in middle school.
Yeah I don't believe you, especially because you have an axe to grind about AI singularity bullshit. No one in their right mind should allow a graphing calculator to be used on an algebra exam, might as well let them bring a laptop and open Wolfram alpha.
Maybe my teachers didn’t know you could program equation solvers into it. Either way it helped me understand that those in authority didn’t understand the nature of the world changing beneath them, which prepared me for how many people would end up misunderstanding AI and under-appreciating it despite how much it is evidently changing the world.
> Reflecting on the fact that 3 credits at UVA costs me $5000+ and 2100+ minutes,” Drew wrote, “I do not believe I grew enough through this course for it to be worth it.” Having noticed only “incremental improvements in [his] writing and thinking,” he concluded that “I would rather have spent this large sum of money and time on a course that interests me and teaches me about my career aspirations, like the finances of real estate. If I need to learn to write, I believe AI can serve me well for MY purpose at a fraction of the cost
Somehow this hits hard
A monopoly on certificates (degrees) is causing it. It's ridiculous that an English course costs 5000$. A lot of people can do a better job teaching this material for 500$ or less but they don't have a right to issue a prestigious certificates.
I just hope "free market fails" people realise one day that the most overpriced industries (healthcare and education) are the ones free competition is not allowed in.
We used to have no regulations on healthcare. It was terrible.
Other countries don’t have populations chomping at the bit to allow Amazon to dropship healthcare. They aren’t perfect, but the US system is singularly broken.
They sort of do, Turkish hairlines, and Cali come immediately to mind. It’s just that you have to drop ship yourself there.
This concept is very far from all rainbows and sunshine [1], exactly what you'd expect to happen leaving it all up to the market indeed.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9jv1xyxm0o
UVA is a heavily Liberal Arts college. (or at least, it was when I was looking a generation ago). That means that there are a lot of distribution requirements and you're going to be doing the soft fuzzy useless sounding things like English rather than going through blindered to things that will be in your major/make you money right out of college. But learning to write means that you need to learn to think critically of what to write.
It's not a Technically oriented college, though it does teach the sciences, but I wouldn't go there (and didn't) for Engineering. That's what VA Tech is for, though the weather is worse, the campus not as nice, and not quite as prestigious.
The generally Liberal Arts system in the US is a strong contrast to the European system, where you often start focusing on a few subjects at the high school level, and then apply to a degree program where you have very few "outside the major" choices. My wife didn't take math or science after she was 12 (but she took languages), Oldest 2 kids are down to 3 or 4 subjects at the high school level (One is doing the Bio/Chem/Physics A levels, one did Phys/Math/Further Math/Geography). The last incidence of anything not STEMish was GCSE/Junior Cert/~15yr old level.
>My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point.
This instantly paints the author as someone out of touch with their students. For the record, it comes from streamers/Twitch a la "Chat, is this real?"
I'm not saying everyone needs to know every meme, but starting off with this does taint the rest of the piece a little.
It's both. I've seen people both in real life (coworkers) and online refer to ChatGPT as "Chat", completely independent of the Twitch "chat" meme.
Yeah I've seen people refer to it as "Chat" too who've nothing to do with Twitch.
My first reflex at this was revulsion, similar to my reaction to “crypto” becoming a term for both cryptography and everything bitcoin-adjacent. But now I think the conflation is pretty cute and apt. LLM chatbots, for better or worse. are aiming to replace actual human chat, so might as well use language that makes it explicit
Huh, everyone I know appends -gpt to the end of things to designate AI. Probably because "chat" is already taken. I suppose there are multiple usages though.
Nah, it's just inconvenient to say "Chat-G-P-T". Particularly in voice mode. If it had officially been GoogleMGL people would have still say "Google it" despite the lack of live streaming reference.
This essay resonated with me because it highlighted the similarity between AI-written texts, describing the result as a word salad. And this also reminded me about some words from my teacher of Russian Literature: that the "bright future" themed novels of the pre-WW2 Soviet writers — works produced under strict political control — read like one big novel without a beginning and an end, and not as separate works.
And this grayness and sameness is what happens when people are forced to "think" as a chorus, either by the authorities or their censorship, or voluntarily by using the same AI's help.
Or by market consolidation, as we're experiencing now.
Really enjoyed that. Shows the "messy middle" that people are caught in during this current wave of AI tech. I think one undeniable positive outcome has been the like collective introspection AI has sparked among so many people. With a tool challenging what it means to be "human" or "creative" (more so than prior technological advances), I've been seeing a lot of wonderful discussions, articles, videos, etc. with people wrestling with those questions and also just affirming their own singular voice and unique creative essence. It's been cool to see.
I think one undeniable positive outcome has been the like collective introspection AI has sparked among so many people.
Has it sparked that? I'm doubtful but I'd be very interested if anyone has a references about such introspection.
I grew up reading Douglas Hofstadter back in the 70s and what I appreciated with his ideas was using AI to illuminate what is human. His wave of AI failed, of course. But still, it's disheartening how little of that kind of inquiry seems missing from the current wave of AI.
> most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce.
Yeah. Overcommitted to partying and skipping class.
Has this author ever been to an average American university?
Let's rephrase it to "most of even the best students" then.
I went to about the cheapest US school that had a decent math program. It costs $17,500/yr between tuition, rent, books, and rice and beans.
That's a lot of money. It's over $10/hr in pre-tax income, even if you work full-time all year, which isn't an easy bar to clear in the sort of towns with cheaper universities. Wages don't scale well enough with more expensive tuition for there to be substantially better options.
Classes are another 22+ hours each week (you could complete school in 3-4 yrs instead, but that makes it even harder to afford and doesn't really reduce the workload enough to make a difference, however I'll also factor in a 15-hour workload later).
The rule of thumb is that you should study 3 hours for every hour of class. I found that approximately correct. Some classes took a lot less. Some took a little more. Combined with the self study you need in adjacent topics, 3hrs is a fair bit low.
During the school year then, you have something that looks like a 128hr/week schedule, or 100hr if you're finishing in 4yrs, and still 60hr/week even if you're finishing in 4yrs and racking up $70k in debt.
Don't get me wrong; I had free time (I worked more during the summer, less during the school year, allowing loans to cover the slack, which bought extra time here and there), but it wasn't exactly a party either. When I skipped class it was because I had to work, had to study for some other more pressing class, or found it more efficient to study the book than to try to understand that particular lecturer.
This matched my experience 30 years ago. Work 20 hours a week, but tuition and living expenses were a lot cheaper back then ($215-$330/month for a room! $900/quarter tuition). The 3 hour for every 1 hour of class is especially true for computer science, and skipping class in favor of self study worked well if the lecturer was really bad. Lectures were pretty much bonus reinforcement if useful at all, a lot of what you learned relied on self study.
A lot of students didn't do what I did, and they washed out pretty quickly (I had a lot of classmates from HS that didn't last the first quarter). My first quarter was pretty harsh (only got one 4.0, and a 2.7 in a chemistry class I had no reason being in), but I wised up quickly. It was hard going from High school where I could do all my homework in the time between classes, to college where I had to do real actual studying.
> This matched my experience 30 years ago.
You know that's fair, I hadn't considered the generational differences to be this vast.
My experience was only 7 years ago. I don't think it's a generational difference so much as the fact that a university is a big place, enough so that even if you engage actively with 100+ people you won't see the whole picture.
It has gotten a lot more expensive and competitive. I’m almost embarrassed to mention how crazy cheap my school was in 1995 compared to 2025. Also, I doubt I would have gotten in with my high school achievements even though I graduated in a fairly decent cum laude position. Life for kids these days is a lot tougher.
The numbers I quoted were current prices for the school/city I attended (UND, if anyone wants to cross check). When I attended prices were lower, but so were wages and a number of other things, roughly proportionally AFAICT.
I could maybe see your point about admittance (I had something like a D average, maybe C- or C+ or something, in high school), but I think my financial estimates were about correct. Is something majorly incorrect?
Even if so, there are a dozen cheaper states in the country with halfway decent programs (if any future internet denizen is reading this, Fayetteville Arkansas is actually great for math right now, both in quality and in cost/jobs). I doubt my observations are too far off-base for a typical student trying to go to school economically.
> The rule of thumb is that you should study 3 hours for every hour of class. I found that approximately correct. Some classes took a lot less. Some took a little more.
lol stop the cap.
Its more like 0.5 hours of grand total work for every hour of scheduled class, since most kids are skipping 50% of the classes and using "chat" (a really fetch name for a new digital drug btw) to make up the rest.
College is just a hoop, remember?
What people are telling you in the comments is that your perspective is not universal. I've personally only ever skipped one class in my time in undergrad (as an American at an American university), and not for a party. I'm not a special case or anything, those classes are very expensive!
You are much closer to a special case than you think. Average attendance in my and my colleagues Math 101 classes is around 30% by mid semester.
i would guess math 101 to be the least attended class across the board though
Isn't it basically a remedial class, or rather a class for people who did the minimum of HS math? I would expect it to be filled with more partiers than studiers, and also that plenty of the people in it would already know a lot of the material that's covered (so why not ditch?)
>plenty of the people in it would already know a lot of the material that's covered (so why not ditch?)
Their test scores show that they don't already know a lot of the material that's covered.
>Isn't it basically a remedial class, or rather a class for people who did the minimum of HS math?
It's College Algebra (or the non-trig part of Precalculus).
I’d have to imagine that very few people in that class want to take it or have any intention of doing more math than the minimum requirement.
Does College Algebra at your school cover something beyond what's typically included in HS 'Algebra 2'?
Like I said, it's the typical HS Precalculus class. So, it's the level above Algebra 2.
In 2012 I took my first course in undergrad. The teacher asked everyone to introduce themselves and say something they liked to do. Every single student, except myself, said they like to party. That was shocking to me. Most students weren’t skipping classes though.
Their writing skills were also abysmal. Frankly if they were that bad by college they didn’t seem likely to improve in my opinion.
Overcommitted in this context probably means "has a schedule that is packed too full"
Between work and school and other responsibilities they have no time to decompress so they burn out
The only time I’ve had as much free time as in university was in my first job.
Since you said "in university" I assume that wasn't in the U.S.
No not in the US.
Speak for yourself maybe
Speaking for myself, has the author ever been to an average American university?
Heh, especially the non-major freshman classes. A few weeks in and half the seats are empty compared to the first day of class.
I have, I'd recommended speaking for yourself
Cool, but has the author?
I've been taking one class at a time for the last six years at what I think is an average American university. The twenty somethings that your comment is aimed at have been my lab partners and such. You're describing maybe 10% of them. As a group they're all over the map.
As learning goes, I'd say anybody taking more than two classes at a time is overcommitted. They might manage to get A's but I speak with these students about the courses we took together a year or two after the fact and it's clear to me that taking four or five classes at once is an awful strategy for retention.
It me.
But I read an article recently about the death of partying in the USA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44514550
I recently did a short stint teaching English to university students. This is English as a second language (possibly unnecessary context) but the level is fairly high. The course was hastily rearranged to prevent the students using llms. They had to hand write their essays under supervision, which made them a real pain to grade btw.
Then I was asked to review the questions for the final exam and I noticed some pretty weird constructions in the sample texts and sentences. Nothing completely grammatically wrong just unusual or semantically off. The example I recall was "... disproportionately affects men and women" but there were other worse examples. You can guess where this is going. But I knew that another native speaker had written the listening texts so I didn't want to directly criticise these, and I thought they might have been pulled from magazines or some corpus. But, of course, the course leader had generated them with chatgpt.
What's the issue with "… disproportionately affects …"? It seems to be a correct English construction (even though the frequency in COCA is relatively low; 72).
Some examples:
> Indeed, the recent cases of hyperinflation in Brazil, Argentina, and Poland illustrate that although hyperinflation is harmful to savers and disproportionately affects the poor (The Independent Review)
> A hearing is set Thursday on the new version of a legislative bill to eliminate scheduled pay increases for state employees that nixes a section that disproportionately affects rural legislative information offices (USA Today)
> Suicide is a key mental health issue which disproportionately affects men. (london.gov.uk)
"disproportionately affects men AND WOMEN" is nonsensical.
"disproportionately affects men" makes sense.
Regarding the phrase "imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable" in the text, I'm old enough to know what has changed.
Today, many university students struggle with basic calculations. I'm not talking about long division of 8-digit numbers. I'm talking about things like expressing 2/10 as a percentage or knowing how many zeros to use when writing 1/1000 in decimal form. Many very bright students, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, struggle with such things. It's heartbreaking.
I'm from the post-calculator era, and those examples are definitely not problematic for me or even a single one of my peers. So apparently calculators don't automatically lead to that skill atrophying.
In my opinion the comparison to calculators is flawed. At least for simpler calculators as someone might imagine.
In its application that would mean for a LLM you define a sentence with one blank, restructure the sentence so the blank gets extracted and then enter it into the LLM to get exactly one word for your blank. On the oppoisite you wouldn't use the calculator for solving equations, but to also formulate them based on a abstract definition.
Furthermore "math" and "text" are two fundamentaly distinct categories. In math we express mathematical observations/context, which can be proven in its correctnes. We can conclude that 1 Apple + 2 Apples won't result in 5 Apples, but 3. Text may express emotions, toughts, directives, information or observations in context of its author. Not in every case it may be proven as math and we may attribute other values to it. Like honesty, authenticity, information and effort. If it was only for the information, you could filter out hallucinations and call it a day. But for other values you literally can not outsource the work to a tool. Except you live in a South Park episode.
> imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable
I was there. We had been given slide rules, and a decent chunk of my 11-yr-old maths classes were devoted to teaching us how to use them. Calculators were banned because they "didn't teach us anything" (but somehow slide rules did? It didn't make any sense at the time either).
Over the course of the next few years, calculators became more acceptable, and by my 18-yr-old Maths A-level class, we were being advised on which scientific calculators to buy.
It's an interesting analogy, as TFA says.
Slide rules tell you how logarithmic scales work.
Calculators let you write "boobless" upside down.
How does that serve to improve your mathematical understanding?
This essay is SO well written. I find myself smiling and laughing along. Is great writing a must for communication? No. Would I wish that all writing was like this? Most definitely YES!
What a lovely essay. Reminds me of the way I loved the liberal arts growing up. I missed having classes like that in college (AP'd and ACT'd my way out of most requirements).
English teachers seem especially prone to that friendly and sporting demeanor the author has. Professors from the engineering schools are far more prescriptive, probably due to the nature of the material.
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All the best writers that I know in the sense that you mean (communicating information precisely), including non-native speakers, are also avid fiction readers. Many also write fiction or prose for fun. Familiarity and fluency with the details of usage and vocabulary are what let one employ these things precisely for whatever purpose, fictional or not.
That is not my experience at all. To the contrary, those who write fiction read mostly fiction, and those who write non-fiction read mostly non-fiction.
They're incredibly different skill sets. One is all about argumentation, convincing, facts, and citations. The other is all about imagination, beauty, evocation, flavor.
Obviously they both require assembling nouns and verbs and other parts of speech in sentences, but they seem to be virtually entirely different capabilities at the end of the day.
Writing excellent short stories doesn't really help with crafting effective business communications, design documents, etc. And vice-versa. In fact, I think they can sometimes even be harmful -- the kind of clarity required for non-fiction can constrain imagination in fiction, while the creativity celebrated in fiction can be quite counterproductive when it comes to functional communication -- what is intended to be clever or unique often gets misunderstood.
To back up your point, I kind of hated English class until my senior year of high school when I took AP English Language (nonfiction), after which I started drinking books from a firehose.
> I had to become a middle aged adult and learn this for myself.
This is a cliche.
You can’t write precisely without an understanding of how language becomes imprecise, of its fundamental instability. Precision and delicate use is an accident when it does happen, and its happening can never be proven. We must have faith in the accident.
I disagree strongly with this, it's like saying you must understand the subtleties of calligraphy or typography in order to be proficient at writing in your notebook with a pencil. I have no doubt you will be more purposeful and deft with your handwriting having this knowledge but they're two completely different skills.
You can be taught to and be proficient in "writing with your pencil" by learning the rules [1]. Efficient, practical, immediately useful and applicable. No subtlety required nor desired. It's the same as all practical skills or trades.
[1] https://stylepedia.net/style/
Style guides can’t teach you what not to write. If you can’t see what could be missing, how do you know you’re making any sense?
Holding yourself to a standard doesn’t mean it’s a meaningful one.
I just used that as an example because it's free, high quality, a good reference, and goes beyond what you would expect out of a style guide and is closer to a textbook on technical writing. So just replace it with your preferred technical writing manual—although a lot of them tend to call themselves style guides or manuals of style.
Either way, it's an avenue of learning to write that ignores, I would say, all the artistic aspects of writing. Inasmuch as you can say anything "isn't an art."
I believe you are confusing verbosity with artistry, and ability with precision. A good writer knows when to smother their creation.
I agree that it's a good distinction to make. Personally I haven't thought about it till I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. In the book he specifically teaches writing nonfiction and even shares an anecdote where he was a guest on a radio show promoting a writing conference and was annoyed with the host because he conflated writing with literary works.
So yeah, I recommend the book to people interested in writing.
More traditionally you'd study "rhetoric", the art of making your arguments appealing. It doesn't really matter whether the things you say are true or false.
Rhetoric is valuable in any writing endeavor; clarity is only valuable sometimes.
For a funny take on the whole "rhetoric" is the use and abuse of logic some people might enjoy How to Win Every Argument by Madsen Pirie which also happens to be where I plucked the tagline regarding rhetoric from. It's a pretty easy book to go through in toilet break sized increments, the author goes through different fallacies and how they're employed one by one along with various rhetorical devices.
Though a few years ago when I searched for a book on rhetoric and making convincing arguments Office Of Assertion by Scott Crider also popped up, but it's aimed more at written rhetoric instead of what most people have in mind.
> For a funny take on the whole "rhetoric" is the use and abuse of logic
But it's much broader than that. You can make true arguments. You can make confusing arguments. And you can use tools that have nothing to do with logic at all. Rhetoric has a lot to say about rhythm, alliteration, and linguistic structure. And a lot more to say about your personal bearing and your tone of voice.
Interesting report.
I understand why much of the discussion about AI and university education has focused on first-year writing classes in the U.S. Some of my own first experiments with ChatGPT in December 2022 were having it write school-like essays [1].
Over the past few months, I cotaught a university class in which we also had first-year students use and reflect on their use of AI in their classwork. But the context was different: the class was a seminar on science communication (how to make science engaging to children and the general public), and most of the time was spent with the students doing group projects. Also, the class was at a university in Tokyo, and we taught it in Japanese.
We have just started analyzing the feedback from the students, but my impression is that they were less conflicted about the use of AI for their group work than they might have been if they had been doing their projects as individuals.
Meanwhile, as the semester progressed, agentic frameworks started to mature. I spent a lot of time on my own experimenting with Claude Code and Gemini CLI. While none of the students in that class seemed to use them, it became clear to me that such higher-level cognitive tools will pose an even greater challenge to higher education than essay-writing chatbots do now.
[1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html
AIs grading AI-generated essays looks like a recipe for model collapse. That's why we certainly need people who go after the "diminishing returns" of improving their writing skills beyond the "good enough" that AI delivers.
Should education systems aim for that for all of their students? Certainly, because AI alone is not sufficient to raise the bar. As impressive an AI is when it seems to invent a new molecule, it is still only possible because of the original works of many people.
I find this a strange criticism. If you look at all of human written stories, the number of stories is quite limited too. There's a lot of retelling of "classic" stories (except in classical times they were probably retelling them too). This even applies to religious stories:
The kings/men who fight over a beauty (which can be a land/crown, or a woman) overcoming a monster/evil opponent or a series of opponents (The Illiad/Troy, Beowulf, King Arthur, ...)
The orphan/abandoned kid/extremely poor that conquers the kingdom, either through marriage or by conquering a (series of) challenges (Moses, Aladdin, Oedipus, Theseus, Heracles, Cinderella, the foundation story of islam/mohamed, ...)
The vizier/prime minister who decides he'll be king and becomes incredibly evil to achieve it. (robin hood, paradise lost (ie. the story of lucifer/the devil), queen esther, aladdin, MacBeth, ...)
The not-evil-but-quite-evil mother who sees her king/husband make a child, either with another woman or sees/fears she or her child will be put aside because of the other child and ... (Hera, Snow White, Medea, biblical story of Abraham, ...)
And then there's stories like Game of Thrones that are in large part a combination and integration of a lot of such stories: Circe and her children. John Snow, after being rejected, climbing up and up and up. Bran becoming king. Arya living through a sort of Herculanean heroic epic. And the kings fighting constantly.
Humans are clearly still a big step up even from state-of-the-art AI, but we are not infinitely creative like we like to think we are. It's a difference in scale, not a fundamental difference.
> Navigating the Digital Age: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives, Learning, and Well-Being
> Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal Reflection on Technology
> Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal and Peer Perspective on Technology’s Role in Our Lives
> Navigating Connection: An Exploration of Personal Relationships with Technology
> From Connection to Disconnection: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives
> From Connection to Distraction: How Technology Shapes Our Social and Academic Lives
> From Connection to Distraction: Navigating a Love-Hate Relationship with Technology
> Between Connection and Distraction: Navigating the Role of Technology in Our Lives
The immediate and obvious response to the above is: turn up the temperature.
As an aside: many of the critiques of genAI in this piece are about the quality of AI right now and won't hold if and when quality increases.
> The immediate and obvious response to the above is: turn up the temperature.
I assume the students were using the ChatGPT web app (as ~99% of teenagers would); there is no way to adjust the temperature in the web app.
Assignments should in total be worth ten percent of the total mark. Not too much to cheat over and waste your chance of valuable feedback. Not too little to ignore, so giving some short term incentive to actually work on them.
I think the most interesting detail was that students started recognizing AI by its tics (obsessive em-dashes, always exactly three examples) and turned detection into a game. Accidentally became better readers.
I'm wondering if the usage of an em-dash in the article (somewhere towards the middle) is self-aware trolling, or just the result of excessive ai use...
> includes both a human and a computer—and “surprisingly,
Thinking back, I have had some woderfull professors that had expertise beyond just published work and knew how to convey it.
Then I have had many bland curriculum reciters matching a semi decent youtube lecture, and some bad communicators where you were better of just reading the book they tried to teach.
There was also a few that couldn't really teach, but whose class was more like a standup comedy performance.
I'd say with the exception of the first and last group, ChatGPT would probably be a good if not better replacement for day to day teaching and mentoring.
Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud:
[...] I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.
But that's what it has been trained on - almost all academic writing is bland flavorless word salad, and this is extremely noticeable in title fads. I have a nearly decade-long game running with my friend where me make up absolutely bullshit concepts that could nevertheless be plausibly published in a journal, and the process has been going on long before that.
'Verbing the noun: towards a genericization theory of expressivity in high-entropy counter-heterogeneity' describes an ongoing problem in academic writing where novelty is deprioritized in favor of acceptability by an evermore tightly circumscribed set of peer professionals whose socioeconomic interests favor the establishment of intellectual stasis that maximally conserves positionality in a quais-Simmelian network space parameterized by income, tenure proximity, and citation count.
Or put more clearly, the more academics write to impress each other instead of to reach the public, the more generic their titles and language will be. Being able to parse and regurgitate wordy titles and abstracts constitutes table stakes in academia, so the incentives tilt toward burying the lede any original proposals as deeply as possible so as the minimize the career-damaging possibility of rejection on technical/syntactical grounds.
chat originates from streamers calling twitch chat chat like a singular entity which has transferred into the common persons vernacular, not chat as in chatgpt
> several statements, including “It is unethical to use a calculator in a math class”
That's too broad to be of any use, if the math class is teaching you to calculate in your head, then using any calculator is cheating. If the math class is teaching some algebra equation solving skills, then using a programmable calculator that auto solves them is cheating.
That's the similar issue with such experiments - they unfortunately aren't rigorous to provide any insight into education
The calculator comparison is so tired and misleading. It's embarrassing to think that rote computation like calculators serve in most math classes is comparable to the "formulate an insightful answer to a prompt and express it clearly through writing" role an LLM fills in (especially early) humanities coursework.
What a great application of AI in college course. The processor made them critically think about how AI may impact their writing, the value of it vs human writing. That's exactly what college should be doing, producing critical thinkers to navigate tomorrow's world.
From the title I thought this was going to be about a student using AI to take their place in class. I imagined a modern version of the montage in Real Genius (1985) where students leave tape recorders on their seats in the lecture hall.
> big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.
I guess nobody tried to adjust the temperature via the API then...
You can make something really unbland then!
Eg. "Write a 3 sentence story" Temperature=1
The old cat, Bartholomew, stretched languidly in a patch of afternoon sun, his purr a rumbling motor. A mischievous bluebird, emboldened by the cat's sleepy demeanor, swooped down to steal a whisker for its nest. Bartholomew's eyes snapped open, a silent promise that their game was far from over.
Temperature=2:
The old clockmaker found a gear he didn't recognize, its teeth shimmering with an otherworldly light. He fitted it into the grand clock tower, and as the hands struck midnight, the town square was bathed in a soft, silver glow. From that day on, no one in the town ever seemed to age.
Which of these are meant to be unbland?
Hand written essays in class. Short and longer form discussions, questions and answers in class. End of unit, term, semester, year. Interview on topic in spoken form.
That doesn't mesh with the $5000 per credit hour ,get students in and out and degree'd ASAP. No 100 level outside of Marlboro college are you going to find a graduate sized class cohort meeting with professors 1 on 1 and debating philosophy and doing stand up rhetorical studies.
Oh yeah, Marlboro is out bidness.
Works for Oxford and Cambridge.
You may have well just said, "well it works for Google and Meta".
Maybe AI is changing how we learn, but it can’t replace the real skill of understanding and thinking for ourselves.
>My students liked to hate on AI
I suspect this was just a vocal minority. This kind of vocal minority is common online to.
So many video ads!
Isn't this written by AI
It occurs to me that writing by those in STEM fields and those in the humanities is entirely different and each group dislikes the other’s writing. When I was in college, my professors in technical classes had no problems with my writing. After I graduated and I wrote some technical articles, my writing received praise from readers. However, when I took two semesters of mandatory English writing classes in college, my professors hated my writing and nothing I did made them happy with it.
When LLMs became widely usable, I was one of the people who really liked much of the writing that they did. I found it was relatively close to my writing style, which I consider to be good, despite the disagreement from those in the humanities. It was close enough to my own writing that I have even had people on Discord accuse me of using LLMs to write my messages for me, when I had not.
The linked article was clearly written by an English teacher. He criticizes AI-generated texts as “a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad“. Now, there are many cases where LLMs output nonsense, but in cases where the writing logically flows, does not self-contradict in any way and avoids unnecessary repetition, “bland” and “flavorless” are good. The goal of writing is to convey information across space-time; writing that is “bland” and “flavorless” is the best way of conveying information.
I can see a number of things he did in his writing to avoid being “bland” and “flavorless”, and I consider them to be examples of poor writing:
He used dozens of idioms that make the text difficult for non-native speakers and unpleasant for native readers. He used a number of colloquialisms, including some that are inappropriate in professional contexts (although I will not repeat them since I refuse to write them). He used a word whose only definition is provided by Urban Dictionary and therefore is not even an official word:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cyborging
He also brought politics into an apolitical topic. The injection of politics is a great way to derail any form of productive dialogue and should be avoided.
He used a story format of the kind that has infected journalism. It is very rare that the process by which something was learned is useful to readers and presenting it for dramatics wastes their time. That is with the exception of stories on the topic of security, where hearing the process is often genuinely informative. My aversion to this writing style is so severe that I have a standing policy to stop reading a news article the moment that I see that it uses this style for a topic that is not security-related. After reading his article, I will extend my policy to apply to essays by academics in the humanities too.
He made numerous attempts to evoke emotional responses to elicit agreement, rather than to make clear arguments based on facts. This is great for propaganda, but not so great for making points. Every one of these appeals to emotions is poor writing.
Beyond those things, he also did not properly cite sources in multiple places. To name a few, the quotes from Sam Altman and Annalee Newitz are uncited. As an academic, he should know better.
Some of these things might actually have places in certain types of writing. They certainly have places in propaganda. They also have places in fictional literature. However, they do not have places in attempts to argue a point.
I imagine if he corrected all of my criticisms, he would find the result to be “bland” and “flavorless”. That is how an attempt to argue a point should be.
Ai being a calculator is a bad analogy. A typical calculator doesn’t do the full assignment for you.
AI can do the full assignment and do it faster and better
Is the goal of the assignment to produce yet another essay, or to demonstrate you understand and can expand on the coursework?
Usually the goal of the student is not aligned with that of the school. The student wants money from a job. The degree helps him find a job. The essay itself or understanding the coursework does not help him find a job directly. If he can bypass understanding to get a degree, he will do it.
The school thinks that the student joined to learn and the school acts this way up to a certain extent. But in the end grading a failing student isn't helping him learn. The school ends up fostering competition and stress internally and uses GPA as a ranking system.
Why a school does all this to a student when the student pays them? Like why give students bad grades when the student gives them money? Because of integrity. Jobs trust the school if the school has prestige and integrity. In order to maintain that prestige and integrity the school needs to pressure and rank the students. Then when the school is sufficiently prestigious companies know and students pay tuition to get the integrity and thus get the job.
The more prestigious the school the more is invested into "ranking". Only at schools with lower prestige do you get more of a "learning environment". But companies prefer candidates who can make it through a ranking system over ones that have to be coddled in an environment that fosters learning.
It is not an illogical concept. Students that make it into these prestigious schools generally have much higher IQ. This is a data driven fact along with the fact that entrance to many schools involves the equivalent of an IQ test. People with higher IQ perform better. So it's the most rational choice for companies to want to pick students from schools that are bad at teaching and better at ranking.
Some students go to higher ed for learning. Most go to run the gauntlet of a ranking system and end up with a degree that bestows prestige and excellence.
There's my ultra real take on your "why don't students want to learn" bs. But it's not like I said anything you didn't already know.