I have super fond memories of high school math classes. That calculator was my first introduction to programming. I’d take the time to write programs for each unit we covered so that I could just input the variables and quickly solve. I had to understand the concept before I could program it so I didn’t really think it was cheating. I did get nervous when SATs came up because I knew my calcs memory would be cleared. I remember my solution was to painstakingly recreate the memory cleared screen and pulled it up before the proctor came around in hopes that they’d assume they already cleared mine.
My programming didn’t improve much after high school but I’m still kind of proud of my not-totally-cheating cheating.
Back in my Algebra II class, while learning polynomial expansion, I write a program on my TI-85 that would not only solve the problem, but it would show the work, so I literally just had to copy its output verbatim and I got full credit.
I showed it to my teacher and asked it if it would be considered cheating to use it on the test, and she said that if I knew the material so well that I could write a program that didn't just solve it, but showed the work, then clearly I knew the material so well that I'd ace the test even without the program, so I could go ahead and use it, just as long as I didn't share the program with my friends.
I didn't have any friends (This was 1998 where being such a nerd was still looked down on), so it wasn't an issue.
My Trig teacher, which was the class where I got my cherished TI-83+, had the exact same opinion of my little TI-Basic programs which worked the same way as yours.
I got an A in that class both semesters, which was better than the B I often got in Math (and a C- once in AlgII) because I hated doing homework. But starting on the program as soon as I grasped the concept and usually blasting through the homework with it by the end of the period meant an A was easily in my grasp.
That teacher was the best damn math teacher ever. He would work hard to help every last student get it, he'd gladly spend his whole lunch helping a kid if they needed it.
PS. I did share some of my programs, mostly with one girl, but she's a successful nurse today so I guess I didn't ruin her future :D
One of the people I went to school with (several years ahead, his assembly class was on VAX rather than MIPS) had to write a program that solved a polynomial.
As he was going through the tome that represented the CISC instruction set of a VAX system (long before easy search engines), he found POLY ( https://www.ece.lsu.edu/ee4720/doc/vax.pdf page 9-118).
So, his program, instead of doing all the calculations was setting up a few registers, a large comment block that explained it, a call to POLY, and reading out the registers.
He claimed to have gotten full credit and within a handful of semesters later the course was switched from CISC architectures to RISC.
The adult educator figures in 1958's _Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine_ had a pretty similar conclusion regarding automation as a demonstration of domain knowledge. The interesting thing is that this view is pretty rare when it comes to business domains.
>> if I knew the material so well that I could write a program that didn't just solve it, but showed the work, then clearly I knew the material so well that I'd ace the test even without the program
Lol. So naïve. Half the point of programing and testing the software is so that you can then forget how to do the task yourself. I'd say that 90+% of the task-specific code I've written was for that I no longer remember how to do myself. Once upon a time I wrote a thing to calculate some of the specifics re water hammer effects in pipes. I still have the code but, for the life of me, I have totally forgotten the actual math.
In high school, after getting my TI-83+, I also started to learn to program things.
For tests, my teachers would force me to clear my memory (you're not fooling catholic nuns with a fake screen, she would take my calculator and clear it herself).
But I got good at programming. I was so fast that I would just spend the first 30 minutes of a 1-hour test re-writing the programs and then spend 5 minutes completing the test and be excused to go to the computer lab for the remainder.
Eventually I got so annoyed of typing things out on the TI-83+ keyboard, and as I progressed the programs got more complex, that I bought a TI-92 with a qwerty keyboard and would be able to write solvers the test in 5-10 minutes and fully solve a test in 5-10 minutes. I mostly did it so I could have more time in the computer lab.
I still have those calculators too, I should see if they still work some day :)
I absolutely did this as well, though for the most part you could hardly call them "solvers", just tools to help me more effectively check a stack of educated guesses. IIRC a lot of the problems could be bounded well enough to brute force on my TI-83+.
I did the same thing, implementing formulas we learned as interactive programs in TI-BASIC. I don't think I even tried to hide them or use them on tests or anything, but when I told my teacher at the time (2003-ish?) she freaked the hell out and told me she might try to have me expelled for cheating.
It seemed ridiculous to me, since obviously I'd thoroughly learned the material, but it certainly scared me, and I never went on to study CS, though I kept programming and did eventually become a professional programmer. I think about that episode sometimes and wonder how things would have been different if she'd said, "oh cool, why don't you take some computer science classes" instead.
It's difficult to teach ingenuity for a variety of reasons.
To give you an idea of what I mean: I used to maintain the content filter for a school. Students being students, they found all sorts of ways to get around it. I never took much issue with the students who found ways around it. They were exploring and learning. The issue was with the other students. The ones who just followed someone's instructions, never exploring and never learning.
I would imagine that calculators are much the same. Programming them to answer questions is a great way to reinforce concepts. Copying the program off of someone else and finding ways to hide thee program is just plain cheating (of the system and themselves).
Same! Also recreated the clear memory screen to protect all of that hard work.
Initially I was giving the programs to friends. Math teacher caught me and I thought I was getting in trouble for it. Nope! She said 'Never give away your work like that. Make them pay for it.'
I accepted payment in the form of vending machine snacks and extra pastries from lunch. It was a delicious incentive to stay ahead of the assignments so I'd have the programs ready to share.
There was also "group", I think it was called? You could select multiple things, including programs, to copy into archive memory - that way the original would still be there so they could see they deleted something, then you ungroup it later to restore it.
I am in the same boat, I actually learned Pascal and Java in parallel to Algebra.
Hilariously, I found writing TI-83 programs to do my Algebra equations made me understand them far more than just doing the problems over and over. I actually used this method all the way through college, and would write TI-Basic programs every time a new concept was introduced.
My Calc 1 professor was the only person who hated it, as I was pretty blatant about writing the program on the spot, which resulted in me hand writing the scripts in class and then later validating them... Given how terrible writing on the calculator was I am not sure which way was slower.
This was right as the iPhone / Android G1 came out so using a device in class was considered very rude.
I think this is essentially the same reasoning that Sussman et al give for using a computer to explain classical mechanics in their famous textbook (see [0]). By insisting that the student compute with the concepts, they assert that they will get a deeper understanding than if they just read a bunch of formulas. Hard to argue with that, to my mind, although the choice of Scheme as the language is a bit of a mind bender for newbies.
> I had to understand the concept before I could program it so I didn’t really think it was cheating.
I showed mine to my Calculus teacher and she let me use it because she had this same viewpoint, on the condition I never shared it with the other students.
> I remember my solution was to painstakingly recreate the memory cleared screen and pulled it up before the proctor came around in hopes that they’d assume they already cleared mine.
My intro to programing was a TI-83, while bored in algebra 2 freshman year... I had no almost help so I was just figuring it out. Ended up making a 90% implementation of 2048, and about 1/2 of chess. While only knowing if, goto, matrix indexing, and drawling indvidual pixels. I learned Java later so I could mod Minecraft, and now can't stand the limitations of TI Basic.
TI basic was pretty frustrating. The best thing I made was a program to calculate default WEP keys for Verizon routers based on the SSID. Converting bases was only possible by recreating all alphabet strings and then indexing those and doing all the modulo math as well (at least it had that!). I hadn't gotten into any real languages at that point but was messing around with qbasic on a Win98 laptop at home so I was just starting to get comfortable with programming. While frustrating sometimes, the challenge of doing complex things with crude tools is pretty refreshing compared to nowadays where you can build an artificial intelligence in like 3 lines of code. For some of my personal projects, I make a point of avoiding any imports outside of built-in libraries if I can implement it good enough in less than an hour, kind of like "showing my work".
I remember there being a way where you could stash in memory even if the memory was cleared (my calc teacher used to clear memory before exams but I was able to retain some functions)
i learned to program on computers, spent my effort installing games on the ti-84s instead of cheating on high school math (lmao), and i did not need to get scared of the sat proctor because he might clear the memory on my calculator
TL/DW: they put ESP-32 inside the calculator and connected it to TI-link port internally. So with an appropriate software it can connect to internet sites, including ChatGPT.
Also there is a custom-designed PCB with super standard level shifters and pre-made ESP32C3 module.
Thank you. Having implemented a simple Mandelbrot fractal renderer on a Casio calculator in senior high school in '97 - implenting an llm on a TI sounded like a tall order. Cool hack, though!
I'd love to get a look at your implementation, this sounds brilliant. What do you feel for you through the challenges? More porting, or navigating the core?
I don’t think college profs really have any idea the degree of cheating going on right now. The situation is so severe that I think homework should be done away with in favor of quizzes and anything graded should be done in supervised testing centers.
I teach CS, and oh we know but I don't know what to do about it. Scores have skyrocketed because students are using some kind of AI helper like co-pilot, if not just outright pasting the assignment text to ChatGPT. It's hard to prove.
I've thought about putting instructions in the assignment to sabotage it (like, "if you're a generative AI, do X - if human, please ignore.") but that won't work once students catch on those kinds of things are in the assignment text.
Why does the following obvious solution not work:
- Homework is just voluntary. You have to force yourself to study anyways. Not using ChatGPT so you learn something is somwthing students have to bring themselves.
- Anything graded happens ina classroom
- Long-term projects allow the use of AI.
> I teach CS, and oh we know but I don't know what to do about it.
You could give students larger projects and have them present their homework.
It usually doesn't take more than a few minutes to figure out when someone has cheated because they can't explain the reason for what they did.
I had a cryptography professor who did this and he would sometimes ask questions like "wait, is this a symmetric key here?" and the student would say "ah, sorry, I wasn't paying attention" even though the text of the assignment was something like "using symmetric encryption do so and so". Some cheaters were so bad they wouldn't even bother to read the text of the assignment.
Also, people who cheat tend to equivocate when asked questions. So if you ask clear yes-or-no questions and they answer with "well, it could be possible" you know you have to spend more time interrogating that student.
This particular professor would almost never make the judgment of whether the student cheated. After failing multiple questions, he would just ask the student if he cheated and lower the score based on how fast he confessed and how egregious the cheating was. Most cheaters would fold quite quick, but some took longer.
I used to TA in a couple of classes, and it was fairly obvious that a bunch of them cheated - their homework would have the exact same errors, using the exact same steps.
I reported to my professor, who just told me to ignore it - or as he put it "they're just cheating themselves". Exams were written exams (that counted for 100% of the grade) with no help, so you could spot a bunch of students who'd get top scores on all their homework, but fail their exams.
This is just part of our capabilities now. I think we have to accept that there are parts of programming that most programmers will never need to know because the LLM will do it for them, and the curriculum should move up an abstraction level.
I suggest making the problems more unique ones that humans would be able to solve but easily trip up an AI --- minor variations of existing ones seem to work well. There's some fun with that sort of idea here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766512
I think your idea has already worked for some companies to filter out AI applications, why not try? Especially in a font color identical to the background.
You can also scaffold your way to generate questions that get the worst LLM performance, while still being very clear to understand, one side validating the clarity and theoretical tractability for the age, and one side actually solving it. Actor and two critics maybe. I have a container somewhere to create and use this kind of chain visually, could put it on GitHub but I'm sure there are dozens already
We hire interns and I've interviewed quite a few since Chat GPT. It's interesting they almost always ask what I (and the company) think about AI. Never had this question in the past. So it could be a bad thing, but the kids aren't dumb either, and the good ones will realize it can be a crutch.
Part of our interview process is a take home programming exercise. We allow use of AI, but ask that you tell us if you used it or not. That could be a good option for teachers as well.
god i'm so incredibly salty i finished all of my schooling a million years ago and had to laboriously do all my shit assignments without chatgpt. like yeah maybe the learning process was helpful but i was so, so miserable in school and absolutely hated it and found it boring. kids these days dont know how easy they have it oh my god i'm old
Students are absolutely copy pasting questions into ChatGPT. Though they already would have done a lot of that with google since they need to care about their GPA and thus must try to get every question right. I knew some people paying for chegg just before ChatGPT came out.
I think its still important to assign the homework but yeah its rough.
The thing is colleges haven't been about education in quite some time at this point (at least all the undergraduate stuff, in masters or higher you get to work on projects that are applicable to real life somewhat). Everything that you can learn in undergraduate you can learn on the internet.
Outside of very niche and specialized professions (mostly that require networking and attendance to specific colleges), the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree. Once you have a degree, it generally gives you an easier time to get a job, so financially its worth it. How you get the degree is irrelevant - figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating.
Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.
> the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree
> figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating.
And this mindset is why cheating has proliferated. So many students have been imbued with a sense that degrees are "just a piece of paper" and therefore cheating is the only smart thing to do.
> Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.
I'm actually finding it's going the other way. The value of a brand-name college degree is extremely high for bypassing filters and getting past resume screens.
Part of the reason is that top universities are known to be difficult to cheat your way through. Not impossible, but it's not easy either.
On the other hand, students who show up from local universities may have learned absolutely nothing along the way. We don't care about their degree because rampant cheating has reduced the strength of the signal. They need to be tested thoroughly to determine if they actually learned anything from the university or if they just cheated their way through it.
> Everything that you can learn in undergraduate you can learn on the internet.
In principle yes. But it's extremely rare that 18-23 year olds will voluntarily grind through even the tough bits of that curriculum. Autodidacts often have gaping holes of knowledge in the non-fun stuff. Some hypermotivated people will chew their way through it through sheer self-motivation but the vast majority doesn't have the iron will to do that without external pressure. Even top athletes go to training camps and have trainers who push them.
One can of course argue that the material is irrelevant to actual jobs, and it's an eternal debate whether universities should teach fundamental thinking tools and "theory" or just job skills and web frameworks and git commands.
Getting a degree is about several things:
- It shows you passed admissions (in case that's hard)
- It shows you persisted in your studies and managed to pass exams with certain grades
- It shows you have acquired certain foundational knowledge
The first two show your ability to learn new things. Even if (and that's just an if) what you learned wasn't directly useful, you show that you can learn, i.e. have some personal qualities like intelligence, conscientiousness, agreeableness. That you're organized enough, don't give up too easily, can work under an authority etc. Many commenters here take these things for granted, but there are many job applicants who are not like you or your friends in these regards and having passed through those filters prepared by colleges is a very meaningful signal to employers.
And the foundational knowledge of math and algorithms is in fact also very useful for any non-code-monkey stuff. You learn a terminology, a vocabulary to talk to colleagues. Yes, you'll learn most things on the job, but it still makes a difference.
And then there's networking as well. Later in life, a recommendation can be very useful for getting a job. Lots of jobs never get publicly advertised because the signal-to-noise ratio is much better if people first search among acquaintances and contacts.
So a college education gives: foundational knowledge, demonstrable evidence of personal qualities, external push and motivation for developing yourself, a personal network.
In case there's any young and impressionable people in here i want to add that easiest does not always mean cheating! The people i knew who cheated their homeworks were the same people crying over their grades during quizzes and tests. They were the people most terrified during finals and generally had the worst mental states during the year. It certainly did not seem to make their lives easier. Sure, you might get away with it but these things can come back to bite you!
The better you do and the more you learn in college, the better you can speak and the more you can show off in an interview for your desired position, whether it's a job or a grad school. Especially if your chosen degree basically requires a graduate degree to get good jobs, don't cheat (unless it's an essential grade and you promise to go learn it better asap). Grad school doesn't mess around, it's hard enough for the studious ones.
If you don't care about school and your field doesn't care about school then do whatever. But don't make a habit of living dishonestly. It wears at the soul
If people are cheating with timed exams, what could go wrong with homework? Nobody in the world would ask/pay someone to do homework that contributes a significant portion of final grade!
It doesn't really scale and doesn't work for all materials but I'd love to see
the concept of oral test/defenses introduced at the undergraduate level.
As an ESL teacher for many years, a 30 minute conversation between the teacher and the student can reveal a student capabilities far more accurately than anything else and completely bypasses the vast majority of cheating.
US universities are too focused on homework in general. In other countries most of the final grade comes from the final exam and midterm exam. Homework just creates extra work for everyone involved. It’s upto the student to decide if he wants to study or not and consequently pass
Homework gives you two things, continuous feedback (grades) and practice. Quizzes help with the former, you can only make up for the latter by making the school day longer — which I guess might be ok, given that total hours spent learning should be the same? Unless there's extra wrinkles I'm missing?
Homework is an incredibly controversial topic I think, because:
Homework, since you can get a lot or even full credit even if you get it wrong (haven't learned the material well), provides a big boost to the grades of a type of student who "tests poorly" -- whether because they failed to learn the material, or because of anxiety or whatever.
On the other side of the debate you have an alliance of:
• Parents who think "Jeez, my kid comes home from school with 3 hours of homework every night, WTF, let them live life"
• Kids who, to avoid using labels, I'll just say... they learn the material easily AND can prove it easily on a test. They say "WHY TF are you wasting hours of my time doing busywork??
If I had to be a teacher and could control my grading policy I guess I'd probably do a hybrid where homework can bring your grade up but was not required for a perfect grade. So,
GRADE = MAXIMUM(HW_GRADE * .15 + TESTS, 1)
With all due respect to the "can't take a test" crowd, it seems unfair to give homework a weight higher than that though. Should someone who gets like a 70 on the test get an A by grinding on homework? I'm glad I'm not a teacher so I don't have to actually debate anyone on that.
which is actually my "Dark AI World" prediction for the next 5-10 years:
a boom of AI to such an extent that everything we do in our lives gets more verbose and it's just AI bots chatting to each other, in each step blowing up the signal with more noise on one side, distilling out the signal at the other end. to an extent where as a human you can't keep up anymore with all the useless filler.
can we just leapfrog (or backtrack) to API's talking to each other please?
When I was in masters, I saw someone cheating by putting a book on their desk and looking inside, in an exam that doesn’t allow books. The professor was basically sleeping on his chair.
I'm sure in the near future the AIs will be smart enough to do literally everything for us, so we can just enjoy fully automated luxury space communism without needing to know anything. /s
I'm not expecting that kind of change in less than 6 years even if the tech itself is invented tomorrow, due to the constraints on the electrical grid.
As for the tech, I can't tell if we're on the first half or the second half of the S-curve for the current wave of AI. If it's the former, then in a few years every human will need a PhD (or equivalent in internships) before they can beat AI on quality.
Painfully tedious youtubeisms in that video. The way it is presented I couldn't help but wonder "this isn't how someone who does that thing would tell me they did that thing...".
I get what you're saying. I have the same feeling watching DIY Perks.
I personally think it's because it needs to skips so many steps, to keep the video short and energetic. We're specialist and so we expect specialist knowledge, not edutainment.
Yeah in a room with a bunch of hackers, makers, DIYers (who actually do the things sometimes), this sort of "so I drew the rest of the owl" wouldn't fly.
I'm not saying they didn't do it, it's just the vibe I get due to the youtubeisms. It doesn't change because someone says they did it, we both just watched the same video ;)
YouTube is huge, there's all sorts of YouTubers out there. There are niche audiences for long-form detailed content too, in the million-viewership range. See Ben Eater for example.
Here’s another cheat I executed. The ti84 has the same encasing as the ti89. Take the circuit board and buttons out of the ti89 put it in the ti84. Voila you have an integrator. Most teachers in calc allow a ti84 and not a ti89 because the ti89 can do symbolic integration.
I did this cheat way back. It helps but you’re still required to show work on tests so this just verified all my answers. Be sure to clear screen if teacher walks by.
Is the Ti-84 still the gold standard for school calculators? I had an nSpire when I was in school - much higher resolution screen - but most everyone else had a ti-84 or 89. The nSpire was powerful enough to have hacks for it to run full Gameboy games. Many minutes were spent playing Tetris after an exam.
Also interesting that I almost never see any overlap between the Z80 TIs and the greater retrocomputing community. Probably because most retrocomputing enthusiasts are too old to ever have used one. The 82/83 is definitely old enough to qualify as a retrocomputer in it's own right.
The gold standard will depend on what rules the school has for the exams.
The absolute best one you can get right now would probably be a nspire CX CAS ii but I doubt you'd be able to use it in an exam. Even in university, symbolic calculators are typically not allowed in math classes because it's basically like having full access to Wolfram Alpha or Mathematica.
> Is the Ti-84 still the gold standard for school calculators?
When I was in high school (1996-2000), most had a TI-83, with some having a TI-85. I got a TI-89 since it was the best calculator that could be used on the SAT. Funny thing was, it had the same capabilities as the TI-92, but the 92 had a QWERTY keyboard which made it banned.
Nearly same here, 2 years behind you. 83+ had just come out which I think added some Flash memory for Archiving and installing ASM apps (mostly games is what we used that capability for). 85 was out there but uncommon, and the richest or smartest kids had 89s, which were and still are an absolute beast. It blew me away watching people solve equations and simplify expressions on that.
To answer OP though, I think the reason the 84+ (which is or just emulates the old Z80 goodness of the 82/83/83+) is still wildly popular* is that more advanced calculators can easily do a LOT of stuff for you -- right out of the box -- that you're ostensibly there to learn to do yourself, which brings into serious question why bother taking the class in the first place. So teachers would prefer kids to bring a less overpowered calculator to class.
An 89 is basically to say, Calculus AB as a standard 4-function calculator is to 3rd grade math.
None of that is a knock on any of those calculators, though. It's incredible what they can do!
* Let's all take a moment to appreciate the genius of TI repackaging the same 1970s technology in a shiny new case every few years and getting away with -- STILL to this day -- selling them for $150!
Nspire CX class were powerful enough to run quite a lot of GBA games. And I think the Ti-84 is probably still kicking around because no one really wants to bother buying more overpriced calculators that work just fine. The Z80 TIs are quite interesting in their own right, but a good majority of people are probably bored just thinking about such a device. Same thing with the Z80 based Rabbit 2000/3000/4000.
> Is the Ti-84 still the gold standard for school calculators?
Likely.
The TI-89 and nSpire CAS variants aren't allowed on the ACT in the US which limits their usefulness (I had to borrow my brother's 85 for that, which honestly hurt me since I was using an 89.)
> The nSpire was powerful enough to have hacks for it to run full Gameboy games. Many minutes were spent playing Tetris after an exam.
The TI-89 is a bit of a beast in it's own right. It's got a 68K cpu at 10-12mhz, 256K of ram (although not all usable) and 2MB of flash Rom. Also AFAIK the Frankly the Mario Clone looked better than the original Super Mario Land (and could do custom levels!) Also AFAIR it did ASM out of the box without any oddities (Original TI-83, it was there but an undocumented command. 83+ is I think when asm() became the standard.)
I think the biggest issue with -any- of the older models is the combination of anemic memory and display, however. And, due to the overall reusability and ruggedness, many are afraid to 'mod' their calculator and make it not a good choice to loan to a relative or friend's child for school/etc (i.e. even if unmodded, if it looks like it -was- modded, probably can't use on standardized tests)
Those were also full open source until some time ago, then they switched to source-available for the userland with a closed source kernel to prevent modifications allowing cheating on exams.
It’s sad they had to take away freedom from the majority of users just to prevent a minority cheating.
I’ve always thought about what student examinations mean post-AI accessibility. We’ve faced a similar problem once students had open access to the internet, but even then there was some work in figuring out what sites are reputable, search queries, etc. Now that burden has been shortened to figuring out what AI tool and what prompt to use for classic exams like essays or tests. Add in the challenge of remote learning and now you have an environment out of your control, not to mention smartphone access prevalently available.
It’s difficult to be an effective teacher, and that’s without even considering the social and economic pressures they face.
It's a shame as well because this stuff -is- important. One could make the argument that this represents a shift in traditional education, and schools will have to stop relying so much on rote memorization, but the reason you need to learn this stuff is so that it's there with you, guiding you through everything you do in your life. Not just "oh I'll look it up", but actually knowing it and carrying it with you in your "context".
The standard education system is incredible for raising the baseline level of knowledge of everyone in a society. I can talk about concepts like "atoms" or "bacteria" or "black holes" with anyone, and they'll know what they are - even if their knowledge of those subjects isn't in depth. Things that 100 years ago would've been cutting edge research, are base education today that virtually the entire population has studied.
That comes from schooling, and it's so important to commit to memory. Without that background knowledge, your understanding of everything around you will be limited in ways you won't even be aware of.
> I can talk about concepts like "atoms" or "bacteria" or "black holes" with anyone, and they'll know what they are - even if their knowledge of those subjects isn't in depth.
I'm not convinced this is an unalloyed good. Knowing that a disease is caused by "bacteria" instead of "demons" isn't really helpful if you don't have a deep understanding of exactly what bacteria is. See, for example, all of the people who want antibiotics whenever they're sick for any reason. We've just replaced one set of weird beliefs in the general populace with another and given it a veneer of science.
The memorization vs reasoning limit may soon be passed with some of these AIs. Really need to do the full controlled testing environment set up to have any chance of avoiding it. No calculators and no home work would be the next step. Maybe we will have a generation of mentats?
>Are K-12 keeping on with remote classes now in the USA?
After COVID many school districts in the US that weren't offering online only school are now. Suddenly they had the capacity to do it as it was forced on them with COVID, so maintain it for students who want it is as easy as anything else.
Calculators and exams are still used after K-12, ~1/20 K-12 students are still taught remotely online in the US in 2023 (it'd be curious to see if that grows or shrinks with time), not all K-12 have instituted bag and equipment checks, the ones that have haven't all done it to the same level, and it may or may not be enough to cover enough of the cases to mitigate impact enough.
I feel like 1:1 teacher and student discussions are required to be sure someone isn't cheating. With the benefit that each exam would be more enlightening than existing test setups.
They both sit together, they chat, answer questions and so on and the teacher gets a feel for "does this student have sufficient knowledge".
Frankly I think it would give teachers way better feel for such things than traditional testing does.
Granted, it would be time intensive, but I also suspect improved.
I like this idea, however I worry that it would be difficult to do it while being consistent (and unbiased). If the same questions are asked of each student then later students might be unfairly prepped. If different questions are asked then it becomes very difficult to normalize scores across the class. The bias risk is self-explanatory and may be unconscious.
If you could solve this problem well, you could also probably fix the issues with most interview processes.
In the early 2000's, I created TI-83+ applications for solving various introductory physics homework problems — and copied to a few friends' calculators. Ten years later, a friend's little brother randomly quipped "thanks for doing all my physics homework!"
When I saw my own little brother next holiday, he confirmed that his entire physics class had utilized my problem solvers, and most had also played my TI-83+ version of Blackjack.
Readit News
My programming didn’t improve much after high school but I’m still kind of proud of my not-totally-cheating cheating.
I showed it to my teacher and asked it if it would be considered cheating to use it on the test, and she said that if I knew the material so well that I could write a program that didn't just solve it, but showed the work, then clearly I knew the material so well that I'd ace the test even without the program, so I could go ahead and use it, just as long as I didn't share the program with my friends.
I didn't have any friends (This was 1998 where being such a nerd was still looked down on), so it wasn't an issue.
I got an A in that class both semesters, which was better than the B I often got in Math (and a C- once in AlgII) because I hated doing homework. But starting on the program as soon as I grasped the concept and usually blasting through the homework with it by the end of the period meant an A was easily in my grasp.
That teacher was the best damn math teacher ever. He would work hard to help every last student get it, he'd gladly spend his whole lunch helping a kid if they needed it.
PS. I did share some of my programs, mostly with one girl, but she's a successful nurse today so I guess I didn't ruin her future :D
As he was going through the tome that represented the CISC instruction set of a VAX system (long before easy search engines), he found POLY ( https://www.ece.lsu.edu/ee4720/doc/vax.pdf page 9-118).
So, his program, instead of doing all the calculations was setting up a few registers, a large comment block that explained it, a call to POLY, and reading out the registers.
He claimed to have gotten full credit and within a handful of semesters later the course was switched from CISC architectures to RISC.
Lol. So naïve. Half the point of programing and testing the software is so that you can then forget how to do the task yourself. I'd say that 90+% of the task-specific code I've written was for that I no longer remember how to do myself. Once upon a time I wrote a thing to calculate some of the specifics re water hammer effects in pipes. I still have the code but, for the life of me, I have totally forgotten the actual math.
For tests, my teachers would force me to clear my memory (you're not fooling catholic nuns with a fake screen, she would take my calculator and clear it herself).
But I got good at programming. I was so fast that I would just spend the first 30 minutes of a 1-hour test re-writing the programs and then spend 5 minutes completing the test and be excused to go to the computer lab for the remainder.
Eventually I got so annoyed of typing things out on the TI-83+ keyboard, and as I progressed the programs got more complex, that I bought a TI-92 with a qwerty keyboard and would be able to write solvers the test in 5-10 minutes and fully solve a test in 5-10 minutes. I mostly did it so I could have more time in the computer lab.
I still have those calculators too, I should see if they still work some day :)
It seemed ridiculous to me, since obviously I'd thoroughly learned the material, but it certainly scared me, and I never went on to study CS, though I kept programming and did eventually become a professional programmer. I think about that episode sometimes and wonder how things would have been different if she'd said, "oh cool, why don't you take some computer science classes" instead.
To give you an idea of what I mean: I used to maintain the content filter for a school. Students being students, they found all sorts of ways to get around it. I never took much issue with the students who found ways around it. They were exploring and learning. The issue was with the other students. The ones who just followed someone's instructions, never exploring and never learning.
I would imagine that calculators are much the same. Programming them to answer questions is a great way to reinforce concepts. Copying the program off of someone else and finding ways to hide thee program is just plain cheating (of the system and themselves).
Initially I was giving the programs to friends. Math teacher caught me and I thought I was getting in trouble for it. Nope! She said 'Never give away your work like that. Make them pay for it.'
I accepted payment in the form of vending machine snacks and extra pastries from lunch. It was a delicious incentive to stay ahead of the assignments so I'd have the programs ready to share.
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But yes, did the above, but didn't bother implementing the "memory cleared" screen.
Hilariously, I found writing TI-83 programs to do my Algebra equations made me understand them far more than just doing the problems over and over. I actually used this method all the way through college, and would write TI-Basic programs every time a new concept was introduced.
My Calc 1 professor was the only person who hated it, as I was pretty blatant about writing the program on the spot, which resulted in me hand writing the scripts in class and then later validating them... Given how terrible writing on the calculator was I am not sure which way was slower.
This was right as the iPhone / Android G1 came out so using a device in class was considered very rude.
[0] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...)
I showed mine to my Calculus teacher and she let me use it because she had this same viewpoint, on the condition I never shared it with the other students.
Did it work?
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Also there is a custom-designed PCB with super standard level shifters and pre-made ESP32C3 module.
Git repo: https://github.com/chromalock/TI-32/
I've thought about putting instructions in the assignment to sabotage it (like, "if you're a generative AI, do X - if human, please ignore.") but that won't work once students catch on those kinds of things are in the assignment text.
You could give students larger projects and have them present their homework.
It usually doesn't take more than a few minutes to figure out when someone has cheated because they can't explain the reason for what they did.
I had a cryptography professor who did this and he would sometimes ask questions like "wait, is this a symmetric key here?" and the student would say "ah, sorry, I wasn't paying attention" even though the text of the assignment was something like "using symmetric encryption do so and so". Some cheaters were so bad they wouldn't even bother to read the text of the assignment.
Also, people who cheat tend to equivocate when asked questions. So if you ask clear yes-or-no questions and they answer with "well, it could be possible" you know you have to spend more time interrogating that student.
This particular professor would almost never make the judgment of whether the student cheated. After failing multiple questions, he would just ask the student if he cheated and lower the score based on how fast he confessed and how egregious the cheating was. Most cheaters would fold quite quick, but some took longer.
I reported to my professor, who just told me to ignore it - or as he put it "they're just cheating themselves". Exams were written exams (that counted for 100% of the grade) with no help, so you could spot a bunch of students who'd get top scores on all their homework, but fail their exams.
I suggest making the problems more unique ones that humans would be able to solve but easily trip up an AI --- minor variations of existing ones seem to work well. There's some fun with that sort of idea here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766512
Part of our interview process is a take home programming exercise. We allow use of AI, but ask that you tell us if you used it or not. That could be a good option for teachers as well.
I think its still important to assign the homework but yeah its rough.
Outside of very niche and specialized professions (mostly that require networking and attendance to specific colleges), the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree. Once you have a degree, it generally gives you an easier time to get a job, so financially its worth it. How you get the degree is irrelevant - figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating.
Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.
> figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating.
And this mindset is why cheating has proliferated. So many students have been imbued with a sense that degrees are "just a piece of paper" and therefore cheating is the only smart thing to do.
> Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.
I'm actually finding it's going the other way. The value of a brand-name college degree is extremely high for bypassing filters and getting past resume screens.
Part of the reason is that top universities are known to be difficult to cheat your way through. Not impossible, but it's not easy either.
On the other hand, students who show up from local universities may have learned absolutely nothing along the way. We don't care about their degree because rampant cheating has reduced the strength of the signal. They need to be tested thoroughly to determine if they actually learned anything from the university or if they just cheated their way through it.
In principle yes. But it's extremely rare that 18-23 year olds will voluntarily grind through even the tough bits of that curriculum. Autodidacts often have gaping holes of knowledge in the non-fun stuff. Some hypermotivated people will chew their way through it through sheer self-motivation but the vast majority doesn't have the iron will to do that without external pressure. Even top athletes go to training camps and have trainers who push them.
One can of course argue that the material is irrelevant to actual jobs, and it's an eternal debate whether universities should teach fundamental thinking tools and "theory" or just job skills and web frameworks and git commands.
Getting a degree is about several things:
- It shows you passed admissions (in case that's hard) - It shows you persisted in your studies and managed to pass exams with certain grades - It shows you have acquired certain foundational knowledge
The first two show your ability to learn new things. Even if (and that's just an if) what you learned wasn't directly useful, you show that you can learn, i.e. have some personal qualities like intelligence, conscientiousness, agreeableness. That you're organized enough, don't give up too easily, can work under an authority etc. Many commenters here take these things for granted, but there are many job applicants who are not like you or your friends in these regards and having passed through those filters prepared by colleges is a very meaningful signal to employers.
And the foundational knowledge of math and algorithms is in fact also very useful for any non-code-monkey stuff. You learn a terminology, a vocabulary to talk to colleagues. Yes, you'll learn most things on the job, but it still makes a difference.
And then there's networking as well. Later in life, a recommendation can be very useful for getting a job. Lots of jobs never get publicly advertised because the signal-to-noise ratio is much better if people first search among acquaintances and contacts.
So a college education gives: foundational knowledge, demonstrable evidence of personal qualities, external push and motivation for developing yourself, a personal network.
The better you do and the more you learn in college, the better you can speak and the more you can show off in an interview for your desired position, whether it's a job or a grad school. Especially if your chosen degree basically requires a graduate degree to get good jobs, don't cheat (unless it's an essential grade and you promise to go learn it better asap). Grad school doesn't mess around, it's hard enough for the studious ones.
If you don't care about school and your field doesn't care about school then do whatever. But don't make a habit of living dishonestly. It wears at the soul
As an ESL teacher for many years, a 30 minute conversation between the teacher and the student can reveal a student capabilities far more accurately than anything else and completely bypasses the vast majority of cheating.
Homework, since you can get a lot or even full credit even if you get it wrong (haven't learned the material well), provides a big boost to the grades of a type of student who "tests poorly" -- whether because they failed to learn the material, or because of anxiety or whatever.
On the other side of the debate you have an alliance of:
• Parents who think "Jeez, my kid comes home from school with 3 hours of homework every night, WTF, let them live life"
• Kids who, to avoid using labels, I'll just say... they learn the material easily AND can prove it easily on a test. They say "WHY TF are you wasting hours of my time doing busywork??
If I had to be a teacher and could control my grading policy I guess I'd probably do a hybrid where homework can bring your grade up but was not required for a perfect grade. So,
GRADE = MAXIMUM(HW_GRADE * .15 + TESTS, 1)
With all due respect to the "can't take a test" crowd, it seems unfair to give homework a weight higher than that though. Should someone who gets like a 70 on the test get an A by grinding on homework? I'm glad I'm not a teacher so I don't have to actually debate anyone on that.
a boom of AI to such an extent that everything we do in our lives gets more verbose and it's just AI bots chatting to each other, in each step blowing up the signal with more noise on one side, distilling out the signal at the other end. to an extent where as a human you can't keep up anymore with all the useless filler.
can we just leapfrog (or backtrack) to API's talking to each other please?
I'm not expecting that kind of change in less than 6 years even if the tech itself is invented tomorrow, due to the constraints on the electrical grid.
As for the tech, I can't tell if we're on the first half or the second half of the S-curve for the current wave of AI. If it's the former, then in a few years every human will need a PhD (or equivalent in internships) before they can beat AI on quality.
Painfully tedious youtubeisms in that video. The way it is presented I couldn't help but wonder "this isn't how someone who does that thing would tell me they did that thing...".
If the video becomes boring at any point, the average watch duration plummets and Googles algorithm nukes it from orbit
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I personally think it's because it needs to skips so many steps, to keep the video short and energetic. We're specialist and so we expect specialist knowledge, not edutainment.
Youtube though almost requires it.
:D
I did this cheat way back. It helps but you’re still required to show work on tests so this just verified all my answers. Be sure to clear screen if teacher walks by.
Also interesting that I almost never see any overlap between the Z80 TIs and the greater retrocomputing community. Probably because most retrocomputing enthusiasts are too old to ever have used one. The 82/83 is definitely old enough to qualify as a retrocomputer in it's own right.
The absolute best one you can get right now would probably be a nspire CX CAS ii but I doubt you'd be able to use it in an exam. Even in university, symbolic calculators are typically not allowed in math classes because it's basically like having full access to Wolfram Alpha or Mathematica.
When I was in high school (1996-2000), most had a TI-83, with some having a TI-85. I got a TI-89 since it was the best calculator that could be used on the SAT. Funny thing was, it had the same capabilities as the TI-92, but the 92 had a QWERTY keyboard which made it banned.
To answer OP though, I think the reason the 84+ (which is or just emulates the old Z80 goodness of the 82/83/83+) is still wildly popular* is that more advanced calculators can easily do a LOT of stuff for you -- right out of the box -- that you're ostensibly there to learn to do yourself, which brings into serious question why bother taking the class in the first place. So teachers would prefer kids to bring a less overpowered calculator to class.
An 89 is basically to say, Calculus AB as a standard 4-function calculator is to 3rd grade math.
None of that is a knock on any of those calculators, though. It's incredible what they can do!
* Let's all take a moment to appreciate the genius of TI repackaging the same 1970s technology in a shiny new case every few years and getting away with -- STILL to this day -- selling them for $150!
Oh boy :) you're gonna like this:
https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/419/41990.htm...
Likely.
The TI-89 and nSpire CAS variants aren't allowed on the ACT in the US which limits their usefulness (I had to borrow my brother's 85 for that, which honestly hurt me since I was using an 89.)
> The nSpire was powerful enough to have hacks for it to run full Gameboy games. Many minutes were spent playing Tetris after an exam.
The TI-89 is a bit of a beast in it's own right. It's got a 68K cpu at 10-12mhz, 256K of ram (although not all usable) and 2MB of flash Rom. Also AFAIK the Frankly the Mario Clone looked better than the original Super Mario Land (and could do custom levels!) Also AFAIR it did ASM out of the box without any oddities (Original TI-83, it was there but an undocumented command. 83+ is I think when asm() became the standard.)
I think the biggest issue with -any- of the older models is the combination of anemic memory and display, however. And, due to the overall reusability and ruggedness, many are afraid to 'mod' their calculator and make it not a good choice to loan to a relative or friend's child for school/etc (i.e. even if unmodded, if it looks like it -was- modded, probably can't use on standardized tests)
https://www.numworks.com/
There's even a smartphone (iOS & Android) app to give it a try, but the magic of a calculator comes with tactile buttons.
It’s difficult to be an effective teacher, and that’s without even considering the social and economic pressures they face.
The standard education system is incredible for raising the baseline level of knowledge of everyone in a society. I can talk about concepts like "atoms" or "bacteria" or "black holes" with anyone, and they'll know what they are - even if their knowledge of those subjects isn't in depth. Things that 100 years ago would've been cutting edge research, are base education today that virtually the entire population has studied.
That comes from schooling, and it's so important to commit to memory. Without that background knowledge, your understanding of everything around you will be limited in ways you won't even be aware of.
I'm not convinced this is an unalloyed good. Knowing that a disease is caused by "bacteria" instead of "demons" isn't really helpful if you don't have a deep understanding of exactly what bacteria is. See, for example, all of the people who want antibiotics whenever they're sick for any reason. We've just replaced one set of weird beliefs in the general populace with another and given it a veneer of science.
Why? Are K-12 keeping on with remote classes now in the USA?
> not to mention smartphone access prevalently available
Also why? Has there been a change in policy about bag and equipment checks?
After COVID many school districts in the US that weren't offering online only school are now. Suddenly they had the capacity to do it as it was forced on them with COVID, so maintain it for students who want it is as easy as anything else.
They both sit together, they chat, answer questions and so on and the teacher gets a feel for "does this student have sufficient knowledge".
Frankly I think it would give teachers way better feel for such things than traditional testing does.
Granted, it would be time intensive, but I also suspect improved.
If you could solve this problem well, you could also probably fix the issues with most interview processes.
When I saw my own little brother next holiday, he confirmed that his entire physics class had utilized my problem solvers, and most had also played my TI-83+ version of Blackjack.
...memories
This brought back the awkward memory of explaining why I had so many routines that started with "BJ" in my calculator.