> 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).
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
>>> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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!"
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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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.
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
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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
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).
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.
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.
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
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 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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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.
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).
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.
So this isn't all that crazy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Learning to perform under pressure is the main purpose of attending college.
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?..
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.
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'.
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?
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.
He wasn’t worried about llms, they were not around, but plagiarism. It worked well.
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.
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.)
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.
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 also a disadvantage for people with test anxiety.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
> 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.
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.
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!"
Yes, they are uncontroversially bad. Schools that don't use them have higher scores.
Unfortunately, even SAT/ACT have calculator slop now.
Somehow this hits hard
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah. Overcommitted to partying and skipping class.
Has this author ever been to an average American university?
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.
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.
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?
Their writing skills were also abysmal. Frankly if they were that bad by college they didn’t seem likely to improve in my opinion.
Between work and school and other responsibilities they have no time to decompress so they burn out
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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.
But I read an article recently about the death of partying in the USA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44514550