You must log in or # to comment.
Homework is not to measure anything is to force you to make the work so your brain develops new connections.
Using AI for homework or study is like bringing a forklift to the gym.
Being able to use exercise equipment with a forklift would be pretty cool tho
To be fair, you’d have to develop mad forklift skills to do anything outside of deadlifts.
That sounds way more fun
Going to a gym to pose as doing exercise while not doing it? Yeah fun.
Bringing a forklift to the gym and trying to pick up all the different shapped weights.
I just spent the afternoon driving 79" helical Piles with a dingo for a solar array, the n grated the land, and since I had an extra hour with the machine , helped landscaping crew on site dig out a trench to plant hedges.
Easily the most fun ive had at work in a month.
Sure, but within the simile that’s sitting at the back of the class and laughing with your friends instead of engaging with the lesson. Fun but you didn’t gain anything and got in the way of people actually trying.
Yar well, in this situation school is for the muscles. Might be fun but it won’t make you stronger
It’d be a different sort of exercise, but it would be interesting as a means of learning how to control a forklift.
I suspect a large part of the problem is that, at least in my experience, this is not at all explained to students and often the teachers themselves do it as “something that everybody does” rather than with the understanding that there is an underlying purposed that homework is meant to serve (which sould inform the when, what, how and how much of homework).
If see a similar kind of problem in my area (Software Development) all the time - people doing certain things because “they’re good practices”, “it’s what you’re supposed to do” or even “that’s what everybody does” without at all understanding the underlying reasons for doing it (and, more importantly, when to do it, when not to do it and how best to do it), which is why for example nowadays you have countless of “Agile” teams that are doing wrong or unecessary (in their context) parts of it whilst not doing the parts that the should do just doing things they think they’re supposed to do it but doing them incorrectly since they don’t get what those things are supposed to achieve and how.
Mind you, some people are just lazy, so some students will just “optimize away” homework with whatever tools they have to do so, even when knowing the purpose of homework and when being given the most learning-enhancing homework possible.
Yeah but for real proof of understanding has always been a problem. One of the reasons generated text is so pernicious is because even in everyday life, it outwardly mimics all the signals of care and cognition.
To the main point: much smaller class sizes is how you solve this problem.
Always has been…
I had Latin in school, and the teacher was a bit senile already. He started making the rounds to check our homework - which I had not done. So I just hastily scribbled some lines of gibberish into my notebook. He came to my place, looked at my notes, and scolded me for my bad writing. And signed it off as done…
Non scholae sed vitae discimus!
Illigitimus non carborundum!
Lorem ipsum!
E pluribus unum!
Ecce, Romani!
Tepus fugit.
Cornelia et Flavia non quod ita vero sum.
Romanes eunt domus.
Semper fidelis tyrannosaurus
For my vitae, Latin has been rather useless in the last 40+ years since I got rid of it.
It was just the choice of the lesser evil back then: French with an asshole teacher or Latin with a demented one. At least the teacher I had at the end let me off with the equivalent of a D instead of an F.
I mean this is exactly what all the kids who told me they loooved essay questions always said they liked about them.
same, they all love cheating, before AI they would mostly just copy paste eachother’s work
and me the alone kid who actually wanted and cared about learning would be drown out in busy work to be done, get bad grades even though I did well in tests and exercises, simply because I failed to do the annoying boring homeowrk of writting an essay that we all know the teacher is not reading, that they just made thjs assigment to give students free grade points because they know that if they didn’t half of the students would fail the class, they would go lenghts about how they were being nice by doing this, and yet screwing over me would never be mentioned, one of the few students that ever displayed any form of curiosity in class
exams … can be fooled by plausible-sounding bullshit
Maybe in the soft sciences, but try passing organic chem. 3 or chemical reactor design with plausible-sounding bullshit.
And even that doesn’t matter: ChatGPT can pass a university-level physics exam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBtfwa-Fexc
Non scholae sed vitae discimus - a student who does their homework with LLMs has learned nothing.
My students can use a translator for every interaction they have forever, or they can do the homework and try to learn the language. Three guesses as to what’s actually easier in the end. Just because it can be done by a computer doesn’t mean there’s no reason for a human to learn it.
I hear you, but language class is actually a decent example. I met a language requirement of 2 years in high school. Then I turned around and completed the required two semesters in college, of the same language, starting over at the beginning. I don’t know anything but the most elementary French.
In high school I did all the homework and felt lots of stress and really struggled. In college, I google translated my way through all the homework, phoned it in and same result, way less time and energy. So using the computer was actually easier in the end.
I’m probably never making it to France. Maybe not even Canada. You could argue it was still good for my brain to stretch in that way, but it was just never going to click for me and was a requirement regardless of my actual educational needs.
My single semester of sign language I actually picked up on decently and it tickled my brain in all kinds of ways, and I actually used it at work once to help a dude. No one’s ever come into any of my workplaces speaking French (at least not yet)
That’s a totally different situation, to be fair. I’m teaching German to recent immigrants to Germany. They will be much, much better off if they know the language.
i can tell you from experience that teachers are using it too lol, to create the homework
one of my university professors admitted that he used copilot to create some questions for our exams of that class 🙃
Would this be better than recycling the same 5yrs worth of material?
What’s wrong with recycling material? If it’s decent, it’s still gonna be useful for a new class…
When your exams are all the same questions every year just in different orders and all your exercises are on obsolete software, yeah, it’s a problem. Even worse is when the prof doesn’t even look at your work and just gives a mark based on his feels that day. I did extremely well in that class, but all I learned was I forgot something in an autoexec.bat file, I didn’t realize it went 1 line past the bottom of the screen with a silly broken command
Autoexec.bat… you’re over fifty :p so am I though :(
This was a class in 2012, and yes. I remember putting “win” in my auto exec so I didn’t have to type it lol
As a public school teacher, part of our training on AI is to use it in our classrooms and to talk about using it, like you would in making a citation.
I do use it to construct rote tasks, especially materials for vocabulary practice which are great but aren’t worth my energy to spend much time on. I always tell the kids when I’ve used AI to create sentences, etc. I think it’s great for them to see usage modelled responsibly.
It would be a disadvantage to deny kids usage altogether, and prompting AI should be explicitly taught as a skill set. Cheating is definitely an issue, but more and more teachers are moving away from rampant computer usage in class and thinking actively about how to forestall such cheating.
Then you had a bad professor and the homework was useless. What class was it?
software engineering processes (the name is in french, this is my best attempt at a translation)
but many of my classes this semester had ai slop in them lol, one of them had nonsensical ai generated images in the class notes, in another one the teacher used cursor as his IDE to demonstrate stuff…
my classmates are all in on it too, naturally. for one project, one of my teammates announced that he’d already done most of the work! wow, so cool, and so early too! in hindsight i should’ve seen it coming… basically the whole thing was vibecoded and i only noticed at the end when it was time to do minor adjustments (such as fixing major features that were not working lol)
AI is terrible in university. Because there is minimal effort on the students to produce it, and the hours I waste marking it is wasted. Pointing out the errors produces no value since The students didn’t go through the process in the first place, and the machine isn’t listening.
I see the same thing in my day job. Analysts produce effortless reams of bullshit that technical experts like myself have to wade through and proof read. We are seen as the barrier, but the more AI is used the longer the review takes because there was no quality control on the generation of the material.
This is kind of the argument I have with my coworkers about AI. One in particular loves using ChatGPT to generate all the bullshit memos, justifications, and accomplishments we have to produce, however I have to point out that those things had no value to begin with. AI is good at doing things that don’t need to be done.
Synthesis: Learning is a mistake, return to ignorance, just figure stuff.
Think about it, do you really think it’s a coincidence that all major religions reject asking questions??
Can’t tell if you’re being serious or doing a bit, but playing along, it’s no coincidence because most major religions want to act as the Source of All Knowledge for people and asking questions makes that more difficult. The ones that didn’t ban questions probably didn’t get as popular, other than maybe Buddhism, though I don’t have any direct experience with Buddhism as a religion, more just its philosophies that do seem to encourage thought and questioning (but then again, Christian philosophy seems to encourage generosity and kindness but how much that is truly valued seems to vary quite wildly by congregation and/or sect).
Though I’d also say that the return to ignorance is well underway.
That’s why trump is where he is today. The Art of Bullshit.
Removed by mod
What kind of VX rig do you have?
Say John is a student in med school. As a professor, I want to know if John truly understands everything he has been taught. I can do this one of two ways:
- I can give John a difficult exam.
- I can send John to the Emergency Room in the hospital and see if he saves lives or kills people.
Number 2 is obviously a much more accurate way to determine what John has learned. It’s much harder for him to cheat that assessment. It’s a real-world scenario instead of some words on a page. The only slight drawback is that people might die if John didn’t study hard enough. It’s going to be essential to eventually do number 2, but it’s probably better to do number 1 first.
A while ago I took a course in teaching English to adults. One of the things they talked about is assessments. They talked about restricted vs. freer questions. A restricted question might be a true/false question, or a multiple choice question. A freer question might be an essay type question. There’s a lot of value in restricted questions even if sometimes a student can get them right just by flipping a coin or guessing. The value is that they can help focus in on areas of difficulty, like verb tenses, spelling, etc. An essay type question tests them differently, but it’s still an artificial construct. Even a no time limit, open book test isn’t assessing a student’s performance in the real world.
Tests and homework may be annoying, and they’re not foolproof, but they’re very useful tools for a teacher to assess progress in learning. People cheat on them because we don’t know of a way of assessing learning in a way that’s fun without demanding way too much of the teacher.
Also, the whole format of this argument is stupid:
Thesis: forklifts are capable of lifting heavy weights, and supposed weightlifters are using forklifts instead of lifting weights.
Antithesis: forklifts do not have muscles.
Synthesis: lifting weights does not develop muscles.
Humans are not LLMs. Just because an LLM can give the correct answers for a test without understanding anything doesn’t mean that a human can also pass that test without understanding what’s on it.
Yes, we have created a bullshit-producing machine in order to automate the production of tedious bullshit. We’d be better off with a society which doesn’t require the bullshit production in the first place, but here we are.
Hey look it’s the hegelian dialectic, except the anthesis is a little weak and has some non negligible overlap with students. But then that’s why we iterate.
deleted by creator
