Instead of banning AI, I made a classroom contract with my students

science.org95 pointsby digital5591 comments

Discussion summary

A teacher shared a classroom contract approach to AI, emphasizing adaptation over bans. Discussions highlighted the practicality of integrating AI into education and the challenges of traditional methods.

What the discussion says

Some see AI as unavoidable and advocate for adapting teaching methods.
Others criticize current AI-generated content for being pretentious or hard to read.
There is support for modernizing education with shorter reports and oral discussions.

“I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely?”
— krater23

“Instruction needs to shift to accommodate AI rather than prevent it.”
— tonymet

Comments

Hacker News

> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely?

...because I'm that I'm writing this article be a AI himself...

by krater23

> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely?

Uh, by also avoiding it entirely?

by Apreche

a football coach is not required to do all the drills and that doesn't make him a hypocrite

by fantasizr

How do you feel about the lines preceeding that?

> He didn’t try to hide that he had used AI to generate much of his assignment. Instead, he admitted his anxiety. He felt that mastering these tools was essential for his future career, yet he had no idea how—or even whether—he was allowed to use them.

I'm empathetic to the student: I'd bet a large majority of employers/careers he's researching right now are making a lot of press noise about "the importance of AI" and how "it's a necessary part of the workplace now." Can you really expect someone in his shoes to avoid it entirely?

by kowbell

"Science" dot org, shilling for the highest bidder yet again. Keep the name of science out your mouth.

by lioeters

I have no problem with AI as-is, but writing should be concise and to the point, and without heavy tweaking current models write pretentious hard-to-read stuff like this article.

A person who has something to say often has trouble stopping writing. Outsourcing writing to AI then feels like the opposite, as if the author doesn't care but wants to just spew some content.

by vitamark

I'm glad to see more of this approach to modernizing education. I roll my eyes seeing people argue that we should go back to pen + paper or other weird rose-colored regressive approaches to preventing AI usage. It's part of education now, it's part of work now, and learning environments that don't acknowledge that are going to be dragged kicking and screaming into a future with empty classrooms.

by llbbdd

Both things can be true at the same time. The article mention switching to shorter reports and oral discussion but other courses may not have the luxury, especially the introductory ones.

by bonzini

I like how professors are all anti AI but had no problems with group work in which at least one student usually didn’t do anything

by moi2388

Instruction needs to shift to accommodate AI rather than preventing it from being used to complete assignments and tests.

Assignments and tests were always lossy, and over time more cheating crept in.

Instruction should shift to benchmarking productive output, strategic thinking and group collaboration. Similar to labs where you are tested on completing an experiment or a project with artifacts. Or an MBA program with quarterly group objectives. A major part of the group effort is dealing with collaboration and overcoming obstacles like laggards.

Hopefully people will realize how poor testing is for preparing students for the real world. the ultimate goal is preparing the students for a productive life, most commonly in commercial enterprise, but even academic pursuits require collaboration, productivity and other characteristics that were not well assessed by traditional testing and homework.

by tonymet

I suspect it is all futile without resurrecting the old idea of being "learned" as in learn-ed.

"Learned" didn't really mean what we mean today by being well educated or smart. You can't use AI to cheat and become "learned". AI can find the books to read but you still have to read them and understand the ideas.

There was connotation of breadth as opposed to depth with being "learned".

I think we also have to forget about "the real world". Being "learned" automatically is going to inherit dealing with "the real world" because the real world is always changing and that is exactly why breadth should be the focus going forward more than the depth of the research university model.

Of course, in a society so dominated by credentialism, credentialed people are going to hate AI because it will obviously let anyone cheat at the credential they put so much time and effort into. This doesn't need to be dressed up in some "think of the children" argument.

Claude to me is the greatest thing since sliced bread that increases my "learnedness" every single day but I also am a drop out that invested basically nothing in being a credentialed person.

by randsorex

This argument has been beaten to death before AI: Ever since calculators were able to do math, students have been wondering why they need to learn how to do all of this math manually when they could get the same answer from a calculator.

The reasons become more obvious only when you get deeper into a field where the math gets too complex to get a simple answer out of a calculator. If you never learned the basic concepts, you can’t progress to the more difficult topics because you don’t have a good understanding of the foundation.

That’s why changing goals to only look at the output doesn’t work for educating kids. Now that they can have ChatGPT answer every question they might see on a middle school or even high school exam, you could conceivably get all the way through high school graduation never having learned a single thing other than how to copy and paste between the assignment and ChatGPT.

Then what happens in the real world when that student needs to learn something new? It’s obvious: They’re going to try to put the problem into ChatGPT and then give you the result back. They don’t have any foundational tools to do anything else. They haven’t even learned how to learn because there was always an easy way out. Why would anyone hire a person who can only act as an interface to ChatGPT? They won’t. They’ll use ChatGPT themselves.

My unpopular opinion is that some times hard work, memorization, doing work manually, and yes, even testing, are necessary to build up an education and thinking foundation. I don’t believe it can all be replaced by ideas about challenging students to get results and then ignoring how they arrive at the result. I’ve worked with kids enough to know that they are more resourceful about finding lazy ways to pass a test than you could ever imagine.

by Aurornis

What would you do instead to make sure the student actually possesses the skills they are intended to have learned by the end of a program?

by BDPW

This is nonsensical. Without a corpus of knowledge memorized and at your fingertips it’s next to impossible to build on it. Project work isn’t going to get you there. Creativity and new ideas happen when someone is deeply immersed in a space and can make connections.

by dyauspitr

If there were a way an AI could generate output only based on the student’s own knowledge, it could be somewhat beneficial...

Unfortunately that’s not how it works…

Long ago, WordPerfect’s grammar checker showed me my writing flaws and helped me improve.

Pasting a poorly written report and getting a dramatically restructured report wouldn’t be as instructive, even if the final result looked “better”.

by BobbyTables2

Why are so many articles like this one?

It read like an ads.

Why push an ads?

by 3dedb728-3f77

Would love to see the 'contract'

by Rutledge

After some debate, we drew a line separating mechanical churning from actual thinking. Automating repetitive tasks or literature searches was acceptable.

Was there any possibility of this not being the case? Rules which are not enforceable do not exist. If it's any part of the process you can't check, students are going to do it in the easiest way possible.

by causality0

I feel like that agreement gives the student a "win" in their minds, that they were going to do anyway, but now its approved so they can feel some labor lifted on their end.

by neonmagenta

My job is to teach students how to get stronger. Instead of forcing them to stack and rerack their own weights, and instead of using the existing university policy against plagiarism, or the existing social contract. I made them sign an additional set of rules where they promise to only use the magic weight lift button when stacking or reracking. I feel that this middle ground is superior: I'd rather sacrifice the subtle exercise benefits of moving relatively light weight in weird ways; that extremely important toward helping prevent injuries, instead of actually dealing with the desire of students (human nature) to get out of the effort that goes into learning.

I have no idea how accurate, or useful that analogy is, but personal intuition tells me it's really close. I also don't envy teachers. I used to teach, so I do understand the position they feel that they are required to adapt into. However, I prefer CS programs that don't encourage people to tolerate non-determinism, or otherwise unpredictable outputs. They're the source of some of the most intractable bugs, one i doubt the next generation of students will be able to troubleshoot correctly if they never learn to solve beginner level bugs without LLM assistance.

by grayhatter

This seems key: "So, I now limit written papers to two pages and base students’ grades more heavily on oral discussions of their work, which allows me to probe their thought process and challenge their decisions."

Oral discussions. That's probably the way education should work, but it requires the professor to spend time talking to each student individually, so it might not scale to large classes with hundreds of students.

by HomeDeLaPot

I found this article frustrating. In my experience, the students who participate in the “co-creation of a contract” would likely also have done their best to comply with Professor induced rules. The challenge is the 10-20% who, stressed and overworked, will be just as likely to ignore this contract as any other. I would have liked to understand how the situation is changed compared to no rules at all…

by ckemere

As an educator, I found that the institution was often powerless to prevent or detect cheating, because many, many applicants are highly motivated by perverse incentives.

Many students attend because it's a "piece of paper" that's mandatory for their career aspirations. They'll never get hired without the college cred, and so they need to grab it by any means necessary. It's often not their own money they're spending: it's a federal grant, a loan, or mommy and daddy pining to give the same or better opportunity to the next generation. So family pressure to achieve is often immense, and overwhelming to a child being shoved through this system.

Other students, they already have a job and/or family, striving to get ahead and be upwardly mobile according to the American Dream, and so they simply don't have time for actual study or homework, but they paid tuition and purchased books, and these consumers need their product that they already invested in.

Perverse incentives abound in higher education, and without removing those or reforming the system, you'll never, ever stop or slow down the cheating, which is pervasive and rampant, believe you me.

by ButlerianJihad

The older I get the more I realize “moderation in everything” is the key to success and happiness. Moderation in the sense of using or consuming something to only a certain degree.

In this case, education, the answer is in the middle. It’s exploring and utilizing new tools while ensuring the base foundation of education. It’s really simple.

Apply “moderation” to nearly any facet of your life and it’s probably the correct choice. Want to consume alcohol? Moderate consumption. Enjoy TikTok or other video entertainment? Moderation. Work? Don’t destroy yourself, moderate extreme effort.

This isn’t to say don’t follow passions or pursue things to a moderate extreme, just don’t ever let it consume you.

by Aboutplants

This is called the golden mean fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argumen...

What I've found as I get older is that when someone says "It’s really simple," that's a good sign it isn't.

by breezybottom

same. the older I get, the more I appreciate the "middle of the world" attitude in classical Chinese teachings. there's no single approach that's always / universally right. so it's wise to avoid going to the extreme in any direction

by laybak

>This isn’t to say don’t follow passions or pursue things to a moderate extreme, just don’t ever let it consume you.

Just moderate your moderation! It’s turtles all the way down

by seemaze

Moderation in fentanyl, too? Some habits are arguably just vices, that have few justifiable middle grounds.

by marginalia_nu

I don’t know about moderation but optimization is the mother of all evil. All extremists are actually optimization agents. Let one run for too long and you greatly loose on everything.

So I don’t think that we should meet a middle ground necessarily but wary of people that are trying to maxxx something.

by mrtksn

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Hacker News
> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely?
...because I'm that I'm writing this article be a AI himself...
by krater23
> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely?
Uh, by also avoiding it entirely?
by Apreche
a football coach is not required to do all the drills and that doesn't make him a hypocrite
by fantasizr
How do you feel about the lines preceeding that?
> He didn’t try to hide that he had used AI to generate much of his assignment. Instead, he admitted his anxiety. He felt that mastering these tools was essential for his future career, yet he had no idea how—or even whether—he was allowed to use them.
I'm empathetic to the student: I'd bet a large majority of employers/careers he's researching right now are making a lot of press noise about "the importance of AI" and how "it's a necessary part of the workplace now." Can you really expect someone in his shoes to avoid it entirely?
by kowbell
"Science" dot org, shilling for the highest bidder yet again. Keep the name of science out your mouth.
by lioeters
I have no problem with AI as-is, but writing should be concise and to the point, and without heavy tweaking current models write pretentious hard-to-read stuff like this article.
A person who has something to say often has trouble stopping writing. Outsourcing writing to AI then feels like the opposite, as if the author doesn't care but wants to just spew some content.
by vitamark
I'm glad to see more of this approach to modernizing education. I roll my eyes seeing people argue that we should go back to pen + paper or other weird rose-colored regressive approaches to preventing AI usage. It's part of education now, it's part of work now, and learning environments that don't acknowledge that are going to be dragged kicking and screaming into a future with empty classrooms.
by llbbdd
Both things can be true at the same time. The article mention switching to shorter reports and oral discussion but other courses may not have the luxury, especially the introductory ones.
by bonzini
I like how professors are all anti AI but had no problems with group work in which at least one student usually didn’t do anything
by moi2388
Instruction needs to shift to accommodate AI rather than preventing it from being used to complete assignments and tests.
Assignments and tests were always lossy, and over time more cheating crept in.
Instruction should shift to benchmarking productive output, strategic thinking and group collaboration. Similar to labs where you are tested on completing an experiment or a project with artifacts. Or an MBA program with quarterly group objectives. A major part of the group effort is dealing with collaboration and overcoming obstacles like laggards.
Hopefully people will realize how poor testing is for preparing students for the real world. the ultimate goal is preparing the students for a productive life, most commonly in commercial enterprise, but even academic pursuits require collaboration, productivity and other characteristics that were not well assessed by traditional testing and homework.
by tonymet
I suspect it is all futile without resurrecting the old idea of being "learned" as in learn-ed.
"Learned" didn't really mean what we mean today by being well educated or smart. You can't use AI to cheat and become "learned". AI can find the books to read but you still have to read them and understand the ideas.
There was connotation of breadth as opposed to depth with being "learned".
I think we also have to forget about "the real world". Being "learned" automatically is going to inherit dealing with "the real world" because the real world is always changing and that is exactly why breadth should be the focus going forward more than the depth of the research university model.
Of course, in a society so dominated by credentialism, credentialed people are going to hate AI because it will obviously let anyone cheat at the credential they put so much time and effort into. This doesn't need to be dressed up in some "think of the children" argument.
Claude to me is the greatest thing since sliced bread that increases my "learnedness" every single day but I also am a drop out that invested basically nothing in being a credentialed person.
by randsorex
This argument has been beaten to death before AI: Ever since calculators were able to do math, students have been wondering why they need to learn how to do all of this math manually when they could get the same answer from a calculator.
The reasons become more obvious only when you get deeper into a field where the math gets too complex to get a simple answer out of a calculator. If you never learned the basic concepts, you can’t progress to the more difficult topics because you don’t have a good understanding of the foundation.
That’s why changing goals to only look at the output doesn’t work for educating kids. Now that they can have ChatGPT answer every question they might see on a middle school or even high school exam, you could conceivably get all the way through high school graduation never having learned a single thing other than how to copy and paste between the assignment and ChatGPT.
Then what happens in the real world when that student needs to learn something new? It’s obvious: They’re going to try to put the problem into ChatGPT and then give you the result back. They don’t have any foundational tools to do anything else. They haven’t even learned how to learn because there was always an easy way out. Why would anyone hire a person who can only act as an interface to ChatGPT? They won’t. They’ll use ChatGPT themselves.
My unpopular opinion is that some times hard work, memorization, doing work manually, and yes, even testing, are necessary to build up an education and thinking foundation. I don’t believe it can all be replaced by ideas about challenging students to get results and then ignoring how they arrive at the result. I’ve worked with kids enough to know that they are more resourceful about finding lazy ways to pass a test than you could ever imagine.
by Aurornis
What would you do instead to make sure the student actually possesses the skills they are intended to have learned by the end of a program?
by BDPW
This is nonsensical. Without a corpus of knowledge memorized and at your fingertips it’s next to impossible to build on it. Project work isn’t going to get you there. Creativity and new ideas happen when someone is deeply immersed in a space and can make connections.
by dyauspitr
If there were a way an AI could generate output only based on the student’s own knowledge, it could be somewhat beneficial...
Unfortunately that’s not how it works…
Long ago, WordPerfect’s grammar checker showed me my writing flaws and helped me improve.
Pasting a poorly written report and getting a dramatically restructured report wouldn’t be as instructive, even if the final result looked “better”.
by BobbyTables2
Why are so many articles like this one?
It read like an ads.
Why push an ads?
by 3dedb728-3f77
Would love to see the 'contract'
by Rutledge
After some debate, we drew a line separating mechanical churning from actual thinking. Automating repetitive tasks or literature searches was acceptable.
Was there any possibility of this not being the case? Rules which are not enforceable do not exist. If it's any part of the process you can't check, students are going to do it in the easiest way possible.
by causality0
I feel like that agreement gives the student a "win" in their minds, that they were going to do anyway, but now its approved so they can feel some labor lifted on their end.
by neonmagenta
My job is to teach students how to get stronger. Instead of forcing them to stack and rerack their own weights, and instead of using the existing university policy against plagiarism, or the existing social contract. I made them sign an additional set of rules where they promise to only use the magic weight lift button when stacking or reracking. I feel that this middle ground is superior: I'd rather sacrifice the subtle exercise benefits of moving relatively light weight in weird ways; that extremely important toward helping prevent injuries, instead of actually dealing with the desire of students (human nature) to get out of the effort that goes into learning.
I have no idea how accurate, or useful that analogy is, but personal intuition tells me it's really close. I also don't envy teachers. I used to teach, so I do understand the position they feel that they are required to adapt into. However, I prefer CS programs that don't encourage people to tolerate non-determinism, or otherwise unpredictable outputs. They're the source of some of the most intractable bugs, one i doubt the next generation of students will be able to troubleshoot correctly if they never learn to solve beginner level bugs without LLM assistance.
by grayhatter
This seems key: "So, I now limit written papers to two pages and base students’ grades more heavily on oral discussions of their work, which allows me to probe their thought process and challenge their decisions."
Oral discussions. That's probably the way education should work, but it requires the professor to spend time talking to each student individually, so it might not scale to large classes with hundreds of students.
by HomeDeLaPot
I found this article frustrating. In my experience, the students who participate in the “co-creation of a contract” would likely also have done their best to comply with Professor induced rules. The challenge is the 10-20% who, stressed and overworked, will be just as likely to ignore this contract as any other. I would have liked to understand how the situation is changed compared to no rules at all…
by ckemere
As an educator, I found that the institution was often powerless to prevent or detect cheating, because many, many applicants are highly motivated by perverse incentives.
Many students attend because it's a "piece of paper" that's mandatory for their career aspirations. They'll never get hired without the college cred, and so they need to grab it by any means necessary. It's often not their own money they're spending: it's a federal grant, a loan, or mommy and daddy pining to give the same or better opportunity to the next generation. So family pressure to achieve is often immense, and overwhelming to a child being shoved through this system.
Other students, they already have a job and/or family, striving to get ahead and be upwardly mobile according to the American Dream, and so they simply don't have time for actual study or homework, but they paid tuition and purchased books, and these consumers need their product that they already invested in.
Perverse incentives abound in higher education, and without removing those or reforming the system, you'll never, ever stop or slow down the cheating, which is pervasive and rampant, believe you me.
by ButlerianJihad
The older I get the more I realize “moderation in everything” is the key to success and happiness. Moderation in the sense of using or consuming something to only a certain degree.
In this case, education, the answer is in the middle. It’s exploring and utilizing new tools while ensuring the base foundation of education. It’s really simple.
Apply “moderation” to nearly any facet of your life and it’s probably the correct choice. Want to consume alcohol? Moderate consumption. Enjoy TikTok or other video entertainment? Moderation. Work? Don’t destroy yourself, moderate extreme effort.
This isn’t to say don’t follow passions or pursue things to a moderate extreme, just don’t ever let it consume you.
by Aboutplants
This is called the golden mean fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argumen...
What I've found as I get older is that when someone says "It’s really simple," that's a good sign it isn't.
by breezybottom
same. the older I get, the more I appreciate the "middle of the world" attitude in classical Chinese teachings. there's no single approach that's always / universally right. so it's wise to avoid going to the extreme in any direction
by laybak
>This isn’t to say don’t follow passions or pursue things to a moderate extreme, just don’t ever let it consume you.
Just moderate your moderation! It’s turtles all the way down
by seemaze
Moderation in fentanyl, too? Some habits are arguably just vices, that have few justifiable middle grounds.
by marginalia_nu
I don’t know about moderation but optimization is the mother of all evil. All extremists are actually optimization agents. Let one run for too long and you greatly loose on everything.
So I don’t think that we should meet a middle ground necessarily but wary of people that are trying to maxxx something.
by mrtksn