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- Hacker News
- Students seem to optimize for local maxima/short-term rewards (homework scores) at the expense of the global maximum/long-term rewards (learning).
- Which was pretty much the whole damn premise of needing a teacher to begin with. What a surprise!by ezst
- by 2716057
- I am waiting for AI Viva Voce (“AVV”). I am really surprised we aren’t hearing more about this idea?
Try it for yourself by making a prompt like this (adapt as needed):
Pretend I am an undergraduate student of Computer Science. I am learning about early microprocessors from the 1970s. I want you to ask me an examination question as if you were doing a viva voce exam with me, to test my understanding of concepts. I want you to receive my answer and then based on what I said I want you to ask me a more specific question to probe my understanding. Repeat this interaction up to 5 times. Then grade my understanding so far, by giving me a pass, merit, credit, or distinction. Can you explain how you arrive at the grade based on my answers and your expectation of undergraduate knowledge of microprocessor theory?
by baud9600 - I mean, everyone I know has been using socratic dialogue for months to aid understanding, this seems like a variation of that. The issue is that if the answer is too easy to obtain it's hard to have the discipline not to cheat.by Avicebron
- I've tried stuff like this, but the problem is that you don't know if it's answers are correct, and more importantly, you don't know if its questions are on base or not. Plus its too easy to go off on tangents, especially when you ask it questions to clarify. You can get some more success by writing down a framework beforehand, but openended dialog is still not a good way to learn with AI, from my experience.
- In my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.by jimmar
- Your employer gave you your job based on your exam results.by blitzar
- Your career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.
- Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
by rtikulit - The exams aren't the thing that matter, they're an experiment to measure the thing that matters. Which, presumably, still matters at work!by tikhonj
- In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.by swatcoder
- Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.
- Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
by cube00 - If you structure learning in such a way that makes learning just a means to some end, and overindex on that end being the ultimate goal, that's what you get.
This is a pedagogical problem that AI merely exposed. Educators need to figure out How to make students choose the scenic route instead of having them optimize for the most efficient completion of a task.
by lxe - School has always been about creating compliant workers, not educating people. They will double down on "performing the right things" and "morals" while the economy will continue on its K shaped path as AI gets more capable.by Nevin1901
- Taking a forklift to the gym increases the number on the bar, but mysteriously your gains go down.by pjc50
- To extend this analogy:
Using the forklift as a spotter and to assist in loading weights increased gains. Then again, a human can do all those things, and provide real human connection.
by lapetitejort - College stopped being about getting an education a long time ago.
It's just a low pass filter for the job market. Students aren't actually interested in learning anything, they have been condition for a long time to jump through the hoops.
It would be much better if we actually returned to exam and performance based evaluation of students, and stopped giving everyone As just for trying hard. But parents look at college fees as buying their kid a job opportunity, and so grade inflation has basically ruined the SNR of academic performance for all but the lowest performers.
by qeternity - I meet a lot of noj-college people and let's just say, "just a low pass filter" is still A LOT of value.by stephbook
- Education sustem is not about the actual knowledge, but about training various aspects of the brain during kids development. So even memorizing literature have benefits, even though it doesn't bring any career use.
If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.
by shuwix - I wish that was the main way countries understood educationby dgellow
- Maybe. As the nature of assistive tools changes, so does pedagogy. Calculators are the easy example since most of us are (still) familiar. But there are others that were just as pronounced -- e.g. log tables and slide rules were transformational and instrumental at one time, and you've (probably) never used them. If you had used slide rules to solve your homework problems then were excluded from using them on exams, you'd see a similar effect.
AI is a big change; pedagogy is going to change too.
by beambot - I see this as a memorize-vs-understand fallacy many repeat.
It is really a combination: you need to memorize a large corpus of information to operationalize knowledge — understanding a bunch of theorems in mathematics does not help much (even if you are able to prove them when you see them) if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.
Or having good understanding of foreign language grammar won't help you if you do not memorize words that you need to express your thoughts.
Good literature will show you some of life's challenges and potentially let you think through them in a non-stressful situation (other than "I've got to finish the last 200 pages by Monday" ;)).
by necovek - For some of the classes my kids were in, the lessons and homework time were reversed.
Learning the material (using the text book and videos) was what they had to do at night and class time was spent working through problems or applying the material in some way.
by criddell - Interesting. Ages?by ekjhgkejhgk
- Flipped classroom method?by ako
- This is typical at the college/university level - when I attended 20-25 years ago, we were expected to learn the material through readings outside of class, and then class time was spent on discussion, application, questions, and working through problems.
IMHO there's a lot to recommend this style. A lot of students learn better when they can wrestle with the material at their own pace, on their own time, in their own setting. It quells a lot of anxiety about "I'm not following what the teacher is saying, am I stuped, will I look bad in front of all my peers?" And then class time can be spent identifying holes in your knowledge and getting instant feedback from an expert, which is where they are most useful.
by nostrademons - They’re using flipped learning even in universities now.by Sharlin
- I think for my ADHD child-self, this would have been a huge improvement. I didn’t need help learning, I needed help doing homework.