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- Hacker News
- Salman Khan of KhanAcademy many years ago suggested that study should be done at home and homework should be done in-person in class with the help of a teacher. That would solve a lot of the homework problems AI access is causing. But it would require extra effort on the part of the teachers.by garg
- I was at EduLearn (a major edtech conference) this year and talked to many professors exactly about this. A lot of them are pulling work back into the classroom, but keep running into the same problems:
- some skills only develop through the actual writing (similar to how you can't learn to code just by watching YouTube videos)
- in-class assignments are not always scalable (and students end up using AI anyway)
- students aren't motivated enough to participate actively
I think looking at the writing process is a more realistic approach, so I built Turingo (https://www.turingo.net). It replays how a Google Doc was written, highlights unusual edits (large pastes) and tracks how that text changed afterwards. Surprisingly, several professors reported that students often underestimate how much LLM-generated text is left in their final drafts, so just seeing the replay changes the conversation.
It's not meant to be a verdict machine like the existing AI detectors (another big problem in education), more of a starting point for the kind of conversations the author's TAs are having. In fact, we're also beta testing a feature that suggests a few questions for the professor to ask based on the replay.
And yes, it's not perfect and autotypers do exist, but they're dumber than you'd expect and nowhere close to mimicking a real human (I hope to address that soon).
by mtrx - Honest question: doesn't this highlight how mundane and rote teaching has become? It's been distilled to the point that the lowest of the lowest common denominators can pass. The kids going through it are forced to learn things they will never use, unless it's going to be used in the more advanced class of the thing they'll never use until they graduate.
My hope is that this is a wake up call to teachers / professors to find a better way to evaluate students. To determine who has actually come away with a real understanding, vs those who were running around copying the assignments off of their peers anyway. These same people are now just skipping the peers and going straight to the all knowing oracle. It's the same as it ever was, degree mills.
by stonedivot - Maybe the Germans were right? One in-person test, preferably an interview, at the end of the semester should be enough to motivate the smarter part of the bunch to make sure they understand the issues at hand. The rest is chaff anyway. Don't optimize for chaff.by Propelloni
- The easiest path is to allow students to cheat on homework and watch them fail in the non-coursework-based exam. Your classes, then, abandon to the un-motivated; with AI enlarging the educational gap.
If you’re forced to attain a pass rate, and can’t watch so many fail, then the certificate becomes worthless in the workplace. Or just offer paid retakes and watch AI make you money.
If you insist on persisting with coursework then a short but heavily-weighted oral part seems to be the only answer, something that will diminish teaching time as a downside, as the article and comments about the flipped classroom touched on.
by tarkin2 - I have been feeling for ages like I am too old for the tech industry.
Reading this has made me understand that the recruitment industry will soon have to adopt the default position that anyone who graduated after mid 2025 is likely misrepresenting the depth of their understanding; people who graduated before that are the equivalent of low-background steel, until our processes catch up.
Maybe there’s still room for me.
by dofm - Seems the core problem is that many/most students aren't there to learn the material, just to get grades. The class is a complex mechanism to force them to learn material against their will in a validation arms race. The teacher's job becomes something like a military commander. Seems depressing.by gblargg
- I am teaching some math courses, and I see how LLMs disrupted all standard approaches, and I don't know what to do.
I rely on written exams that are open book, but forbid any use of computers and smartphones in class.
The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning. I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.
I just had an experience where all students were given "sample problems" to try at home and prepare for the written test. Many of them just dumped the document into an LLM, asked it to produce some "exam guide", and showed up with that thing printed out, asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.
It seems like the university also has many people pushing for AI use for everything, but I teach basic stuff where the goal is to make students think on their own and digest some fundamental ideas, LLMs can produce perfect solutions, but relying on them is pointless.
by a57721