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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
- 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
- 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 - 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
- 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 - It's going to be a rough decade but I think we're going to come out a lot better in the long run. Education, especially in the US, has been really stagnant for a long time, and primary and secondary education has been more and more obviously just a mill to turn out middle-wage earners to dutifully pay taxes and buy products and not try to think to hard about things.
Now that we have systems that can pass for students at this baseline level, educational systems are facing a reckoning and we can, hopefully, move past cookie-cutter education solutions and recognize the need for more hands-on, engaged education. Will it be an easy transition? No. Will all schools adapt successfully? Also, no.
But will we finally have a path away from standardized testing, middle-of-the-road education? I am hopefully optimistic. We'll rediscover the need for human growth and development in our schools. It's either that or we lose. I'll choose the optimistic route and join and support those who believe the same.
by basilgohar - 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