> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student? And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.
While this might be more true of "factoid based classes" (such as geography) - it completely misses the point of subjects where students actively benefit from struggling through the act of the craft itself. (writing, music, foreign languages, etc.)
Hard agree! Although I'm biased as a foreign language teacher :)
Geography is a great example actually because it can be "factoid based" or it could be based on investigation. Off the top of my head, students could make rivers through sandpits to investigate erosion. Hopefully AI inspires a change to the latter approach.
I often see people online saying "We were never taught this in school!" as if the point in education is to memorize all the factoids. But we should be teaching people how to do experiments, look things up and apply critical thinking.
Secondly, the author / prompter misses the point entirely with this closing paragraph:
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.
You learn fundamentals because they are necessary for you to understand how the magic works, and because that’s how the human brain works.
Is it important for you to be able to write a binary search algorithm perfectly from scratch? Not especially, no. Is it important for you to be able to describe what it’s doing, and why? Yes, very much so, because otherwise you won’t know when to use it.
If your rebuttal to this is “we can feed the problem to AI and let it figure that out,” I don’t want to live in that world; where curiosity and thought are cast aside in favor of faster results.
Homework, exams, essays, assignments and so on are all tools designed to help students achieve learning outcomes. Those tools are becoming less effective due to the technology to which the students now have access.
Making adjustments to the educational tools makes more sense to me than banning the technology.
To be fair, we, all of us, have been living in that world for quite some time now. Not really sure how we'd ever slow down our advance down that road?
But how will they ever know that if they don’t go through the process? I am not saying the current way of teaching is perfect but you can’t tell what is and isn’t bullshit without some experience at some point.
We had a mandatory home economics class that taught how to balance a check book, cook, do laundry, and even how taxes worked. Yet people still thought that class was bullshit and a waste of time. Many classes such as health, gym, shop, a/v, typing, all had people blowing it off as useless stuff they will never need to know. ChatGPT turning every class into that is a nightmare future for the youth of the world. People will grow up entirely unable to think.
Given that I worked with people well before the advent of LLMs who had no idea how marginal tax rates worked, it seems like we should be more aggressively pursuing this as an educational goal.
Sounds about right. This author is talking about whether the kids think the material is important as if kids have good judgement and can be trusted. But that obviously is not the case. Kids are overconfident and ignorant and have no basis at all to determine what is and isn't good learning for them.
By that logic now that text to speech has gotten quite good we should stop teaching kids to read.
You can cheat on tests, shoplift in stores, and pretty much nothing will happen to you.
When teachers can’t give failing grades to students or kick them out of their class for blatantly breaking the rules, this is what happens.
Meanwhile I took a language exam in Japan last weekend where a bunch of people got kicked out of the room - instant fail - for using their phone during the break when it was expressly disallowed (we had to put it in a sealed envelope that we couldn’t open until the exam was over, break included). Given reports I’ve heard, I suspect at least a single digit percent of test takers failed the test this session simply for breaking this rule.
From the test takers who got kicked out of the room and tried to negotiate (unsuccessfully) with the proctors, it was instantly obvious who came from cultures where the consequences of rules are carried out and who didn’t.
The learning is the point. Learning by nature shouldn't be optimized for efficiency. You learn deeply when you have to read sources, draw conclusions, synthesize information, and connect it to your own experiences. I recall writing essays in grade school and what mattered wasn't the end product but the process to arrive at the end product. The hours of research and analysis... figuring out what was true and what was questionable. When you skip steps 1-10 and arrive at the final deliverable a la ChatGPT, you miss the entire point of the assignment. Unfortunately, students are only judged on the final deliverable.
Truly, I think the only way we get back to real learning is through paper and pencil. The problem is that we've optimized our systems for learning efficiency, not learning efficacy.
Almost every sentence of this piece is a very powerful reminder that we're not really talking about education vs cheating and it's actually about real work vs optics, appearances vs reality, fake news vs information, and all the rest at the same time. A certain amount of bullshit is and always has been standard, and you see it in all kinds of folk wisdom (e.g. "the people capable of being politicians are the least qualified", "those who do not steal steal from themselves", "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"). But in a very short period of time, society itself has shifted away from rewarding real effort or real results almost everywhere.
I agree that game-theory is a pretty good way to understand it, but the conclusions are pretty dark. Defection as the only available strategy and equilibriums that add up to large-scale attractors that we maybe cannot escape.
In the Good Old Days, part of the role of a good education was to set oneself up to join influential social groups. These groups contained smart, interesting, learned people. They tacitly or overtly selected new members based on how smart, interesting, and learned they were. You can get the grades but remain excluded if your interviewer at Oxford or Harvard thinks you are boring, or the chaps at the Worcesthampton Natural History Club think you’re an uncouth moron, or the managing partner at Wasper & Vanderson LLP doesn’t find you engaging enough. It’s not just these posh elite groups either. Hacker cliques, artists communes, and the like have always focused on cultivating an elite membership on some axis or other through exclusivity that rewarded interestingness.
What is the equivalent nowadays? Are these groups being taken over by fakers who are constantly all pretending to each other, to the extent that the entire ranks fill up with people who can’t spell competence without a computer? If someone makes an interesting remark about a poet or artwork or engineering practice does everyone else excuse themselves for a bathroom break in order to open up Wikipedia and find something interesting to say in response?
Do they actively reward fakers, seeking out their ilk to the point that the most influential groups are the ones filled with the best self-promotion soloists? Or perhaps the whole ideal of influential social groups is just going to disappear?
At some point these kids will be faced with a timed pen-and-paper exam. The earlier you can show them what that’s like and how one needs to prepare for it the better.
On the other hand, I taught high school CS that was assessed solely with terminal examination. If you’re managing pupils whose mark comes from papers they write at home I concede the article’s point entirely!
* catpaw = 3
The purpose of an assignment is to give the student problems that can be solved by applying the knowledge and techniques they were taught in class, so that the student can gain experience using that knowledge and those techniques and demonstrate that they have done so to the teacher.
> Y did.
> And that might be...
It's just so... AI. If the author wanted to make a pro-AI-writing point, maybe they shouldn't have let the AI start their essay with the exact AI grammar we're all exhausted having to read every day.
- when students come to the classroom, before assigning them work, have them place their cellphones at the teacher's table
- then give them homework, as simple as that
The structure they chose is in-class work counts for 80%+ of their grade. All work in class is done with pencil & paper. Quite simple in fact to solve a large part of the homework cheating issue.
The root of the flaw in this thinking is a common assumption that school is designed to create drones for the workforce rather than to round out human beings. Giving youth an opportunity to be a part of a shared understanding and a shared culture that is rooted in the history of the previous generations.
This kind of essay is on par with a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires. It's not doing us any favours because kids pick up on this disdain and make if part of their own identities.
I'm even more convinced by this when I look at other things this person has asked GPT to write for them. Their core focus is on convincing people not to value traditional education so that they can sell their own competing product.
This is Idiocracy in the making.
If you play fairly, the skills and knowledge you learned are truly yours. But if you are outsourcing all your proficiencies to an AI, than what will become of you?
Kids want to be cool unique snowflakes, if one can master a skill without the resorting to cheating, one will gain the ability to impress the peers.
Push in that direction.
>It strips away everything that can be automated, leaving only what requires actual thinking: creativity, collaboration, real-world problem-solving.
This is rich coming from an article written by AI instructed to SEO it to the moon.
Funny thing is, memorising something is a big help to understanding it.
In that system, AI is a very useful tool. AFAIK, this is how they still do it in many Asian countries.
It worked pretty well. Produced a lot of educated people.
Avicebron•52m ago
ares623•48m ago
altcognito•7m ago
chii•40m ago
teachers still do this today. It's just that kids are less disciplined, and more prone to attention deficits. Not to mention that punishment for failure has been dulled down to almost non-existent. "No child left behind" had noble intentions, but the way it was implemented leaves much to be desired.
To me, the fix is to cure the lack of consequences in the outcome of cheating. If you're allowed to cheat in an exam (or not enforced), then obviously it's seen as an encouragement to cheat.
Bring back in-person, closed room, no calculator/phone exams, and these score determines your grade(s), rather than the teachers from the school.
BobbyJo•4m ago
I think this puts the blame too much on the kids. Its not their fault we've created a world where they are surrounded by dopamine treadmills.
I know you go on to say that we need to change their environment to solve the problem, and I wholeheartedly agree. I just wanted to point out that kids today are the victims in all this mess.
spamizbad•32m ago
Hate to say "back in my day" but even as a millennial raised by laid-back parents I'd have been in deep shit if I cheated.