> the system loses legitimacy, defection becomes the dominant strategy.
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?
You know, back in the day, teachers used to try and convey the "why" behind things like writing essays and reading books. Spark notes existed, but a good teacher could convey, hey, there is a reason we are doing this thing, it is because it has value outside the note that says you completed the task itself.
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.
> It's just that kids are less disciplined, and more prone to attention deficits.
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.
They still do this. The difference is, in my experience, is that parents are totally cool with their kids cheating. I've overheard parents openly mention it at line-up at school.
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.
My entire (non American) education career was exam based. The exams were tightly supervised, no books etc. Every thing had to be memorised. Cheating was impossible.
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.
This article isn't really about AI. It's about how this blogger doesn't value high-school education beyond it serving as a day-care. Talking about AI is for dressing this up as a controversial hot-take for click-bait.
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.
> 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 the dumbest thing for a culture to do to itself. I'm often so incredulous I want to believe it was actually done by soviet-bloc propaganda to undermine the west.
There seems to be a tacit premise here, that anything an LLM can do is meaningless as an exercise for a student, but that is simply not true, and if it were, it would likely be the case that we would soon run out of pedagogically-‘meaningful’ tasks (the author has no practical suggestions for how we could avoid this situation.)
This is the correct answer and is being used by teacher friends of mine with great success.
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.
that does mean that there is less classroom time devoted to lecture or other activities though if the teacher is supervising drills and group work, but it might be the only realistic way to proceed
This article doesn’t really jive with me. Homework is more about spaced repetition and the discipline to do it. The notion that it is about writing an insightful essay with a novel interpretation of an already well trodden topic is overly dramatic. Maybe that’s truly what happens at Ivy Academy but most of the children around me are filling in the blanks to conjugate verbs, practicing cursive, or doing some other variation of 10 - catpaw = 7? drill*.
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!
I think there must be a different angle to win this game.
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.
First of all, the entire post reads like it was written by AI.
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.
I was allowed to use a scientific calculator in all my high school math exams. My parents were shocked by this because it would've been considered cheating when they were in school.
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.
I know this will come across as a trope, but a calculator doesn’t seem to me to be at the same level as AI in most circumstances.
If we’re talking about grade school children who are learning multiplication, then yes, a calculator is unhelpful to their education. If we’re talking about a high school physics exam, it probably doesn’t matter if you can show your work on converting units so much as it does that you knew which formulae to use.
> 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?
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.
Most western countries have somehow decided over the last couple decades that small negative actions should mostly be free of negative consequences.
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.
> Most western countries have somehow decided over the last couple decades that small negative actions should mostly be free of negative consequences.
There's a general loss of decorum, and it has such immense negative impact. There's so often someone acting like an animal on public transit, which is why many avoid it entirely.
just curious - if they went through the process of providing sealable bags and (I assume) verifying the bags were in fact sealed - why not go one step further and require the sealed phones to all be placed in a bucket which could then be taken to another room to ensure no access, and also no interruptions during the exam from a rogue ring or alarm?
You'd hope AI would be used more to support children and teach them. Can you imagine a patient teacher who's available 24/7? I actually ask LLMs to teach me stuff sometimes, and it does work, but... early days.
This writing an essay / writing a paper obsession doesn't make any sense to me. All American kids are always "writing a paper" on something. I never wrote a paper on anything of significance. If this constant writing of papers had a great effect, you'd expect me to perform at the 50th percentile or lower of people. But my income has always been much higher than that, I'd say I write more blog posts than the 50th percentile (the quality of which might suffer from the lack of paper-writing, one might claim), and I'd rate my life at much higher than the 50th percentile.
My parents took a different tack, and insisted that I spend my time reading, playing, or doing something. I spent very little time on homework because my parents negotiated this with the school. My school scored us entirely on exams, which I performed well on - just as I did well on the GRE to come here.
By the pedagogical standards of America, this must mean that I was atrociously educated. Why then am I happy and successful here? I suspect it is because paper-writing is a waste of time. I suspect that almost all education comes from solving the unknown related to the known (exercises), repeating the known (revision), and introduction of model-breaking notions (for which I don't have a short word). Even literary criticism would probably benefit from this structure.
This, along with the religion of note-taking[0], has made me suspect that US pedagogy is not particularly well-informed. The higher-education system is obviously superlative, but the teaching of children seems pretty haphazardly determined.
Why not just let it be survival of the fittest? Those who are lazy will continue to be lazy. Those who are determined will continue to be determined. We don't need to help everyone, especially those who don't want to help themselves. If they want to suffer financially in the future because they are being lazy now, oh well, it can't be helped.
Because we live in a society, and all of us suffer if the average worker and citizen falls significantly in their competence and understanding of the world.
This. Technology tends to increase the value of capital and not the value of labor, at least that has been the pattern for the last 50+ years. Take that trend to its conclusion and merit is crushed under the weight of who your parents are.
This is nonsense. School work is important. It isn't just teaching kids things, it's making them _practice thinking_.
I hate the classic question that often comes up in regard to math education, "When will I ever use this??"
The answer is simply that it makes them practice thinking. Human knowledge is transferable across domains. And practicing concentration and persistence is critical. Without these things, people can have all of the information in the world at their fingertips, but be completely unable to make reasoned decisions or continue to continue building new things upon the foundation that all of mankind has been building up diligently for millennia.
Don't let the kids cheat. Make them do their homework after hours in the library. Or the auditorium. Or the gym. Anywhere. Homework is supposed to be a couple of hours of "on your own" study after all, isn't it?
> 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.)
> students actively benefit from struggling through the act of the craft itself.
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.
Memorizing things, like place names, creates places in the brain to hang new information. New unknowns to pick at. Things other than how to get better at fortnite.
> To be clear, I’m not advocating for AI in real learning. AI is only useful right now as a stress test as it reveals how hollow adolescent work has become. If it pushes schools toward offering work with relevance, impact, and agency and away from hopeless busywork (“When will I ever use this?”), that is a win.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Execution is the point for the vast majority of the population, and academia has always been tone deaf to the raison d'etre of their enrollment base. people are there for jobs, academia is aware they are there for jobs, academia pretends they are the elite socioeconomic class there for knowledge and networking or on the path to be. they are not, they are an underclass in a world where it was temporarily beneficial for a broad population to be knowledge workers. A brief half century that caused all problems that academia faces today.
A half century that will be a footnote in the millenium of these institutions as a reversion to total class segregation returns, glasses clinking to laughs over this case study of folly.
Now, we're experiencing the industrialization of knowledge work, a segment that has been spared for 260 years of the industrial revolution. The nihilism is entirely warranted, and those validating the output of agents should remain specialized in their domain, trained by niche organizations on an adhoc basis via apprenticeships.
Learning skills are hard. Learning to add numbers requires drills. Learning to read big books is hard. There's no getting around that except that some students are intrinsically motivated, but all of them need to learn to read, write, and calculate and hopefully do so with meaningful and accurate information.
This is just another aspect of the failure to foster a positive society. The rich who are balls deep in AI don't give a fuck about what happens at a societal level. They want numbers to go up and the result is dumb people in charge of things they shouldn't be in charge of.
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.
> the system loses legitimacy, defection becomes the dominant strategy.
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.
Brilliantly said.
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?
I disagree about your final conclusion. To add another aphorism to your collection, "The pendulum always swings back".
From that one quote alone you can likely tell this was written by AI.
Other comments suggest the same. Ironic, isn't it?
The city I once knew as home is teetering on the edge of radioactive oblivion.
A three-hundred thousand degree baptism by nuclear fire.
I’m not sorry, we had it coming.
A surge of white hot atonement will be our wakeup call.
Hope for our future is now a stillborn dream.
yeah the real war is between people who do useful stuff and the trillion dollar industry which means to displace them.
You know, back in the day, teachers used to try and convey the "why" behind things like writing essays and reading books. Spark notes existed, but a good teacher could convey, hey, there is a reason we are doing this thing, it is because it has value outside the note that says you completed the task itself.
> back in the day...
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.
> It's just that kids are less disciplined, and more prone to attention deficits.
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.
> puts the blame too much on the kids.
kinda, but i would say it's more a blame on the parents. They need to be able to control, and discipline their kids - ala, raising them properly.
Back in the day when teachers’ salary can support a family I bet
Teachers salaries were never super amazing. Experienced teachers probably could, but it did take a good 10-15 years to get there.
They still do this. The difference is, in my experience, is that parents are totally cool with their kids cheating. I've overheard parents openly mention it at line-up at school.
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.
My entire (non American) education career was exam based. The exams were tightly supervised, no books etc. Every thing had to be memorised. Cheating was impossible.
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.
This article isn't really about AI. It's about how this blogger doesn't value high-school education beyond it serving as a day-care. Talking about AI is for dressing this up as a controversial hot-take for click-bait.
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.
> 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 the dumbest thing for a culture to do to itself. I'm often so incredulous I want to believe it was actually done by soviet-bloc propaganda to undermine the west.
There seems to be a tacit premise here, that anything an LLM can do is meaningless as an exercise for a student, but that is simply not true, and if it were, it would likely be the case that we would soon run out of pedagogically-‘meaningful’ tasks (the author has no practical suggestions for how we could avoid this situation.)
- the solution is very simple, stop giving homework completely
- 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
This is the correct answer and is being used by teacher friends of mine with great success.
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.
that does mean that there is less classroom time devoted to lecture or other activities though if the teacher is supervising drills and group work, but it might be the only realistic way to proceed
This article doesn’t really jive with me. Homework is more about spaced repetition and the discipline to do it. The notion that it is about writing an insightful essay with a novel interpretation of an already well trodden topic is overly dramatic. Maybe that’s truly what happens at Ivy Academy but most of the children around me are filling in the blanks to conjugate verbs, practicing cursive, or doing some other variation of 10 - catpaw = 7? drill*.
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
I think there must be a different angle to win this game.
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.
First of all, the entire post reads like it was written by AI.
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.
I was allowed to use a scientific calculator in all my high school math exams. My parents were shocked by this because it would've been considered cheating when they were in school.
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.
I know this will come across as a trope, but a calculator doesn’t seem to me to be at the same level as AI in most circumstances.
If we’re talking about grade school children who are learning multiplication, then yes, a calculator is unhelpful to their education. If we’re talking about a high school physics exam, it probably doesn’t matter if you can show your work on converting units so much as it does that you knew which formulae to use.
> it would've been considered cheating when they were in school.
Doubt. What field of study?
The predominant calculation helper was slide rules, which were allowed in engineering exams in the 60s and 70s.
Besides, in engineering you had to show all of your work and that had a large impact on the grade you got.
I agree, by this argument why teach any child 2+2? This has been performed perfectly by computers for years.
>I don’t want to live in that world; where curiosity and thought are cast aside in favor of faster results.
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?
> 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?
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.
Most western countries have somehow decided over the last couple decades that small negative actions should mostly be free of negative consequences.
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.
> Most western countries have somehow decided over the last couple decades that small negative actions should mostly be free of negative consequences.
There's a general loss of decorum, and it has such immense negative impact. There's so often someone acting like an animal on public transit, which is why many avoid it entirely.
just curious - if they went through the process of providing sealable bags and (I assume) verifying the bags were in fact sealed - why not go one step further and require the sealed phones to all be placed in a bucket which could then be taken to another room to ensure no access, and also no interruptions during the exam from a rogue ring or alarm?
this would likely make the test administrators liable if any of the phones went missing.
Discipline is the test.
You'd hope AI would be used more to support children and teach them. Can you imagine a patient teacher who's available 24/7? I actually ask LLMs to teach me stuff sometimes, and it does work, but... early days.
I'm looking forward to the day a student accidentally turns in a solution to P vs NP and nobody realizes it for months because nobody is doing work.
Maybe that’ll be when AI starts testing us
This writing an essay / writing a paper obsession doesn't make any sense to me. All American kids are always "writing a paper" on something. I never wrote a paper on anything of significance. If this constant writing of papers had a great effect, you'd expect me to perform at the 50th percentile or lower of people. But my income has always been much higher than that, I'd say I write more blog posts than the 50th percentile (the quality of which might suffer from the lack of paper-writing, one might claim), and I'd rate my life at much higher than the 50th percentile.
My parents took a different tack, and insisted that I spend my time reading, playing, or doing something. I spent very little time on homework because my parents negotiated this with the school. My school scored us entirely on exams, which I performed well on - just as I did well on the GRE to come here.
By the pedagogical standards of America, this must mean that I was atrociously educated. Why then am I happy and successful here? I suspect it is because paper-writing is a waste of time. I suspect that almost all education comes from solving the unknown related to the known (exercises), repeating the known (revision), and introduction of model-breaking notions (for which I don't have a short word). Even literary criticism would probably benefit from this structure.
This, along with the religion of note-taking[0], has made me suspect that US pedagogy is not particularly well-informed. The higher-education system is obviously superlative, but the teaching of children seems pretty haphazardly determined.
0: I've always hated note-taking. I'm glad to have found at least some others on HN like me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640454
College prestige locks people into life dependent paths, and needs to go away
Why not just let it be survival of the fittest? Those who are lazy will continue to be lazy. Those who are determined will continue to be determined. We don't need to help everyone, especially those who don't want to help themselves. If they want to suffer financially in the future because they are being lazy now, oh well, it can't be helped.
Because we live in a society, and all of us suffer if the average worker and citizen falls significantly in their competence and understanding of the world.
Because children need to be disciplined. That's part of education and parenting.
The lazy and stupid but rich will out-survive the industrious and smart but poor.
This. Technology tends to increase the value of capital and not the value of labor, at least that has been the pattern for the last 50+ years. Take that trend to its conclusion and merit is crushed under the weight of who your parents are.
This is nonsense. School work is important. It isn't just teaching kids things, it's making them _practice thinking_.
I hate the classic question that often comes up in regard to math education, "When will I ever use this??"
The answer is simply that it makes them practice thinking. Human knowledge is transferable across domains. And practicing concentration and persistence is critical. Without these things, people can have all of the information in the world at their fingertips, but be completely unable to make reasoned decisions or continue to continue building new things upon the foundation that all of mankind has been building up diligently for millennia.
Don't let the kids cheat. Make them do their homework after hours in the library. Or the auditorium. Or the gym. Anywhere. Homework is supposed to be a couple of hours of "on your own" study after all, isn't it?
From the article:
> 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.)
> students actively benefit from struggling through the act of the craft itself.
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.
Memorizing things, like place names, creates places in the brain to hang new information. New unknowns to pick at. Things other than how to get better at fortnite.
> To be clear, I’m not advocating for AI in real learning. AI is only useful right now as a stress test as it reveals how hollow adolescent work has become. If it pushes schools toward offering work with relevance, impact, and agency and away from hopeless busywork (“When will I ever use this?”), that is a win.
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.
> 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.
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.
> how taxes worked
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.
> If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?
By that logic now that text to speech has gotten quite good we should stop teaching kids to read.
IMO the students are way ahead already. If they have no chance of making a life for themselves why continue with the whole song and dance.
Many of my university classmates would give up on more than one paragraph so I'd say we're already there.
Big swing and a miss by the author here.
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.
> The learning is the point.
Execution is the point for the vast majority of the population, and academia has always been tone deaf to the raison d'etre of their enrollment base. people are there for jobs, academia is aware they are there for jobs, academia pretends they are the elite socioeconomic class there for knowledge and networking or on the path to be. they are not, they are an underclass in a world where it was temporarily beneficial for a broad population to be knowledge workers. A brief half century that caused all problems that academia faces today.
A half century that will be a footnote in the millenium of these institutions as a reversion to total class segregation returns, glasses clinking to laughs over this case study of folly.
Now, we're experiencing the industrialization of knowledge work, a segment that has been spared for 260 years of the industrial revolution. The nihilism is entirely warranted, and those validating the output of agents should remain specialized in their domain, trained by niche organizations on an adhoc basis via apprenticeships.
"If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?"
This is Idiocracy in the making.
Learning skills are hard. Learning to add numbers requires drills. Learning to read big books is hard. There's no getting around that except that some students are intrinsically motivated, but all of them need to learn to read, write, and calculate and hopefully do so with meaningful and accurate information.
This is just another aspect of the failure to foster a positive society. The rich who are balls deep in AI don't give a fuck about what happens at a societal level. They want numbers to go up and the result is dumb people in charge of things they shouldn't be in charge of.
children now don't have to work hard, but they're precious because no one is having children in the educated world.
> X didn't.
> 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.
>AI is a filter.
>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.