cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31251815
I asked teachers to tell me how AI has changed how they teach.
The response from teachers and university professors was overwhelming. In my entire career, I’ve rarely gotten so many email responses to a single article, and I have never gotten so many thoughtful and comprehensive responses.
One thing is clear: teachers are not OK.
They describe trying to grade “hybrid essays half written by students and half written by robots,” trying to teach Spanish to kids who don’t know the meaning of the words they’re trying to teach them in English, and students who use AI in the middle of conversation. They describe spending hours grading papers that took their students seconds to generate: “I’ve been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student,” one teacher told me. “That sure feels like bullshit.”
We are melting ice caps and boiling lakes to help high schoolers not learn Spanish.
The more fundamental problem is that the capitalist indoctrination system has never been ok. Schools have never been about diversity, critical thinking, and education but rather conformity, privilege, and indoctrination. The system of grading and filtering students based on tests, essays, etc. is counter to the purported goal of education. Schools are just just pre-prisons for kids while parents waste their lives serving capital.
schools are extremely useful for the economy because in the last 200 years, contributing to economy was much more efficient if the kids got some education. That is why the education was often revolving around practical skills such as math, reading comprehension or natural sciences.
Our university has already adapted. We get little homework now, but have to write (very) short mini-tests at the beginning of each lesson. They typically take up 5-10 minutes and contain 1-2 questions which you can easily answer if you understand the course materials.
This certainly sucks hard. A possible path forward could be to simply discontinue papers. Only grade verbal exams and written exams started and completed in class. Open book, but prohibit usage of non-vetted electronic devices
In uni we always had a verbal defense for our papers. That had 2 benefits: (1) verify that the student actually wrote the paper (plagiarism and ghost writers were a thing before LLMs too), and (2) the prof could test the boundaries of the student’s understanding with additional questioning.
The obvious caveat being the amount of time it takes for the teacher to have a 1-on-1 with each student.
This is pretty much the only way to verify knowledge. And it’s kind of what interviewers do when they’re thinking about hiring someone for a job, right? Same goal.
One potential avenue that schools have, especially in college, is to let the students know that. You’re not up against the school; you’re up against the interviewer.
This academic year I’m going to try to set up a thing where we do mock interviews with students, hopefully with real interviewers from real companies. I want to show the students where they’re going, and what they really have to get ready for.
In my dream world, we wouldn’t even have grades or diplomas. After all, when we’re learning things on our own we don’t have those and yet somehow we manage to get the job done. But not having grades comes with its own set of problems in this academic structure we’ve set up.
I agree, the assignments will need to adapt to discourage the use of LLMs. Easiest is in-class writing or written exams. Unfortunately that takes away from other class activities.
I remember one of my favourite courses in university had exams where you could bring in any resource you wanted (excluding phones), because the exam was written in a way that required understanding of the core topic, something you can’t simply look up.
A quote from one of my favorite profs, “You can bring your books, you can bring your notes, you can bring a friend; if you don’t know the material, you will fail.”
I’m not sure why schools are allowing unfettered access to the internet on school devices.
