Stop relying on students to do their work in home. Most of people work from 9 to 5 yet education system expects teenagers to do overtime assignments. And noone even pays them for it.
Students don’t learn by just going to class then doing nothing afterwards. Teachers give the tools, the kids need to practice them. Jesus I wish I could get paid for just going to school.
That’s not entirely true. Practice is important, but homework actually has a negative impact on learning: https://hachyderm.io/@Impossible_PhD/112969358305278574
Are you actually referencing a mastodon post made by one individual claiming to be a lifelong teacher as substantiated evidence to support your claim?
I’m also a lifelong teacher, and I think homework has its place.
- It allows teachers to assess a students progress and identify issues that individual might be struggling with.
- Teacher can modify the curriculum to improve common shortcoming appearing in homework results, in other words, hw can help the teacher help the students.
- HW allows more accurate grading, so you’re not just judged based on your tests, your attitude in class, and the teacher’s gut.
- As I mentioned, it’s practice for the student. Sure I could do math accurately if I really thought about it, but getting lots of practice in means it takes less time and I don’t look foolish at some point when it matters.
That said, I almost never assign hw in my own classes unless students need more time with a project than I am able to provide. That said, some student are never happy when I give them a score based solely on how much (or how little) they actually participate in class vs poke about on their phones.
Students don’t learn by just going to class then doing nothing afterwards
Really? Then why are they going there in the first place???
And how do you get that juicy job experience allowing you to negotiate higher wage? You spend time on homework given you by your boss???
Jesus I wish I could get paid for just going to school.
Maybe you should be paid for passed exams and decent grades?
I’ve always believed that fiscal responsibility and interpersonal skills should be taught in schools. Add online etiquette and context interpretation to that list as well.
Also, who’s going to pay you? You’re going to school so you can learn how to make money for yourself later. If you don’t do your schoolwork, you might end up making less than others who did because you’ll be less experienced with it.
When students want to cheat their way through the education system, the fault is not solely their own. Perhaps this will drain some of the excess credentialism out of the system.
On the contrary, it will raise the floor of required credentials. When everyone has a HS education, an undergrad degree is needed to stand out. Now that a bachelors is the de facto education level, a masters degree is necessary. If it gets easier to get a MS degree, we’ll be requiring a PhD for entry level positions.
If they’re smart enough to cheat they’re smart enough to pass.
Be real now. How much of that stuff do you all really use in your daily lives?
Because the real world doesn’t care about rote memorization as long as the work gets done in my experience.
The only thing the world gives a shit about:
CAN you do it? If you can, how long will it take and how much?
The how is irrelevant.
The how is irrelevant.
What I usually tell students is that homework and projects are learning opportunities. The point isn’t for them to produce a particular artifact; it’s to go through the process and develop skills along the way. For instance, I do not need a program that can sort numbers… I can do that myself and there are a gazillion instances of that. However, students should do that assignment to practice learning how to code, how to debug, how to think through problems, and much more. The point isn’t the sorting program… it’s the process and experience.
How do you get better at say gymnastics? You do a bunch of exercises and skills, over and over.
How do you get better at say playing the guitar? You play a lot songs, over and over.
How do you get better at say writing? You write a lot, some good, some bad, over and over.
To get better at anything, you need to do the thing, a lot. You need to build intuition and muscle memory. Taking shortcuts prevents that and in the long run, hurts your learning and growth.
So viewing homeworks as just about the artifact you submit is missing the point and short-sighted. Cheating, whether using AI or not, is preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding.
I want to start off by saying that I agree there are aspects of the process which are important and should be learned, but this is more to do with critical thinking and applicable skills than it has to do with the process itself.
Of note, this part of your reply in particular I believe is somewhat shortsighted
Cheating, whether using AI or not, is preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding.
Using AI to answer a question is not necessarily preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding. The use of AI is a skill in the same way that any ability to look up information is a skill. But blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results is very different from using AI as a resource in a similar way one might use a book or an article as a resource. A single scientific study with a finding doesn’t make fact - it provides evidence for fact and must be considered in the context of other available evidence.
In addition, learning to interact with and use AI is a skill in the same way that learning to interact with and use a phone, or the internet, or an app are all skills. With interaction layers becoming increasingly more abstract (which is normal and good), people need to have skills at each layer in order for processes to exist and for tools be useful to humanity. Most modern tools require people who can operate on different levels with different levels of skill. While computers are an easy example since you are replying on some kind of electronic device which requires everything from chemists to engineers to fabrication specialists and programmers (hardware, software, operating system, etc.) to work, this is true for nearly any human made product in the modern world. Being able to drive a car is a very different skill set than being able to maintain a car, or work on a car, or fabricate parts for a car, or design parts for a car, or design the machinery that manufactures the parts for the car, and so on.
This is a particularly long winded way of pointing out something that’s always been true - the idea that you should learn how to do math in your head because ‘you won’t always have a calculator’ or that the idea that you need to understand how to do the problem in your head or how the calculator is working to understand the material is a false one and it’s one that erases the complexity of modern life. Practicing the process helps you learn a specific skill in a specific context and people who make use of existing systems to bypass the need of having that skill are not better or worse - they are simply training a different skill. The means by which they bypass the process is extremely important - they could give it no thought at all or they may critically think about it and devise a process which still pays attention to the underlying process without fully understanding how to replicate it. The difference in approach is important, and in the context of learning it’s important to experiment and learn critical thinking skills to make a decision of where you wish to have that additional mastery and what level of abstraction you are comfortable with and care about interacting with.
Well, that’s academic…
Again, when you are in the real world… how is irrelevant.
It doesn’t matter if you did your homework or did the same thing over and over again.
Sure, some people acquire the capability through repetition. But all that matters in the end is if you are capable or not.
So viewing homeworks as just about the artifact you submit is missing the point and short-sighted.
No, the point is to get an irrelevant piece of paper that in the end doesn’t actually indicate a persons capabilities.
I’m an engineer. I use all of it. I use it whether I’m writing technically correct and accurate forensic reviews or doing math in my head (or on paper) to analyze a condition in real time or checking a complex finite element model to ensure that there are no improper assumptions or invalid boundary conditions. AI/ML is really useful for some things, and deadly for others.
Rote memorization may seem unnecessary, but a mental catalog - whether it be quotes, body parts and systems, equations of natural phenomena, or even manufactured parts and specifications - is the hallmark of someone who can work independently in a real time industry. It may not matter for some jobs, but it’s make or break in others.
I am entirely certain that it’s the same amount of cheating as it always was and the only thing that changed is that AI is how they’re doing it.
Maybe. It is true that people who would have cheated in the past are now just using AI in addition to the previous means. But from my experience teaching, the number of students cheating is also increasing because of how prevalent AI has become and how easy it is to use it.
AI has made cheating more frictionless, which means that a student who might not have say used Chegg (requires some effort) or copied a friend (requires social interaction) in the past, can now just open a textbox and get a solution without much effort. LLMs have made cheating much easier, quicker, and safer (people regularly get caught using Chegg or copying other people, AI cheating can be much harder to detect). It is a huge temptation where the [short-term] benefits can greatly dwarf the risks.
What exactly was the tool we cheated with in the past that was equivalent to LLMs? What is your certainty based on?
Other people writing it for you and the openness with which I heard many other students discussing that they weren’t writing their own stuff.
Colleges having a meltdown over AI reminds me of colleges having a meltdown over Wikipedia when wikipedia first came out 20 years ago.
