To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain
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They don't pick what it's good at. If they did then of course they would choose money before art.
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Try thinking about what having a rich life means in less mercenary terms.
And yes: this is an attitude I can afford to have now, possibly because I chose to work four jobs while a full-time grad student and parent of a newborn when younger. It's kind of why I did those things, because I had that attitude then, too*. My priorities got out of whack from time to time, to be fair, and sticking with the topic of hard work and callouses building skills while shortcuts and cheats buy us nothing of lasting value, I tell myself the mistakes were worth making as long as I learned from them.
*Thanks, Dad!
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Why does his help?
It's still easy to have the AI make the answer and then you transcribe it.
... and you guys are worried about no critical thinking skills. I got into computer because my high school librarian did everything in her power to stop me playing games on those computers. I had to learn a lot about how computers worked to get around it.
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If I'm honest my time in university was actually very AI able.
Really it was testing for who had the best memories. Who read the books and could regurgitate that on an A, B, C style test best.
Practical application in some comp sci classes for projects, but lots of other class were purely information retention and spitting back out - which I didn't get even back then.
Why are we memorizing these things? I always thought if I could cheat on this test with Wikipedia or the book in front of me you were fundamentally testing the wrong thing. Tests should have been open notes use whatever you want - which is how life works.
In our world the raw facts are no longer this sacred cow you need to have on hand. More important that you know how to get those facts, evaluate their accuracy, and apply them to some task.
We should be more interested in crafting problems that pupils need to learn to use tools to navigate. I understand LLMs make this more complicated, but to me that argues for yet different style tests. LLMs are here, don't craft tests that they can easily do because that's a perfectly good tool kids should learn to use.
Really it was testing for who had the best memories. Who read the books and could regurgitate that on an A, B, C style test best.
Practical application in some comp sci classes for projects, but lots of other class were purely information retention and spitting back out - which I didn't get even back then.
Why are we memorizing these things? I always thought if I could cheat on this test with Wikipedia or the book in front of me you were fundamentally testing the wrong thing. Tests should have been open notes use whatever you want - which is how life works.
In our world the raw facts are no longer this sacred cow you need to have on hand. More important that you know how to get those facts, evaluate their accuracy, and apply them to some task.
We should be more interested in crafting problems that pupils need to learn to use tools to navigate. I understand LLMs make this more complicated, but to me that argues for yet different style tests. LLMs are here, don't craft tests that they can easily do because that's a perfectly good tool kids should learn to use.
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One of the biggest uses is turning out to be replacing programming jobs, so those smug jerks are getting it too.
Also people are already using AI for filing taxes. A friend of mine was just telling me a horror story about how his tax preparer used AI and it botched his return.
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I was seeing a lot of em dashes in this article and was laughing internally because I was thinking that you probably see paperwork with em dashes a lot of the time and shake your head, but then I was wondering if you put that in your article as a hidden joke also or do you really love to use them? Honestly I used to use them all the time back in the day because I thought they were a fancy dash, but I stopped using them after ChatGPT came around and they give away AI generated material.
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Why do I feel like you keep assuming I don't understand that perspective, or that all I care about is money? There's no reasonable way to expect to have a good life in this country if you don't have a good enough plan on where the money is going to come from, so why am I not allowed to point that out? I didn't say it was a perspective no-one could have, just that it was a perspective that only works if your immediate needs are already secure.
<rant> There's hardly a single priceless thing someone isn't trying to either monetize or interfere with. Time with friends and family in a public space in nature, comfortably having some refreshments and enjoying the peace and quiet in the fresh air? The air is polluted, it's loud and busy, fast-paced updates try to butt in via your phone if you let them. Ads everywhere, of course, fewer places you can just exist without someone profiting off of you first. Refreshments/snacks from the store cost more than they used to and yet they cut corners on every recipe so nothing tastes as good as it used to, but the little man was driven out a long time ago and it's nowhere near the heyday of the farmer's market, much less the local general store. Nothing lasts as long as it used to, everything cuts corners to work for the mass market, even if it's less comfortable in that one size fits all kind of way. Hard to meet anyone, hard to afford to raise a family, hard to find the time or energy for either when it's all sucked out of you just treading water. </rant>
I hope I don't sound like someone who cares too much about money and buying flashy new consumer junk, rather than someone who is just being realistic about what order you have to go about things. To go back to the original topic, it's simple. As long as only some jobs are good enough to allow you to pursue the things that really matter, and as long as a degree is part of how you compete to get that job, then it's logical to get that degree first and then pursue the other things, instead of pursuing the other things until you run out of money and then end up with neither money nor satisfaction. Maybe people shouldn't try to do everything you did, as it sounds like you tried to do everything at once, but hey, live and learn!
Another part of what I was saying is that if someone really didn't need to care about certification, and just cared about learning, there would be no reason to pay for all these classes that you only take because it is part of your degree plan. There'd be no need to graduate or to even attempt a particular degree nor to care about grades - you'd just attend those few classes which were the best use of your limited time and resources. It's my belief that while the access to faculty and resources at a university would be valuable in a vacuum, they have successfully made everyone busy enough that no-one has time to make the most of that. So for some topics, you can find free or cheap alternative ways to learn them - online courses from smaller schools, youtube tutorials, practical experience, personal tutoring, all the above. For other topics, you might find that the best person for each topic is at a different university, and it may well be that if certification was irrelevant then bouncing around meeting these people to learn specific things from them would be a rational thing to do. Since that's not what almost anyone is doing, then probably we're not in a world where the primary purpose of university students is to learn.
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LLMs use emdashes because human writers use emdashes. The fact that you used them yourself until very recently, but still believe they’re a giveaway for AI just makes my head hurt.
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One thing that caught my eye was 'agent AI can complete online quizzes in minutes'
How does that work? AI can now just read and answer questions and click next? That's a thing? I would presume there would need to be coding involved for that
How does that work? AI can now just read and answer questions and click next? That's a thing? I would presume there would need to be coding involved for that
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Who it should really be replacing is the portion of management/admin who don't actually accomplish meaningful things. I've heard an anecdotal rumor that people at some company discovered that their management had been making strategic decisions for months based on information in reports or presentation materials generated by AI that turned out to be made up because the actual source data was never provided to the AI in the first place. It may or may not be a particularly true rumor, but if they were doing a better job at their role than AI, you'd think it would be less believable.
I doubt AI replaces that many good programming jobs, because the value of a good programmer is in making good decisions more than it is in producing lines of code. Manglement has used that metric before with bad effects, for instance when it turns out that people who review code for security and reliability tend not to add very many lines, so if you use the metric blindly your code becomes an insecure mess.
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I remember when assigning homework in the later years of grad school I would tell the students that I did not grade it because it was a "self-correcting problem." If you didn't do the homework, you'd do poorly on the tests. I gave regular ol' pen-and-paper tests.
You could in principle memorize the solutions given by an LLM, though. But if you can read those and generalize well enough to pass a test, maybe you deserve the grade at that point.
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This reminds me of the survivors bias. I think we are looking at this from the wrong perspective indeed.
Could it be the work load is too high? They’re simply not interested? Back then I would pay attention to every word my macro economics professor would utter, because it was my favorite subject and that guy was a real pro.
Other classes I would do the bare minimum to pass (accounting for example) as I simply did not care about it.
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I see what you did there. I, of course, am immune to infection with the Dunning Kruger virus. I reiterate the immortal words coined by my mother: "You people that think you know everything are very annoying to those of us that do". Also I am not an engineer or politician...The tendency of smart professionals whose field requires substantial investment of focus and learning to assume that expertise extends into areas they couldn't be bothered to care about in school is widespread, to the extent of infecting many of us in these forums, in fact. I don't consider myself immune to it, and do try to remind myself periodically the line between ignorance and knowing enough to be dangerous is super-duper thin and nigh invisible.
For the record, if anyone suspects I might be talking about you and your fellow [insert profession], you are probably correct—as always, of course
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LLMs can take my em dashes—from my cold, dead hands.
There are lots of things that make LLM text jump off the page to me (especially in student assignments) but that ain't ever been one of 'em.
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Who knows what will happen if the AI bubble pops and the frictionless and ubiquitous access to LLMs withers into something much more limited.
The problem there is that regardless of what happens in the AI tech space, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Students will have access to tools like LM Studio or Ollama which will allow them to use capable, locally hosted LLMs (no Internet connection needed). Not as good as frontier models, but more than sufficient for what you're talking about.
I'd also point out that there's also numerous tools which are explicitly designed to "humanize" LLM generated content, like BypassGPT, AIHumanizer and HIX Bypass. Going down the detection route is largely a waste of time (as you've discovered); it's an arms race you can never win.
I don't know that there's any good answer for this. If a student wants to learn, they'll put in the effort to learn. If they see a degree as a piece of paper that opens a bank vault for them, then you're just someone presenting a series of hurdles they need to leap over to get a prize, and they're going to optimize that path any way they can.
The problem there is that regardless of what happens in the AI tech space, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Students will have access to tools like LM Studio or Ollama which will allow them to use capable, locally hosted LLMs (no Internet connection needed). Not as good as frontier models, but more than sufficient for what you're talking about.
I'd also point out that there's also numerous tools which are explicitly designed to "humanize" LLM generated content, like BypassGPT, AIHumanizer and HIX Bypass. Going down the detection route is largely a waste of time (as you've discovered); it's an arms race you can never win.
I don't know that there's any good answer for this. If a student wants to learn, they'll put in the effort to learn. If they see a degree as a piece of paper that opens a bank vault for them, then you're just someone presenting a series of hurdles they need to leap over to get a prize, and they're going to optimize that path any way they can.
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I don't see these general purpose LLMs as tools. They're automated systems designed to complete complex tasks. If I use a miter saw and a power drill to build a table, I still had to use a lot of skill and physical effort to build it and I would still learn a lot in the process. If I just asked a robot to do it and sold the table without further thought, I wouldn't learn a thing - and I would atrophy my skills in the process.
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IIRC it takes approximately 24 km/s of delta-v to hit the Sun from low Earth orbit. It takes about 16.5 km/s of delta-v to leave the Solar System.
Anger is no excuse for inefficient use of propellant.
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I've long been an advocate for launching things into Jupiter instead, as a cost saving move.
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Slightly more worrisome is that some research studies imply that learning to handwrite creates neurological connections that appear to affect emotional health, and have an effect on physical health.
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Bias in oral finals is real. However, that same bias also occurs in written finals.
Personal example. PSY 401 had an oral final. The instructor gave me an F on my answer, simply because he didn't like it. (I answered the question by pointing out why the flaws in the question that made every answer meaningless.) Fortunately the department chairman was also present, and promptly changed my grade to A. The grade on that was my grade for the entire course.
HIS 255 had a written final. My answer to the written final was from a revisionist perspective, which the department loathed with a passion. the compromise was I'd be given a C, with the proviso I never take another course in that department, or shared a course number with a different department. One of the department instructors later told me that that the department consensus was that my answer should have gotten an A, but because of my approach, it did not deserve that grade.
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Well writers use them, but when you see them excessively used in comment sections and it's an elaborate expose on the human condition with prose likening that to a skilled post doctorate student, i'm generally pretty confident that its AI. Especially since em dashes written outside of a word processor require a special ascii code as it's not on the keyboard and its extra work on a mobile device. It's a sense you get when you get used to seeing AI a lot. I never presume that something is AI just because it has em dashes in it. Precisely why i didnt call out the article or anything. It's a combination of indicators and often situationally based.
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Yep, keep crying about how your job needs to change. I'll wait. No, time won't turn back so you can just do what you always did.
Guess it's time to create a new, good path for your field since the old assumptions don't hold. Or switch fields.
It doesn't seem impossible to monitor and watch while people at home work on "homework". Will it be perfect and free? No. But if you're trying to see when someone creates something, the obvious answer is to watch them create it. Right?
Are we finally to the point where colleges test us to figure out our existing knowledge, then they let us skip what we already know? I think that'd lead to no more "classes" where you have a cohort of students and a particular teacher managing them. Instead you'd have students working on their own to learn, and what they produce would need to be reviewed by topic knowledgeable people. With some tutors to help explain topics beyond what text or videos manage. It never made sense to me why we wanted every teacher to recreate the wheel (poorly often) under this misguided idea that kids only learn from that.
Guess it's time to create a new, good path for your field since the old assumptions don't hold. Or switch fields.
It doesn't seem impossible to monitor and watch while people at home work on "homework". Will it be perfect and free? No. But if you're trying to see when someone creates something, the obvious answer is to watch them create it. Right?
Are we finally to the point where colleges test us to figure out our existing knowledge, then they let us skip what we already know? I think that'd lead to no more "classes" where you have a cohort of students and a particular teacher managing them. Instead you'd have students working on their own to learn, and what they produce would need to be reviewed by topic knowledgeable people. With some tutors to help explain topics beyond what text or videos manage. It never made sense to me why we wanted every teacher to recreate the wheel (poorly often) under this misguided idea that kids only learn from that.
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Depends on the device and the keyboard layout. Maybe Windows makes it hard, but on macOS with the US International layout it's just holding down option while you press the hyphen key. In iOS you just long-press on the hyphen. It's also not that unusual for two hyphens to be auto-corrected to an em dash.
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I'm currently setting up an oral exam for a post-graduate statistics subject, which includes a bunch of literature research. The findings generally indicate that this claim is not entirely true:
The main reason for use of written exams is resources. It takes a lot more work to run oral exams and educators do not have the resources to do it in the Anglosphere, or the institutional knowledge to support development. There are other countries where oral exams are the norm such as the Czech Republic.
Written exams standardise the delivery of questions only, they do not standardise student experience because the actual process of interpreting questions from the written page is very dependent on the student. For example, if there is terminology that has a subtly different meaning to the writer and the reader, or a language barrier. This is the same reason that writing survey questions is so damn hard, but we rarely think about exams as survey instruments. Oral exams are considered better at getting access to what students understand rather than what they can regurgitate because the option to ask follow-up questions, and for students to seek clarification of questions themselves, gives more information to the examiner.
The main reason for use of written exams is resources. It takes a lot more work to run oral exams and educators do not have the resources to do it in the Anglosphere, or the institutional knowledge to support development. There are other countries where oral exams are the norm such as the Czech Republic.
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How about "Are chickens dinosaurs?"
That's something that most kids today know (ask any ten-year old). However, the DuckDuckGo AI says "Chickens are not dinosaurs, but they are descendants of dinosaurs and share a close evolutionary relationship with them, particularly with the T. rex." where Google says "Yes, chickens are technically considered living dinosaurs. According to evolutionary biology and modern cladistics, all birds are avian dinosaurs, specifically descending from small, feathered theropods—the same group as Tyrannosaurus rex. Chickens are considered closely related to T. rex due to shared skeletal anatomy and genetic data."
So maybe rather than just ask one LLM, have them ask several?
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But that's not an in depth question, nor one they're going to have the in-depth knowledge about to actually know which answer is correct. Because it's a very complex thing and... there's arguments for both yes and no.
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