To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain

LLM use is the most demoralizing problem I’ve faced as a college instructor.

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[GraphicH]

“The friction matters, Sam!”

Without (a little) friction, sex wouldn't be enjoyable.

Seriously, friction does matter. Assuming the goal of education is to "get the grade" is like assuming that when I run 3 miles for exercise, it's because I needed to be where ever the end of that 3 miles was.

The reduction in friction to gambling that sports betting laws, and then prediction markets, have made, are similarly a case where "the friction mattered". Even people like Nate Silver is like "well, maybe there should be SOME friction".

It really is not always about making things easier, the work, the journey, is more often what we need to become more fulfilled and human not the destination or goal.

 

[JohnDeL]

As an educator, LLMs make we want to launch myself into the Sun

I get and sympathize with the sentiment, but you probably meant "make me want to launch myself into the Sun".

The problem with LLMs is that they take the old "they wouldn't print it if it weren't true" argument and amplify it by a million. Not only are they untrustworthy plagiarism machines, they also tend to lead people to abandon critical thinking and assume that the LLM output is correct. (It often isn't, as you well know.)

About the only way to kill this is to have the students ask the LLM an in-depth question about something that they know very well, just so they can see how wrong the LLM often is. And I fear that even that isn't enough.

ETA: In many subjects, there are misconceptions that can act as a block to learning. I am willing to bet that LLMs would get the answers to those misconceptions wrong in many cases, which suggests basing homework assignments and tests on misconceptions (which is where they really should be, honestly).

 

[rachel612]

You have my sympathies.

The embrace of LLMs is just so insanely stupid. I long for the day when the current bubble business model collapses. I’m sure there will be LLMs after that, but they’ll need to be priced beyond casual users.

Fingers crossed. I may be Pollyanna.

 

[markgo]

People using AI aren’t doing work. They’re commissioning it, just like a rich patron commissions art. Of course they learn nothing. They did nothing.

 

[EvolvedMonkey]

I dont really recall getting that many assignments in university: the majority was learning principles and then applying them in an examination. If I had a time travelling AI helper back then I’d only be able to influence about 30% of my total score. Not insignificant but it would be clearly suspect if I aced assignments but failed exams consistently. And I seem to recall that you had to get a passing grade on exams as well as overall to get that module.

one possible defense against excessive AI dependency would be to require each assignment to have a reference back to a previous assignment, I.e. “consider how this differs from the area reviewed week 3”. That is much harder to feed into a machine to write as it doesn’t know what week 3 was, unless you pay for a lot of tokens.

 

[bone_collector]

We are sleepwalking into a world where people are so reliant on LLMs that society cannot function without them. The CEOs of these company know this - in fact, they are counting on it to allow them to raise the rates of LLM product subscriptions for professionals exponentially. Access for students will continue to be low-cost or subsidized by the schools, of course.

 

[JohnDeL]

I dont really recall getting that many assignments in university: the majority was learning principles and then applying them in an examination. If I had a time travelling AI helper back then I’d only be able to influence about 30% of my total score. Not insignificant but it would be clearly suspect if I aced assignments but failed exams consistently. And I seem to recall that you had to get a passing grade on exams as well as overall to get that module.

one possible defense against excessive AI dependency would be to require each assignment to have a reference back to a previous assignment, I.e. “consider how this differs from the area reviewed week 3”. That is much harder to feed into a machine to write as it doesn’t know what week 3 was, unless you pay for a lot of tokens.

And require lots and lots of documentation (e.g., references in Harvard format) and step-by-step derivation of solutions (something that most LLMs don't do).

 

[Tactical Finesse]

I trained to be a teacher...and am glad I went elsewhere. Between the US republican war on education, and now capitalism deciding learning is optional. Ugh.

 

[Sulla]

Obviously, there are other effects, like low-quality students reflecting poorly on your educational institution once they get out into the world, but at a certain point, don't you bascially just have to throw your hands up in the air and say, "You're only fucking yourselves by not learning [except how to use AI]?"

 

[MrMcLargeHuge]

My brother is a high school history teacher. He's going 100% paper next year. If his district hadn't allowed it, he was going to quit. Says kids will spend more time trying to find an LLM that isn't blocked than it would take to just actually do the work.

 

[NedKrist]

Second the experiences of this author.

Disheartening when assignments that used to return creative, good products (and lead to good questions) now return substantially the same midrange answers and phrasing.

More generally, the rewarding parts of the job--helping students--drop off as they find they can get their questions answered by AI tools. The bottom third of the class are then "punished" more severely by the tests they can't fake. Not why I wanted to do this.

I think it is (or will be) possible to set AI tools up as passable tutors in some instances, but I don't see how a tool that encourages one to think will win in the marketplace of students who (rightly or without) feel they already don't have the time for traditional learning.

 

[Aaldert]

I feel for your loss.
Does anyone remember the part from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance where Phaedrus stops grading his students: Some students stop turning in assignments and or stop following his classes, most students get an existential crisis because they no longer have a frame of reference for how the are doing, but the most motivated students are still doing fine. I'm curious to know the results of this experiment in the LLM-age.

 

[Nalyd]

I dont really recall getting that many assignments in university: the majority was learning principles and then applying them in an examination. If I had a time travelling AI helper back then I’d only be able to influence about 30% of my total score. Not insignificant but it would be clearly suspect if I aced assignments but failed exams consistently. And I seem to recall that you had to get a passing grade on exams as well as overall to get that module.

one possible defense against excessive AI dependency would be to require each assignment to have a reference back to a previous assignment, I.e. “consider how this differs from the area reviewed week 3”. That is much harder to feed into a machine to write as it doesn’t know what week 3 was, unless you pay for a lot of tokens.

There are newer platforms which allow a student to gIve them their institutional login to access their online course in its entirety, which can and will take the entire course for the student with no further intervention, and will use previous assignments as context. (the massive IT security problem this represents notwithstanding).

 

[Nalyd]

I think we should just look back to how we did this 25 years ago. We all used Sparknotes, and most problems asked by professors were answered in the spark notes. You could literally copy/paste whole sections and just move sentences around and change some words and get a good grade. Fraternities and academic societies have maintained “test banks” for years.

Which is all to say, this is probably not as big a problem as it seems.

Who's "we all"? Don't lump us into your cheaters circle.

 

[ArsLongaVitaBrevis_4321]

I’ve long been skeptical of long-distance learning.

Primarily I feel that way as: an occasional student, because my motivation flags when I have to spend more time in front of screens. (Though I do recognize that, for some students, long-distance learning is the only possibility.)

But also as a past, and potential future instructor, I’m skeptical because of the cheating plague that has existed long before the rise of AI. LLMs, and other forms of AI are just ‘weaponizing’ that phenomenon, alas…

At this point the only way that I’d agree to teach would be: in-person only; and a student’s grade would rely solely (or at least largely) on their proctored work (e.g., in-class quizzes, exams, etc. ). However I’m not sure if typical schools and administrators would allow that approach…?

 

[instrumentlevel]

one possible defense against excessive AI dependency would be to require each assignment to have a reference back to a previous assignment, I.e. “consider how this differs from the area reviewed week 3”. That is much harder to feed into a machine to write as it doesn’t know what week 3 was, unless you pay for a lot of tokens.

Except that people are working on AIs that will do that. 404 did a story on Feb 25 (it won’t take the url) about the Einstein system from Companion.ai that students deploy across all their online asynchronous courses, that will access all the readings, do all the assignments, across multiple semesters, even do “human” things like vary submission dates of assignments and read your previous writing to sound more like you. That system could easily refer back to week 3, since it did the work on week 3!

Interestingly, the website for the system has been changed to make none of those claims. It’s just a blank page with a signup for the waitlist.

I’ve been a college professor for 22 years, and am heading back to the classroom in the fall after a 7 year stint as an administrator. I thought I’d be excited, but now it’s just dread. And my job teaching in-person is nowhere near as hard as my colleagues like the author, who do asynchronous online.

Edit: ninjaed by @Nalyd

 

[johnz]

Tough problem. I usually have some inkling of a solution to problems in subjects I know little about, even if they're likely wrong, but I have no idea how to handle ai use in education. AI is definitely here, and in all likelihood is gonna stay and improve. Maybe treating ai as you would drugs like heroin, and giving instruction from an early age would encourage kids to avoid ai in a learning environment. Honestly, I think that probably wouldn't work, cause everyone's lazy, especially kids, but it's the only answer I can come up with.

 

[Ninetailed]

It's a real problem, but I feel like it's touching on another one at the same time. There's a paragraph towards the end where the author notes that no student using a LLM actually thinks they're learning, and that they're using it as workload management.

This was true in my time as well, but it's only become worse since: students are doing triage. The old cliche goes, "Will this be on the test?" And it's an old cliche.

Yes, LLMs in education are a blight, but their use by such a large proportion of students is a symptom of the larger problem. Students, like everyone else, have to decide how to spend their time and effort to get the most out of them. Time management and prioritisation like that is a skill, and one they tend to be taught late or not at all. This while contending with authorities who usually don't have their best interests at heart, and will quite happily lie about what's important for the student to suit their own agenda, or more likely just not consider the student's needs at all.

This is not meant as a criticism of the teachers on the ground, like the author. They're the ones most likely to actually care, if that system hasn't worn them down too.

The one lesson every single student learns early is that the school as an institution is not there to help them. It's an obstacle course they have to navigate. They all want to have a good life for themselves, every single one of them, but they have to try and judge what will actually help them to achieve that, and what's only there to make them a more valuable commodity for someone else at their own expense. And since most of them are young, either very young adults or literal children, they don't have the experience to avoid making big mistakes when navigating that minefield.

They're using LLMs as a tool to try and manage the parts they've identified as unimportant or detrimental to them. Like the author, I think that, in itself, is one of those big mistakes. But I also think it's critically important to be aware of why they're making it.

 

[GalacticNorth]

It’s just workload management to them.

This is the crux of it.

LLMs are only exacerbating the existing problems of grading. Namely that learning is not the valuable thing, rather getting the required grade or credential for a career is essential. This is only made worse when the education itself is expensive.

In one sense students cheating is the rational response to this environment. I don’t think any solution at the level of individual classes is possible, we need deep systemic reforms.

If education was free, if living was cheap (whether by UBI, socialist policies, whatever), then courses would not have to be rushed and grades would carry less importance so students wouldn’t be incentivized to engage in “workload management”

 

[Tactical Finesse]

I feel for your loss.
Does anyone remember the part from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance where Phaedrus stops grading his students: Some students stop turning in assignments and or stop following his classes, most students get an existential crisis because they no longer have a frame of reference for how the are doing, but the most motivated students are still doing fine. I'm curious to know the results of this experiment in the LLM-age.

There's already studies under way on this

https://news.gallup.com/poll/704090/routine-college-students-despite-campus-limits.aspx

If you read the report...most students admit to LLM plaigarism. Just flat out. They don't call it that it is "use LLMs in coursework" or other convenient whitewashing euphemisms. Those not using it regularly--view it as cheating, which it is. Of course it isn't just cheating or even plargarism, it is wholesale subverting the entire reason to go to school. And take out life-long financial-hardship levels of debt to fund for the not-learning LLM party.

Which...particularly with the customer-pays-for-college US model (whereby employers have to pay their employees to repay loans, thereby driving costs up)....we really need a reckoning about the reason for college. is it to:

1. Make better humans in a better society, or
2. Finish schooling for a job

Which...if it #1, why are we not paying for it via taxation and not perverse-incentivizing the offshoring of American labor. If it is #2, why are we forcing kids to gamble on the randomness of the labor market when even professional economists cannot predict trends 4 years out.

 

[xoa]

Thank you for the powerful article on your on the ground experience. It echoes sentiments I've heard a lot elsewhere but each pebble on the pile matters. I've avoided AI in part because I'm genuinely concerned about what it will do to my own mind, as well as the dependency issue. Or perhaps it'd be more accurate to say that these two things are really intertwined? Putting aside my personal feelings, if an AI was purely local on my own personal hardware with my own personal data store then I can see plausible ways in which it could evolve into a sort of "exocortex", a genuine additional layer to my own thinking and memory that was personal to me. Of course, that being ok assumes a lot about implementation, but on a fundamentals level at least the resulting meat/silicon amalgam would still all be my thing for better and/or for worse. And the incentives would certainly be very clear, again setting aside my personal capability to act upon them. But this:

Who knows what will happen if the AI bubble pops and the frictionless and ubiquitous access to LLMs withers into something much more limited.

if anything doesn't go remotely far enough. For example, before any AI bubble "pops" by economic means, it seems near certain we'd see enormous enshittification first as companies that have invested hundreds of billions and all their investors try desperately to get an ROI. It's not hard to envision ways the AIs they control could be directed to the task of profit extraction in extremely insidious ways against much of the population.

The recent increasing falling apart of the post-WW and CW period of relative geopolitical stability also points to a more violent potential "AI bubble pops" scenario. If you go and look at the number of AWS data centers worldwide for example, there are not actually that many of them. Like, sure on the one hand hundreds of sites seems like a lot, that's indeed a great number vs any natural disaster or local instability. But on the scale of modern missile and drone attacks, which are only increasing in capability and falling in price, it doesn't look like much. In any serious conflict, or even serious terrorism or the like, going after data centers seems like an increasingly obvious choice. Artifacts of the time period of their construction, I don't think they were built in general with "hit by lots of high explosive/incendiary warheads" in mind. What would it do to an advanced country if the cloud and central AI all went poof? Not something that can be repaired in a day either, and if tape warehouses and so on were hit too how much data would be permanently lost? How many people just have everything live in the cloud? That's scary enough, but if "thinking" gets outsourced to the cloud for a lot of people now what?

Not to say we may not make it through the crux but various kinds of swan events from black to pretty darn white feel more and more plausible.

One minor niggle aside as well (emphasis added):

Many instructors are trying to adapt to this crisis by going back to the only evaluation tools that are pretty much LLM-proof—tests like oral exams or handwritten work created under supervision in the classroom.

I see this a lot, handwriting being put on this strange pedestal. I'd like to point out that there is absolutely zero better about handwriting vs typing, so long as the college supplies an appropriately locked down (with no network access) computer, as has long been utterly trivial to do. I say this as a deeply personal plea: I went back to school as an adult and took some very interesting and useful classes. I did well in all of them but one, where the final exam did require handwriting essays and questions. I literally, physically could not do it. I can touch type well, but I have not hand written much of anything in decades. My hand seized up, I could write no more or barely hold the pencil. I had to just stop mid paragraph and failed that one. Even before that the frustration of the medium being unable to keep up with my thoughts was near overwhelming. So please don't let this particular strange fetishization get any more traction. If some people want to hand write fine, but for the amount of money a course costs buying a 15 year old iMac or whatever, creating a guest account, cutting the wifi and putting a locked plate over its ports should be plenty sufficient in a classroom.

 

[jhodge]

I think part of the answer has to be teaching the students that doing the work is the point, not the final result. Hammer it in over and over that the only one being cheated when they use the AI (Wiki, calculator, etc.) is them. Then continue with the quizzes, essays, and teaching.

But - make the final exam in-person, on-paper, and worth the majority of the total grade. Those who have done the work will be fine, and those who have cheated their way through will crash & burn. Which will be instructive in and of itself. Those who want to learn should figure it out pretty quickly that there is no substitute for doing the work.

 

[DCStone]

"The reason this feels so different to teachers than the tech panics of the past is that there is no clear solution to how AI is undermining nearly every aspect of education."

Just go back to grading fully based on supervised written exams. You won't see the administrators of the Korean civil service exams wringing their hands and lamenting about how they will ever manage LLM facilitated cheating.

You obviously haven't been keeping up with exam cheating technology. We've long since passed the age of notes written on arms or legs. There are whole kits you can buy that let you connect miniature wireless cameras and speakers to your phone, so someone can see the question on your exam and dictate an answer to you (no doubt using an LLM to generate text these days). The wireless ear pieces in some of these kits are so small, you need a magnet to retrieve them from your ear canal. You can bet that those taking the Korean civil service exam (and those having to invigilate it) are very much aware of these kits.

Back to the article: out-sourcing learning tasks to LLMs bypasses pretty much every single aspect of how human beings learn. It is indeed deeply disturbing.

The article mentions the video creation AI Sora up above. There's also one for music called Suno: one disturbing thing about that company is that the list "impatience" as one of the foundational "virtues" that make up their company/product mission statement.

And that's just the tip of the fat berg. Musician and educator Adam Neely did a deep dive video on that. Turns out, not only are people using this tool since it avoids effort, but their playlists are basically just the results of their own prompts. They aren't listening to anything else, which is antithetical to development as a musician.

 

[jhodge]

I see this a lot, handwriting being put on this strange pedestal. I'd like to point out that there is absolutely zero better about handwriting vs typing,

There's evidence that this is not correct. The act of writing seems to enhance learning in and of itself.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8641140/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/

 

[Rector]

It's a real problem, but I feel like it's touching on another one at the same time. There's a paragraph towards the end where the author notes that no student using a LLM actually thinks they're learning, and that they're using it as workload management.

This was true in my time as well, but it's only become worse since: students are doing triage. The old cliche goes, "Will this be on the test?" And it's an old cliche.

Yes, LLMs in education are a blight, but their use by such a large proportion of students is a symptom of the larger problem. Students, like everyone else, have to decide how to spend their time and effort to get the most out of them. Time management and prioritisation like that is a skill, and one they tend to be taught late or not at all. This while contending with authorities who usually don't have their best interests at heart, and will quite happily lie about what's important for the student to suit their own agenda, or more likely just not consider the student's needs at all.

This is not meant as a criticism of the teachers on the ground, like the author. They're the ones most likely to actually care, if that system hasn't worn them down too.

The one lesson every single student learns early is that the school as an institution is not there to help them. It's an obstacle course they have to navigate. They all want to have a good life for themselves, every single one of them, but they have to try and judge what will actually help them to achieve that, and what's only there to make them a more valuable commodity for someone else at their own expense. And since most of them are young, either very young adults or literal children, they don't have the experience to avoid making big mistakes when navigating that minefield.

They're using LLMs as a tool to try and manage the parts they've identified as unimportant or detrimental to them. Like the author, I think that, in itself, is one of those big mistakes. But I also think it's critically important to be aware of why they're making it.

You write as if students have to manage a busy schedule of many fundamentally worthy activities, out of which they have to choose those to which they will be able to commit their full attention. In reality however, students are prone to skimping (or cheating) on "boring" coursework in order to have more time for TikTok or goofing off with friends.

 

[Marlor_AU]

I think we should just look back to how we did this 25 years ago. We all used Sparknotes, and most problems asked by professors were answered in the spark notes. You could literally copy/paste whole sections and just move sentences around and change some words and get a good grade.

My undergraduate days were 25 years ago, and I’ve never even heard of Sparknotes.

When working through an assignment, I just did the work. After all, the whole point of doing a degree is to learn how to do things. The output is just a byproduct, and grades are recognition of the competence developed by the student through hard work.

If I’m paying for a degree, and putting four years of my life into it, there’s no way I’m going to half-ass it by cheating.

The real problem with LLMs is they create the possibility that honest work isn’t enough.

In the days of students getting by with shoddy, clandestine notes handed around in study groups, those notes may just about get you a passing grade. Doing the work thoroughly and methodically made your efforts stand out by comparison, and the results were rewarded.

However, if everyone else is producing heavily tool-assisted work (even if they barely understand the output), which is slick, competent and looks professional, then there’s a possibility that honest, thorough output worked through from first-principles will no longer stand out, and may even seem lacklustre by comparison.

If I was an undergrad today, I’d be tempted to get some LLM assistance, just to make sure I’m not leaving anything on the table when it comes to assignments. But what starts as quality checking can quickly become a crutch and an addiction, relied upon as an alternative to genuine understanding.

 

[ubercurmudgeon]

"Yes, education got destroyed, along with a lot of other things that makes societies work. But for a beautiful moment in time we made a few tech billionaires the richest people in history."

 

[AlexAnders]

When I started my first high school degree, there were almost no tests. You could go visit lectures without presence requirements and then only pass one test mid-diploma and for the final diploma. The idea was, you want to be a researcher so it is your responsibility to get there and we give you the opportunity of being tested. Nowadays, high school is like elementary school because the industry needs streamlined applicants with certified skills and they need the state to pay for their education because they don't want to. In that climate, of course grades become more important than knowledge. As public funding for education goes down, leading to larger classrooms, and people turn from independent learners to easy-to-integrate work force AI use is a symptom of decades of misguided politics.

This is not going away. Local AIs which run on a laptop are already so good, they can make enough assignments meaningless. Even if OpenAI, Anthropic and all the others close tomorrow, the genie is out of the bottle.

We need to take away the motivation for cheating. If the student uses an AI for work management, why do they need that management in the first place? Do they need more free time? Do they need a different curriculum? Do they need to connect the dots better between their work and why they are there? Do they need a state that strongly regulates the labor market for the benefit of all?

AIs can be awesome tutors and hallucinations will die out. AIs are available 24/7 and they answer questions students are too afraid to ask. If the students missed the basics, AI has the patience to explain years of prerequisites exactly how the students needs it and when they need it. Some can give links to original sources and find the most rare documentation of the most fringe simulation tool.

I do not know what is the best answer to this but here is one I give as teacher of programming exercises: I ask my students to take the role of a software team group lead. Yes, instead of copy&paste code from a reddit forum they will commission an AI to write 90% for them but that means they need to explicitly define what they want. They need to write it down for the AI in a way in which they would never have written it down before. So they actually need to think about what they want in advance. They need to check the result and they need to answer me (test like) when I go with them over their solution about what every single piece in their code does. I try to prepare them for a world that will ask AI use of them but to learn something they can only use it to automate the mundane but need to understand everything in-depth. I have found that leads them to be so motivated that they add functionality, because now they have the time, and they still can answer every question about every small detail. Maybe that approach will hit a road-block at some point and maybe it is not transferable to other sciences and levels but maybe something can be helpful for you.

 

[Mawich]

There's a horrible thing here where education strategy has been based around using methods of assessment that students find extremely difficult to cheat, because you have to trick a significant proportion of students into actually learning something instead of just getting a grade on a certificate.

I cannot help but think that in the age of LLMs being able to defeat a lot of those methods, imperfect as they are, we have to go back as a society to the root of that problem, which is that the students want the grade rather than to learn the stuff. yes some students will always want to actually learn things - probably mostly in their specific preferred subjects - but while there's a significant number of students who don't understand the value and necessity of the learning, this kind of thing will always be a problem.

How we'd actually achieve such a change though... no idea. Not a clue. Especially not in the age of LLMs where their vendors are trying to get companies to accept them as a substitute for employee ability, and company management are largely happy to do that. At least for now.

 

[Ninetailed]

You write as if students have to manage a busy schedule of many fundamentally worthy activities, out of which they have to choose those to which they will be able to commit their full attention. In reality however, students are prone to skimping (or cheating) on "boring" coursework in order to have more time for TikTok or goofing off with friends.

I write as if they consider that to be a valuable use of their time. Sure, I think they're wrong, and I don't think it's a judgement most of them are making consciously, but I do think they're making it.

Humans are a social species. Most folks come with a set of basic instincts that tells them to value social connection, and a basic upbringing that tells them to value at least their own group. "Goofing off with friends" is building social connections in the community. Scrolling Tiktok isn't, but it feels like it is when you're doing it.

So, respectfully to your point, yes, I do think they're choosing between a busy schedule of activities that, to them personally, do seem fundamentally worthy.

 

[beheadedstraw]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, AI is just one big ass Dunning-Kruger generator.

 

[Rector]

"The reason this feels so different to teachers than the tech panics of the past is that there is no clear solution to how AI is undermining nearly every aspect of education."

Just go back to grading fully based on supervised written exams. You won't see the administrators of the Korean civil service exams wringing their hands and lamenting about how they will ever manage LLM facilitated cheating.

Two problems with this approach:

1. Apparently the goal of university administrators is to collect tuition money. Secure examinations result in more failures and drop-outs, thus reducing the tuition income. University administrators love online asynchronous classes, because they bring in a lot of tuition dollars. Students love them because they can cheat easily.

2. Secure testing can be (and has been) attacked as "inequitable". It is "unfair" to students with anxiety disorders, with ADHD, from underprivileged backgrounds, cultural minorities, etc. etc.

 

[Bzored]

Going to have a world full of morons who know even less than they do now they also probably wont even be able to function without an AI buddy to help them.

 

[Starlionblue]

Very interesting article, and I will echo those who say that there are solutions that involve forcing the students to think.

Going on a slight tangent; In civil aviation, there is an ongoing shift towards EBT, Evidence Based Training. This isn't really in response to LLMs, but many of the same principles apply.

Until recently, a proficiency check in the simulator was a canned exercise where you knew what was going to happen. With EBT, the mandatory check items are handled more rapidly, and the majority of the simulator time is spent on exposure to varied scenarios. These scenarios still lead to the same things being tested, but the way you get there requires much more decision-making and consideration.

Many of "the youngsters" know the books by heart, and could probably perform a simulator check profile from memory. Some of them are struggling with the transition. EBT requires actual decision-making, much in the same way that you would need to do when faced with a situation in the jet.

 

[Red Zero]

The problem of Fake It till you Make It, is that if you never have ever learned how to actually make it, your always just going to be a fake, and people will eventually figure that out.

I feel Hollywood Sci-Fi has set a, while story expedient, comically tropey bad example where the supposively very intelligent character simply asks the computer for the answer to a difficult question. Star Trek/Galaxy Quest