To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain
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This is how I'm using LLMs for learning. I've always found on-line classes to be terrible, they're always just a recorded video with maybe a TA to answer questions on a message board. It always feels like it's assumed you're left to your own devices to figure out lessons.
But having an LLM available that I can ask pointed questions and walk me through concepts is eye-opening. I'm decades removed from school but I'm enjoying learning new things again because it feels like I have a teacher always available to answer questions. That's something I never felt like I got with my college tuition 30 years ago.
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There are plenty of non-extreme accounts of the rampant cheating; I have high school-age children who fit the mold of today's average teenager and, while I don't dispute your own experiences, they attend a great high school in a great area and it jives.
YMMV.
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I have to wonder about that, what if you had a friend who took the class and kept his copy of the test? No rule against that (assuming the teacher returns it). Surely just reviewing the prior year's copy of the test isn't in and of itself cheating? If you went to an upperclassman and asked for help and they pulled out their old copy of the test to review that would be fine.
So if reviewing the test is fine, but you knew the questions would be the literal same, what are you going to do? Study it but don't commit any details to memory?
The fact that the questions were unchanged and the professor surely knew what was happening seems like borderline malfeasance on their part.
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Hell, I had to do that as a TA. Altering tests so that wrote memorization can't get a passing grade is like...half of the work.
(Computer Engineering and Systems Architecture track courses)
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Depends on the student, on the teacher, and on what the goals of the student are. I
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I mean even those of us who did the work probably did it to launch our careers not because we have that deep a love of the subject. And I don't think it's unique to higher education, I don't think a plumber would go around fixing pipes for the love of plumbing if they weren't paid for it. If you got your Star Trek job and you'd still be there trying to cure cancer in a post-scarcity world good for you but that's probably 0.01% of employed people.
Unfortunately it seems like true skill is unfashionable and it's no longer about stretching the truth it's wholesale replacing it with AI vibe coding and if it breaks you use more AI to fix it. I'm glad that I'm far enough into a niche there's very little chance of success with that strategy but I think companies will spend a lot more on churn because the only way to know if they'll actually work out is to employ them and see if they can do the job or not.
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I've been a physics professor for about 25 years. In that time, I have seen homework scores gradually go up, while students coming to my office for help and average exam scores have gone down. The unfortunate consequence is that exams have become a larger percentage of the course grade. I try to pound it into them that physics is like weight training - watching someone lift weights on Instagram is not going to make you stronger. Those that don't listen fail the exam. As a remedy sometimes I make them explain to me how they did one of the homework problems they got 100% correct, and grade the explanation. That has helped a lot - more students come to my office before the homework is due now just in case. Plus, it makes them realize "Hey, I understand things better after talking with the prof! That actually helps! I might go more."
I'm fortunate enough to teach mostly in-person classes small enough for this to be practical in. And I teach at least some students who actually want to learn the material. I teach a lot of pre-meds who a) know its going to be on the secure MCAT, and b) know it will be of relevance when they actually get to med school and learn about torque in the limbs and conduction in the nervous system. God help us when someone gets an MD by having AI do all the work!. I'm also fortunate that LLM's still aren't that great (yet) at solving carefully worded physics problems. Even when they try to use AI for homework it's pretty likely to hallucinate an answer. There's no question its a problem, though. My exam scores on average are still not what they were 20 years ago. Even without LLM's some of them will just pay Chegg. And I have caught one student paying a person in Asia to do the online homework - they weren't smart enough to submit the answers themselves, so they all came from an Asian IP address. Students not doing the homework is not a new problem. AI has just made it much worse. Getting the students to understand that learning is the point of homework is the only partial solution.
I'm fortunate enough to teach mostly in-person classes small enough for this to be practical in. And I teach at least some students who actually want to learn the material. I teach a lot of pre-meds who a) know its going to be on the secure MCAT, and b) know it will be of relevance when they actually get to med school and learn about torque in the limbs and conduction in the nervous system. God help us when someone gets an MD by having AI do all the work!. I'm also fortunate that LLM's still aren't that great (yet) at solving carefully worded physics problems. Even when they try to use AI for homework it's pretty likely to hallucinate an answer. There's no question its a problem, though. My exam scores on average are still not what they were 20 years ago. Even without LLM's some of them will just pay Chegg. And I have caught one student paying a person in Asia to do the online homework - they weren't smart enough to submit the answers themselves, so they all came from an Asian IP address. Students not doing the homework is not a new problem. AI has just made it much worse. Getting the students to understand that learning is the point of homework is the only partial solution.
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I was thinking less of cheating and more some of the other extreme social issues you see brought up there.
In middle and high school I was as lazy as I could be without incurring the ire of my parents, and then just a little lazier than that, so I'm not surprised about the cheating. I never cheated because I didn't need to to get good enough grades, but if that hadn't been the case I'm sure I would have been tempted. But cheating back then was hard work, so probably the lazier solution would be to recalibrate my parents' expectations on grades.
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That's a lazy excuse. No company cares about your GPA if you can do the work, get along with others, and add value--or certainly no company I would choose as an employer, a vendor, or a customer.
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If we assume, as you imply, that the world is full of shitty human beings who lie, cheat, and steal every chance they get. Then it's bigger problem, isn't it?
Like in the olden days, I assume sparknotes and "test banks" weren't a silver bullet every time. Right?
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It's not just in education, it's everywhere. Even on hobby forum websites: people post text obviously from one wrong LLM or another.
I don't know why anyone would bother, the posts are so obvious and so broken, they get jumped on, dissected, refuted, mostly destroyed pretty quickly. Lately there's always 3 or 4 folks including me saying "stop posting the A1 slop!". The OP is often looking for folks' real experience doing X thing maybe Y way, and posting the A1 slop means it's not anyone's authentic personal experience. "This is what happened when I tried X using Y, so instead I use Z now".
As for education... It doesn't matter. There's no jobs for graduates, if they get a job it's not for any career development, the social contract about hiring is broken both ways so the position won't last, it will never pay enough to actually pay off student loans, housing, transportation (need a car), and building savings.
I don't know why anyone would bother, the posts are so obvious and so broken, they get jumped on, dissected, refuted, mostly destroyed pretty quickly. Lately there's always 3 or 4 folks including me saying "stop posting the A1 slop!". The OP is often looking for folks' real experience doing X thing maybe Y way, and posting the A1 slop means it's not anyone's authentic personal experience. "This is what happened when I tried X using Y, so instead I use Z now".
As for education... It doesn't matter. There's no jobs for graduates, if they get a job it's not for any career development, the social contract about hiring is broken both ways so the position won't last, it will never pay enough to actually pay off student loans, housing, transportation (need a car), and building savings.
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Yah, one big difference is that in the before times cheating and not learning the material would eventually catch up to you. Those pre-med students still have to take the MCAT. Students in science and engineering would be learning more things that build off of what they learn in lower level courses and would fall further and further behind. You can find answers to physics 1 and 2 problems all over the place, but get to higher and higher levels and eventually they're screwed. And so you could say, well, tough luck guys, should have studied more in the earlier classes.
Do you think that's not true now? I bet an LLM could fart out some mostly ok answers for lower-level courses, but if I grab my old copy of Wangsness' EM Fields it will very quickly not be producing believable answers.
Of course I'm no longer smart enough to answer those questions either so it'll be hard for me to test it!
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GPA often determines starting salary for new-grads new hires. Not just +/- a few percent, but like up to 30% or more.
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This problem is also contributing to the dismal employment opportunities for recent college grads. It's not just that AI is taking away entry-level jobs; it's that employers no longer trust that you have the skills your degree says you have.
I run a software company, and the only way I can know whether a young person has any real skill or knowledge is if they have at least one job where they accomplished something, because I no longer trust degrees. Every employer is thinking that way, which is why we're not hiring college grads with no experience. It's a huge risk to take on someone with no experience who I know cheated for at least part of their degree, especially since they're likely to cheat at work and deliver AI slop. As you point out, even the honest kids who don't cheat on classes in their major are cheating on everything else, and probably cheated with AI in HS to get into college in the first place.
Not only are these kids cheating themselves out of knowledge and wasting their parents' money, but they're undermining the entire value of higher education. It makes college pointless. Parents are better off taking that 529 fund and rolling part of it into an IRA, so their kids at least have some retirement money since they probably won't have much of a career.
My kids are in college and high school, and they tell me cheating is the norm now. Even in-person colleges are effectively online colleges now. They all use Canvas, the same system used for online classes. Most tests or quizzes can be taken from your dorm or in class, and even in class, they're taken on your personal laptop. My son was in a top-tier econ program, and he sent me a pano pic from the back of the class as a test was starting-every single student in the 200-person class had ChatGPT open. These were econ and business majors, all cheating. On days when there wasn't a test or a quiz, he was the only person in the lecture hall. He transferred out after one semester.
When I try to think of solutions to this and to the obvious dystopia where it's taking us, all I can come up with is that it should all be shut down, but I know that won't happen.
We need kids to full-on rebel. Rebel against AI, rebel against social media, rebel against phones. It's like they're in a corporate Matrix. They don't realize what's at stake. They're at an age where they have nothing to lose, and they have more power than they think. The tech giants fueling AI are funded by the hours of ad viewing that kids put in each day for free--they have the power to take that away, reclaim their youth, and reclaim their future.
I run a software company, and the only way I can know whether a young person has any real skill or knowledge is if they have at least one job where they accomplished something, because I no longer trust degrees. Every employer is thinking that way, which is why we're not hiring college grads with no experience. It's a huge risk to take on someone with no experience who I know cheated for at least part of their degree, especially since they're likely to cheat at work and deliver AI slop. As you point out, even the honest kids who don't cheat on classes in their major are cheating on everything else, and probably cheated with AI in HS to get into college in the first place.
Not only are these kids cheating themselves out of knowledge and wasting their parents' money, but they're undermining the entire value of higher education. It makes college pointless. Parents are better off taking that 529 fund and rolling part of it into an IRA, so their kids at least have some retirement money since they probably won't have much of a career.
My kids are in college and high school, and they tell me cheating is the norm now. Even in-person colleges are effectively online colleges now. They all use Canvas, the same system used for online classes. Most tests or quizzes can be taken from your dorm or in class, and even in class, they're taken on your personal laptop. My son was in a top-tier econ program, and he sent me a pano pic from the back of the class as a test was starting-every single student in the 200-person class had ChatGPT open. These were econ and business majors, all cheating. On days when there wasn't a test or a quiz, he was the only person in the lecture hall. He transferred out after one semester.
When I try to think of solutions to this and to the obvious dystopia where it's taking us, all I can come up with is that it should all be shut down, but I know that won't happen.
We need kids to full-on rebel. Rebel against AI, rebel against social media, rebel against phones. It's like they're in a corporate Matrix. They don't realize what's at stake. They're at an age where they have nothing to lose, and they have more power than they think. The tech giants fueling AI are funded by the hours of ad viewing that kids put in each day for free--they have the power to take that away, reclaim their youth, and reclaim their future.
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how do you do that if you can't distinguish between LLM cheaters and honest students? if you don't know how the honest students are doing, you don't know what they need. for all the teacher knows, the honest students could be those at the bottom range of test scores, so she'll just go faster and leave them in the dust.
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This the most spectacular example in history of how creating a Path Of Least Resistance, just because you CAN and it means PROFiT (supposedly), backfires catastrophically.
It's like blowing a giant hole in a pumped hydro dam: SO much more efficient at releasing the water. Unfortunately without turbines.
It's like blowing a giant hole in a pumped hydro dam: SO much more efficient at releasing the water. Unfortunately without turbines.
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the credentialization driven system of education has so destroyed the founding socratic dialog that it has optimized learning almost entirely out of the process.
for $20/mo I can have something that approaches socratic dialog on any domain of human thought, and the only thing the institution of education can say is 'but you might use it to cheat on essay assignments'
for $20/mo I can have something that approaches socratic dialog on any domain of human thought, and the only thing the institution of education can say is 'but you might use it to cheat on essay assignments'
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Voix des Airs
Ars Praefectus
The article even mentions this but...
Teaching/being a student is not a contest between the teacher and the student. (I mean, if that were the case - unless you happen to be like Carl Gauss or something - the student is going to lose every single time.)
As a student, and the author is talking about college classes, you are presumably voluntarily paying money to learn something. And that isn't possible without actually doing the thing.
When I was first teaching an undergrad class as a grad student, my advisor gave me this advice: "There are materials that will burn when you hold a flame to them and then go out and other materials that will keep burning after lit. Students are like that. They may think that they understand something while you are presenting it in class but that will go away as soon as they leave. Part of your job is to make sure that that understanding is actually persistent; to force students if necessary, to actually do homework and prepare for tests so that the understanding persists." And if I do that then the rest is on the student. I don't use LLM's for anything but unless it actually negatively affects your learning, it wouldn't make any difference to a student if I did. This is about the student's learning. [And there are studies that show that using LLMs actually make you stupider. Kinda the opposite of why you are paying to take a class, right?]
In what I do LLM's aren't really a problem because I only teach in-class and grading is based on in-class tests and I don't see that ever changing. I did at one time teach a lower division undergraduate class where one of the tests could be pretty time consuming so to try to remove some of that pressure I gave it as take home. But it was the first of five (I think) tests and a final and since it was a subject that built on itself, if you had to cheat on the first you weren't going to pass the rest anyway. The problem would take care of itself. And I discussed this at length with the class before the test. People still cheated and subsequently failed the class anyway. But that is not the case in a huge range of other subjects. I have no idea what to do about that and have great sympathy for the instructors who have to deal with it.
[I wonder if Google and Anthropic and OpenAI are looking to hire students who effectively used LLM's to cheat their way through school while not learning anything? Answering my own question, I, in fact, know that they are doing the complete opposite. I also know that executives and VCs and high raking engineers in Silicon Valley are keeping their own kids away from AI and social media and the like and spending big money to send them to technology-free private schools. It's almost like they know something that they want the rest of us to think is the opposite.]
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Just as side-point, it should also be noted there are definitely some academic faculty outsourcing their marking to LLMs (or at least TA/grad students/tutors they delegate marking assignments to). Doesn't make it right, just an inevitable consequence.
A friend of mine who works in academia recently had their faculty dismiss a PhD candidate who had been marking student assignments using a tailored LLM (I'm keeping the subject/locale vague for obvious reasons). The most shocking part he said is that the LLM marking was actually mostly adequate and generally reflective of the grade those student assignments genuinely were, but of course the ends couldn't justify the means. His words - it just feels like it eventually becomes a weird echo chamber of ai screaming into the void at each other!
A friend of mine who works in academia recently had their faculty dismiss a PhD candidate who had been marking student assignments using a tailored LLM (I'm keeping the subject/locale vague for obvious reasons). The most shocking part he said is that the LLM marking was actually mostly adequate and generally reflective of the grade those student assignments genuinely were, but of course the ends couldn't justify the means. His words - it just feels like it eventually becomes a weird echo chamber of ai screaming into the void at each other!
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Before electronic calculators, people used logarithmic slides. Of course, some people of the old school would claim that people adopting the calculators would not learn enough. Others would claim that using a calculator would speed things up such that the real problem could get more attention.
Difference to LLMs is, as pointed out in the article, that calculators and log slides essentially do the same thing and even possibly at the same precision. The latter just take more hands-on skills to operate, and yes, likely, induced a greater amount of fundamental understanding of how to perform difficult calculations to high accuracy.
LLMs can't even reliably give the same answer to the same question. It is not a more efficient way of doing things. It's a scam.
Difference to LLMs is, as pointed out in the article, that calculators and log slides essentially do the same thing and even possibly at the same precision. The latter just take more hands-on skills to operate, and yes, likely, induced a greater amount of fundamental understanding of how to perform difficult calculations to high accuracy.
LLMs can't even reliably give the same answer to the same question. It is not a more efficient way of doing things. It's a scam.
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Emphasis mine. The LLMs are often correct, for the trivially true subjects, undisputed facts, where extremely little information in the training data was wrong.
In other words, when a non-subject matter expert (such as all students) evaluates the output from an LLM, everything the student (in this case) can verify to be true, is true. And what isn't is never verified to be false.
With too little life experience (and/or cynicism), I don't think it's surprising that people trust the output. After all, the LLMs often appear to be very confident.
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I have to say this drove me nuts in undergrad, many of the professors had rules in their syllabus that they will treat having or studying a prior year's copy of a test as academic dishonesty, fail your test, etc. Yet the more warnings against doing it, the more likely the final exam was the same for the last 8 years, and that many of students would have an old copy.
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A depressing but poignant read, thank you. Too many people without experience sure have opinions on what teachers "should do" in general. And with AI still being relatively new and constantly evolving it's gotta be even worse. I don't know if there's going to be a satisfying solution to any of this; I would bet no. "Increased funding" is usually a good start, but history (and Republicans) have proven otherwise.
Amen. I remember drawing all the op-amp circuits on my TI-83 for Intro to EE. Pretty sure I learned them really well just from this level of effort to "cheat". Okay so that probably wasn't your exact point was it....
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t_negative1
Ars Centurion
all this talk about writing for homework made me realize how much computers evolved.
used to type out papers in gradeschool on a typewriter eventually.
that saved time.
then in high school had a typestar, thermal printer typewriter
(you could only do line edits, and not save your work).
then moved on to pc clones (at & t pc6300), and then used wordstar for word
processing.
well, i was an electrical engineering major, so couldn't really use it for homework
or projects, since i needed equations, math etc. only professional programs could
do it, and were super expensive.
eventually found a word processor that supported it, but it was super clumsy entering everything and took hours to typeset, and print to a dot matrix printer.
which then i then photocopied to look better. (didnt have a daisy wheel printer)
i think the program was chiwriter:
https://grokipedia.com/page/chiwriter
i learned a lot more doing it that way, than writing it out. but there were people who though i cheated, etc.
later i would submit everything on paper, written in pen, in near microscopic
size writing. and thats what i did until word processing finally ended all that.
all this was pre word, wordperfect, teX, and lateX. i was using wordstar at the
time for basic text processing.
i ended up being an average student. but i felt i learnt better that way.
used to type out papers in gradeschool on a typewriter eventually.
that saved time.
then in high school had a typestar, thermal printer typewriter
(you could only do line edits, and not save your work).
then moved on to pc clones (at & t pc6300), and then used wordstar for word
processing.
well, i was an electrical engineering major, so couldn't really use it for homework
or projects, since i needed equations, math etc. only professional programs could
do it, and were super expensive.
eventually found a word processor that supported it, but it was super clumsy entering everything and took hours to typeset, and print to a dot matrix printer.
which then i then photocopied to look better. (didnt have a daisy wheel printer)
i think the program was chiwriter:
https://grokipedia.com/page/chiwriter
i learned a lot more doing it that way, than writing it out. but there were people who though i cheated, etc.
later i would submit everything on paper, written in pen, in near microscopic
size writing. and thats what i did until word processing finally ended all that.
all this was pre word, wordperfect, teX, and lateX. i was using wordstar at the
time for basic text processing.
i ended up being an average student. but i felt i learnt better that way.
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This just seems so weird to me, because in the UK my college would sell you any past paper you wanted for essentially the cost of the photocopying. Past exams would give you a really good idea about the kind of question that could show up in the current exam but you'd never be able to just copy/paste answers - especially not from the previous year's exam which was pretty much the worst past paper to go off.
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The one study I've seen on this found that LLMs did pretty well on first-year science content but, by third year, were basically failing.
I suspect that is related to the facts that (1) a lot of first year is reviewing and building on what was supposed to be covered in high school and (2) given that a lot of 1st (and some 2nd) year science courses are catering to US pre-med programs, there's going to be tons of relevant content on-line for the LLMs to slurp up and regurgitate. For upper level science courses, not so much.
I do wonder how that is holding up as time goes by, though. There's probably a need for repeat studies to be done as the AI companies refine their tools and training. "Know your enemy" and all that...
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Though I avoid social media, your statement says SO much about why it is a plague
on society. Thank you.
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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"
I tried out Gemma 4 on my local 24Gb VRAM gpu, and there's little doubt that it will do The Job just fine. The cat is out of the bag, unfortunately.
I tried out Gemma 4 on my local 24Gb VRAM gpu, and there's little doubt that it will do The Job just fine. The cat is out of the bag, unfortunately.
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Um - TeX is from 1978, the exact same year as WordStar. I believe it had reached the PC by the time your AT&T PC6300 launched in the mid 80s.
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Well, obviously this is so. If you write a new test every year, there is no point in issuing warnings against studying off of the old one.
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I believe LLMs are great at these things and become better everyday. (I know that's a minority position here.)
However. It's just so, so, easy to use them to cheat instead. LLMs are practically begging to do all of the work for you.
"Oh hi, I see you're trying to type an essay on Shakespeare... Maybe I could clean it up for you just a little.. maybe change a word here, add a paragraph there, come up with a better thesis statement, rewrite the first 3 pages... "
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the medical profession understands how useless credentials alone are. that's why they have the worlds heaviest apprenticeship program.
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I teach social science theory and political and social philosophy. Most of what I teach is really critical thinking: analysis, synthesis and evaluation. AI can be useful for analyzing lots of complex data but that's not what undergrads in my courses are learning to do. They are learning the basics. I don't want students to use AI to "generate ideas" or "help organize their thinking", that is almost the entire purpose of the courses I teach. If that is what I am supposed to do now, I will basically be teaching keyboarding.
Essays were one of the key ways that people in social science and philosophy organized their ideas and argued for positions. The ability to do that was also one of the major ways that I evaluated students. I have totally given up take home writing assignments for 1st and 2nd year university students over the last couple years. Next year I will probably stop giving outside class writing assignments for anything except small seminars for 4th year advanced students where the number of papers is small and you end up being very familiar with the student and their style before you need to grade the paper.
So for me teaching university courses has shifted immensely in 3 years since LLMs started to be widely available (or perhaps more like inescapable) for students (I started teaching in 2000).
I feel like the whole paradigm of university teaching and academics (... academic writing and publishing as well) will need to be reassessed.
I used to feel that what I taught, especially at introductory level, was valuable to every student and every future profession, but I don't know if that will be so true in an AI dominated future where critical thinking has been surrendered to LLMs.
Luckily I am pretty old and AI hasn't ruined fishing yet.
Essays were one of the key ways that people in social science and philosophy organized their ideas and argued for positions. The ability to do that was also one of the major ways that I evaluated students. I have totally given up take home writing assignments for 1st and 2nd year university students over the last couple years. Next year I will probably stop giving outside class writing assignments for anything except small seminars for 4th year advanced students where the number of papers is small and you end up being very familiar with the student and their style before you need to grade the paper.
So for me teaching university courses has shifted immensely in 3 years since LLMs started to be widely available (or perhaps more like inescapable) for students (I started teaching in 2000).
I feel like the whole paradigm of university teaching and academics (... academic writing and publishing as well) will need to be reassessed.
I used to feel that what I taught, especially at introductory level, was valuable to every student and every future profession, but I don't know if that will be so true in an AI dominated future where critical thinking has been surrendered to LLMs.
Luckily I am pretty old and AI hasn't ruined fishing yet.
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For me this comes back the question that Seth Godin taught me to ask. "What's it for?" What is "my education" for? Is it to memorize facts? Is it to learn something? Is it to become a more rounded human? Is it to develop empathy for other people? Is it to learn what other humans have tries so I can avoid the same mistakes? I could go on. I have 13 and 15 year old daughters. They have very much learned the lesson at school that "AI is cheating". I can understand and value that perspective, but I'm also concerned that they're going to fall behind in some abstract way. I'm not sure what to tell them about college/education/LLMs. Let me explore a bit more...
I'm also do a lot of interviewing job candidates. I work in an area of tech where there is no real credential or certification or degree that can tell me if a candidate knows anything of value for the role where I'm interviewing. I will glance at degrees and certifications, but I won't hire based on them. In fact, if a resume is overloaded with certifications and degrees, I tend to be more skeptical of the candidate (they value certifications over actually doing). What I want to learn about a candidate during an interview is how they structure and then solve problems. Do they take the time to actually understand their objectives and why those are the right thing to solve? Do they have a framework for thinking through problems and devising tests that will tell them if a particular solution/direction/approach might be valuable? Do they have a way of demonstrating impact? If they can't tell stories that demonstrate that type of thinking, they're going to struggle with the roles I tend to be interviewing for.
If I'm interviewing a candidate virtually, and they use AI tools in a way that is seamless and supports the flow of conversation and provide real/correct responses, I guess I don't really care. I can remember about 5% of what I need to know and it seems unfair for me to hold a candidate to a higher standard. I take the approach that this is just another way that the candidate augments their capabilities. If they say "hold on a moment" and then clearly are interacting with a screen, then its on me to probe more deeply to figure out whats going on. If I can't get the clarity I need, then I'll reject that candidate.
So, back to "What's it (my education) for?" I would suggest that for me "my education" was ultimately about learning how to solve problems. I got a lot of this from formal education, but I get a lot more of it from "the real world". I think my formal education set me up well to continue doing this throughout my life but I don't think formal education is the only path to "learning how to learn".
I completely agree with the statement that "friction is the point". I use AI of various kinds in my day-to-day life, but in the end, I have to slow myself down and own the outcome. I might use Claude to help me write a softball practice plan. But, I then have to mentally rehearse the plan to identify the gaps and problems and then edit the plan myself. Or I might have to tell Claude, "nope, you got that wrong, let's start over". I can't just take the output and use it.
One more thought, I wish that teachers and professors didn't feel like they had to be the "gatekeepers" on this. Ultimately, it is on the student to either learn the material or not. And for me as the interviewer, its on me to determine if a candidate can be successful in a role. A degree or certification is one smallish data-point in that evaluation.
In the end it comes back to who am I holding accountable? The professor who gave and "A" to a student who really didn't know the material, or the student who "cheated" and didn't actually learn anything beyond how to cheat? I put that on the student every time.
I know my thinking on this will evolve over time, but I have empathy for everyone who is impacted by this AI driven change.
I'm also do a lot of interviewing job candidates. I work in an area of tech where there is no real credential or certification or degree that can tell me if a candidate knows anything of value for the role where I'm interviewing. I will glance at degrees and certifications, but I won't hire based on them. In fact, if a resume is overloaded with certifications and degrees, I tend to be more skeptical of the candidate (they value certifications over actually doing). What I want to learn about a candidate during an interview is how they structure and then solve problems. Do they take the time to actually understand their objectives and why those are the right thing to solve? Do they have a framework for thinking through problems and devising tests that will tell them if a particular solution/direction/approach might be valuable? Do they have a way of demonstrating impact? If they can't tell stories that demonstrate that type of thinking, they're going to struggle with the roles I tend to be interviewing for.
If I'm interviewing a candidate virtually, and they use AI tools in a way that is seamless and supports the flow of conversation and provide real/correct responses, I guess I don't really care. I can remember about 5% of what I need to know and it seems unfair for me to hold a candidate to a higher standard. I take the approach that this is just another way that the candidate augments their capabilities. If they say "hold on a moment" and then clearly are interacting with a screen, then its on me to probe more deeply to figure out whats going on. If I can't get the clarity I need, then I'll reject that candidate.
So, back to "What's it (my education) for?" I would suggest that for me "my education" was ultimately about learning how to solve problems. I got a lot of this from formal education, but I get a lot more of it from "the real world". I think my formal education set me up well to continue doing this throughout my life but I don't think formal education is the only path to "learning how to learn".
I completely agree with the statement that "friction is the point". I use AI of various kinds in my day-to-day life, but in the end, I have to slow myself down and own the outcome. I might use Claude to help me write a softball practice plan. But, I then have to mentally rehearse the plan to identify the gaps and problems and then edit the plan myself. Or I might have to tell Claude, "nope, you got that wrong, let's start over". I can't just take the output and use it.
One more thought, I wish that teachers and professors didn't feel like they had to be the "gatekeepers" on this. Ultimately, it is on the student to either learn the material or not. And for me as the interviewer, its on me to determine if a candidate can be successful in a role. A degree or certification is one smallish data-point in that evaluation.
In the end it comes back to who am I holding accountable? The professor who gave and "A" to a student who really didn't know the material, or the student who "cheated" and didn't actually learn anything beyond how to cheat? I put that on the student every time.
I know my thinking on this will evolve over time, but I have empathy for everyone who is impacted by this AI driven change.
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Well said and well thought out, I agree with pretty much everything.
On the flip side lets not give college professors a clean escape either. In my thoughts, they to bear some of the blame for the current college situation. They teach to a class, not to an individual, nor do they tailor their class to the audience at all, its regurgitation. Take a quick look class by class and see 'oh this semester I've got a lot of Info Tech kids, and education' majors, maybe i should adjust my plans..
I'm not saying you shouldnt learn something from it, nor am i saying that cheating is ok, I wholly appreciate and have used my wide base of knowledge i got from all the college classes i took, even Art. But really, if you have a Finance major who has to take 9 hours of "art, music, drama" and 9 hours of hard science "organic, physics and biology". That is 18hours of course work that they will likely really struggle with at best, and at worst they could do without.
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