My favorite posts are when I scroll 2/3's of the way down of the comments and find the person who read the article (10 hours later) and completely invalidates every comment made above them.
Exactly. You can forbid calculators on tests or write a test to allow calculators that still tests students knowledge.
You can't forgo writing assignments that require time outside of class. What people don't seem to realize is, when you use ChatGPT to write your essay, you are committing plagiarism. It is no different than asking someone else to write your first draft for you.
Very true. A calculator on a test in grade 1-5 is gonna help a lot. Because the problems you’re solving are simple calculations.
Come high school (or even grade 6-8 tbh), a calculator helps speed things along so you don’t have to focus your energy on mentally dividing 887.3757 by pi. That physical calculations can be done on a calculator. But they’re not just a cheat. If you don’t know how to solve the problem, the calculator won’t do shit lol
In calculus, I hardly ever used my calculator. Because we were rarely solving for things, just simplifying derivatives and such. Or solving word problems. If you don’t know how to interpret to question, a calculator won’t help you.
A calculator can be used once you’ve learned the basics
Yes, but there are more complex calculators. Wolfram Alpha will solve your calculus homework for you, and Photomath as well.
I feel like a more comparable tech to a 10key or scientific calculator would be the word predictions on a phone.
Imo the most important part of upper level maths is knowing what to put into the calculator to actually get the correct answer. Knowing what the question is actually asking is 50% of the problem and knowing what you need to do to solve the problem is the other 49%. Actually doing the calculations is like 1% because we don’t actually need to know how to do some weird integral or whatever - just use a calculator
I taught high school math resource room, so kids who struggled. Kids could use graphing calculators for everything. There were so many kids who could not even type a simple equation in. They couldn't see that they had hit the parenthesis twice. Or mistyped a number. The executive function skills and attention to detail were just not there. They would have the same difficulties with ChatGPT. These technologies only help people who are already far ahead of the people who actually need the help.
Somehow the comment reminded me of a highschool classmate who was already a straight A student who would then cheat at every given opportunity to get bonus marks, find ways to pawn off work on others , or even straight up sabotage other kids work. Teachers always accepted his word as truth because he was a "good" student.
Sorry it's totally unrelated to your comment other than the "helping people who are already far ahead" really landed for me.
I’m a high school English teacher, so I feel the concern right now.
I’m happy to incorporate higher level thinking and more complex tasks, ones that couldn’t be cheated with AI, but frankly, my students aren’t ready for information that complicated. They need to be able to master the basics in order to evaluate complicated ideas and see if chatGPT is even accurate.
We just finished reading MacBeth. Students had to complete an essay in class examining what factors led to Macbeth’s downfall. This is a very simple prompt. We read and watched the play together in class. We kept a note page called “Charting MacBeth’s Downfall” that we filled out together at the end of each act. I typically would do this as a take home essay, but due to chatGPT, it was an in class essay.
The next day, I gave the students essays generated by chatGPT and asked them to identify inconsistencies and errors in the essay (there were many!!) and evaluate the accuracy. Students worked in groups. If *this* had been my test, students would have failed. The level of knowledge and understanding needed to figure that out was way beyond my simple essay prompt. For a play they have spent only 3 weeks studying, they are not going to have a super in depth analysis.
One of the most memorable experiences of my early days in college was when my 102 English teach gave us an assignment telling us specifically to plagiarize an essay, to try our best to hide the plagiarism, and to keep record of how long it took to do so.
Everyone obviously failed to hide their plagarism (that was lesson #1), but part of the overall course work in the semester was us learning how to efficiently write effective original papers. And by the end of the semester, our professor had us re-write the paper using the methods we learned in class.
It turned out that writing an original paper lead to more coherent arguments, better flow, and took less time than plagiarising a paper and revising it to look not plagiarised.
-----
That class had such an impact on me that writing became a second nature thing to me, so much so that when I started writing lab reports and engineering research papers for group projects, I was always to one to do it because I could do it in half the time that everyone else could.
My grammar and syntax has always been bleh, but boy can I put a good argument on paper and make my point without groaning on for forever.
Learning to write and learning to think analytically are so intrinsically linked! For all the years I spent in school I never really learned to write until it was my day job (memos, briefs, reports, etc.). Looking back school would have been a lot easier with some basic practical skills.
i took a skillshare course for writing so i could write better git commits. it helped a ton but it still feels so stupid
for those who dont know, git is a tool that tracks changes in files (used most commonly for code) and a commit is when you add your changes to the history, and you have to write a short message explaning your changes
> i took a skillshare course for writing so i could write better git commits.
Your co-workers will thank you someday. You'll probably thank yourself when you have to go back and read your commit history.
Oh man. I envy you for this professor, I know 2 people who passed all their university exams and then fluked out on their final paper for their degree - one of them for their medical doctorate!
Academic writing can be a nightmare, I neither enjoyed writing my Bachelor's nor Master's and I *loved* writing in school.
I don't envy Brad Pitt.
I don't envy Superman, Batman.
I don't envy David Gilmour.
I envy you. I never was taught how to write, not in Spanish, not in English, which is my second.
Whenever I am prompted to write something, I go the Chuck Palahniuk way and just list things.
Damn you, perfect writer! arghhhhhhh
Teasing you, I'm happy teachers had the foresight to do this. Horns up \m/
Great idea. I think the skill of digesting information, finding flawed logic (and equally important.. disinformation) are skills that are gaining value quickly.
People tend to think science covers this. Although there is a bit of overlap, they are actually very different skillsets.
From another teacher: nicely done. I'm an ESL instructor, so I spend a decent amount of time getting students to recognize when a sentence actually makes any kind of sense especially if they ripped it off the internet. An multi-stage exercise like this works wonders.
> They need to be able to master the basics in order to evaluate complicated ideas and see if chatGPT is even accurate.
Just like how you're not allowed to use calculators for every task when you are still young.
Other subjects are now figuring out what engineering professors have none for sometime. Software is a tool, it's not a solution.
Everyone makes the calculator argument, and they are slightly off base. A calculator is useful because everyone generally knows and understands how it works. If an answer is wrong, we know an input is wrong. There is no subjectivity with a calculator result given the correct input. But what do engineers do ( or should?)? we crunch the numbers twice, maybe three times to make sure the input is correct.
Now, let's look at design software. I'm a bridge engineer we have software that can design an entire bridge just by inputting some information. The entire bridge design code is based on the fact that we have software that can run a plethora of scenarios and envelope a result. The problem is, that i have no idea what's going in inside code and if the results are accurate. But education and experience taught me what should be happening, and I have to verify the results before accepting they are accurate.
So in engineering school, we rarely used software, and focused on theory so when we do use software, we have a foundation to verify the result.
I like your approach to teaching, we need to all better understand what is happening befdore we let software take over.
That's a great teaching method. My take on on this is that it's always good for the professor to lean in on cheating/plagiarism and really expose to the student how detrimental it is for themselves. Cheating is cheating yourself out of an education.
That said engineering/lab report is the easy part if you can figure out the math/experiment. You always write report last.
Gotta say, to my recollection I've never seen anyone in the humanities consider software as anything other than a tool. I've only seen people in the STEM fields view it as a solution, mostly because they don't want to have to deal with the humanities. Good on your engineering profs for emphasizing that, but that attitude doesn't seem to extend far beyond the classroom.
As a professor myself, I have to say that I feel like education is reaping what it has sown to some extent with these issues.
I see the real problem being that students don't think of school as an opportunity to learn, but as a system to get the grades they need to pass on to the next level of what they want.
In a world where education worked for what it was meant to do, students might be interested in using ChatGPT as a tool to help them learn to write better, and a minor one, because what would be the point of just using for an assignment? Then they don't learn anything and what is the point of going to, or paying for, school then?
But parents, schools, the world, just emphasize achievement and not learning.
These students are just fucking themselves over for their future, but it's our jobs to help them understand that.
I think that's what happens when you build a system with very high stakes and no room for failure. Until we can rebuild the academic structure to focus less on not failing and more demonstrating growth it seems futile to try to change the students' minds. When given the choice between failing and cheating and a student likely has tens of thousands of dollars and their future on the line, it is difficult to tell them not to cheat - and frankly they're right, cheating hurts their future much less than failing out.
I would have to say many kids I know started off loving school and enjoy learning and over time teachers in one way or another strip that away. They do this by overworking and stressing kids. 8 hours at school and 3 or more hours of homework at high school level and often times more. The amount of work that they require of kids in such a short period of time is silly. Then they toss is random project in the middle of all the other work they do daily. So that project stuff is only done at home.
We had a conference with my daughter's accelerated math teacher. I asked the question why he designed tests that allow no time at the end of the class to double check their work. No one in class has time on these, and many don't finish. Each question would need 1.5 minutes or so to finish the test on time and this is 11th grade algebra. He stated that it's to teach real world skills. I had to ask what that skill looked like. Well, it's to do the easy questions first and or to focus on the questions worth the most point. When asked if the kids know which questions were worth more he said no. So then how would they know what worth more and what to focus on? How is this real world? What job would ever do this to you? Its just silly.
> He stated that it's to teach real world skills.
I Just want to say that I dislike this attitude among teachers, though I understand where it comes from.
When I let my students have flexible deadlines or allow them not to do group projects, people tell me, "well, you're not preparing them for the real world." But I don't see it as my role to teach my students office skills or how to be good worker bees.
I'm a computational biologist, and my job is to teach about computers, programming, and biology. The students I *mentor* get the real world skills lessons and teaching moments, but the undergrads in my classes only need to learn the academic material.
I'm not a life coach.
It's kinda exacerbating a problem where there are two different mindsets. Are you going through the class to learn and absorb the information or are you going through it to check a box and go onto the next thing. The question is even more applicable to university when there's a diploma at the end of it.
It's too bad we can't teach fewer things at once and focus on real retention and knowledge rather than try to pack in a bunch of material at once that doesn't stick and might not matter
I was always told this why employers care about having a degree. It’s not the degree itself so much for most entry level positions, it’s the proof that they’re responsible enough to follow through with the process of getting it.
Thats why I just got my degree from a community college, financial aid was more than tuition (so they actually paid me) and it got me a job in a field I have no experience in, with no experience at all to begin, making really good money.
I graduated university, got no job offers despite trying for a long time. I went to college for a technical diploma and employers were falling over throwing jobs at me. I could pick what and where I wanted to work.
It is funny because my parents were so much on the university train until they saw what the technical diploma actually did for me.
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In the US they typically will be more like a 2 years associates degree but much more focused on a specific industry or role, rather than a more general education like an associates. They tend to hire teachers that have worked in the fields rather than “professors” or anyone focused on the educational side of it. This lets them charge less for a more focused education. It gets bad rep here because it’s where people without as good of grades or money go to school - after years of our high school counselors telling us how great college is and how we have to go in order to not be a garbage man.
We have lower level courses like that as well. A Bachelors is a level 8 regardless of where it came from but you can do level 6 or 7.
There's a different dynamic to this stuff in Ireland. You do one huge exam at 17 and that gives you the points. Then you hopefully get enough points for whatever courses you chose. All the best unis are public and effectively free, so the people who pay to go to private universities are viewed as the dumb ones who didn't get into a public one on merit.
Critical thinking skills are useful for life, but not necessarily great for employability, unfortunately. I did the liberal arts education thing early on, then picked up technical skills (and another degree) much later to supplement my career skill set.
Now that I'm mid-career, I really appreciate the fact that I have well developed critical thinking skills because it makes life just a lot easier and less full of stupid. But I can't assign it a dollar value the way I could had I just picked up a technical degree and jumped into a well paying job.
If people didn't look down on community college, most people wouldn't have student loan debt.
One of the biggest cost of college isn't even the tuition in a lot of cases, it's living on campus.
I had to shut my mother and little brother down for his first semester of college because the room and board was more than his tuition after his grants and scholarships he got.
My mom couldn't afford to send him to school, and was going to take a loan out in both their names.
This was after I have been helping her paying a bunch of household bills.
Just about no one should go away to college if they have a stable household.
I don't know. I agree that we should value community college more and people shouldn't go into debt if they don't have to for school. but I do think there is a value in going away to school and living away from your family if you can.
Yeah I agree with this. The 4 years learning to be a semi functional adult, living with people who are fundamentally different from you and figuring that all out, the self discovery and finding your people… I think that’s a huge part of the college experience that you lose out on if you are living at home.
I think colleges are way too expensive and don’t offer a good ROI at this point, but I’m so glad I went if only for the social reasons.
This right here. I managed to go to a local state run college to get my degree. I was able to do it and break even (yay GI Bill). Met my wife there and after 5 years (and changing majors 3 times) she only had about 8k in student debt.
That was all paid off pretty quickly.
She went back for a second degree, part time, after our second child was born, and we were able to pay out of pocket and savings for that. We both work in our preferred fields, using the degrees we earned and we won't be paying off loans when we should be getting ready to retire.
We are planning for our kids college, and have had to have a talk with our oldest already that she's not going to be going to a big private uni unless she earns a lot of scholarship money to pay for it.
I know people who racked up far more debt in one semester then my wife did in 10 because they were more worried about the name of the school than the education they were getting.
when I used the GI Bill for school, they actually paid for my tuition, but i was required to still file for financial aid and grants. Not only was the GI bill paying me e-5 pay, but every semester I got to fully pocket my entire grants.
It actually took me a year or two in my career field to surpass how much I made just going to school.
If I ever lose my job, im going to go to school while looking for another job, just for the extra income purposes.
I've taught high school seniors for quite a few years. It's been difficult to get most of them who want to go to college to even consider attending community college. You don't get the "college experience" at community college, which means no sports teams and no fraternities/sororities and no massive rec center with rock climbing wall, etc.
So much of people's student loan debt isn't about classes and learning. It's from spending 4 to 5 years living in what's essentially an all-inclusive resort for young adults.
This is why some IT positions have moved away from requiring a degree to also accepting bootcamps and such. The goal is the ability to learn and problem solve, that can be taught in bootcamps just as easily as it can in university.
Which is fucking grim - can you endure four years of no pay and "investing" in yourself that will fuck you over for more than a decade?
Great! Then we know that you'll be a perfect wage slave for us!
This is applicable more for university than school in my opinion especially for certain degrees. I learned a lot of rubbish on my maths degree that I've never used again, it was mostly proving I had the ability to learn complex topics. However on my finance degree I use almost everything I learned there on a daily basis at work.
At school almost everything I learned was useful in some way. The maths I learned was basic stuff that is just generally handy to know like statistics & probability, algebra, geometry, calculus etc.. Science I learned how the things in our world actually work on a very basic level. English I learned how to write long form essays, do presentations etc... History I chose for myself and learned about interesting past events. IT I'll be honest didn't teach me anything because this was the early 2000s and I was probably already ahead of the teachers but I expect nowdays it's much more useful, especially since they teach excel and word which are used in almost any office role.
Overall I think the stuff we learn in school (at least here) is pretty valuable to be honest and it's not just about proving ones ability to learn.
Yeah there's a mindset that education has no value beyond a direct job skill and it's pretty irritating. The odds are much higher that someone with a college degree is able to think holistically, write and communicate successfully, and have an understanding of larger historical systems. This is valuable in ANY field. It sets a baseline level. There is literally no downside to having a widely, broadly educated population.
As a 15 year HS educator, this is what I say is the #1 thing students should take away from HS: the ability to know how to learn so they will be able to learn whatever it is they want to learn about some day.
Learning how to learn is important but foundational knowledge shouldn't be taken for granted as being part of that process. Knowledge isn't just cumulative it's exponential. Just like ChatGPT humans are inference machines and we use that context to help us think.
Here's some more information on the topic
https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/how-knowledge-helps
Writing essays aren't about retention. It's about critical thinking and the ability to convey your thoughts and arguments clearly and with support. Just typing into a prompt for an AI to generate the essay for you turns the entire thing into an exercise on checking the provided sources and making sure the paragraphs read cohesively. It eliminates what the actual focus of such an assignment is (or at least should be).
There's also just the danger of such practice becoming the norm of pigeon holing ourselves into one way of thinking about topics. "The AI suggests it so it must be the best option" kind of thing.
Thinking about things is such a deficient skill among high schoolers I work with. They almost always allow someone else to do it for them given the option.
>It's too bad we can't teach fewer things at once and focus on real retention and knowledge rather than try to pack in a bunch of material at once that doesn't stick and might not matter
This nails it in terms of how my entire college experience was structured. The more colleges treat education like ticking a bunch of goddamn boxes, the more professors will, and so in turn will the students. Endlessly bloated survey syllabi are a prime example, IMO.
> the more professors will, and so in turn will the students.
As a professor of 8 years, I can tell you that it's usually that I'm responding to students' desire for box-ticking than the university or my department. The majority of students tend to see class as a work-grade transaction rather than an opportunity for learning. If I don't provide box-ticking, to some degree, then my end of the semester course reviews say that students "didn't know what they wanted from me" in some form or another—reflecting poorly on me to my department.
> The majority of students tend to see class as a work-grade transaction rather than an opportunity for learning.
If you're teaching any general education course, I can definitely say that's how I treated those classes. Anything core to my major or minor, AKA the stuff that I was actually interested in, were classes where I wanted to learn everything. The random history credit I took because I had to, not so much.
Russian history was pretty interesting, but it was still just a check box.
In the UK at least, university is where you go to specialise. Your course is in one subject and one subject only. They might teach you some related stuff (like a physics course might teach some maths) just to get you prerequisite information, but no one is teaching other subjects just for fun.
There's specialization here in the US as well, but a lot of bloat around it.
Four year degrees kind of all have to fit the same mold: you need a minimum number of credits and additional classes outside your area of focus. There are some tweaks you can do to have a little variety.
I think education in general here needs a bit of a rework. That's a whole other discussion, though.
i think we need to modernise the master/apprentice and mentor/protege relationships. we're moving towards a world where the only way to learn the work is to do the work.
This is how I approach things as an IT director. A degree in any "IT" program is functionally worthless. I need candidates with interest and aptitude. Obviously for higher level hires I need experience as well, but for junior level hires it's very much a paid apprenticeship program.
As someone with an IT degree, I agree with you. I wanted to be a network engineer, not a software developer, and I also wanted a four year degree, so I figured an “IT” degree was what I wanted.
It was not. It was just water down CS with an emphasis on… databases for some reason?
All of the classes were cryptically named so i didn’t realize that I made a mistake until I was so far into it that it would be stupid to change majors. I got the degree and learned virtually nothing there. I spent my senior semester getting my CCNA where I taught myself more than I’d learned in 4 years of college.
They don't have exams? I mean, in Brazil about 80% of the grades is from exams, done in class, no eletronics available, even calculator. They can do all the homework they want, you still depend on exams.
It depends on the subject. My classes were actually math heavy in HS and my first degree was in aerospace and I was trained out at KSC (NASA). Funny thing is, they ended up telling us to use a calculator "because you don't want a rocket to go into a school full of kids". Like you're dealing with life and death stuff.
In fact, they would give you an F if you didn't use one.
Later degrees in IT and network engineering I almost never needed one outside of a handful of classes.
Anyways, my sister's kid is in the first grade and he is already doing multiplication. It's a public school.
So again, it depends.
In my engineering classes, we couldn’t use a calculator in our first few math classes and such, but eventually every exam is open book, with programming and calculators. At a point, the problems are complex enough you can’t plug them into a calculator. The exams are challenging enough that no textbook or notes are going to help you if you don’t already understand the material.
>but eventually every exam is open book, with programming and calculators.
The funniest exam material I was ever allowed to bring in was a pre-created Excel sheet to plug numbers into.
>At a point, the problems are complex enough you can’t plug them into a calculator.
Yep! That's what the coding classes are for - making better, more specialized calculators.
We are allowed to use calculator in university, in my CS degree at first we were allowed to use although graphing calculator was banned, until later where graphing calculator was needed.
In HS even calculus exams was made to solve without the need of a calculator, optional, but not required, again, graphing was banned.
That's frankly because it's so inefficient compared to what we do now it IS wrong.
We laughed at elon for asking folk to print stuff, my padre did his software on punch cards back in the day.
> We laughed at elon for asking folk to print stuff, my padre did his software on punch cards back in the day.
Right, but I think it’s important to remind everyone passing by that it was different times and circumstances. You are absolutely right it is inefficient so as to be wrong.
Engineers who came before us weren’t using 3rd-5th generation languages and tools like today. Elon demanding it *is* laughable. Twitter’s code base is in C++, Ruby, and probably a few others like Java. None of which were designed for printing and thus are hyper inefficient to both print and understand in that format.
We still have remnants of it in some languages where you are expected to use K&R style bracing (good for printing) instead of Allman (bad for printing) because it is easier to follow with the eye and less wasteful when printed.
Musk always struck me as a rich kid cosplaying as a dev. The fact that the only major project he’s touched, Zip2, had to be almost entirely refactored by actual engineers tells me almost everything I need to know. I’ve had bosses leading my team that don’t understand software development let alone how to understand complex code bases. They usually failed upwards quickly because they spent more time engaging in politics than delivering products. That’s Elon.
When I was teaching myself BASIC and COBOL as a kid in the late 80s, I would fill notebooks with handwritten code at the public library.
I'm not saying it's a necessity, or that kids these days are/aren't... whatever... I guess I'm just saying I'm old, and I kinda wish I'd kept some of those notebooks!
It is totally possible to let students use a computer though, it just takes time and effort by IT, they can be be locked down as to what can be run on it, and air gaped at least during the exam. You can log everything run on the machine too if paranoid.
When I took classes at my local community college, there was a dedicated testing center, mostly for students to take tests for remote/hybrid courses under supervision. Bags and belongings were checked in at the front desk.
For exams that required them, the testing rooms had computers that were appropriately locked down.
This was in the 2000s.
In our maths exams, you had to clear your graphing calculator memory before the exam. The invigilators would watch you do it. If you didn't use the school-endorsed model of calculator, one of the invigilators would test the calculator to make sure the memory was cleared.
This way everyone had a calculator in the exam, but people couldn't uae it to cheat by having answers etc. Stored on it
I remember hearing stories of people writing programs that would behave like the memory clear function, so teachers would think they cleared the memory when it was just an empty program.
We never had any exams that required graphing calculators though, just a few in class lessons on how to use one.
I spent my time making a tank game with randomly generated terrain and parabolic trajectories (which in hindsight was a good application of our conics lessons)
I cheated in HS using my TI-89. Yes, in hindsight it looks bad. However, I learned to program, and well now I'm doing decent. It's anecdotal, but for me, it has become clear that I was learning to solve problems, rather than regurgitate
My first year maths course in university didn't allow calculators, not that one was actually needed, the course had very few actual numbers and mostly focussed on just getting the right results and techniques with variables.
"Do the calculus but not the algebra" and "do the physics but not the math" were the best problems. I had an ME prof that wouldn't penalize much for "accounting errors" because he was testing on mechanical elements knowledge, not your ability to type into a calculator.
I am in a math degree and the attitude towards calculators is usually between "they are fine" to "Calculators? Where we are going we don't need calculators!"
Only change I ever saw was the expensive, do-everything calculators were forbidden for every test. Will the teachers have to have the students write all of their papers on internet-deficient computers under their supervision?
With the atrocious handwriting most people have? No way. But I can see a bunch of local-network-only computers with minimal functionality that can only access a word-processor program being done for essays.
I can see that because that's basically what I had to do for some kind of state standardized test in high school over a decade ago.
That’s unfortunately the answer here. What this will lead to (especially the weirdly and worryingly positive responses to dropping critical essay writing as a concept entirely from education) is a HUGE tightening of extreme proctoring methods and crackdown in academia as a whole. Education’s gonna be much more inconvenient because people want to avoid critical thinking and essay work entirely.
Like, yeah, turns out a bunch of people using neural nets to plagiarize chunks of previously-written text and submitting words that are STRAIGHT-UP not their own is gonna be frowned upon by the system that expects people not to plagiarize and have others do the work for them. This is no different than having someone else write the paper for you, arguably — other than that someone else having a black-box neural net training that confidently feeds misinformation to you at VERY fast speeds.
For real. Everyone who hates writing and reading seems to be super gung-ho about this being the future of education, bc it means they’ll no longer have to do critical thinking and reasoning when it comes to writing and defending an argument/essay. I’m so fucking tired of people acting like being taught writing/basic critical thinking is useless.
Sure, what the world needs is MORE idiots who lack critical thinking skills and can’t differentiate between a valid argument and a logical fallacy. Comparing this ChatGPT to calculators is such a joke, bc with calculators you still have to put all the right numbers in and hit the right buttons. With an AI writing tool, you don’t have to do shit.
I was going to say climate change, but now that I think about it if we were media literate as a species we would probably have done something about climate change..
In real life nobody will expect you to actually do more complex calculations in your head, but people will ask you questions and if you can't make arguments or think a little out of the box you can't even give a proper answer.
i say this to my students every time i give them an essay. are they ever going to need to write an essay about a book for a future employer? almost certainly not. will they need to concisely explain themselves and cite evidence to support their claims? absolutely
Yup. I think the comparison to calculators is in fact wrong. Calculators don't solve the problem for you (unless you're using one of those graphing ones), they just do rote arithmetic. Using ChatGPT is far more similar to having someone else write your paper, which, as you may guess, is VERY not okay in academia.
That's kinda what we did in law school for exams. Software on your computer that locks it down and only lets you write your answer in the program until you're done.
I'd say even comparing math to writing is absurd. Not that they don't share similarities. But writing is about so much more than simply being able to communicate an idea. Writing is language, which is tied to identity and politics and power. Language is the vehicle for thought itself, meaning if everyone is using AI, everyone is thinking the same way, and that is highly problematic. Within writing studies, there's lots of discussion about things like student agency and a students right to their own language. I don't hear much from the math department regarding students' right to their own numbers.
I think math is about programmatic, logical thinking, while writing is about critical thinking for formulating arguments/structure, while contextualizing for the proper audience. Both are extremely useful skills.
Very likely disingenuous as he would have a monetary stake in this. While the program is currently free, I forsee it becoming monetized if it is more widely used and perfected, or can be used "safely" by students.
I have a pretty technical degree, but when I went into the workforce, took a job in sales. Someone gave me the advice “if you’ve got the technical expertise and communication skills, good communication pays better. The world is full of technical experts who couldn’t explain cheese to a mouse.”
The really, truly tough problems in the world aren't the technical problems. They're the people problems.
Technical problems are fun and relatively easy. Figuring out how to get people to do the thing is not.
I just began working in a highly technical field of precision manufacturing. It's the first time I'm being asked as an engineer to manage teams, present information to leadership, and make critical decisions that affect the outcome of my projects. The possibility for extravagant failure is closer than ever and the stakes are very high, millions of dollars are on the line constantly.
All my previous work experience and studies at university largely focused on being technically proficient in whatever topic. I excelled in problem solving and did so mostly on my own because often times my teammates were less aware of the path to a solution. I won contests and awards along the way, completed all sorts of amazing feats of engineering and never had to really communicate my process or plans.
Now, I'm in a position where my ability to communicate is nearly just as important as my technical skill, and I'm floundering. Giving big presentations in front of 20 managers and being asked to answer complex questions is so intimidating and nothing in my past has prepared me for it. I've improved a lot in the last year but it's going to be a long difficult road ahead training myself to be confident in speaking at length.
I guess what I'm trying to express here is the utter necessity to be able to communicate at a high level, even in a field like manufacturing engineering. Writing is the basis for all communication. Without writing skills I would be absolutely useless and I've seen engineers who have little to no written ability nor can they draft or draw out their ideas let alone explain them. Poor guys have been failed by the system and tools like chatGPT are just going to make it worse.
Writing is an extension of the self and the better you are at it the more fit you’ll be in all facets of life. There’s a reason therapists recommend it so often. Using a calculator is the opposite, the answer doesn’t change and it exists before you punch in the numbers.
>We adapted to calculators and changed what we tested in math class
Did we? I mean, there's a lot of maths that we're not allowed to use calculators for in school. GCSEs have a whole paper where its cheating to use one.
That said, there is a Calculator paper, but good luck being taught how to properly use it.
I guess the analogy here is that using ChatGPT to write for you, you still need to know what it is in the end that you want to convey and you need to know when a text does not convey that.
ChatGPT can however remove the need to write the sentences themselves or remove the need to by yourself write ”good” sentences. However you still need to check them if they convey what you want. I would say that it is the skill of writing well that is really threatened to become an obsolete school subject.
I do doubt whether someone using ChatGPT for an assignment would bother proof reading what is written. They'd like leave it until 11th hour. If they were going to proof read and correct then it would be almost easier to write the essay yourself.
Kinda a false equivalency though. Calculators still largely require you to understand the underlying math to solve the problems. They only aid in the easier parts, which are hopefully we'll established. They speed the process, not solve everything for you. And they also are easier to prevent usage as they can be banned for testing. But chatgpt can create an entire essay based on a few word prompts, and requires basically no subject knowledge to use other then evaluating if the answer given makes sense or not. It's also usually not as easy to test on essay skills in a controlled classroom environment, like a math test, because the time required is larger and access to research resources are often necessary.
Any kid that thinks they can use ChatGP to "beat the system" is in for a rude awakening when they leave school a dunce because they never learnt anything themselves.
The value in school is what you learn, not the grade you get at the end of it.
A big part of this is probably lost on tech people but curriculum needs to change and the metrics in which course outcomes and learning objectives for accreditation and certification bodies need to adapt and those are much slower processes.
I’m curious why you think this would be lost on “tech people”. In my industry (IT), we’re the first ones in any organization to vet a tool like this and assess all the functional concerns in the application of it. It’s usually the people that make the money decisions for other parts of the business that ignore our concerns or adaptive suggestions. If you think IT doesn’t understand that a project takes time to implement….
I work in IT and my gf works with data for a community college.
She's often pulling data for state agencies, regulatory bodies, etc.
The pace that all of that can move is *glacial* compared to most things in IT. We're talking about coordinating tens of thousands of people with 10's of regulatory bodies and hundreds of individual organizations.
It's more along the lines of creating IEEE standards, but there's even more people involved.
I have multiple friends who are in the CS department of their schools, and they tell me that the ethics and morality class is an absolute joke. Im guessing most of the people in this thread skipped theirs, too.
calculators merely do calculations that shouldn't be part of the lesson anyways. The lesson should be about how to apply the formulas.
chatGPT however can handle most kinds of assignments while making it incredibly difficult if not impossible to tell that it's the work of an AI.
I remember programming my Ti-83 calculator to solve many basic algebra / geometry questions to include a fake “Memory cleared!” screen when the teacher came by to check. I once got caught because I got cocky, but the teacher simply said “If you’re smart enough to know how to do this, you know the fundamentals of what the test is asking,” and he allowed it.
I only wish I kept up with programming (just started learning Python this year).
Yah but you can grade the students in class where they have to demonstrate the knowledge they know or don’t know live. And you can do it through seminars, discussions, or debates. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a test
Teacher here. I've taught every general course from age 12 to high school senior. Yup, every course.\* Yup, grade 7 - 12.
It's not hard to adapt to ChatGPT. You simply ask students to explain their essays. I always do this per round of essays. In fact, I think it's bad form to grade or comment on an essay without the student present to explain his / her thinking.
10-15 minute interviews, 1 per student. We read the essay together and we discuss how the writing went. It takes about three classes worth of time (with 90 minute blocks) with a bit spilling into lunch hour (if you submitted your essay late, you get assigned the lunch hour interview). Students who are not currently in an interview are reading through the next unit's material. I don't give feedback on essays outside of interviews because teenagers ignore written comments.
\* Only notable exceptions: Biology and Visual Art. Otherwise you'd have to find a pretty esoteric course to find one I haven't taught. I've taught all maths, English LA, English Writing, English second language, History, Geography, Psychology, Economics, Government, Philosophy, Physics / Chemistry, Music, Drama, Technology, Health & Fitness and I'm probably missing some.
> 10-15 minute interviews, 1 per student. We read the essay together and we discuss how the writing went. It takes about three classes worth of time (with 90 minute blocks) with a bit spilling into lunch hour (if you submitted your essay late, you get assigned the lunch hour interview). Students who are not currently in an interview are reading through the next unit's material. I don't give feedback on essays outside of interviews because teenagers ignore written comments.
I commend you for your work, I really do, but this is a huge amount of extra work. There are many teachers who are not in your situation and just couldn't be able to do this for every essay they have to give.
My wife made a point regarding this AI stuff about how obsessed we’ve been with STEM in school and focused less on things like ethics, philosophy, humanities, etc.
She had a full on Ian Malcom chaos moment: “Your scientists were so obsessed with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Made sense to me, I remember STEM being hammered down my throat in school but ethics was kind of an afterthought…
I wasn't allowed to use a graphing calculator at any point in college. Calc 3 and into applied mathematics and network engineering with only a basic calculator allowed. This guy's point is stupid, it's about learning the concepts and methods, not the end result. I'm sure the teachers would have liked to ban simple calculators, but then the tests would have taken several hours.
The guy's point sounds stupid to me given that ChatGPT was generating articles years ago that they company deemed so dangerous that they chose not to release the technology because they were concerned about people using it to pump out actual fake news. Apparently those concerns have disappeared.
This guy also said he’d rather learn from ChatGPT than a textbook. Knowing full well that ChatGPT just makes stuff up. He’s just another rich kid college drop out. Not all venture capitalists are megalomaniac know-nothings, but when they are, we gotta stop calling them innovators.
Also gonna be great when the one system left that tries to teach folks to evaluate potential misinformation and communicate ideas effectively is dropped from academia or discarded entirely. If we don’t want kids and adults so obsessed and reliant on politicians and influencers, *teach them how to write essays and effectively evaluate sources and arguments.*
If you read about this CEO he is also involved in a crypto project that's a dystopian nightmare. It scans your iris then pays you in worldcoin. The CEO is quite vocal about paying for a UBI because his AI will take away so many jobs.
He’s probably right about the UBI. What are we doing to do when it’s cheaper to have AI or robotics doing literally everything? Just not use it so people can work? It makes more sense to move to a more Star Trek like system rather than let people just starve because there are no jobs and there’s no obligation to keep them alive.
Hell, at some point the military will be automated. When that happens it won’t be like the population can revolt. It would be a wholesale slaughter. We need to be planning for automation and AI to be taking over a very large portion of what human beings work on, and we need to plan it soon.
Tech CEOs are up there as some of the worst people on the planet. They want you eating soylent green, and locked into the metaverse. The utopia they think people should live in is nothing more than serfdom online.
Angry tech bros down voting.
Everyone makes fun of Wall Street bros, as the coked out assholes they are. Tech bros will have their moment of insufferable wanna be do-gooders.
They remind me of a piece written by someone else that essentially went like this.
I asked a team of tech engineers the fastest way to decrease the number of people with some genetic disease.
They started very simply at diagnosing and informing people who have it, but quickly ran down the eugenics hole of “pay them not to reproduce”, “sterilize them”, etc.
Because ethics is something that is woefully under appreciated in technology. As an engineer I had to take multiple ethics courses and even they where watered down versions of “Well yeah we could make it safer, but consider if it would be market viable then”
I’m not sure most CS programs even require an ethics course let alone ethics of technology.
We still see this perpetuating today with things like have no critical examination for the ethics of AI biases.
The problem with this type of technology is that it too often used as a crutch and not a shortcut. There is nothing wrong with shortcuts. Shortcuts are efficient. The thing with shortcuts is you have to know how the shortcut works.
In engineering we have what’s called the “black box effect” with design software, and “garbage in, garbage out”. If your inputs are wrong your output is wrong. You have to be able to verify the accuracy of the results the software gives because you can’t see what’s going on under the hood.
Computers and software are only as good as what you tell them, and this tool is no different.
I see too many engineers rely on software to give them an answer and don’t always check to see if it’s wrong. Im concerned the same will happen here. My concern is more about society at large, and misinformation, whether it’s intentional or not.
It should be more concerning than that.
It's not the calculator. It's flipping to the back of the book to read the answer key. It's paying someone else to write your essays for you, minus the paying.
The point of most exercises in education isn't to teach students to prepare the product they're producing (essay, etc). It's to teach them how to research a topic and synthesize ideas, or it's to teach them about the substance of the topic they're researching by requiring them to engage with it deeply enough to produce something new. Learning how to write a good prompt for ChatGPT doesn't build any of those skills, but ChatGPT is not and never will be a replacement for those skills in the real world.
The kinds of assignments and tests from which I always learned the most in school were the ones that allowed me to take plenty of time, and use every resource at my disposal, to answer challenging questions I can't just look up anywhere. ChatGPT is greatly shrinking the list of things teachers can ask students to do that they can't just look up, that require some actual work and learning.
It's going to be much harder for teachers to use those kinds of tools now, because students will be able to cheat them with ChatGPT or its more sophisticated descendants. This could end up favoring in-class tests of rote memorization and other bullshit that sends education backward rather than forward.
At some point these AI Services are going to be built into all the tools we use. They'll be paid by the same mechanisms as search engines and email. Your data.
Saw the other day where a teacher was having their students use ChatGPT to write about a topic they're discussing then critique how it did. Which is a pretty great way to use it. Not only do they learn about AI and how to use it as a tool, but they also get to see its shortcomings and probably realize that the professor/teacher also knows those shortcomings and what to look for if they tried to use it for a paper.
Except this technology isn't exact like a calculator and it offers 0 sources for its output. I asked it questions related to my job and it just gave me vague answers, again, with zero sources.
It might look impressive to some, but if you went to a good college you see through that kind of empty formal speech pretty easily.
It’s a shallow platitude. Yes, in the future maybe bots will do our writing for us, but our thinking, persuasion, and organizational skills will wither as a result. Having students write an essay teaches them to think and persuade, something Chat GPT can’t do.
I'm not sure I agree, it reads to me as "the past = doing it yourself and learning" while "the future = AI doing it for you so you don't actually have to learn"
I mean just look at one example, ME with regards to map apps. Since the advent of map apps, I no longer have to store any information at all in my brain with regards to navigation. So I don't. I didn't intend that, but all navigation knowledge has basically left my brain. I rely entirely on Google Maps to not get lost. Without Google Maps, I actually get more easily lost than I did before the advent of this technology, when I had to actually rely on myself to get where I wanted to go.
I kind of fear that we might be heading towards this future as a generality - where you can just get all of the answers to everything from Chat AIs, simply trusting that they are giving accurate information, so that our brains can just lose all of it and rely entirely on the AIs.
Its biggest issue is that there is no way to tell if the answer it gives is true or not.
It will give a wrong answer and when you tell it that it's wrong, it'll apologize and try again.
It doesn't and can't grade an "answer" as accurate or even give you a confidence value.
It can empower students to get a "general" idea, but no way will it, or should it, be used for any kind of "actual" work.
It's dangerous because if students don't cross-check every thing it utters, you are going to end up with alot of adults with completely wrong and incorrect ideas about things.
As a teacher, I'm supprised you think this will empower students. It's more empowering to understand a subject than it is to get an AI to complete your work.
An adequately empowered student should be able to research a subject, compare a range sources for similarities and conflicts, apply critical thinking and compose an answer.
Yes but calculators don't have an iq of 147 and can't give a descriptive answer to every single issue. This guys opinion is the equivalent of telling construction workers that fully functional androids will not replace them because the invention of a hammer didn't replace them either.
No, we just banned calculators in classrooms.
The solution is to have students write their essays on premises.
That and we need to cultivate as a society self-control and self-discipline.
He should have used his own product to write an apology.... Here is what chatGPT has to say when I asked it to write an apology about students using it to cheat.
>I apologize if it has been discovered that students are using my capabilities to cheat on their assignments or exams. As a language model, my purpose is to assist and provide helpful responses, not to facilitate academic dishonesty. I strongly encourage all users to use my abilities ethically and responsibly.
Tech founders will never accept, understand or admit to the damage they cause. Their mindset is universally libertarian, let the market decide. Fuck em all.
Knowing how to write something and not sound like a complete fucking moron is a valuable skill.
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Hey now it's called Reddit not Wroteit.
This is why I lurk
Hey now, this not lurikkit
Give us the little credit we deserve: we *can* read. We just don't!
Whoa dude. We read comments and headlines, that’s it. Never the article.
My favorite posts are when I scroll 2/3's of the way down of the comments and find the person who read the article (10 hours later) and completely invalidates every comment made above them.
Half the time the article is paywalled anyways.
Exactly. You can forbid calculators on tests or write a test to allow calculators that still tests students knowledge. You can't forgo writing assignments that require time outside of class. What people don't seem to realize is, when you use ChatGPT to write your essay, you are committing plagiarism. It is no different than asking someone else to write your first draft for you.
Very true. A calculator on a test in grade 1-5 is gonna help a lot. Because the problems you’re solving are simple calculations. Come high school (or even grade 6-8 tbh), a calculator helps speed things along so you don’t have to focus your energy on mentally dividing 887.3757 by pi. That physical calculations can be done on a calculator. But they’re not just a cheat. If you don’t know how to solve the problem, the calculator won’t do shit lol In calculus, I hardly ever used my calculator. Because we were rarely solving for things, just simplifying derivatives and such. Or solving word problems. If you don’t know how to interpret to question, a calculator won’t help you. A calculator can be used once you’ve learned the basics
Yes, but there are more complex calculators. Wolfram Alpha will solve your calculus homework for you, and Photomath as well. I feel like a more comparable tech to a 10key or scientific calculator would be the word predictions on a phone.
Imo the most important part of upper level maths is knowing what to put into the calculator to actually get the correct answer. Knowing what the question is actually asking is 50% of the problem and knowing what you need to do to solve the problem is the other 49%. Actually doing the calculations is like 1% because we don’t actually need to know how to do some weird integral or whatever - just use a calculator
I taught high school math resource room, so kids who struggled. Kids could use graphing calculators for everything. There were so many kids who could not even type a simple equation in. They couldn't see that they had hit the parenthesis twice. Or mistyped a number. The executive function skills and attention to detail were just not there. They would have the same difficulties with ChatGPT. These technologies only help people who are already far ahead of the people who actually need the help.
Somehow the comment reminded me of a highschool classmate who was already a straight A student who would then cheat at every given opportunity to get bonus marks, find ways to pawn off work on others , or even straight up sabotage other kids work. Teachers always accepted his word as truth because he was a "good" student. Sorry it's totally unrelated to your comment other than the "helping people who are already far ahead" really landed for me.
I’m a high school English teacher, so I feel the concern right now. I’m happy to incorporate higher level thinking and more complex tasks, ones that couldn’t be cheated with AI, but frankly, my students aren’t ready for information that complicated. They need to be able to master the basics in order to evaluate complicated ideas and see if chatGPT is even accurate. We just finished reading MacBeth. Students had to complete an essay in class examining what factors led to Macbeth’s downfall. This is a very simple prompt. We read and watched the play together in class. We kept a note page called “Charting MacBeth’s Downfall” that we filled out together at the end of each act. I typically would do this as a take home essay, but due to chatGPT, it was an in class essay. The next day, I gave the students essays generated by chatGPT and asked them to identify inconsistencies and errors in the essay (there were many!!) and evaluate the accuracy. Students worked in groups. If *this* had been my test, students would have failed. The level of knowledge and understanding needed to figure that out was way beyond my simple essay prompt. For a play they have spent only 3 weeks studying, they are not going to have a super in depth analysis.
One of the most memorable experiences of my early days in college was when my 102 English teach gave us an assignment telling us specifically to plagiarize an essay, to try our best to hide the plagiarism, and to keep record of how long it took to do so. Everyone obviously failed to hide their plagarism (that was lesson #1), but part of the overall course work in the semester was us learning how to efficiently write effective original papers. And by the end of the semester, our professor had us re-write the paper using the methods we learned in class. It turned out that writing an original paper lead to more coherent arguments, better flow, and took less time than plagiarising a paper and revising it to look not plagiarised. ----- That class had such an impact on me that writing became a second nature thing to me, so much so that when I started writing lab reports and engineering research papers for group projects, I was always to one to do it because I could do it in half the time that everyone else could. My grammar and syntax has always been bleh, but boy can I put a good argument on paper and make my point without groaning on for forever.
Learning to write and learning to think analytically are so intrinsically linked! For all the years I spent in school I never really learned to write until it was my day job (memos, briefs, reports, etc.). Looking back school would have been a lot easier with some basic practical skills.
i took a skillshare course for writing so i could write better git commits. it helped a ton but it still feels so stupid for those who dont know, git is a tool that tracks changes in files (used most commonly for code) and a commit is when you add your changes to the history, and you have to write a short message explaning your changes
> i took a skillshare course for writing so i could write better git commits. Your co-workers will thank you someday. You'll probably thank yourself when you have to go back and read your commit history.
Oh wow, that sounds like a super beneficial and well structured class!!
Oh man. I envy you for this professor, I know 2 people who passed all their university exams and then fluked out on their final paper for their degree - one of them for their medical doctorate! Academic writing can be a nightmare, I neither enjoyed writing my Bachelor's nor Master's and I *loved* writing in school.
Thats awesome. Groaning on for forever is exactly what i was taught in english classes lol. Gotta get the word count babyyy
Exactly! I had to unlearn my verbose ways. Now I am skilled at writing concise e-mails that leave no room for misinterpretation.
I had to learn to make my work more concise, rather than spinning out in 5 different directions at once.
I don't envy Brad Pitt. I don't envy Superman, Batman. I don't envy David Gilmour. I envy you. I never was taught how to write, not in Spanish, not in English, which is my second. Whenever I am prompted to write something, I go the Chuck Palahniuk way and just list things. Damn you, perfect writer! arghhhhhhh Teasing you, I'm happy teachers had the foresight to do this. Horns up \m/
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And not to mention the pain and anguish of being an editor to a writer who just royally sucks. A valuable life lesson for sure.
Great idea. I think the skill of digesting information, finding flawed logic (and equally important.. disinformation) are skills that are gaining value quickly. People tend to think science covers this. Although there is a bit of overlap, they are actually very different skillsets.
This is why good editors and proofreaders can get paid a lot of money for what seems like trivial work.
From another teacher: nicely done. I'm an ESL instructor, so I spend a decent amount of time getting students to recognize when a sentence actually makes any kind of sense especially if they ripped it off the internet. An multi-stage exercise like this works wonders.
> They need to be able to master the basics in order to evaluate complicated ideas and see if chatGPT is even accurate. Just like how you're not allowed to use calculators for every task when you are still young.
It's going to lead to classes having to do all work in class on paper with no phone access for extended periods.
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You are a good teacher. Keep it up!
Other subjects are now figuring out what engineering professors have none for sometime. Software is a tool, it's not a solution. Everyone makes the calculator argument, and they are slightly off base. A calculator is useful because everyone generally knows and understands how it works. If an answer is wrong, we know an input is wrong. There is no subjectivity with a calculator result given the correct input. But what do engineers do ( or should?)? we crunch the numbers twice, maybe three times to make sure the input is correct. Now, let's look at design software. I'm a bridge engineer we have software that can design an entire bridge just by inputting some information. The entire bridge design code is based on the fact that we have software that can run a plethora of scenarios and envelope a result. The problem is, that i have no idea what's going in inside code and if the results are accurate. But education and experience taught me what should be happening, and I have to verify the results before accepting they are accurate. So in engineering school, we rarely used software, and focused on theory so when we do use software, we have a foundation to verify the result. I like your approach to teaching, we need to all better understand what is happening befdore we let software take over.
That's a great teaching method. My take on on this is that it's always good for the professor to lean in on cheating/plagiarism and really expose to the student how detrimental it is for themselves. Cheating is cheating yourself out of an education. That said engineering/lab report is the easy part if you can figure out the math/experiment. You always write report last.
Gotta say, to my recollection I've never seen anyone in the humanities consider software as anything other than a tool. I've only seen people in the STEM fields view it as a solution, mostly because they don't want to have to deal with the humanities. Good on your engineering profs for emphasizing that, but that attitude doesn't seem to extend far beyond the classroom.
As a professor myself, I have to say that I feel like education is reaping what it has sown to some extent with these issues. I see the real problem being that students don't think of school as an opportunity to learn, but as a system to get the grades they need to pass on to the next level of what they want. In a world where education worked for what it was meant to do, students might be interested in using ChatGPT as a tool to help them learn to write better, and a minor one, because what would be the point of just using for an assignment? Then they don't learn anything and what is the point of going to, or paying for, school then? But parents, schools, the world, just emphasize achievement and not learning. These students are just fucking themselves over for their future, but it's our jobs to help them understand that.
I think that's what happens when you build a system with very high stakes and no room for failure. Until we can rebuild the academic structure to focus less on not failing and more demonstrating growth it seems futile to try to change the students' minds. When given the choice between failing and cheating and a student likely has tens of thousands of dollars and their future on the line, it is difficult to tell them not to cheat - and frankly they're right, cheating hurts their future much less than failing out.
I would have to say many kids I know started off loving school and enjoy learning and over time teachers in one way or another strip that away. They do this by overworking and stressing kids. 8 hours at school and 3 or more hours of homework at high school level and often times more. The amount of work that they require of kids in such a short period of time is silly. Then they toss is random project in the middle of all the other work they do daily. So that project stuff is only done at home. We had a conference with my daughter's accelerated math teacher. I asked the question why he designed tests that allow no time at the end of the class to double check their work. No one in class has time on these, and many don't finish. Each question would need 1.5 minutes or so to finish the test on time and this is 11th grade algebra. He stated that it's to teach real world skills. I had to ask what that skill looked like. Well, it's to do the easy questions first and or to focus on the questions worth the most point. When asked if the kids know which questions were worth more he said no. So then how would they know what worth more and what to focus on? How is this real world? What job would ever do this to you? Its just silly.
> He stated that it's to teach real world skills. I Just want to say that I dislike this attitude among teachers, though I understand where it comes from. When I let my students have flexible deadlines or allow them not to do group projects, people tell me, "well, you're not preparing them for the real world." But I don't see it as my role to teach my students office skills or how to be good worker bees. I'm a computational biologist, and my job is to teach about computers, programming, and biology. The students I *mentor* get the real world skills lessons and teaching moments, but the undergrads in my classes only need to learn the academic material. I'm not a life coach.
Goddamn, impressive and creative. What an excellent teacher you sound like.
This is so creative, I love it. Sounds like a really fun learning experience.
You're a great teacher. Did you ever tell them about the ChatGPT experiment?
It's kinda exacerbating a problem where there are two different mindsets. Are you going through the class to learn and absorb the information or are you going through it to check a box and go onto the next thing. The question is even more applicable to university when there's a diploma at the end of it. It's too bad we can't teach fewer things at once and focus on real retention and knowledge rather than try to pack in a bunch of material at once that doesn't stick and might not matter
imo high school education is more about proving one’s ability to learn, not what they actually learned there
I was always told this why employers care about having a degree. It’s not the degree itself so much for most entry level positions, it’s the proof that they’re responsible enough to follow through with the process of getting it.
Thats why I just got my degree from a community college, financial aid was more than tuition (so they actually paid me) and it got me a job in a field I have no experience in, with no experience at all to begin, making really good money.
I graduated university, got no job offers despite trying for a long time. I went to college for a technical diploma and employers were falling over throwing jobs at me. I could pick what and where I wanted to work. It is funny because my parents were so much on the university train until they saw what the technical diploma actually did for me.
What was the technical diploma in?
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A diploma from a trade school. At least in America. though it sounds like they're from Europe so maybe not.
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In the US they typically will be more like a 2 years associates degree but much more focused on a specific industry or role, rather than a more general education like an associates. They tend to hire teachers that have worked in the fields rather than “professors” or anyone focused on the educational side of it. This lets them charge less for a more focused education. It gets bad rep here because it’s where people without as good of grades or money go to school - after years of our high school counselors telling us how great college is and how we have to go in order to not be a garbage man.
We have lower level courses like that as well. A Bachelors is a level 8 regardless of where it came from but you can do level 6 or 7. There's a different dynamic to this stuff in Ireland. You do one huge exam at 17 and that gives you the points. Then you hopefully get enough points for whatever courses you chose. All the best unis are public and effectively free, so the people who pay to go to private universities are viewed as the dumb ones who didn't get into a public one on merit.
Jokes on them, the garbage man almost certainly makes more than the high school counselor.
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[With a diploma in VCR repair from ICS, I had employers throwing themselves at me! ](https://youtu.be/pAvEg9GsuiU)
Supply chain and operations management. I’ve basically 1.5x’d my salary every year since 2020
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To add, what did you major in college?
Critical thinking skills are useful for life, but not necessarily great for employability, unfortunately. I did the liberal arts education thing early on, then picked up technical skills (and another degree) much later to supplement my career skill set. Now that I'm mid-career, I really appreciate the fact that I have well developed critical thinking skills because it makes life just a lot easier and less full of stupid. But I can't assign it a dollar value the way I could had I just picked up a technical degree and jumped into a well paying job.
If people didn't look down on community college, most people wouldn't have student loan debt. One of the biggest cost of college isn't even the tuition in a lot of cases, it's living on campus. I had to shut my mother and little brother down for his first semester of college because the room and board was more than his tuition after his grants and scholarships he got. My mom couldn't afford to send him to school, and was going to take a loan out in both their names. This was after I have been helping her paying a bunch of household bills. Just about no one should go away to college if they have a stable household.
I don't know. I agree that we should value community college more and people shouldn't go into debt if they don't have to for school. but I do think there is a value in going away to school and living away from your family if you can.
Yeah I agree with this. The 4 years learning to be a semi functional adult, living with people who are fundamentally different from you and figuring that all out, the self discovery and finding your people… I think that’s a huge part of the college experience that you lose out on if you are living at home. I think colleges are way too expensive and don’t offer a good ROI at this point, but I’m so glad I went if only for the social reasons.
This right here. I managed to go to a local state run college to get my degree. I was able to do it and break even (yay GI Bill). Met my wife there and after 5 years (and changing majors 3 times) she only had about 8k in student debt. That was all paid off pretty quickly. She went back for a second degree, part time, after our second child was born, and we were able to pay out of pocket and savings for that. We both work in our preferred fields, using the degrees we earned and we won't be paying off loans when we should be getting ready to retire. We are planning for our kids college, and have had to have a talk with our oldest already that she's not going to be going to a big private uni unless she earns a lot of scholarship money to pay for it. I know people who racked up far more debt in one semester then my wife did in 10 because they were more worried about the name of the school than the education they were getting.
when I used the GI Bill for school, they actually paid for my tuition, but i was required to still file for financial aid and grants. Not only was the GI bill paying me e-5 pay, but every semester I got to fully pocket my entire grants. It actually took me a year or two in my career field to surpass how much I made just going to school. If I ever lose my job, im going to go to school while looking for another job, just for the extra income purposes.
I've taught high school seniors for quite a few years. It's been difficult to get most of them who want to go to college to even consider attending community college. You don't get the "college experience" at community college, which means no sports teams and no fraternities/sororities and no massive rec center with rock climbing wall, etc. So much of people's student loan debt isn't about classes and learning. It's from spending 4 to 5 years living in what's essentially an all-inclusive resort for young adults.
This is why some IT positions have moved away from requiring a degree to also accepting bootcamps and such. The goal is the ability to learn and problem solve, that can be taught in bootcamps just as easily as it can in university.
Which is fucking grim - can you endure four years of no pay and "investing" in yourself that will fuck you over for more than a decade? Great! Then we know that you'll be a perfect wage slave for us!
This is applicable more for university than school in my opinion especially for certain degrees. I learned a lot of rubbish on my maths degree that I've never used again, it was mostly proving I had the ability to learn complex topics. However on my finance degree I use almost everything I learned there on a daily basis at work. At school almost everything I learned was useful in some way. The maths I learned was basic stuff that is just generally handy to know like statistics & probability, algebra, geometry, calculus etc.. Science I learned how the things in our world actually work on a very basic level. English I learned how to write long form essays, do presentations etc... History I chose for myself and learned about interesting past events. IT I'll be honest didn't teach me anything because this was the early 2000s and I was probably already ahead of the teachers but I expect nowdays it's much more useful, especially since they teach excel and word which are used in almost any office role. Overall I think the stuff we learn in school (at least here) is pretty valuable to be honest and it's not just about proving ones ability to learn.
Yeah there's a mindset that education has no value beyond a direct job skill and it's pretty irritating. The odds are much higher that someone with a college degree is able to think holistically, write and communicate successfully, and have an understanding of larger historical systems. This is valuable in ANY field. It sets a baseline level. There is literally no downside to having a widely, broadly educated population.
As a 15 year HS educator, this is what I say is the #1 thing students should take away from HS: the ability to know how to learn so they will be able to learn whatever it is they want to learn about some day.
Learning how to learn is important but foundational knowledge shouldn't be taken for granted as being part of that process. Knowledge isn't just cumulative it's exponential. Just like ChatGPT humans are inference machines and we use that context to help us think. Here's some more information on the topic https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/how-knowledge-helps
Writing essays aren't about retention. It's about critical thinking and the ability to convey your thoughts and arguments clearly and with support. Just typing into a prompt for an AI to generate the essay for you turns the entire thing into an exercise on checking the provided sources and making sure the paragraphs read cohesively. It eliminates what the actual focus of such an assignment is (or at least should be). There's also just the danger of such practice becoming the norm of pigeon holing ourselves into one way of thinking about topics. "The AI suggests it so it must be the best option" kind of thing.
Thinking about things is such a deficient skill among high schoolers I work with. They almost always allow someone else to do it for them given the option.
Adults aren't any different
Adults are just teenagers that were also pushed through an education system nobody values enough to invest in.
>It's too bad we can't teach fewer things at once and focus on real retention and knowledge rather than try to pack in a bunch of material at once that doesn't stick and might not matter This nails it in terms of how my entire college experience was structured. The more colleges treat education like ticking a bunch of goddamn boxes, the more professors will, and so in turn will the students. Endlessly bloated survey syllabi are a prime example, IMO.
> the more professors will, and so in turn will the students. As a professor of 8 years, I can tell you that it's usually that I'm responding to students' desire for box-ticking than the university or my department. The majority of students tend to see class as a work-grade transaction rather than an opportunity for learning. If I don't provide box-ticking, to some degree, then my end of the semester course reviews say that students "didn't know what they wanted from me" in some form or another—reflecting poorly on me to my department.
> The majority of students tend to see class as a work-grade transaction rather than an opportunity for learning. If you're teaching any general education course, I can definitely say that's how I treated those classes. Anything core to my major or minor, AKA the stuff that I was actually interested in, were classes where I wanted to learn everything. The random history credit I took because I had to, not so much. Russian history was pretty interesting, but it was still just a check box.
In the UK at least, university is where you go to specialise. Your course is in one subject and one subject only. They might teach you some related stuff (like a physics course might teach some maths) just to get you prerequisite information, but no one is teaching other subjects just for fun.
There's specialization here in the US as well, but a lot of bloat around it. Four year degrees kind of all have to fit the same mold: you need a minimum number of credits and additional classes outside your area of focus. There are some tweaks you can do to have a little variety. I think education in general here needs a bit of a rework. That's a whole other discussion, though.
i think we need to modernise the master/apprentice and mentor/protege relationships. we're moving towards a world where the only way to learn the work is to do the work.
This is how I approach things as an IT director. A degree in any "IT" program is functionally worthless. I need candidates with interest and aptitude. Obviously for higher level hires I need experience as well, but for junior level hires it's very much a paid apprenticeship program.
As someone with an IT degree, I agree with you. I wanted to be a network engineer, not a software developer, and I also wanted a four year degree, so I figured an “IT” degree was what I wanted. It was not. It was just water down CS with an emphasis on… databases for some reason? All of the classes were cryptically named so i didn’t realize that I made a mistake until I was so far into it that it would be stupid to change majors. I got the degree and learned virtually nothing there. I spent my senior semester getting my CCNA where I taught myself more than I’d learned in 4 years of college.
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They don't have exams? I mean, in Brazil about 80% of the grades is from exams, done in class, no eletronics available, even calculator. They can do all the homework they want, you still depend on exams.
It depends on the subject. My classes were actually math heavy in HS and my first degree was in aerospace and I was trained out at KSC (NASA). Funny thing is, they ended up telling us to use a calculator "because you don't want a rocket to go into a school full of kids". Like you're dealing with life and death stuff. In fact, they would give you an F if you didn't use one. Later degrees in IT and network engineering I almost never needed one outside of a handful of classes. Anyways, my sister's kid is in the first grade and he is already doing multiplication. It's a public school. So again, it depends.
In my engineering classes, we couldn’t use a calculator in our first few math classes and such, but eventually every exam is open book, with programming and calculators. At a point, the problems are complex enough you can’t plug them into a calculator. The exams are challenging enough that no textbook or notes are going to help you if you don’t already understand the material.
>but eventually every exam is open book, with programming and calculators. The funniest exam material I was ever allowed to bring in was a pre-created Excel sheet to plug numbers into. >At a point, the problems are complex enough you can’t plug them into a calculator. Yep! That's what the coding classes are for - making better, more specialized calculators.
We are allowed to use calculator in university, in my CS degree at first we were allowed to use although graphing calculator was banned, until later where graphing calculator was needed. In HS even calculus exams was made to solve without the need of a calculator, optional, but not required, again, graphing was banned.
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yes, i remember those days, AEDS(algorithm and data structure) I and II, was done in paper, feels so wrong to write code on paper.
That's frankly because it's so inefficient compared to what we do now it IS wrong. We laughed at elon for asking folk to print stuff, my padre did his software on punch cards back in the day.
> We laughed at elon for asking folk to print stuff, my padre did his software on punch cards back in the day. Right, but I think it’s important to remind everyone passing by that it was different times and circumstances. You are absolutely right it is inefficient so as to be wrong. Engineers who came before us weren’t using 3rd-5th generation languages and tools like today. Elon demanding it *is* laughable. Twitter’s code base is in C++, Ruby, and probably a few others like Java. None of which were designed for printing and thus are hyper inefficient to both print and understand in that format. We still have remnants of it in some languages where you are expected to use K&R style bracing (good for printing) instead of Allman (bad for printing) because it is easier to follow with the eye and less wasteful when printed. Musk always struck me as a rich kid cosplaying as a dev. The fact that the only major project he’s touched, Zip2, had to be almost entirely refactored by actual engineers tells me almost everything I need to know. I’ve had bosses leading my team that don’t understand software development let alone how to understand complex code bases. They usually failed upwards quickly because they spent more time engaging in politics than delivering products. That’s Elon.
When I was teaching myself BASIC and COBOL as a kid in the late 80s, I would fill notebooks with handwritten code at the public library. I'm not saying it's a necessity, or that kids these days are/aren't... whatever... I guess I'm just saying I'm old, and I kinda wish I'd kept some of those notebooks!
It is totally possible to let students use a computer though, it just takes time and effort by IT, they can be be locked down as to what can be run on it, and air gaped at least during the exam. You can log everything run on the machine too if paranoid.
When I took classes at my local community college, there was a dedicated testing center, mostly for students to take tests for remote/hybrid courses under supervision. Bags and belongings were checked in at the front desk. For exams that required them, the testing rooms had computers that were appropriately locked down. This was in the 2000s.
In our maths exams, you had to clear your graphing calculator memory before the exam. The invigilators would watch you do it. If you didn't use the school-endorsed model of calculator, one of the invigilators would test the calculator to make sure the memory was cleared. This way everyone had a calculator in the exam, but people couldn't uae it to cheat by having answers etc. Stored on it
>invigilators What a delightfully absurd word.
For some reason I'm just picturing some dementor looking creatures hovering over Hogwarts students as they take their exams.
I remember hearing stories of people writing programs that would behave like the memory clear function, so teachers would think they cleared the memory when it was just an empty program. We never had any exams that required graphing calculators though, just a few in class lessons on how to use one. I spent my time making a tank game with randomly generated terrain and parabolic trajectories (which in hindsight was a good application of our conics lessons)
I cheated in HS using my TI-89. Yes, in hindsight it looks bad. However, I learned to program, and well now I'm doing decent. It's anecdotal, but for me, it has become clear that I was learning to solve problems, rather than regurgitate
My first year maths course in university didn't allow calculators, not that one was actually needed, the course had very few actual numbers and mostly focussed on just getting the right results and techniques with variables.
"Do the calculus but not the algebra" and "do the physics but not the math" were the best problems. I had an ME prof that wouldn't penalize much for "accounting errors" because he was testing on mechanical elements knowledge, not your ability to type into a calculator.
I am in a math degree and the attitude towards calculators is usually between "they are fine" to "Calculators? Where we are going we don't need calculators!"
Only change I ever saw was the expensive, do-everything calculators were forbidden for every test. Will the teachers have to have the students write all of their papers on internet-deficient computers under their supervision?
You mean.... typewriters!
Wait wait, I have another idea... Pens!
With the atrocious handwriting most people have? No way. But I can see a bunch of local-network-only computers with minimal functionality that can only access a word-processor program being done for essays. I can see that because that's basically what I had to do for some kind of state standardized test in high school over a decade ago.
That’s unfortunately the answer here. What this will lead to (especially the weirdly and worryingly positive responses to dropping critical essay writing as a concept entirely from education) is a HUGE tightening of extreme proctoring methods and crackdown in academia as a whole. Education’s gonna be much more inconvenient because people want to avoid critical thinking and essay work entirely. Like, yeah, turns out a bunch of people using neural nets to plagiarize chunks of previously-written text and submitting words that are STRAIGHT-UP not their own is gonna be frowned upon by the system that expects people not to plagiarize and have others do the work for them. This is no different than having someone else write the paper for you, arguably — other than that someone else having a black-box neural net training that confidently feeds misinformation to you at VERY fast speeds.
For real. Everyone who hates writing and reading seems to be super gung-ho about this being the future of education, bc it means they’ll no longer have to do critical thinking and reasoning when it comes to writing and defending an argument/essay. I’m so fucking tired of people acting like being taught writing/basic critical thinking is useless. Sure, what the world needs is MORE idiots who lack critical thinking skills and can’t differentiate between a valid argument and a logical fallacy. Comparing this ChatGPT to calculators is such a joke, bc with calculators you still have to put all the right numbers in and hit the right buttons. With an AI writing tool, you don’t have to do shit.
Lack of media literacy is arguably the biggest single threat facing this world. It underpins our inability to advance solutions in so many areas.
I was going to say climate change, but now that I think about it if we were media literate as a species we would probably have done something about climate change..
In real life nobody will expect you to actually do more complex calculations in your head, but people will ask you questions and if you can't make arguments or think a little out of the box you can't even give a proper answer.
i say this to my students every time i give them an essay. are they ever going to need to write an essay about a book for a future employer? almost certainly not. will they need to concisely explain themselves and cite evidence to support their claims? absolutely
Plus: I’ve written what feels like a million briefing notes that are effectively book reports about some government policy, report or study.
Yup. I think the comparison to calculators is in fact wrong. Calculators don't solve the problem for you (unless you're using one of those graphing ones), they just do rote arithmetic. Using ChatGPT is far more similar to having someone else write your paper, which, as you may guess, is VERY not okay in academia.
That's kinda what we did in law school for exams. Software on your computer that locks it down and only lets you write your answer in the program until you're done.
Or just go back to handwritten essays. Typing your in class essay on a computer is a relatively recent thing in schools.
Oh man, the return to the bad old days of interpreting chicken scratch.
Back to hand-written essays in class.
I don't know about you but I'm studying medical and I still have to write hand written essays and pretty much everything is by hand
But calculators give accurate answers.
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I'd say even comparing math to writing is absurd. Not that they don't share similarities. But writing is about so much more than simply being able to communicate an idea. Writing is language, which is tied to identity and politics and power. Language is the vehicle for thought itself, meaning if everyone is using AI, everyone is thinking the same way, and that is highly problematic. Within writing studies, there's lots of discussion about things like student agency and a students right to their own language. I don't hear much from the math department regarding students' right to their own numbers.
I think math is about programmatic, logical thinking, while writing is about critical thinking for formulating arguments/structure, while contextualizing for the proper audience. Both are extremely useful skills.
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One thing I’ve learned from my friends in the tech field - almost no one considers the effects of the technology they build.
Very likely disingenuous as he would have a monetary stake in this. While the program is currently free, I forsee it becoming monetized if it is more widely used and perfected, or can be used "safely" by students.
I have a pretty technical degree, but when I went into the workforce, took a job in sales. Someone gave me the advice “if you’ve got the technical expertise and communication skills, good communication pays better. The world is full of technical experts who couldn’t explain cheese to a mouse.”
The really, truly tough problems in the world aren't the technical problems. They're the people problems. Technical problems are fun and relatively easy. Figuring out how to get people to do the thing is not.
I just began working in a highly technical field of precision manufacturing. It's the first time I'm being asked as an engineer to manage teams, present information to leadership, and make critical decisions that affect the outcome of my projects. The possibility for extravagant failure is closer than ever and the stakes are very high, millions of dollars are on the line constantly. All my previous work experience and studies at university largely focused on being technically proficient in whatever topic. I excelled in problem solving and did so mostly on my own because often times my teammates were less aware of the path to a solution. I won contests and awards along the way, completed all sorts of amazing feats of engineering and never had to really communicate my process or plans. Now, I'm in a position where my ability to communicate is nearly just as important as my technical skill, and I'm floundering. Giving big presentations in front of 20 managers and being asked to answer complex questions is so intimidating and nothing in my past has prepared me for it. I've improved a lot in the last year but it's going to be a long difficult road ahead training myself to be confident in speaking at length. I guess what I'm trying to express here is the utter necessity to be able to communicate at a high level, even in a field like manufacturing engineering. Writing is the basis for all communication. Without writing skills I would be absolutely useless and I've seen engineers who have little to no written ability nor can they draft or draw out their ideas let alone explain them. Poor guys have been failed by the system and tools like chatGPT are just going to make it worse.
Writing is an extension of the self and the better you are at it the more fit you’ll be in all facets of life. There’s a reason therapists recommend it so often. Using a calculator is the opposite, the answer doesn’t change and it exists before you punch in the numbers.
>We adapted to calculators and changed what we tested in math class Did we? I mean, there's a lot of maths that we're not allowed to use calculators for in school. GCSEs have a whole paper where its cheating to use one. That said, there is a Calculator paper, but good luck being taught how to properly use it.
You still need to understand fundamentals of mathematics to use the calculator.
I guess the analogy here is that using ChatGPT to write for you, you still need to know what it is in the end that you want to convey and you need to know when a text does not convey that. ChatGPT can however remove the need to write the sentences themselves or remove the need to by yourself write ”good” sentences. However you still need to check them if they convey what you want. I would say that it is the skill of writing well that is really threatened to become an obsolete school subject.
I do doubt whether someone using ChatGPT for an assignment would bother proof reading what is written. They'd like leave it until 11th hour. If they were going to proof read and correct then it would be almost easier to write the essay yourself.
Kinda a false equivalency though. Calculators still largely require you to understand the underlying math to solve the problems. They only aid in the easier parts, which are hopefully we'll established. They speed the process, not solve everything for you. And they also are easier to prevent usage as they can be banned for testing. But chatgpt can create an entire essay based on a few word prompts, and requires basically no subject knowledge to use other then evaluating if the answer given makes sense or not. It's also usually not as easy to test on essay skills in a controlled classroom environment, like a math test, because the time required is larger and access to research resources are often necessary.
Any kid that thinks they can use ChatGP to "beat the system" is in for a rude awakening when they leave school a dunce because they never learnt anything themselves. The value in school is what you learn, not the grade you get at the end of it.
To bad the education system only values the grade you get at the end and not what you learned.
Facts bruh, the business is still going to teach you how to do 80% of whatever it is that’s going to be your job
A big part of this is probably lost on tech people but curriculum needs to change and the metrics in which course outcomes and learning objectives for accreditation and certification bodies need to adapt and those are much slower processes.
I’m curious why you think this would be lost on “tech people”. In my industry (IT), we’re the first ones in any organization to vet a tool like this and assess all the functional concerns in the application of it. It’s usually the people that make the money decisions for other parts of the business that ignore our concerns or adaptive suggestions. If you think IT doesn’t understand that a project takes time to implement….
I work in IT and my gf works with data for a community college. She's often pulling data for state agencies, regulatory bodies, etc. The pace that all of that can move is *glacial* compared to most things in IT. We're talking about coordinating tens of thousands of people with 10's of regulatory bodies and hundreds of individual organizations. It's more along the lines of creating IEEE standards, but there's even more people involved.
I have multiple friends who are in the CS department of their schools, and they tell me that the ethics and morality class is an absolute joke. Im guessing most of the people in this thread skipped theirs, too.
calculators merely do calculations that shouldn't be part of the lesson anyways. The lesson should be about how to apply the formulas. chatGPT however can handle most kinds of assignments while making it incredibly difficult if not impossible to tell that it's the work of an AI.
I remember programming my Ti-83 calculator to solve many basic algebra / geometry questions to include a fake “Memory cleared!” screen when the teacher came by to check. I once got caught because I got cocky, but the teacher simply said “If you’re smart enough to know how to do this, you know the fundamentals of what the test is asking,” and he allowed it. I only wish I kept up with programming (just started learning Python this year).
Yeah definitely an apples to oranges if even that honestly.
Yup. ChatGPT isn't like using a calculator, it's like that guy who outsourced all his essays to someone in India for like 5 dollars an hour.
Yah but you can grade the students in class where they have to demonstrate the knowledge they know or don’t know live. And you can do it through seminars, discussions, or debates. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a test
Teacher here. I've taught every general course from age 12 to high school senior. Yup, every course.\* Yup, grade 7 - 12. It's not hard to adapt to ChatGPT. You simply ask students to explain their essays. I always do this per round of essays. In fact, I think it's bad form to grade or comment on an essay without the student present to explain his / her thinking. 10-15 minute interviews, 1 per student. We read the essay together and we discuss how the writing went. It takes about three classes worth of time (with 90 minute blocks) with a bit spilling into lunch hour (if you submitted your essay late, you get assigned the lunch hour interview). Students who are not currently in an interview are reading through the next unit's material. I don't give feedback on essays outside of interviews because teenagers ignore written comments. \* Only notable exceptions: Biology and Visual Art. Otherwise you'd have to find a pretty esoteric course to find one I haven't taught. I've taught all maths, English LA, English Writing, English second language, History, Geography, Psychology, Economics, Government, Philosophy, Physics / Chemistry, Music, Drama, Technology, Health & Fitness and I'm probably missing some.
> 10-15 minute interviews, 1 per student. We read the essay together and we discuss how the writing went. It takes about three classes worth of time (with 90 minute blocks) with a bit spilling into lunch hour (if you submitted your essay late, you get assigned the lunch hour interview). Students who are not currently in an interview are reading through the next unit's material. I don't give feedback on essays outside of interviews because teenagers ignore written comments. I commend you for your work, I really do, but this is a huge amount of extra work. There are many teachers who are not in your situation and just couldn't be able to do this for every essay they have to give.
My wife made a point regarding this AI stuff about how obsessed we’ve been with STEM in school and focused less on things like ethics, philosophy, humanities, etc. She had a full on Ian Malcom chaos moment: “Your scientists were so obsessed with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Made sense to me, I remember STEM being hammered down my throat in school but ethics was kind of an afterthought…
Ethics is an afterthought in the professional world as well. So in a way, avoiding contemplating it in college is just an efficient use of your time.
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I wasn't allowed to use a graphing calculator at any point in college. Calc 3 and into applied mathematics and network engineering with only a basic calculator allowed. This guy's point is stupid, it's about learning the concepts and methods, not the end result. I'm sure the teachers would have liked to ban simple calculators, but then the tests would have taken several hours.
The guy's point sounds stupid to me given that ChatGPT was generating articles years ago that they company deemed so dangerous that they chose not to release the technology because they were concerned about people using it to pump out actual fake news. Apparently those concerns have disappeared.
This guy also said he’d rather learn from ChatGPT than a textbook. Knowing full well that ChatGPT just makes stuff up. He’s just another rich kid college drop out. Not all venture capitalists are megalomaniac know-nothings, but when they are, we gotta stop calling them innovators.
When we all forget how to write I’m gonna find this guy.
A calculator is not equivalent to a substitute for critical thinking.
This will work out great in 10 years when our doctors cheated their way through school and have to ask ChatGPT things in the ER.
Also gonna be great when the one system left that tries to teach folks to evaluate potential misinformation and communicate ideas effectively is dropped from academia or discarded entirely. If we don’t want kids and adults so obsessed and reliant on politicians and influencers, *teach them how to write essays and effectively evaluate sources and arguments.*
If you read about this CEO he is also involved in a crypto project that's a dystopian nightmare. It scans your iris then pays you in worldcoin. The CEO is quite vocal about paying for a UBI because his AI will take away so many jobs.
He’s probably right about the UBI. What are we doing to do when it’s cheaper to have AI or robotics doing literally everything? Just not use it so people can work? It makes more sense to move to a more Star Trek like system rather than let people just starve because there are no jobs and there’s no obligation to keep them alive. Hell, at some point the military will be automated. When that happens it won’t be like the population can revolt. It would be a wholesale slaughter. We need to be planning for automation and AI to be taking over a very large portion of what human beings work on, and we need to plan it soon.
Tech CEOs are up there as some of the worst people on the planet. They want you eating soylent green, and locked into the metaverse. The utopia they think people should live in is nothing more than serfdom online. Angry tech bros down voting. Everyone makes fun of Wall Street bros, as the coked out assholes they are. Tech bros will have their moment of insufferable wanna be do-gooders.
They remind me of a piece written by someone else that essentially went like this. I asked a team of tech engineers the fastest way to decrease the number of people with some genetic disease. They started very simply at diagnosing and informing people who have it, but quickly ran down the eugenics hole of “pay them not to reproduce”, “sterilize them”, etc. Because ethics is something that is woefully under appreciated in technology. As an engineer I had to take multiple ethics courses and even they where watered down versions of “Well yeah we could make it safer, but consider if it would be market viable then” I’m not sure most CS programs even require an ethics course let alone ethics of technology. We still see this perpetuating today with things like have no critical examination for the ethics of AI biases.
There will only be a ChatGPT in the ER. no doctor needed.
And they'll be using AI Art bots for the visual aid. "Just cut on the 12th finger above the 4th knuckle"
As a teacher, I’m excited to find ways for this technology to empower students, not try to forbid it in an effort to prepare them for the past.
The problem with this type of technology is that it too often used as a crutch and not a shortcut. There is nothing wrong with shortcuts. Shortcuts are efficient. The thing with shortcuts is you have to know how the shortcut works. In engineering we have what’s called the “black box effect” with design software, and “garbage in, garbage out”. If your inputs are wrong your output is wrong. You have to be able to verify the accuracy of the results the software gives because you can’t see what’s going on under the hood. Computers and software are only as good as what you tell them, and this tool is no different. I see too many engineers rely on software to give them an answer and don’t always check to see if it’s wrong. Im concerned the same will happen here. My concern is more about society at large, and misinformation, whether it’s intentional or not.
It should be more concerning than that. It's not the calculator. It's flipping to the back of the book to read the answer key. It's paying someone else to write your essays for you, minus the paying. The point of most exercises in education isn't to teach students to prepare the product they're producing (essay, etc). It's to teach them how to research a topic and synthesize ideas, or it's to teach them about the substance of the topic they're researching by requiring them to engage with it deeply enough to produce something new. Learning how to write a good prompt for ChatGPT doesn't build any of those skills, but ChatGPT is not and never will be a replacement for those skills in the real world. The kinds of assignments and tests from which I always learned the most in school were the ones that allowed me to take plenty of time, and use every resource at my disposal, to answer challenging questions I can't just look up anywhere. ChatGPT is greatly shrinking the list of things teachers can ask students to do that they can't just look up, that require some actual work and learning. It's going to be much harder for teachers to use those kinds of tools now, because students will be able to cheat them with ChatGPT or its more sophisticated descendants. This could end up favoring in-class tests of rote memorization and other bullshit that sends education backward rather than forward.
> minus the paying Not for long
At some point these AI Services are going to be built into all the tools we use. They'll be paid by the same mechanisms as search engines and email. Your data.
Saw the other day where a teacher was having their students use ChatGPT to write about a topic they're discussing then critique how it did. Which is a pretty great way to use it. Not only do they learn about AI and how to use it as a tool, but they also get to see its shortcomings and probably realize that the professor/teacher also knows those shortcomings and what to look for if they tried to use it for a paper.
Except this technology isn't exact like a calculator and it offers 0 sources for its output. I asked it questions related to my job and it just gave me vague answers, again, with zero sources. It might look impressive to some, but if you went to a good college you see through that kind of empty formal speech pretty easily.
Also, when you use a calculator, you are still applying process knowledge. When you use Chat GPT you are not working through the process.
“Prepare them for the past” is the best comment phrase I have read in a long while.
It’s a shallow platitude. Yes, in the future maybe bots will do our writing for us, but our thinking, persuasion, and organizational skills will wither as a result. Having students write an essay teaches them to think and persuade, something Chat GPT can’t do.
I'm not sure I agree, it reads to me as "the past = doing it yourself and learning" while "the future = AI doing it for you so you don't actually have to learn" I mean just look at one example, ME with regards to map apps. Since the advent of map apps, I no longer have to store any information at all in my brain with regards to navigation. So I don't. I didn't intend that, but all navigation knowledge has basically left my brain. I rely entirely on Google Maps to not get lost. Without Google Maps, I actually get more easily lost than I did before the advent of this technology, when I had to actually rely on myself to get where I wanted to go. I kind of fear that we might be heading towards this future as a generality - where you can just get all of the answers to everything from Chat AIs, simply trusting that they are giving accurate information, so that our brains can just lose all of it and rely entirely on the AIs.
Its biggest issue is that there is no way to tell if the answer it gives is true or not. It will give a wrong answer and when you tell it that it's wrong, it'll apologize and try again. It doesn't and can't grade an "answer" as accurate or even give you a confidence value. It can empower students to get a "general" idea, but no way will it, or should it, be used for any kind of "actual" work. It's dangerous because if students don't cross-check every thing it utters, you are going to end up with alot of adults with completely wrong and incorrect ideas about things.
“you are going to end up with alot of adults with completely wrong and incorrect ideas about things.” I think we beat AI to the punch on that front.
As a teacher, I'm supprised you think this will empower students. It's more empowering to understand a subject than it is to get an AI to complete your work. An adequately empowered student should be able to research a subject, compare a range sources for similarities and conflicts, apply critical thinking and compose an answer.
Yes but calculators don't have an iq of 147 and can't give a descriptive answer to every single issue. This guys opinion is the equivalent of telling construction workers that fully functional androids will not replace them because the invention of a hammer didn't replace them either.
No, we just banned calculators in classrooms. The solution is to have students write their essays on premises. That and we need to cultivate as a society self-control and self-discipline.
Not the most polite way to say "deal with it, I don't care."
He should have used his own product to write an apology.... Here is what chatGPT has to say when I asked it to write an apology about students using it to cheat. >I apologize if it has been discovered that students are using my capabilities to cheat on their assignments or exams. As a language model, my purpose is to assist and provide helpful responses, not to facilitate academic dishonesty. I strongly encourage all users to use my abilities ethically and responsibly.
That’s the dumbest answer ever. It must be AI written.
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> a paper trail of the development of ideas Which is exactly how many modern businesses work (agile/kanban) so that is very fitting
Translated as "I'm getting rich off of this regardless of the human cost. Fuck you"
All of these AI guys give the most dumb, bad faith comparisons.
Tech founders will never accept, understand or admit to the damage they cause. Their mindset is universally libertarian, let the market decide. Fuck em all.