Microblog Memes

Something I think you neglect in this comment is that yes, you're using LLMs in a responsible way. However, this doesn't translate well to school. The objective of homework isn't just to reproduce the correct answer. It isn't even to reproduce the steps to the correct answer. It's for you to learn the steps to the correct answer (and possibly the correct answer itself), and the reproduction of those steps is a "proof" to your teacher/professor that you put in the effort to do so. This way you have the foundation to learn other things as they come up in life.

For instance, if I'm in a class learning to read latitude and longitude, the teacher can give me an assignment to find 64° 8′ 55.03″ N, 21° 56′ 8.99″ W on the map and write where it is. If I want, I can just copy-paste that into OpenStreetMap right now and see what horrors await, but to actually learn, I need to manually track down where that is on the map. Because I learned to use latitude and longitude as a kid, I can verify what the computer is telling me, and I can imagine in my head roughly where that coordinate is without a map in front of me.

Learning without cheating lets you develop a good understanding of what you: 1) need to memorize, 2) don't need to memorize because you can reproduce it from other things you know, and 3) should just rely on an outside reference work for whenever you need it.

There's nuance to this, of course. Say, for example, that you cheat to find an answer because you just don't understand the problem, but afterward, you set aside the time to figure out how that answer came about so you can reproduce it yourself. That's still, in my opinion, a robust way to learn. But that kind of learning also requires very strict discipline.

And just as back then, the problem is not with people using something to actually learn and deepen their understanding. It is with people blatantly cheating and knowing nothing because they don’t even read the thing they’re copying down.

To add to this, how you evaluate the students matters as well. If the evaluation can be too easily bypassed by making ChatGPT do it, I would suggest changing the evaluation method.

Imo a good method, although demanding for the tutor, is oral examination (maybe in combination with a written part). It allows you to verify that the student knows the stuff and understood the material. This worked well in my studies (a science degree), not so sure if it works for all degrees?

I might add that a lot of the college experience (particularly pre-med and early med school) is less about education than a kind of academic hazing. Students assigned enormous amounts of debt, crushing volumes of work, and put into pools of students beyond which only X% of the class can move forward on any terms (because the higher tier classes don't have the academic staff / resources to train a full freshman class of aspiring doctors).

When you put a large group of people in a high stakes, high work, high competition environment, some number of people are going to be inclined to cut corners. Weeding out people who "cheat" seems premature if you haven't addressed the large incentives to cheat, first.

While eroding the body of actual practitioners that are necessary to train the thing properly in the first place.

It’s not simply that the bots will take your job. It that was all, I wouldn’t really see that as a problem with AI so much as a problem with using employment to allocate life-sustaining resources.

But if we’re willingly training ourselves to remix old solutions to old problems instead of learning the reasoning behind those solutions, we’ll have a hard time making big, non-incremental changes to form new solutions for new problems.

It’s a really bad strategy for a generation that absolutely must solve climate change or perish.

God I am sick of seeing emdashes but am so glad it helps me filter out aislop on certain subreddits.

One of the worst parts about that policy was that some states had both a "meets standards" and "exceeds standards" results and the high school graduation test was offered five times, starting in sophomore year.

So, you would have students getting "meets standards" on sophomore year and blowing off the test in later attempts because they passed. You would then have school administrators punishing students for doing this since their metrics included the number of students who got "exceeds standards".

AFAIK those only help the instructor with grading as it would put all the essays they need to review on an even (more or less) playing ground. I've never really seen any real use in the professional world outside of scholarly/scientific journals.

My opinion is that they tend to stifle creativity of expression and the evolution of our respective languages.

The Doctor would absolutely agree. He was intended to be a short-term assistant when a doctor wasn't available, and he was personally affronted when he discovered that he wouldn't be replaced by a human in any reasonable amount of time.