[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> The primary purpose of an essay is that the act of writing an essay teaches the student critical reasoning and structured thought. Essays would be an effective tool even if they weren't graded at all. Just writing them is most of the value. A big part of the reason they're graded at all is just to force students to actually write them.

That's our problem, I think. Education keeps failing to convince students of the need to be educated.

[Zababa]

I think that students know they need to be educated, but they also know that grading/academic success, in the form of good grades and going to prestigious universities, matters more than actual knowledge in the real world. And the funny thing is that if you teach critical reasoning to someone, there's a good chance they will use that skill to realize that the grade of the essay matters more than the actual process of writing it.

I think companies face a similar problem when they try to introduce metrics to evalute performance, either of individual employees or of whole parts of the company, and people start focusing on gaming these metrics instead of doing what's actually beneficial to the company. One reason for that is probably that it's really hard to evalute what actually beneficiates the company, and what part you played in it.

Back to students, maybe writing that essay instead of asking GPT-3 is more beneficial in the long run, but on the other hand you're also learning to use a new tech that will keep getting better, but maybe you're not learning the "value of hard work correctly", etc etc. Evaluating what's good for you is very hard, focusing on a good grade is easier and has noticable positive results. I think getting educated is very important, but I also think no one can certainly known if learning to use AI is actually a worse thing that doing stuff "yourself".

All in all, it's a very hard problem. It's trying to see the consequences of our own actions in very complex systems. And different people work differently. For example, when I use ChatGPT or Copilot, I end up spending more time overall working, and producing way more stuff even without counting what the AI "produced", because the back and forth between me and the AI is a more natural way of working for me. In the same vein, it's easier for me to write or even think by acting out a conversation. Maybe for some people it's the exact opposite and they need to be alone with their thoughts to be more productive.

[munificent]

Delaying gratification is hard for all of us. We're just primates doing the best we can with our limited wetware.

[hndamien]

Seem like it would be fairly trivial to make a document writer that measured if a human was doing the typing such that it was much more likely to have been written by a human sitting and thinking at a keyboard. We do it in ad fraud detection all the time at scale with much less willing participants.

[BurningFrog]

The value of a degree is very clear.

The value of an education is much less clear.

I'm saying the students are probably right.