[moduspwnens14]

That seems to be a common theme in the responses to me here.

The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades.

Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?

[wvenable]

Teachers aren't dumb here; they know what's going on. And they're actively working to figure out how best to navigate this situation. They're not looking to grade how well ChatGPT does in their course.

[Yoric]

I have many teachers among my friends. So far, they're mostly powerless. If a student is creative, there is basically nothing that will prevent them from cheating at any homework/exam.

My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.

[lukeschlather]

The problem is tests/quizzes and especially standardized ones. They have never been good teaching tools, and teachers have been railroaded into using them because they provide a blunt way to measure outcomes at a population level. But real teaching is 1:1 and teachers have a lot of power, it's just stuff that doesn't scale and you can't mandate organizationally. But this has mostly always been the case. Trying to measure student performance with a student who is more interested in gaming the process than learning is a fools' errand.

[nradov]

Tests/quizzes are good teaching tools. Students learn more effectively when they are frequently tested on the material.

https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/optimal-protocols-for-st...

[macrocosmos]

Students do better on tests the more they’re tested. How was the effectiveness of learning measured?

I’m not doubting your claim but I don’t have time to listen to that podcast and I’m interested in what was said since you did.

[dns_snek]

> Tests/quizzes are good teaching tools.

I skimmed the linked material and that's not my conclusion. Practice tests are better teaching tools than just memorizing the material and then taking a real test, but on an absolute scale, I'm convinced that they're pretty terrible for most types of material.

Throughout my education I've come across countless people who could memorize the material and recite it with relative ease but they didn't have any intuitive understanding so they couldn't use that "knowledge" to solve real problems. Much like ChatGPT itself.

Equating good memorization and recall performance with good education and knowledge seems like a form of cargo culting to me, it's missing the essence of what makes knowledge powerful in the first place.

[foxglacier]

What kind of school did you go to where you needed to memorize things? That's not how schools usually are these days. Tests don't test memorization, they ask you to solve problems.

[nxobject]

Reading the abstracts and introduction of the linked articles: the testing literature focuses on recall performance, no? It's only part of the picture of "learning'. Of course, any good educator will interleave quizzes with integrative projects, chances to review past work, etc.

[Yoric]

That is true, but the problem shows up even with open-ended tests. In my country, we generally don't use tests/quizzes, and nevertheless, every year, many students attempt to cheat – and some of them undoubtedly get away with it.

Regardless, I agree, attempting to assess the progress of a cheater is a fool's errand.

[cma]

Why have grades like this that then still move everyone on to the next class. Don't move on until you've mastered the prerequisite. Why have a track of people making C's moving on from Algebra I to algebra II with the same people making A's. Get to college earlier by mastering, rather than a weird compounding competition that kicks off in middleschool.

Something like that was advocated by the Khan academy guy, but I'm not sure if he worked out a full replacement system. There are some things in the current system like honors classes or retaking the classes for people who got an F, but why have the F ruin their chance at college if they later master it and get an A? If they always lag but eventually get there, I guess an argument is college would be too expensive if it took them a long time to get through it.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Are you suggesting that in general and over the longer term teachers are going to advocate for changing curriculum and grading standards in such a way that students outsourcing their homework to ChatGPT (or whatever popular LLM comes after) would be advantageous in some way?

I would not wish to live in a society where “can bullshit an assignment with ChatGPT” is generally competitive in education.