[siscia]

I created something similar, but instead of final oral examination, we do homework.

The student is supposed to submit a whole conversation with an LLMs.

The LLM is prompted to answer a question or resolve a problem, and the LLM is there to assist. The LLM is instructed to never reveal the answer.

More interesting is the concept that the whole conversation is available to the instructor for grading. So if the LLMs makes mistake, or give away the solution, or if the student prompt engineer around it. It is all there and the instructor can take the necessary corrective measures.

87% of the students quite liked it, and we are looking forward to doubling the students that will be using it next quarter.

Overall, we are looking for more instructor to use it. So if you are interested in it please get in touch.

More info on: https://llteacher.blogspot.com/

[digiown]

Good that at least you aren't forcing the student to sign up for these very exploitative services.

I'm still somewhat concerned about exposing kids to this level of sycophancy, but I guess it will be done with or without using it in education directly.

[siscia]

The perspective from an educator is quite concerning indeed.

Students are very simply NOT doing the work that is require to learn.

Before LLMs, homeworks were a great way to force students to approach the material. Students did not have any other way to get an answer, so they were forced to study and come up with an answer to the homeworks. They could always copy from classmates, but that was considered quite negatively.

LLMs change this completely. Any kind of homework you could assign undergraduates classes are now completed in less than 1 second, for free, by LLMs.

We start to see PERFECT homeworks submitted by students who could not get a 50% grade in classes. Overall grades went down.

This is a common pattern with all the educators I have been talking with. Not a single one has a different experience.

And, I do understand students. They are busy, they may not feel engaged by all the classes, and LLMs are a way too fast solution for getting homeworks done and free up some time.

But it is not helping them.

Solutions like this are to force students to put the correct amount of work in their education.

And I would love if all of this would not be necessary. But it is.

I come from an engineering school in Europe - we simply did not have homework. We had frontal classes and one big final exams. Courses in which only 10% of the class would pass were not uncommon.

But today education, especially in the US, is different.

This is not forcing student to use LLMs. We are trying to force student to think and do the right thing for them.

And I know it sounds very paternalistic - but if you have better ideas, I am open.

[digiown]

I think it's a mix of a few things:

- The stuff being covered in high school is indeed pretty useless for most people. Not all, but most, and it is not that irrational for many to actually ignore it.

- The reduction in social mobility decreasing the motivation for people to work hard for anything in general, as they get disillusioned.

- The assessment mechanisms being easily gamed through cheating doesn't help.

It's probably time to re-evaluate what's taught in school, and what really matters. I'm not that anti-school but a lot of the homework I've experienced simply did not have to be done in the first place, and LLM is exposing that reality. Switching to in-person oral/written exams and only viewing written works as supplementary, I think, is a fair solution for the time being.