[yavor-atanasov]

This thread made me think of education (as in schools). To paraphrase:

“Don’t post generated/AI-edited assignments. School is for conversation between humans”

AI can be a great tool for learning, but also can pollute or completely hijack the medium for human interaction and learning.

Having HN flooded with AI generated content will be sad as I like reading it, but losing that same fight at schools will be detrimental.

[chid]

I haven't heard of any recent discussion on the impact of AI on schooling. I agree with you entirely but curious to read any recent thinking on this.

[eptcyka]

It is horrendous - it seems that oral verification is required to test pupils skills - this does not scale. People not using LLMs to finish assignments are getting penalized by lower grades, people using llms to finish assignmnets learn nothing.

[lucumo]

Why would oral verification be needed? Hand-written answers on paper in a proctored classroom should still work fine. That was the way most verification worked when I was in school, and still is the most used verification method used currently around me.

Homework assignments are harder, but those were always a bit difficult for teachers. It's not like cheating was invented by Gen Z...

[yavor-atanasov]

Gen Z definitely didn’t invent cheating, but LLMs brought qualitative difference and scale. That changes the properties of the system.

During my university most courses had a good mixture of take-home assignments/projects and in-class exams. Yes, people could always cheat either through plagiarism (usually easily caught) or at the extreme by getting someone else to do the work (which I have never personally seen).

Anecdotal data around me shows:

* outright paper/assignment generation via LLM

* using chatGPT as a “professor” proofreading and polishing course work before submission (arguably good use but depends on the personal effort)

* avoiding reading by asking chatGPT for summaries

* using chatGPT to help explain various concepts (this is a good example of using LLMs as a source for learning…accepting that occasionally they can lie)

In a small classroom where a good teacher-student interaction happens, I guess it’s easier to catch people cheating. But some universities (maybe most) have massive classes where a professor may never have an actual conversation with some students. That context makes cheating harder to detect.

I accept my outlook on this may be a bit bleaker (hopefully), but saying it’s business as usual is at the other extreme.

[lucumo]

My college classes usually had one offline written test per quarter, and about half the classes had an assignment with them. I can see how those would be easier to cheat on now, though they were already hardly cheat-free. (Not just plagiarism, also free-riding on group assignments for example.) The written examinations carried the heaviest load precisely because of that.

Offline written tests solve the issue quite well. They scale well too. At least as far as assignments do.

People saying that oral examinations are the last bastion of cheat-free examinations are really over-stating the case.

> But some universities (maybe most) have massive classes where a professor may never have an actual conversation with some students.

Probably most yeah. At least it was my experience.