[jakelsaunders94]

This is really interesting. I've been out of education for a long time, but I was wondering how they were dealing with the advent of AI. Are exams still a thing? Do people do coursework now that you can spew out competent sounding stuff in seconds?

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I teach CS at a university in Spain. Most people here are in denial. It is obvious to me that we need to go back to grading based on in-person exams, but in our last university reform (which tried to copy the US/UK in many aspects) there was so much political posturing and indoctrination about exams being evil and coursework having to take the fore that now most people just can't admit the truth before their own eyes. And for those of us that do admit it, we have a limited range of maneuver because grading coursework is often a requirement that emanates from above and we can't fundamentally change it.

So in most courses nothing has changed in the way we grade. Suddenly coursework grades have gone up sharply. Anyone with working neurons know why, but in the best case, nothing of consequence is done. In the worst case (fortunately uncommon), there are people trusting snake oil detectors and probably unfairly failing some students. Oh, and I forgot: there are also some people who are increasing the difficulty of the coursework in line with LLMs. Which I guess more or less makes sense... Except that if a student wants to learn without using them, then they suddenly will find assignments to be out of their league.

So yeah, it's a mess.

[technothrasher]

> Except that if a student wants to learn without using them

My son, who is a freshman at a major university in NYC, when he said to his freshman English professor that he wanted to write his papers without using AI, was told that this was "too advanced for a freshman English class" and that using AI was a requirement.

[senordevnyc]

Now colleges will have to try and detect if you didn't use AI!

[tdeck]

I don't understand what they think it is they're teaching? Will we teach kids to "read" by taking a photo of their bedtime story and hitting a button next?

[Izkata]

I'm afraid you're decades late for something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language

One of the teaching methods is "look at the context, like pictures, and guess what the word is". One example I remember was thinking "pony" is "horse" due to association without being able to sound it out.