[curun1r]

I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, answers were complex and the only way to know whether you'd done the question correctly was to be sure of your method. They even allowed us to write programs in TI-BASIC that we could use on tests, the only limitation was that we were not allowed to share programs with other students. I discovered that rather than trying to cram for exams, I could just write a program that would solve each class of problem we were likely to see on the exam, and by essentially teaching my calculator to pass the test, I also taught myself. It was a vastly better way for me to study. It also led to my decision to major in comp sci and my career in software. I'm forever grateful to those teachers for choosing to see the latest technology as a multiplier of student potential rather than a way students could cheat to avoid learning.

So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? These tools are not going to cease to exist. The students they are preparing are going to live and work in a world where they exist. To my mind, you best prepare students by teaching them how to use the tools most effectively, not by teaching them how to work without the tools. Students should be learning how to prompt AI without hinting it towards a specific answer. They should be learning how to double check the answers AI gives them to ferret out hallucinations. They should be learning how to produce work that is a hundred times more complex than what us older folks had to do in school. We should be graduating students who are so much more capable than any generation before them. I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations. The world they will inhabit has changed radically from the one we entered into following school.

[PunchyHamster]

> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI?

Because using AI is the complete opposite of "I learned programming just to make tests easier".

By learning how to program solver, you not only learned how to program but also learned the method well enough to write it.

By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it.

You can use AI to get some knowledge about the problem (assuming you won't hit hallucination) but that's not what will happen when you use it for test.

And if you DO want to teach students how to use AI effectively, you can just have an AI class...

[logicchains]

>By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it.

If you got AI to produce a working solution, you solved the problem. In the real world nobody who's paying you cares about the method as long as you deliver results. Students taught to solve easy problems by themselves will be at a big disadvantage in the workforce compared to students taught to solve hard problems using AI.

[bregma]

The part you're missing is that the evaluator already knows the answer. They're not looking that you can arrive at the correct answer, but that you know how to arrive at the correct answer. If "arriving at the correct answer" just means retrieving data from a Baysian database using a Markov chain you have only demonstrated you provide no value in the chain and should indeed get a mark of zero or get recycled.

[logicchains]

>The part you're missing is that the evaluator already knows the answer. They're not looking that you can arrive at the correct answer, but that you know how to arrive at the correct answer.

The university evaluator is not the one paying you, the one paying you is your boss or customer. It doesn't matter how highly your university professor thinks of you, if you can't solve difficult problems as fast because your university never taught you to solve hard problems with AI, you're going to be at a competitive disadvantage in the workforce when you graduate.

[Gander5739]

I don't think the entire purpose of schools is to teach you how to answer some specific set of questions; they want to improve your knowledge and skills in various domains, and the questions are merely a roundabout way to assess that. If you can answer the questions but don't know the knowledge, you're missing the most important part.

[logicchains]

For most students the "purpose" of studying computer science at university is to get a better job and make more money. And for the people for whom this isn't the case, they're generally smart and motivated enough to learn the extra details they're interested in by themselves.

[mistrial9]

that is a trade school.. there is nothing wrong with trade school, but it is not the same thing as a general education.

[chmod775]

There's also no reason to learn to read and write! First graders could just point their phone at some text and have it read to them, or dictate to their phone to achieve the reverse. Why learn to swim, walk, run? Machines can do that for you too!

For now there's plenty of people who are significantly more capable than AI models. Someone who fully outscources to machines will never join that club.

You have to evaluate students on their own skills before you continue their education, because at some point AI models won't be able to help them. Anyone can use some LLM to pass the first few months of undergraduate engineering disciplines, but if you got through that and haven't learned a thing, you're completely fucked. Worse, you won't even notice the point at which AI starts to fail until you get your test results.

Once the above is not true anymore, education is pointless anyways. However for now AI can at best replace the worst performers and only in some areas.

[logicchains]

>You have to evaluate students on their own skills before you continue their education, because at some point AI models won't be able to help them.

If at some point AI models won't be able to help them, then give them assignments that reach the point where AI alone isn't enough, so they'll only be able to solve them if they learn whatever is necessary. This is what's meant by "making assignments harder". Students who learn to solve harder problems with AI will be more competitive in the workforce than students who only learn to solve easier problems by themselves. Because AI already allows people to solve harder problems than they could unassisted, but it's a skill that needs to be learned.

As an example, with AI, it'd be a reasonable assignment to ask students to write a working C compiler from scratch. Without AI that'd be completely beyond the reach of the vast majority of students.

[chmod775]

That's great for autodidacts, but most students will be stumped by a complicated problem if you don't slowly walk them up an incline first.

Also what do you think is an appropriate assignment for first graders where "AI is not enough"? Are we supposed to give them problems meant for engineering majors?

The things you are saying at best apply to a few select areas of education and you are hyperfocusing on them. What you are neglecting is that a lot of education focuses on teaching tool use: reading and writing is a tool, CAD software is a tool, AI is a tool, even language is a tool. For many people the best way to learn to use tools is being taught by another human being. That human being has to evaluate their progress somehow. If a first grader uses their phone to have text read to them, this tells me very little, except maybe that they can at least understand spoken language to a degree.

Using LLMs effectively, especially without essentially becoming the LLMs meat-puppet, requires a set of skills many 10th graders still struggle with. Skills like putting what you mean into words, extracting meaning from text, and thinking critically about the information you are fed.

Finally there's the matter of philosophy, ethics, and politics, which also happen to be on the curriculum in some places. Are you going to let a LLM argue for you? If you have never learned to evaluate your own beliefs and turn them into something coherent that you can communicate to others, and instead let the LLM argue on your behalf, then congratulations: you have just un-personed yourself because you refused to let others help you become an actual individual in society. You're a sack of meat hooked up to a machine. ... It's probably obvious I feel strongly about this in particular.

At the end of the day, we can at least agree that people should learn to read and write? For now?

[justonceokay]

By this logic cheating off another student or calling someone outside the room for answers should also be allowed

[PunchyHamster]

Why would someone hire you if all you have proven is that AI can solve the problem, not you ?

And another question: why you are even at school if all you do is put questions into AI and pass on the answers ?

[cubefox]

> Students taught to solve easy problems by themselves will be at a big disadvantage in the workforce compared to students taught to solve hard problems using AI.

What hard problems could students solve with AI that requires the students to be especially trained? It seems you are thinking of GPT-3 style "prompt engineering". That's a thing of the past. Students can just copy the assignment into the LLM. They don't need to be taught to do that.

[Dumblydorr]

“You” being the operative word in You solved it. Typing a question into AI and having it solve it is not “you” solving it by any stretch.

[sbuttgereit]

There are a number of assumptions in what you say that don't necessarily hold.

1) That school is simply about landing a job.

2) That there is a value in students knowing how to have the AI do problems for them.

3) That follow-on effects of manually solving difficult problems is discountable compared to the direct output of the work.

I would say you're absolutely correct in that people pay for the result and they don't really care how you got there. But that's a pretty shallow rationale which overvalues the ability to be the conduit from the source of requirements to the final output and undervalues the individual ability to think for one's self when faced with the challenges of technological, geopolitical, or simply uncontrolled personal circumstances.

"The conduit", who you seem to be believe is the one with marketplace advantage, is exactly the person I would say is the most vulnerable. Not because getting the AI to produce demands is without value, but that its quickly becoming a task that doesn't need the intermediary at all. Those magicians that can prompt/agent/mcp/etc their way through to positive successes are actively being challenged by the very AI producers which our conduits people now depend on. Removing the need for intermediaries would be a great competitive advantage for any AI vendor able to achieve it. But insofar as intermediaries create output from LLMs, they'll not be very well differentiated: the common wisdom tends to be the output, lest the AI be accused of hallucination or being overly supportive. But when everyone is using AI for everything the opportunities will be in arbitraging that which is missed by common wisdom... filling in the cracks that any responsible AI would simply never venture to consider. Our conduit-person will be at a decided disadvantage because it takes real thought to know when it's best to color within the lines, and when it's best to not do so.

And that's really it. A good education is teaching you about the process of thought and becoming practiced at thinking. I would expect a better educated, thinking person to more easily adapt and make use of technology such as generative AI to solve problems more so than a person that just knows how to deal with today's prompting needs. The thinking person will be able to understand the bigger picture to better get a consistent and high quality series of results than the person just getting results as needed.

And that's really it. The output of a good education is you as a thoughtful & knowledgeable person: the output on the page is merely a means to that end. But if you focus solely on the answer on the page and the only important thing... you're really evaluating the AI, not the person that acted as intermediary.

In otherwords, if the person following your advice comes for a job, simply ask them which AIs they used in the interview and then just sign contracts with those vendors instead... you'll get better bang for your buck cutting out the middleman.

[amtamt]

> Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI?

That is way to high recurring cost that many won't be able to afford. One could get a second hand calculator or even computer, and then additional resources needed was one's willingness. With mandating AI usage, we'd only increase the gap of haves and have-nots. I personally do not like the idea.

[madrox]

This is probably the fairest counter argument I’ve heard. One can hope that today’s AI will eventually be as cheap as a calculator, though.

[amtamt]

I hope so too, however cheap is relative. One's ordinary morning coffee is a full day wage for someone else. If we could have decent models fitting laptops of most students, that would be point where we could possibly treat AI as we treat calculator or computer today.

Just to put things in context, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8444gex65o shares income for a good number of people now a days. (note that many of those workers are taking care of a family of 2+ members, most of the time)

[madrox]

I remember a TI-89 being mandatory for my AP math classes (calculus and statistics). It was utterly essential for solving problems in a reasonable amount of time. There were programs available to assist families who couldn't afford one so their children wouldn't be left behind.

I like to think we'll figure this out.

[encrux]

AI in it‘s current phase, definitely. However, we‘ve been seeing the transformer architecture plateauing in the last couple of years. There are still improvements, but open source models are catching up.

I feel like at this point it’s an inevitability that given enough time, capable models will be cheap enough for everyone.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

If poor students have capable models but rich students have much better models that go the extra mile for a great mark and do everything in a single prompt, it would still be unfair.

For it to be fair, you would not only need good free models, but actual parity between free models and the highest subscription tier the big AI companies can offer. And I don't think that will happen in the short or mid term future.

[madrox]

When I was in AP classes in high school, you were required to have a TI-89 calculator. If you couldn't afford one, there were assistance programs.

You were not allowed to use a TI-92, which was the next step up. It had built-in solvers for many kinds of problems.

I'm not saying this isn't a concern, but addressing financially-based inequities in learning is not a new problem within certain bounds. There's established ways to deal with it. If we can get AI cheap enough that you can cover a year of education with $100 then we're in a good range.

[neal_jones]

That is my hope. At the same time, feels like a peak “don’t know what we don’t know” situation

[oerdier]

A critical difference between a calculator and an LLM is that a calculator doesn't make decisions. A calculator performs the operations you type in, nothing more. An LLM does make decisions. The human operator of the LLM needs to be able to evaluate the decisions made by the LLM. That requires education and experience beforehand.

An LLM is a force multiplier only, not a replacement. It's a personal assistant to an expert. To use an LLM in a acceptable way, you still first have to learn how to do what it does yourself. I think your suggestion for people to be taught how to use LLMs is justified, but they should do so only after first being taught a no-LLM curriculum. I think this should be entirely after what the notion of an education was in pre-LLM times. Don't incorporate LLMs into our current education, instead teach use of LLMs after our current education.

[vincnetas]

continuing on personal asistant analogy, i bet even now we have ultra rich people who are not smart enough to do things themselves but are smart enough to buy (hire) smart people to work for them. And even allow them to make decisions without understanding them. But with only a guard rails : does this produce wealth for me. If yes, do what you need, i don't care :)

So this i think is applicable to AI also, pay for smarter than you AI's pit them against each other, let them supervise each other and measure the outcomes you need. Who cares how they achieve that (sound clinical and scary)

[oerdier]

It has gone well enough for these rich people because their hired assistants were human. With humans there is some degree of responsibility, liability and a slow tempo (= time to correct) involved. LLMs are a significantly different beast.

[prox]

The post yesterday about the teacher who gave students an Apple II and taught assembly was very enlightening and example of how to go forward.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI?

It's an interesting debate, but I see several reasons not to.

1. As a human you need to learn gradually, e.g. in CS you need to learn the basics of programming before going into more complex stuff. If you embrace AI from the beginning, it can let you skip the basics (why would you code a simple 200-line program if the LLM can do it?) and then you don't have the fundamentals when you reach the more complex level where human thought is needed. It's a similar problem as firing the juniors (because AI can do their work) but then who will become senior if you have no juniors.

2. If you evaluate coursework with the expectation of students using AI, those who pay the $200 subscription will have an advantage over those who pay $20, and in turn over those who use free LLMs. The only way to make it fair would be to provide all students with the best available LLM.

3. While I have heard the analogy with calculators many times, I feel that LLMs are at a different qualitative level. The calculator doesn't really replace human thought, or if it does, it's only some very specific form of it. LLMs replace human thought in a very broad way, so I think they are much more dangerous for learning.

[bendergarcia]

I agree with all these points. The algorithm to multiplying being done by the calculator, is not the same because you still have to learn why you are multiplying. If you rely on ai you may not know why the ai is giving the answer. All you’ve learned is copy paste. Figuring out how someone can use ai and give the wrong answer will solve the a huge problem. But it feels quite difficult at the time being. Ai is so general it’s hard to think of how to pose the question in a way that ai can’t answer. Maybe submitting prompts and judging prompts that bypass understanding. What if the test was more how to teach the ai? Meh ai in education is filled with gotchas.

[curun1r]

The issue I have is that people are still trying to shove AI into a pre-AI educational paradigm. And yes, if you introduce AI into a world where people are still trying to teach kids the way that they were taught in the 20th century, AI looks like a threat because it allows kids to cheat, both testing and themselves. But we have the option to stop trying to teach kids the way that they were taught in the 20th century, which I think people here are fundamentally not understanding.

It's an old book now, but Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age includes the vision that we should have for education. We literally have the tools today to build his fictional "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer." What he envisioned was not that far off from an iPad with a Claude subscription where Claude has specific goals for the conversation. It's not teachers lecturing a class, it's individualized education where an AI teaches students at their own pace using their own interests. And built into AI is the ability for precocious kids to go beyond the curriculum, either on tangents or to more advanced subjects. This is impossible in a world where a teacher is trying to shepherd dozens of students through a curriculum as a group.

In the 2010s, we got some of the way there with Khan Academy. It was genuinely new that a student could rewatch something until it clicked rather than having to digest a lecture and have any question that didn't immediately spring to mind go unanswered. AI offers the possibility to go a step beyond this. Instead of rewatching the exact same content, AI can present it to the student in multiple ways based on a student's confusion and keep explaining it until a topic clicks. It can find examples of things that a student finds interesting to show how what they're learning isn't just theoretical. If a student likes space, the AI can discuss how the trig concepts they're learning apply to the Artemis II mission. If they like sports, it could apply the same concepts to tennis. Students in literary classes could read different books according to their interests while AI ensures that they understand the same sorts of concepts while discussing them. By customizing based on the specific curiosity of the student, it can make learning far more engaging and actually fun.

To address your #2, schools should be working with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to shape a new personalized paradigm of educating students. They should be working out deals that give access to AI to their entire district. If I were heading the Department of Education, I would go a step further and get companies to bid on a contract to put their AI in the hands of every public school child in America. A version of the AI where teachers input their curriculum into the AI and students work through it with the AI, either alone or in small groups and the AI reports back to teachers so they can intervene where they are most needed would allow school districts with staffing shortages to serve more students more efficiently and with better results.

Sometimes it feels like our current system of education is only secondarily concerned with students actually learning and the primary concern is testing students to sort them into different tiers to be absorbed into different strata of our workforce. AI does compromise this sorting process to some extent. But if we can get back to the true mission of education and think creatively to deploy AI to best educate students, we have the potential to transform education like never before. What if we don't need to test students? An AI can give an individualized assessment of how well a student has grasped what they're supposed to be learning based on weeks of individualized work. It's as if we can give every student their own private tutor who will report back to the teacher on the student's actual progress. When you have that, stress-inducing exams are a ridiculous substitute.

I've been pretty shocked at how closed-minded the responses to my comment have been. We're supposed to be a community that envisions radically better futures that can be built with technology. And here we have a revolutionary new technology that upends a staid and increasingly problematic part of our society and the majority of the responses are geared towards explaining why that staid and problematic institution should be maintained unchanged. AI is fundamentally a danger to our current education model, but that model can change radically for the better. And I would've hoped that more people here would have recognized that.

[RugnirViking]

Have you tried to learn a new topic with ai? Not like, learn the answer to a fleeting question. An actual large topic one might take even a short course on.

I say because most of the experiments I have seen in this space have failed. Chatgpt education was quietly removed not that long ago. Khan academy recently said that their Khanmigo AI tutor was facing challenges because students don't want to use it. Its a long-standing observation in the field of education that the miracle of the internet, computers being ubiqutous, phones etc hasn't clearly resulted in improvements to education (theres some minor evidence for or against it, but no blindingly obvious effect)

I worked at one point in ed-tech and the longer I was there the more I realised that nobody wanted this. Students only used it if they were made to, teachers only did it if admins wanted, admins only did it if they were sold on it, and the sales people seemed to be the only people who actually thought it was helping anyone

People often seem to think that teaching is the process of neutrally presenting facts to a learner. That the better and more clear the facts are presented, the better. But any book can do that. The entire business of education, as it were, is the management of motivation in students. Exams function just as much as a tool in this as the institution of coming to a classroom at all, rather than sitting at home remote learning. You need a clear mind, distraction free - just bored enough to find the content acceptably appealing (content cannot be made more interesting).

The best things for education seem to be:

- getting enough sleep

- getting a good diet

- good exercise

- being around other people you respect who are also learning the content

- being around other people you respect who have already learned the content, and who you want to emulate

- having someone who visibly cares if you learn the content or not, who expresses and reinforces that they expect you to learn it. (both "you need to focus, stop messing around" but also "you are capable of this, its hard but I know you personally can do it")

- having a good reason to want to learn the content

- having time pressure to learn the content

note that literally none of this regards the actual presentation of the content. Books have existed for centuries. A well motivated learner with all of the above will find the content. That is in no way the problem

An argument might be "but why, given all of this, are teachers actually teaching, why arent they standing up and lecturing soley about the importance of learning the content" and to some extent thats fair (although lecturing does satisfy some of the above if you think about it), but they ALSO tend to assign reading, link to further resources etc. Probably half or more of teachers speaking time is given over to procedural stuff working towards the above goals. Explaining the process of upcoming exams, worksheets, homeworks that need to be done (time pressure), demonstrating their love and knowledge of the subject (people you respect who know the content), building rapport with students (people you respect), holding people to account/motivating, explaining why the content is important, and trying to build good habits in their students (organising study groups, project work, dealing with problems and creating distraction free conditions)

AI are a poor facsimile of the above. Though they may try to replicate it, their inherent lack of physicality and humanity makes much of the power lose its effect. I dont care if a chatbot is disappointed in me. I'm not inspired by a chatbot that claims enthusiasm about a subject. I don't care if a chatbot tells me I absolutely must do this by next week else ill be left behind (behind who?).

[muzzleflash]

I think the controversial part about AI is far above the "it is a new technology so use it".

When the scientific calculator was invented, people could easily know what went into its production. As in what circuitry appears in them. You knew that if you bought it, it is yours. Want to program it? Grab a book and do this. The whole package would be a fixed price. You are in control. With AI? You are not at all in control. You rely on a big tech giant (or just like 4 useful ones) who is riding what people controversially still call an economic disaster. You are relying on a technology that is designed to very likely bait-and-switch you. As soon as you get too comfortable with AI, the big tech companies can just bump the prices up and you will not be able to say no. You rely on a technology that you do not control.

The comparison of AI to a calculator or any other technological advancement for students is apples and oranges for that reason.

Imagine giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them. This may be more of a fair comparison.

PS Training students on using AI, especially for free, is setting them up for reliance on the big tech companies and the subscription model.

[mquander]

Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute to download and operate exactly that for free, with performance perhaps a year behind the state of the art.

[latexr]

> but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute

Even if we assume that to be true, you severely underestimate how many people that condition excludes.

[zozbot234]

There are simpler LLMs that run on much cheaper devices and are still helpful for baseline tasks. Of course they are prone to hallucinating once they reach the limits of their world knowledge, but this also changes their effectiveness in an educational context: they can help you polish a paper (much of their reliable knowledge is about language, syntax and style/pragmatics of the input texts), but you still have to plan the writing on your own.

[muzzleflash]

Maybe teaching students to take their whatever devices to run AI is the way, sure. All I tried to say is if we're teaching students to think independently, we should teach them independent tools.

[mquander]

It doesn't exclude people who attend high schools and colleges that have a computer lab.

[mschuster91]

That however requires significant investments - either each computer gets a powerful GPU for local inference (which cost a fortune) or the school gets a rack worth of compute. Most schools however even struggle to get their children fed.

Another issue is that it forces kids to stay in school for longer to do their homework, which can be a serious problem in rural areas where public transport is limited, so parents are forced to fetch their kids from school which may not be compatible with working hours.

[spaqin]

Replace "using AI" with "asking your parents". From a student's perspective, their parents are probably an expert in anything, but sometimes might make things up and they won't be any wiser to notice, because they don't yet have the basic knowledge to know what to double check for. Just like LLMs.

Why doesn't the essay class allow us asking your parents to write it for them? The art class, why not ask your parents to paint something for you? Geography, why not let ask your parents during a test?

[ZiiS]

The difference is you learned useful maths teaching your calculator. At the moment a teacher can't tell if you even read the LLM output. Even if all future literature is writen with an LLM it is highly likely the are skills you need to learn to become a best selling author.

[yorwba]

So, scientific calculators

- made tasks easy that were a necessary prerequisite for advanced math (basic arithmetic), but not what the lesson was supposed to be about

- could in theory also let students skip over what they were supposed to be learning (applying the correct operations in the correct order to solve a problem) but doing so would require programming or getting a program from someone else, which the teachers probably figured was a high-enough hurdle to accept the risk

Hence, scientific calculators helped teachers by removing unnecessary friction.

Meanwhile, current LLMs

- will happily attempt to do the student's entire homework for them

- cannot reliably be restricted in functionality to leave the part the students are supposed to do themselves to the student

Hence, LLMs undermine teachers by removing necessary effort.

Sure, in theory LLMs could enable even more focused lessons by removing even bigger unnecessary frictions (e.g. in history class, have a LLM scour a large collection of primary sources to exhaustively list passages mentioning a certain topic), but students cannot be trusted to use them this way.

Hence, teachers are trying to use all kinds of tricks to ensure that what they wanted to teach actually passed through the student's brain at some point.

[zozbot234]

> - cannot reliably be restricted in functionality to leave the part the students are supposed to do themselves to the student

Small local LLMs are essentially that. If an LLM can tell you to eat rocks as a tasty snack or use glue to make the cheese stick to your pizza, imagine what it says when you ask it to analyze/explain complex academic subjects, or solve fiddly problems. But it will still reliably help you polish your language, like a subject-specific dictionary/thesaurus.

[yorwba]

Small LLMs are certainly restricted, but they're not reliably restricted in a way that aligns with educational goals. Even Qwen3.5-0.8B, the smallest, dumbest LLM I have lying around, can solve quadratic equations. In math class, learning about quadratic equations for the first time, such helpfulness defeats the purpose. In physics, learning about ballistic trajectories, it might be acceptable, as long as the students themselves come up with the correct equation to model the problem, and do the reasoning to identify which of the two theoretical solutions corresponds to the physical setup.

A single model that can do many things, some less reliably than others, independently of what the requirements for the lesson are, is not a good tool to give students. You would need something that can do ancillary tasks perfectly, but won't do the part student are supposed to practice doing themselves. And what exactly that is changes with every exercise.

If you want to give students access to thesaurus functionality and nothing else, you're better off with a thesaurus.

[PunchyHamster]

Homework is waste of time for everyone involved tho

[qwedaH]

Because AI is different from calculators. People stop thinking and just excel at verbose and incomplete rationalizations of every evil, just like you do in your reply.

[fho]

Yeah... We had those bulky TI Voyage 200 graphical calculators in school [1]. They could do everything the teachers could throw at us up to the point of having all but a few formulas build in.

I would say that definitely shaped me in a way where I rarely bother with the underlying details and tend to focus on how high level abstractions interact. [2]

[1] German "Mathe-LK", we could chose specializing in two things, for me it was math and computer science, the later being quite novel back in 2003. [2] I _do_ tend to specialize in things, but e.g. for LLMs or GLMMs, while I do have the capability to understand the technical details, I just don't bother.

[latexr]

At this stage, I can no longer take comparing LLMs to calculators as a good faith argument. That’s a talking point, a framing device, one whose flaws have been explained ad nauseam (as exemplified by the sibling replies), and I’m left questioning either the reasoning abilities or the honesty of those still making it.

They. Are not. The same.

Have you ever known people to commit suicide, kill, or give themselves rare diseases because of their calculators? How about people dating their calculator and going batshit for a software update?

Not to mention learning to do on your own is a useful skill to teach you to think, and an essential skill to (as you suggest) verify answers. People not understanding how things work is exactly why they take bullshit output from an LLM as gospel.

I also note that such arguments tend to be profoundly selfish and self-centred. Your anecdote happened to have an outcome you enjoyed and benefitted from, but I bet that wasn’t the reality for all your colleagues. Just like you are glad for the calculators in your class, some other student may be glad for the lack of them in theirs and it may be the reason they got into their field of study.

[rwmj]

We weren't allowed to use calculators until aged 16 and I'm glad because I learned to do mental arithmetic. Many people I know, even in STEM, aren't able to do that, or lack a feel for numbers.

[galkk]

It was good for you but you don’t address reality of life.

Here’s one possible scenario: After graduation, you (or somebody else) shares the program with friend, with a promise to not to share further. Soon enough, it’s on everybody’s calculator. What did real educational thing for you, is just cheat where one needs to press the right buttons and get the right answer. This completely destroys the educational purpose, but significant amount of people just don’t care and want to get a pass.

Yes, there always is a counter weapon by teachers: for example, to point to random line and ask to explain and whatever, but this is not (always) scalable.

I’ve seen this in reality in college, when there was a cs/database course final project implementation, written in Delphi (very popular at a time in xussr), that was passed from year to year, that the professors and ta were so fed up, that I got almost auto pass because I wrote mine in C++…

——

To summarize - the overinreasing amount of pure slop is seen everywhere. Regular multi-thousand line prs where author didn’t even bother to look into code, written by ai. Just prompt -> commit, push, or. Nobody wants to deal with that

Same is happening here - u it’s not to punish people who use tool in proper context, it’s to filter out people who just don’t give a fuck.

[intended]

The calculator analogy comes up very often, and it’s a good one because it also illustrates where AI diverges.

The other analogy is taking a forklift to the gym. Sure you lift weights, but you don’t really do any exercise to develop your own muscles.

AI automates a significant chunk of the exercises. So you are left with people who didn’t build any mental muscles.

This would be bad enough, but it’s worse because AI severely benefits experts who have build mental reflexes/taste and can judge / verify output with minimum information.

[binarypixel]

Interesting thought! I wonder what kind of assignments, etc. would require AI that would still allow assessing how the student has absorbed the knowledge. Maybe the assignment would require sending in the prompts and the whole conversation how the problem was approached and solved?

With the calculator analogy, I think that the calculator automates executing certain algorithms (like multiplication, etc.), but using AI takes away some (most?) of the thinking.

[exceptione]

Bad idea. This is pretty much endgame territory you are talking about.

You would give the brains of the younger generation to American tech oligarchy, a class of people openly hostile to the principles of the democratic rule of law. If you want to see the damage actors like Fox News et alii alone can do, just take a look around in the US. Now imagine them taking over the parenting and teaching role; you wouldn't need gerrymandering if you can control people's beliefs.

[sdevonoes]

There’s one significant difference between: typewriters and calculators are a one-time-paymeny device. LLMs are subscription based baked by billionaire companies. That alone leaves LLMs in a bad enough place

[fph]

You have a point, but it is very ironic that this sounds a lot like the old argument "you must still learn to compute by hand because you won't have a calculator with you all the time".

[Cthulhu_]

Just like computers in schools nowadays, I will concede that part of the education should be about learning how to use AI - but they should also learn how to do research and accomplish things without the help of AI.

[lpcvoid]

>why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI?

Because this makes a subscription a requirement for education, and thus advances the grift that is subscriptions, rent-seeking and dependence on a service. This isn't something we should ingrain into our children from an early age.

Calculators were buy once, use forever. Subscriptions to slop generators are a long term dependency and I want my children to not be exposed to that until they can decide for themselves.

[ilovecake1984]

In the Uk we have two exam papers that make up the age 16 mathematics exam. In one you use a calculator and one your don’t.

You need to be able to do both things. We don’t need to make it a choice.

[shagie]

> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI?

Back in college, my assembly class was in MIPS (incidentally taught by Professor Larus of SPIM fame). I remember slogging through writing the assembly to compute factorial and saving registers and then dealing the frame pointer and the stack pointer.

One of the other students had access to a DecStation, wrote the program in C, and ran gcc -S to get the MIPS assembly from it. However, the compiler realized the for loop (and tail call) optimizations and instead of making it a recursive function (and help us practice and understand $fp) write it with a jump instruction instead.

Aside from getting a 0 on that homework, they struggled with the next assignment that presupposed understanding of how write function calls.

---

You could argue that learning C makes needing to learn assembly irrelevant (and MIPS is even less relevant today than back in the 90s). But for learning in school, it's not about the assignment but rather the journey that one takes to get to that assignment and learn from it.

Being able to check the answers that are provided to someone requires the understanding of what goes before and beneath the answer itself.

Writing the assignment in C when you're learning the before and beneath of "this is how assembly works" means that when you later take the complier class you won't be able to debug if your code generation is incorrect.

Working with an AI as the primary tool for learning problem solving keeps the person at the higher level. There is some foundational level that a person needs to learn without relying on an AI to do it for them.

The AI and other abstractions of the underlying problem do allow us to work with more complex problems. Would you trust a bridge built by an engineer who built it with AI and didn't understand the underlying math and physics themselves?

This is especially at issue in college where some students are taking classes to get the requirement out of the way, some are taking classes for that directly - an accountant is taking the math class to do math with the numbers, while the engineer is taking the math as a prerequisite for physics which is a prerequisite for a material science class which is a perquisite for a soil mechanics class.

If you don't understand the various foundational levels without using AI then trying to identify where the AI (or any other tool) got it wrong isn't something that you're necessarily able to do.

[ksenzee]

There's a big difference between learning to program a calculator, which is deterministic, and "learning" to prompt an LLM-based AI service that is tuned deliberately to be non-deterministic and that changes every few months. I would prefer my kids learn things like thinking critically and communicating and logic, not spend their time "chatting" with an unpredictable oracle.

[mold_aid]

It's not a bad point, but the "calculator" metaphor is not the best one. First, schools don't create schoolwork. Teachers in different disciplines do. Second, calculators aren't in pervasive use across disciplines; AI products are. Third, schools provide these AI products for free - teachers don't. So a student in a psych methods class uses a free tier to create lit reviews, or whatever. The asymmetry there creates a problem for most assessments of skill, because students want expediency, and teachers assess skills and memory.

Finally, nobody seems to know what teachers are actually discussing. To your assertion:

>So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI?

Many teachers do create schoolwork that requires AI. Many teachers ban it. Everybody's trying to work out policy (to the detriment of other policy discussions, particularly the new ADA landscape). Many ED departments are captured by AI vendors - AI is a normal technological competency for ED majors at different levels. It's not that the discussion is not "are students going to work with AI?" The discussion is "how do we teach?" which is what the discussion always is.

But policy is a part of that. Admin will have guidance and policy statements, and each instructor will as well. Students, who get thrown off balance if they have two teachers with different nav bars in the CMS, want clarity of policy: can I use it? is a different question than should I use it? But "should I use it?" is the much more relevant question for instructors. The instructors passed through the 90s/00s/10s blissfully unaware of anything that was happening in these fields.

>These tools are not going to cease to exist.

Which tools, precisely? Because I'd assert your 200-dollar-or-whatever tier that runs out of tokens on Monday does not functionally exist for most students. I don't know what happens at MIT but Penn State satellite campus students aren't whipping up agentic solutions to "I have a summer online course with discussion boards." They're just plugging that shit into whatever chatbot they have on their phone. Honestly, most online courses aren't even worth that effort, but: different discussion.

The only reason there is pervasive student use is because someone made it free. The CoPilot window that comes with the basic tier of 365 and all the other in-app copilots are what my students have; the Google Docs stuff exists, and the Grammarly stuff exists, and the best way to "ban" it (which is just fine as an approach) is to make it even slightly more expensive. If someone does that, yeah, I think some of these products might cease to exist.

>I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations

Students graduate into a world where all kinds of stuff is going on and all sorts of ideological forces shape what they encounter in schools. "AI" more a dominant element in that force than the calculator was because calculators didn't have hundreds of billions of dollars of investments, and I'm not sure I ever knew what the prevailing political project of Texas Instruments was. Maybe TI's CEO had a manifesto; tbf, I do remember IBM's corporate culture being strong enough to drive cultural change. But it would be naive to not recognize that these products are made by people antagonistic to the idea of education as a compulsory and public good.

[mystraline]

> The only reason there is pervasive student use is because someone made it free. The CoPilot window that comes with the basic tier of 365 and all the other in-app copilots are what my students have; the Google Docs stuff exists, and the Grammarly stuff exists, and the best way to "ban" it (which is just fine as an approach) is to make it even slightly more expensive. If someone does that, yeah, I think some of these products might cease to exist.

So the solution is raise cost, thus making the richies have access but the poors not to?

I guess thats one way to academically bin students; just put yet another financial gatekeeping to the academic process?

[mold_aid]

Bit silly to read that as a "solution." Financial gatekeeping? Unis don't set costs for AI products.

>thus making the richies have access but the poors not to?

I don't know that you need "thus" to describe the status quo. My school has tiny little Dells that are ten years old inside our Prometheus units. You think we're gonna upgrade each unit in the school with costs as they are, or do you think MS is just going to suddenly "provide" a cloud computing solution?

[shmichael]

Imagine military instructors would say that it's important to focus on cavalry and bayonette use just because they can't figure out how to adapt their curriculum to the new reality.

World war I was very much that.