| > 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. |