[waffletower]

"Yes, going back to paper and pencil strains our current resources, but is a likely necessity" -- When I reached this sad, arthritic point in the article it was clear that the author has no constructive idea about what happens next in education. There is no critical dialogue regarding assessment and its necessity. There is no critical understanding and projection for what intelligence as a service represents for society. Just a simple monastic shrug and a familiar scent of old world pencil lead.

[FloorEgg]

It frustrates me that your comment is being down voted, because I agree with your sentiment.

Too many educators don't actually know how to educate, and only focus on what to educate.

LLMs are offering some ways to dramatically improve how people learn (and therefore how well they learn, what they learn,etc - to rapidly accelerate and improve outcomes). However most educators, who are ignorant to the principles of how people learn, have no idea how to harness that potential. The result is in most cases students are just using AI to sabotage their own learning, because no better alternative is being offered.

It's a hard problem... But it's a shame that so few people are working constructively and pragmatically on it.

[root_axis]

> LLMs are offering some ways to dramatically improve how people learn

But in practice, they are overwhelmingly having the opposite effect, and if we're realistic about the structural incentives that have no practical path to being changed in higher ed, this will continue to be the case indefinitely.

[FloorEgg]

Yes, it's tragic.

It's as if electricity had the potential to save lives but everyone was just frantically electrocuting themselves.

[waffletower]

I hope some have already thought of this addition to the AI-inundated academic's bag of tricks -- in college and graduate school I was fortunate to have some important one-on-one conversations with professors, guests and peers where I had dialogues which meaningfully stimulated and advanced my thinking in a variety of subjects. It is clear that frontier models can provide similar opportunities on demand in nearly any subject. One assessment could be student sharing of raw chat logs on a course relevant topic where particular questions were engaged and discussed. The focus is not on the prose product, but the development, the grappling and the questions. There is intellectual value here in the depths of the nested questions, corrections, and unique additions made by the student during the exchange. If not a substitute for an essay, it could be required pre-planning for it.