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by Royce-CMR 33 days ago
I was home schooled - so my perspective of education is at best, unique. I finished a dual major undergrad at 18, got an MBA at 21.

Based on my own experiences and those of people I’ve watched, I have three points. Sample size of 1 and all that; but it’s a lowkey passion topic for me.

- The argument that AI is “the next calculator” and education testing and overall methods need to adapt, is true.

- The distance between learning concepts to passing memorization tests(or worse, non-reality test specific logic) has grown significantly in my lifetime, and the AI education problems are really a mix of the cascade impacts of this issue + the AI impacts on conventional education measures.

- The problem with students who use AI to get past (often arbitrary) difficult courses or testing scenarios may look like one problem compensating aka solving for another (and I love AI for it!) but the parallel problem of AI (and our education system baseline) enabling students to normalize non-cognitive drone like approaches to any problem is super problematic.

The last point is an admittedly recent eye opening moment for me. Working with younger students recently, they are shocked at anything less than a fully clearly defined problem (education system training) and anytime thinking is required, they go to AI (which is fine!) and they can’t think beyond the AI output (which is super not fine!) The latter has been astonishing for myself and coworkers and really has us reconsidering our young talent programs.

1 comments

I've heard students react this way to seeing problems on exams that are not strictly of the types taught in class or in previously-assigned homework. "It's not fair! The teacher never showed us how to do problems like that!" This kind of thing was expected and assumed when I was in secondary school, that there would be combining of some concepts from the unit into a single problem. Very worried that there's both a cultural change supported by AI tools that will lead to the outsourcing of thought to the AI rather than outsourcing drudgery.
I kind of agree with that perspective, if you're testing them on something in the exam, why isn't the course material teaching it to them? After all you're paying a lot of money for tuition. I went to a good university where the assignments were hard, but as long as you did them the final exam ended up being easy without having to study for them because you already learned everything.

But i also did a semester abroad at a German university and i found there was a different philosophy there where the assignments don't teach you much, and everyone skips class and then studies really hard for the final exam which is often 100% of your grade