Technology

College professor here. The way I see it, AI is inevitable and it's here to stay. Fighting against AI would be like trying to fight against pocket calculators in the 70s. It's coming whether we like it or not, in class and in the real world; so we need to focus on adjusting the curriculums to work with it, rather than against it.

Right now, a lot of course curriculums are predominantly regurgitation based learning: I'll tell you X, you tell me X but in 3 months. But AI trivializes that way of thinking. If I want to, I can get ChatGPT to generate an entire essay on the impact of ink drying speeds to the colour of grass. Whatever I want, it takes it 10s to write. However, LLMs still struggle with critical thinking, nuances, and originality; which I think is the more important aspect of education.

When schools make the objective of school education then children will prioritize learning the material.

The goal is to keep them in day care while their parents are at work and getting a degree because it's the bare minimum requirement for a shit load of jobs.

Tests and homework can be easily gamed, cheating is literally the smart thing to do if that gets you through it to the degree.

I had a classmate in college who paid his friend to take his finals for him IN PERSON. The classes were so big the teacher didn't know what he looked like. These days he gets 90k/yr reprogramming streetlights.

who could have predicted this???

Literally everyone:

I know the article mentions these, but it's time to bring back oral exams and handwritten-in-class essays

At this point the cat is out of the bag, I'm doing uni currently and have used ai to assist, though I've only used the ai to help me understand topics, or asked it to give me practise questions, never given it an assignment question or asked it to gen my answers for me.

As a sort of personal tutor it can be really great. I was thinking about how you can try to encourage students to use it without cheating, and the only thing that came to me was if the education system maintained its own "virtual tutor" ai, one that was specifically designed to prevent cheating and encourage ethical use.

Not sure though, it's a tough problem to deal with, I guess the other option is just more controlled tests, which no one likes.

Maybe students should be given very locked-down computers. They can run school-approved software and access school-approved websites, nothing else.