Implications of AI to schools

One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment.

Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself? My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. It's a dilemma that an increasing number of honest students will face, unfortunately.

In my CS undergrad I had Doug Lea as a professor, really fantastic professor (best teacher I have ever had, bar none). He had a really novel way to handle homework hand ins, you had to demo the project. So you got him to sit down with you, you ran the code, he would ask you to put some inputs in (that were highly likely to be edge cases to break it). Once that was sufficient, he would ask you how you did different things, and to walk him through your code. Then when you were done he told you to email the code to him, and he would grade it. I am not sure how much of this was an anti-cheating device, but it required that you knew the code you wrote and why you did it for the project.

I think that AI has the possibility of weakening some aspects of education but I agree with Karpathy here. In class work, in person defenses of work, verbal tests. These were corner stones of education for thousands of years and have been cut out over the last 50 years or so outside of a few niche cases (Thesis defense) and it might be a good thing that these come back.

I think legacy schooling just needs to be reworked. Kids should be doing way more projects that demonstrate the integration of knowledge and skills, rather than focusing so much energy on testing and memorization. There's probably a small core of things that really must be fully integrated and memorized, but for everything else you should just give kids harder projects which they're expected to solve by leveraging all the tools at their disposal. Focus on teaching kids how to become high-agency beings with good epistemics and a strong math core. Give them experiments and tools to play around and actually understand how things work. Bring back real chemistry labs and let kids blow stuff up.

The key issue with schools is that they crush your soul and turn you into a low-agency consumer of information within a strict hierarchy of mind-numbing rules, rather than helping you develop your curiosity hunter muscles to go out and explore. In an ideal world, we would have curated gardens of knowledge and information which the kids are encouraged to go out and explore. If they find some weird topic outside the garden that's of interest to them, figure out a way to integrate it.

I don't particularly blame the teachers for the failings of school though, since most of them have their hands tied by strict requirements from faceless bureaucrats.

It's a fair question, but there's maybe a bit of US defaultism baked in? If I look back at my exams in school they were mostly closed-book written + oral examination, nothing would really need to change.

A much bigger question is what to teach assuming we get models much more powerful than those we have today. I'm still confident there's an irreducible hard core in most subjects that's well worth knowing/training, but it might take some soul searching.

As a teacher, I try to keep an open mind, but consistently I can find out in 5 minutes of talking to a student if they understand the material. I might just go all in for the oral exams.

Here is my proposal for AI in schools: raise the bar dramatically. Rather than trying to prevent kids from using AI, just raise the expectations of what they should accomplish with it. They should be setting really lofty goals rather than just doing the same work with less effort.

> The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later.

Learning how to prepare for in-class tests and writing exercises is a very particular skillset which I haven't really exercised a lot since I graduated.

Never mind teaching the humanities, for which I think this is a genuine crisis, in class programming exams are basically the same thing as leetcode job interviews, and we all know what a bad proxy those are for "real" development work.

I made a tool for this! It's an essay writing platform that tracks the edits and keystrokes rather than the final output, so its AI detection accuracy is _much_ higher than other tools: https://collie.ink/

This is exactly why I'm focusing on job readiness and remediation rather than the education system. I think working all this out is simply too complex for a system with a lot of vested interest and that doesn't really understand how AI is evolving. There's an arms race between students, teachers, and institutions that hire the students.

It's simply too complex to fix. I think we'll see increased investment by corporates who do keep hiring on remediating the gaps in their workforce.

Most elite institutions will probably increase their efforts spent on interviewing including work trials. I think we're already seeing this with many of the elite institutions talking about judgment, emotional intelligence critical thinking as more important skills.

My worry is that hiring turns into a test of likeability rather than meritocracy (everyone is a personality hire when cognition is done by the machines)

Source: I'm trying to build a startup (Socratify) a bridge for upskilling from a flawed education system to the workforce for early stage professionals

Having had some experience teaching and designing labs and evaluating students in my opinion there is basically no problem that can't be solved with more instructor work.

The problem is that the structure pushes for teaching productivity which basically directly opposes good pedagogy at this point in the optimization.

Some specifics:

1. Multiple choice sucks. It's obvious that written response better evaluates students and oral is even better. But multiple choice is graded instantly by a computer. Written response needs TAs. Oral is such a time sink and needs so many TAs and lots of space if you want to run them in parallel.

1.5 Similarly having students do things on computers is nice because you don't have to print things and even errors in the question can be fixed live and you can ask students to refresh the page. But if the chatbots let them cheat too easily on computers doing hand written assesments sucks cause you have to go arrange for printing and scanning.

2. Designing labs is a clear LLM tradeoff. Autograded labs with testbenches and fill in the middle style completetions or API completetions are incredibly easy to grade. You just pull the commit before some specific deadline and run some scripts.

You can do 200 students in the background when doing other work its so easy. But the problem is that LLMS are so good at fill in the middle and making testbenches pass.

I've actually tried some more open ended labs before and its actually very impressive how creative students are. They are obviously not LLMs there is this diversity in thought and simplicity of code that you do not get with ChatGPT.

But it is ridiculously time consuming to pull people's code and try to run open ended testbenches that they have created.

3. Having students do class presentations is great for evaluating them. But you can only do like 6 or 7 presentations in a 1 hr block. You will need to spend like a week even in a relatively small class.

4. What I will say LLMs are fun for are having students do open ended projects faster with faster iterations. You can scope creep them if you expect expect to use AI coding.

I think part of the reason AI is having such a negative effect on schools in particular is because of how many education processes are reliant on an archaic, broken way of "learning." So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information (which AI is unmatched at doing).

School is packed with inefficiency and busywork that is completely divorced from the way people learn on their own. In fact, it's pretty safe to say you could learn something about 10x by typing it into an AI chat bot and having it tailor the experience to you.

I did a lot of my blog and book writing before these AI tools, but now I show my readers images of handwritten notes and drafts (more out of interest than demonstrating proof of work).

In other words, learn to use the tool BUT keep your critical thinking. Same with all new technologies.

I'm not minimizing Karpathy in any way, but this is obviously the right way to do this.

It seems like a good path forward is to somewhat try to replicate the idea of "once you can do it yourself, feel free to use it going forward" (knowing how various calculator operations work before you let it do it for you).

I'm curious if we instead gave students an AI tool, but one that would intentionally throw in wrong things that the student had to catch. Instead of the student using LLMs, they would have one paid for by the school.

This is more brainstorming then a well thought-out idea, but I generally think "opposing AI" is doomed to fail. If we follow a montessori approach, kids are naturally inclined to want to learn thing, if students are trying to lie/cheat, we've already failed them by turning off their natural curiosity for something else.

"You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI."

That is just such a wildly cynical point of view, and it is incredibly depressing. There is a whole huge cohort of kids out there who genuinely want to learn and want to do the work, and feel like using AI is cheating. These are the kids who, ironically, AI will help the most, because they're the ones who will understand the fundamentals being taught in K-12.

I would hope that any "solution" to the growing use of AI-as-a-crutch can take this cohort of kids into consideration, so their development isn't held back just to stop the less-ethical student from, well, being less ethical.

This is the correct take. To contrast the Terance Tao piece from earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972), AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. You can't, however, become a Terence Tao by asking AI to solve your homework.

So, in learning environments we might not have an option but to open the floodgates to AI use, but abandon most testing techniques that are not, more or less, pen and paper, in-person. Use AI as much as you want, but know that as a student you'll be answering tests armed only with your brain.

I do pity English teachers that have relied on essays to grade proficiency for hundreds of years. STEM fields has an easier way through this.

I submitted this but why is there an xcancel link added to it?

I recently wrote on something similar. I think the way we design evaluation methods for students needs to mirror the design of security systems. https://kelvinpaschal.com/blog/educators-hackers/

I’ve been following this approach since last school year. I focus on in-class work and home-time is for reading and memorization. My classmates still think classrooms are for lecturing, but it's coming. The paper-and-pen era is back to school!

This couldn’t have happened at a better time. When I was young my parents found a schooling system that had minimal homework so I could play around and live my life. I’ve moved to a country with a lot less flexibility. Now when my kids will soon be going to school, compulsory homework will be obsolete.

Zero homework grades will be ideal. Looking forward to this.

This doesn't adress the point that AI can replace going to school. AI can be your perfect personal tutor to help you learn thing 1:1. Needing to have a teacher and prove to them that you know what they teached will become a legacy concept. That we have an issue of AI cheating at school is in my eyes a temporary issue.