Instead of banning AI, I made a classroom contract with my students

The older I get the more I realize “moderation in everything” is the key to success and happiness. Moderation in the sense of using or consuming something to only a certain degree.

In this case, education, the answer is in the middle. It’s exploring and utilizing new tools while ensuring the base foundation of education. It’s really simple.

Apply “moderation” to nearly any facet of your life and it’s probably the correct choice. Want to consume alcohol? Moderate consumption. Enjoy TikTok or other video entertainment? Moderation. Work? Don’t destroy yourself, moderate extreme effort.

This isn’t to say don’t follow passions or pursue things to a moderate extreme, just don’t ever let it consume you.

Would love to see the 'contract'

After some debate, we drew a line separating mechanical churning from actual thinking. Automating repetitive tasks or literature searches was acceptable.

Was there any possibility of this not being the case? Rules which are not enforceable do not exist. If it's any part of the process you can't check, students are going to do it in the easiest way possible.

My job is to teach students how to get stronger. Instead of forcing them to stack and rerack their own weights, and instead of using the existing university policy against plagiarism, or the existing social contract. I made them sign an additional set of rules where they promise to only use the magic weight lift button when stacking or reracking. I feel that this middle ground is superior: I'd rather sacrifice the subtle exercise benefits of moving relatively light weight in weird ways; that extremely important toward helping prevent injuries, instead of actually dealing with the desire of students (human nature) to get out of the effort that goes into learning.

I have no idea how accurate, or useful that analogy is, but personal intuition tells me it's really close. I also don't envy teachers. I used to teach, so I do understand the position they feel that they are required to adapt into. However, I prefer CS programs that don't encourage people to tolerate non-determinism, or otherwise unpredictable outputs. They're the source of some of the most intractable bugs, one i doubt the next generation of students will be able to troubleshoot correctly if they never learn to solve beginner level bugs without LLM assistance.

Instruction needs to shift to accommodate AI rather than preventing it from being used to complete assignments and tests.

Assignments and tests were always lossy, and over time more cheating crept in.

Instruction should shift to benchmarking productive output, strategic thinking and group collaboration. Similar to labs where you are tested on completing an experiment or a project with artifacts. Or an MBA program with quarterly group objectives. A major part of the group effort is dealing with collaboration and overcoming obstacles like laggards.

Hopefully people will realize how poor testing is for preparing students for the real world. the ultimate goal is preparing the students for a productive life, most commonly in commercial enterprise, but even academic pursuits require collaboration, productivity and other characteristics that were not well assessed by traditional testing and homework.

I'm glad to see more of this approach to modernizing education. I roll my eyes seeing people argue that we should go back to pen + paper or other weird rose-colored regressive approaches to preventing AI usage. It's part of education now, it's part of work now, and learning environments that don't acknowledge that are going to be dragged kicking and screaming into a future with empty classrooms.

> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely?

Uh, by also avoiding it entirely?

> I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely?

...because I'm that I'm writing this article be a AI himself...