logoalt Hacker News

personjerry • today at 10:14 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Like other comments, I can't help feel uncomfortable with the way everything was written defensively, where every example is used to justify the author's actions.

The author concludes near the end:

> That said, I have no judgment to pass on you here.

And follows with this as the very next sentence:

> We are all human beings, we all make poor choices and mistakes in our lives.

Which seems to be clearly judging the students for their "poor choices and mistakes".

I feel the author is out of touch with the students and the times; If so many of them are leveraging AI perhaps the better move is to find ways to align that usage with learning. He quotes:

> "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer"

But if there is such a scenario in a classroom rather than a courtroom, then perhaps the methodologies should be revisited?

It feels like the author is the ACKCHYUALLY meme, striving to prove themselves technically right, rather than empathizing with the students, which I feel shows a lack of maturity for an educator more than 2 decades older than his students.

I understand that education and evaluation is difficult in this AI era, but I can't come to agree with the author's actions or conclusions in this case.


Replies

ndriscoll • today at 10:26 PM

Assuming that the students were using generative AI when told not to...

The way you leverage AI for learning is to do the work yourself and ask it to review and provide feedback, or to ask it to explain some concept, ask it questions to check your understanding, ask it to generate questions for you to answer, etc. If the entire point of the exercise is the exercise, then generating the answer... misses the point.

Like I can easily find online how to encode if statements in the lambda calculus, or how to make a half-adder out of logic gates, or how to prove that bijections are invertible. It's always been cheating to not do it yourself. School intentionally gives you easy problems with known solutions, not open research problems where you should use any and all tools and information you can find.