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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

I've said it in another thread, but if you have to ban a tool to preserve the value of some course or examination then it's likely they have little to no value in the real world.

In most cases the courses are fine, but the examination probably isn't testing anything useful if it can be cheated with tools like ChatGPT. For example any maths test which only tests students on problems which are easily solvable by a calculator isn't testing any skill of real world use. But this doesn't mean maths itself isn't valuable, just that the test isn't.

In some cases like programmers and writers, ChatGPT might actually be eroding the value the current curriculum. For example, I'm not sure if there's much value in learning things like basic SQL queries anymore which was something I had to learn when studying computer science. ChatGPT is great at writing SQL queries if you're able to tell it exactly what you need.

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> I'm not sure if there's much value in learning things like basic SQL queries anymore which was something I had to learn when studying computer science.

I really disagree, a major function of education is to teach concepts before introducing tools. I took a physics class in undergrad that required a graphing calculator, does that mean I wasted years learning all of the mathematical concepts that could be performed by a graphing calculator?

Having an understanding of what's going on is so important, especially when something is broken. If we encourage students to start with AI and not learn the fundamentals themselves, they won't wind up learning how to identify root cause when the tool causes an issue (and ChatGPT is by no means perfect).

Obviously it's nonsensical to say students should have access to all tools. In the real world every single idea and fact is easily look up able, but by teaching students to derive known facts gives them the skills to eventually derive unknown facts in the future. But most people have a super neoliberal view of education and pretty much want every American student to be an idiot who just can't think

If a student can look up anything on ChatGPT it could very well inhibit their ability to develop critical thinking skills. They could just copy the output of ChatGPT rather than actually engaging with a text like Of Mice and Men, for example, and considering what it's trying to say about the American dream or interpersonal connections. Lots of learning exercises are relatively meaningless in isolation but are a part of a greater skill development journey. It's like just taking the answers from the back of the book rather than working through exercises. Getting the answer isn't the point. The point is actually doing the work so you develop skills that can be used beyond your current homework assignment or exam.

When I was in high school we 'barely' had search engines. I graduated in 98, I'm not even sure google was around then. I've never seen them try to get rid of google which has just as much ability to inhibit critical thinking skills. I mean imagine having to learn and remember code constructs instead of being able to search online. Imagine if all your docs were books, and that's it. Sure you'd need to retain more, but would you be more performant because of it? We're moving to a society where ai-augmentation will be the norm, not the exception and we need to start training on that premise so that we can perform to our best when we have more info at our fingertips.

This feels like it could be solved partly, and more effectively, by a step wise show your work process. So if it’s Of Mice and Men, it could be a reading journal, then important points, then an outline, then an essay.

If they successfully use ChatGTP to do this, they likely have engaged with the text.

> For example, I'm not sure if there's much value in learning things like basic SQL queries anymore which was something I had to learn when studying computer science. ChatGPT is great at writing SQL queries if you're able to tell it exactly what you need.

Using ChatGPT to generate something that you can't independently verify is a terrible idea. Most of the time it'll be fine, but when it's not you need to be able to recognize the flaws. Hopefully you at least test it before pushing, but if you don't know how to write the query you also don't know its failure modes, so your tests will likely miss important edge cases.

AI tools are great for speeding up processes you can do by hand, but because they're all statistics you can't count on them to do it alone: some percentage of the time they will inevitably be wrong.

EDIT: Note that this stands in contrast to a wholly deterministic tool like a calculator, which in most circumstances doesn't need to be second guessed.

> Using ChatGPT to generate something that you can't independently verify is a terrible idea

It depends. A calculator can calculate things I'd struggle to independently verify with a pen and paper.

I think I wasn't clear enough and you might be taking what I said to it's extreme. I'm not suggesting there is zero value in knowing SQL, I'm saying the value of learning it is now much lower than when I learnt it. While it might be helpful to have a good understanding of SQL to verify a query yourself (especially where performance is a concern), in most cases this likely isn't necessary. For your average select query with a couple of joins and a where clause ChatGPT can generate that and you can verify it at least works by running it.

But maybe SQL isn't the best example. It just came to my mind because I was writing a spatial query for MariaDb recently and I couldn't get the results I wanted after a few Google searches, but ChatGPT got it right first time. It seems to me that query languages have a lot of properties which make ChatGPT very good at writing them, but there are probably other skills which ChatGPT more clearly erodes the value of.

I don’t entirely agree with this. My math education relied way to heavily on mechanical substitute-and-compute, but there’s definitely value in making sure that children can actually do and understand what computations are actually happening.

I would imagine writing is similar - the endless essays full of bullshit I pumped out in high school were obviously pointless. But being forced to write much earlier in school was super foundational for having the skill in the first place.

As to the SQL example, I also think it’s flipped - learning the basic sql queries is probably the most valuable as it’s a foundation.

> For example any maths test which only tests students on problems which are easily solvable by a calculator isn't testing any skill of real world use.

True in university, but memorizing multiplication tables and learning the mechanics of long division and multiplication are important parts or math education for kids. Most of school is not strictly for "real world" skills anyway (even if doing basic math unaided is almost as close as we come in school to teaching a real world skill).

Same goes for say, basic reading comprehension and summarization.

I don't buy your argument

This would replace the skill of SQL with the skill of being able to ask specific questions which is a valuable skill, also when collaborating with humans.

At the same time it is a completely different mode to operate. Writing and editing SQL while you are trying to solve a problem will lead you to a different way of thinking, iterating, maybe even induce fewer context switches.

Using ChatGPT can be similar to delegating those type of tasks to a colleague. There are upsides and downsides to this but never underestimate the benefits of strengthening your own abilities.

While I see your point, it is not hard to see the implications of your argument. Should students be allowed to use calculators in basic math? Don't you think they should learn arithmetic and be tested on that? What about reading? Why learn how to read when you can just use a device to read text to you?

When you first learn it is generally important to learn the basics without tools. In your example knowing the times takes, at least for single digits is important... But can be fine with a calculator. When you first learn SQL knowing sums simple queries is important. Maybe they'll pick it up after asking chatgpt, stack overflow, or Google, but one shouldn't have to do a search everytime they need to do a basic thing

Not sure I entirely agree. Imagine there's a trainable skill like writing, and GPT can write at low-intermediate level, but can't at high level. How do you test students before they completed intermediate level?

Make students write in the classroom using a pen and paper? Isn’t that more or less the standard at low-intermediate level?

Handwriting is at least just as pointless exercise.

I agree about handwriting being pointless, but simply doing writing exercises in the classroom should be sufficient to get students past the ChatGPT level. Right?

Assuming the teacher is doing their job, it should be really easy to make sure nobody is cheating using machine learning.

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