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Comment by rspoerri | Hacker News Reader

It's only cheating if it's not allowed.

My Students are allowed to do theyr homework with ai. But it's not theoretical assignments, but doing projects. I assume that being able to use AI in the future work is a important part, so they should use it early and experiment with it during study. Just because calculators got invented math didnt just vanish, they had to adapt what to teach and how to do assignments.

The ones who struggle the most are the ones that do the same assignments since 20 years and now are confronted with a new tool that makes theyr tests obsolete.

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The problem is that many tests aren't about asking the specific questions; those questions are mere proxies for the presence of foundational knowledge. They're testing whether a student is building up a rich mental model of the domain.

So we're not really testing students to see if they can do X times Y arithmetic problems, and we're not anticipating that future work involves being a calculator. Instead we're using these tests as proxies for whether a student has a good model of multiplication.

ML tech has the possibility of making someone look like they have the foundational knowledge. We can ask people to design "better" tests, but that also makes things harder to cope for everyone else! Must we all take increasingly difficult and fatter tests when a cheap proxy would've sufficed?

Also, perhaps some might say that foundational knowledge is not foundational because ML tech can one day do everything. Yes, this is a possibility. That one day there's no point in learning foundational math because ML can handily beat people just like it does in Go and Chess. But in such a world we won't be talking about students cheating in school, we'll be talking about massive economic revolution.

I teach math in the first year of the university. Stuff like solving a 2×2 or 3×3 system of linear equations or the derivative or integral of x*exp(x^2).

They are very important for the phisics or whatever class next year, but they are just tools too boring to make a special project about them.

I had a math instructor in my small, unknown technical school for my mechanical engineering program. He took a huge amount of initiative to work with the profs in the engineering department to make our assignments into word problems showing us exactly how what we were learning would be used later on.

I think it was a lot more useful because we could see how each of the subparts in a multi-part question worked together to solve engineering problems.

I know this isn't possibly in a generalist class with students from many departments, but there are some ways to make them less boring.

I'd recommend researching where such math is applied in the industry and at least show them where it's used. I have rarely understood why I should learn something. While having to research it again years later.

Matrix multiplications are for example used in game engines or in image processing. One example of rather complex algorithm is potential based interception algorithms for moving objects (Ai for Game Developers - O'Reilly).

Yup. I've been programming for 40 years. The toolset has gotten vastly better than it was in the old days but it's always been about letting the system take care of the scutwork. The oft-repeated claim that such-and-such a tool will mean people can do their own stuff never pans out--no, computers excel at scutwork but you still need the human to lay out the picture.

However, you say "tests"--no, the problem is assignments, not tests.

In that case, you should provide your students with access to an AI service so that those Who cannot afford it are not disadvantaged.

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