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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I remember taking a math class in college and the professor had a very unique way of dealing with cheating. He let us use our books, notes, and "any calculator capability" from our TI-84's. His rationale is that students will try to use these tricks anyways so just let them and then update the test to be "immune" from these advantages. Before every test he mentioned that we could use all those tools but always said "but please study, your books, notes and calculators won't save you".

Long term I see education going this route, rather than preventing students from using AI tools, update course curriculum so that AI tools don't give such an advantage.

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I’ve done this but then you end up with students who are not used to “thinking”. They do bad on the test. Now I’m known as a hard teacher. Now people avoid my classes. Administration hounds me for having s low passing rate. I need a job. I now give easy tests.

The real issue as I see it is that no one wants to face the reality that far too many incapable, incurious people are going to college. So I pretend to give real tests and pretend to give real grades and students feel good about themselves and my classes fill.

When I was in college there were professors who were hard but fair, hard and not fair, and just easy.

Profs who were hard but fair never had a problem filling up their classrooms with students who self selected for wanting to learn.

The hard but not fair ones were just assholes IMHO.

The easy ones also had their classes filled up.

My community college had two history profs, one had all essay questions, one had multiple choice. The essay question prof was considered "hard", but so long as your essay justified your position and was well reasoned, you got full credit for the answer.

I hated the multiple choice prof. He gave the entire class his test bank every quarter and you just had to memory hundreds of questions and he'd pick 50 for the test. IMHO it took more time studying because I had to read the book and then memorize a bunch of pointless answers, vs reading the book and understanding what was going on, which I can typically do in the first pass.

Throughout my time in college and university, I did have two teachers I would describe as "hard and not fair".

The first was a second-year Physics teacher at my community college. He said that at least 50% of the class should fail. Not 50% will fail, but that 50% should fail, and if less than 50% fails, the class was too easy. He demanded that we memorize 30+ equations that could appear on the final and did not allow a notecard of equations.

The other was my Algorithms teacher in my third year, who basically wasn't teaching what we really needed to know, as far as I was concerned. I was expecting to learn breadth/depth-first searching, binary search, sorting algorithms, maybe even path-finding like A* and Dijkstra's, etc. Instead, the entire course was about algebra dealing with Big-O, Big-Theta, and Big-Omega, with only a slight nod to how they related to code.

I was involved in K-12 math education for a few years and there's absolutely a pressure to make things easy for kids. When certain parents see Johnny scored poorly on a test, guess what they do? They start a conversation with the teacher and administration. Johnny needs to pass, or maybe even succeed, and it's the education that has to change around him. It creates more work. Teaching already isn't a traditional 9-5. Grading homework can consume hours outside of normal working time. Meanwhile, I can count on one hand how many times I needed to put in overtime at my office job.

If the school has a tuition, then there's even more of a conflict of interest. I've had parents/admins imply that we might be losing a student due to poor grades.

People want to be engaged with the work they believe in. Students or adults.

Fundamentally, kids that are just trying to pass a class don't see the value in learning and it seems that the contributions towards the "pointless" school work are parts teacher attitudes, parts curriculum design, parts real-life applicability to the student's interests, parts framing.

We've been using tests and such for far too long as a proxy for competence, rather than developing the competencies in such a way that engages the kids.

I think we need to look at reframing fundamental parts of how education is structured. I don't think there needs to be drastic changes, just some small things that allow the education and curriculum to become more engaging.

> Fundamentally, kids that are just trying to pass a class don't see the value in learning and it seems that the contributions towards the "pointless" school work are parts teacher attitudes, parts curriculum design, parts real-life applicability to the student's interests, parts framing.

It is 100% societal. It is because society is focused on "get degree, get job, get money". It is because Western societies have gotten so damn competitive that if you don't succeed at any of the above, there is a non-trivial chance you won't even be able to afford a house to live in.

In America, I'll admit that No child left behind made it a lot worse, with tests left and right, which gives students the wrong impression of what learning is about.

Every class should be about critical thinking. Every single class. Multiple choice tests are a societal cancer and should be limited to a tiny fraction of tests given.

The point of school is to learn how to learn. That is it. What facts are taught are almost irrelevant. The point is to learn HOW to learn. Be that researching the history of fabric dyes in Ancient Egypt or making a scale drawing of one's house.

The "WHAT" IS NOT IMPORTANT.

The HOW is important.

How to write an essay, the topic doesn't matter.

How to learn about the culture of a country.

How to learn a new field of mathematics.

How to learn a new type of art.

How to give a presentation.

How to learn a hard science.

Yes the basics of physics and chemistry and such need to be taught. But the things that are learned should be inline with teaching the all important skill of how to learn.

…don't think there needs to be drastic changes, just some small things that allow the education and curriculum to become more engaging.

I think the vast majority of people who say and think this haven’t taught in the classroom much.

Most first year classes for STEM courses at most universities are very large, highly impersonal, and from what I have seen, often taught by very poor communicators.

Students want to be engaged in their coursework, but the universities aren't there to encourage or support it.

> I’ve done this but then you end up with students who are not used to “thinking”.

Then we need to teach them. You are doing the right thing for being a "hard" teacher, and it doesn't prevent you from also being known as a caring one.

From experience, acknowledging the students' difficulties with it and emphasising that it is because they were not taught how to think (as opposed to some innate inability to do maths) can go a long way.

> I need a job. I now give easy tests.

That seems more of an indictment of your profession than anything to do with the students.

Since the state no longer properly funds higher education there has been a shift in attitude. We are now a business and the client is the student. This has negative long term consequences. One of them is that I pretend to give real tests and real grades. The client must pass. The cost of acquiring new clients is much greater than the cost of keeping existing clients. It's easy to give a passing grade.

Students largely just want to pass. They mostly don't care that they don't know anything.

If that's how you feel, why don't you find a different career? Teaching doesn't even pay enough to do the job if you don't care about doing it well also.

By acknowledging that students will try to use every tool at their disposal, the professor created an environment where the focus shifts back to true understanding

That makes sense when tools are as dumb as static notes and TI-84s.

But in the (hypothetical) limit where AI tools outperform all humans, what does this updated test look like? Are we even testing the humans at that point?

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