The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades.
Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?
Something like that was advocated by the Khan academy guy, but I'm not sure if he worked out a full replacement system. There are some things in the current system like honors classes or retaking the classes for people who got an F, but why have the F ruin their chance at college if they later master it and get an A? If they always lag but eventually get there, I guess an argument is college would be too expensive if it took them a long time to get through it.
My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.
https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/optimal-protocols-for-st...
I’m not doubting your claim but I don’t have time to listen to that podcast and I’m interested in what was said since you did.
I skimmed the linked material and that's not my conclusion. Practice tests are better teaching tools than just memorizing the material and then taking a real test, but on an absolute scale, I'm convinced that they're pretty terrible for most types of material.
Throughout my education I've come across countless people who could memorize the material and recite it with relative ease but they didn't have any intuitive understanding so they couldn't use that "knowledge" to solve real problems. Much like ChatGPT itself.
Equating good memorization and recall performance with good education and knowledge seems like a form of cargo culting to me, it's missing the essence of what makes knowledge powerful in the first place.
Regardless, I agree, attempting to assess the progress of a cheater is a fool's errand.
I would not wish to live in a society where “can bullshit an assignment with ChatGPT” is generally competitive in education.
Unless the child is a literal genius or very charismatic, wouldn’t they almost certainly have worse prospects after graduating in the 10th to 30th percentile of their class at Harvard than from the 80th to 90th percentile of their class at Boston U?
(Assuming they could even manage to squeak into Harvard in the first placd)
By definition to join a network they need to be accepted by their class peers.
But you'll be exposed to different people and opportunities by going to a state school instead of a community college, or a better school out of state with a scholarship vs. a state college, etc. The small differences matter.
I literally got my first job because my roommate's dad knew of someone looking for a software developer job. Would I have met that person in community college? Maybe! Lots of people with good networks go to community colleges, too - but I'd bet fewer than more expensive schools.
For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.
For instance, having graduated from Harvard is going to get you a fairly good job _regardless_ of their GPA.
Similarly, there is no objective way to measure "merit" that isn't unfair to _someone_ and also scales to dozens/hundreds/thousands of students. So people use GPA.
Life isn't fair.
Clearly peers do evaluate each other in any ways they choose, pretty much every day at Harvard I imagine.
I would note that students who depend on AIs to answer questions on homework will do poorly on tests. I am not really sure what all the fuss is about. Kids cheating on homework is nothing new and a machine doing it for your is little different than all the other ways kids cheat on homework. And cheating on homework doesn’t help you in your grades - it hurts you because you’re unprepared for exams, which typically dominate the weighting of a grade. Then once you take a standardized placement exam you’re totally screwed.
How does this relate to the prior comment?
I’m clearly not an admissions officer at Harvard, nor likely are the other HN commentors here.
Parents are worried about the worst case scenario, and going to Harvard raises that floor by ensuring they can get noticed straight out of graduation, even if they are bottom of the class.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/twitters-internal-hiring-poli...
Oh wow, I thought Americans were super lax when it came to this, especially compared to more competitive educational systems like China. My kid is in second grade and hasn't gotten a real grade yet.
It's hard to generalize here, as Americans are a heterogeneous bunch. Demographic subsets exist where education is seen as a vigorous competitive sport, where the goal is to achieve admission to the "right" college. The parents are as involved as the kids, usually for better but sometimes for worse.
At the same time, among other groups of Americans, the goal is simply for kids to reach adulthood without too much interaction with the police. You can't draw sweeping conclusions that will cover the entire spectrum.
The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.
US, China, India, UK, etc, much more disparity so it’s much more important for kids to be ‘top of the field’.
Fully agree.
> The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.
Fascinating observation! Wonder if that shows up at the school level as well? For example, In the US the highest/lowest performing schools tend to correlate to high/low income areas and have significant disparity in quality of education, and I expect this is a strongly self-reinforcing trend towards elite private institutions.
AP courses notwithstanding. AP courses were insanely competitive and speaking as someone had been all over the map in my K12 years (AP, accelerated courses, early foreign language, and a touch of remedial relative to grade level) the students in AP were mainly in competition with themselves. That however is just personal anecdote.
I also suspect that most kids, particularly grade schoolers, aren't aware they're competing in this sense. Parents are a different story.