Comment by stevemadere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevemadere | Hacker News Reader

I guess this signals the end of focusing on testing to prove one's "rank" as a student and actually start focusing on educating students rather than evaluating them.

The whole problem with factory mass-education is the almost exclusive focus on evaluation. A little bit of education happens as a side-effect of the unrelenting soul-crushing evaluation so we've put up with it and called it education for 100 years.

ChatGPT will make it nearly impossible to cause any educating to happen as a side effect of constant re-evaluation.

That means we are going to have to focus on education directly. Probably just train ChatGPT to be a really good tutor and everybody gets a 19th century rich boy's education instead of the junk we've had in feed-lot-style schools for the last 100 years.

Note that Waldorf schools are kind of immune to this problem since the kids don't get to touch a computer until they are in 9th grade and heck, they don't even read until 2nd grade.

In France the extreme majority of your grades comes from in-class exams that are essay-based or at least long format rather than multi-choice like in the US. Homeworks are just exercises to learn and aren't graded.

This entirely solves ALL the problems introduced by LLMs.

The US just needs to adapt their evaluation system.

At my high school, teachers were given a lot of freedom to decide their own grading, but had the rule that the final could not be more than 20% of your grade. Typically, homework ended up being 50%.

I failed my Geometry class despite getting 110% on the final (She had some hard extra-credit questions that went beyond what we learned) because I didn't do a single homework assignment.

Meanwhile, this high school made all sorts of claims about preparing students for college, and my first math class in college, homework was only 3% of your grade.

This is probably because you can fail catastrophically with the college way of doing things. I remember many people who failed one test out of three for the semester and essentially failed the class (given they did average on the other 2). No high school wants to deal with a system like that, it would be too much for kids to handle.

I think this shifts the problem from academic integrity to the time it takes to mark the in-class, pen and paper assignments.

The sheer volume of evaluations is what makes us choose methods that help us scale our marking efforts, but I’m curious to see how this changes.

Cost is a huge factor. Asking a student to write what 7+8 is on a sheet of paper is a cheap substitute of high quality math education.

Not saying that this is the case in OP, it's very likely that the teacher will eventually catch up to the fact that a kid with A on their homework isn't quite a math genius. The same systems that would catch a child being aided by parents or cheating would catch this anomaly.

Teachers are a well trained profession after all.

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