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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

Teachers used to be able to talk at students and then use asynchronous writing assignments as convenient shortcuts for verifying understanding. Teaching is still very possible, just less logistically convenient than it used to be. I naively envision a next-gen college where admission and instruction are conducted by interview and conversation.

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It's already long been clear that if you want an excellent education you cut the student-to-teacher ratio down (10:1 max) and have a lot more small group discussions.

Public schools can't afford that (they'd need to more than double their teaching staff) and the trend is the other direction—replacing teachers with technology, because there's a shortage, the teacher training pipeline has dried up, and they can't raise salaries to attract more.

It would pretty much ruin any small group discussion if it was used as most of your grade.

I'm not sure that's true at all. Seminars are a thing although participation is often not the only grading output. And participation absolutely factors into grades in many at least medium-ish sized business and law classes.

Here’s something else we could try instead of grading written essays: video-recorded oral exams conducted by LLMs. Wouldn’t that be a twist. The teacher would need to watch each recording and grade them, and I suppose the lazy ones might use AI to do that step instead.

At 10:1 of and you spend 15k per kid per year. You get 150k per class so 100k for the teacher and 50k for overhead. This is all quite reasonable. The problem is that overhead is much too high and that 1 in 5 kids need additional services that really destroy that ratio and you end up at 30:1

Yeah the private schools that use seminar-style manage it by 1) having much higher incomes than $15k/yr/kid, and 2) avoiding teaching kids who have special needs, since they can cost several times as much to educate as a kid who doesn't, and besides, they tend to drag down test scores and university acceptance rates.

Also helps to not pay teachers for the summer semester.

My university was too lazy to introduce automated marking for coding assignments. We have to go in-person to a lab session and demonstrate our code compiling/running to the TA, who asks us questions to verify understanding.

It's hilarious how much this immunizes us from ChatGPT, given that we're a mid-tier school co-located with a needle exchange center in Toronto.

It's been a very long time since I was involved in teaching basic coding but were I to plan such a course now, I think I would not even consider including automated grading. In fact, I think I'd focus even more on individual and group feedback, lab sessions, remote/office hours and the like. Those things become even more important the easier it is to produce and hand in something you don't really understand.

That would be very nice. Who is going to pay for the teachers, of whom you're going to need many more with this (superior) teaching style?

The University of Texas has 51,000 students.

In state tuition and fees are $31,000 per year. Out of state is $42,000.

Maybe we could try taxing the rich?

oh no! Anything but that! Everything will fall apart!

I don't think that anyone seriously disputes that at least some degree of personalized instruction and perhaps hands-on (depending on the subject) is valuable. But it doesn't really scale.

What’s the point of a question like this? “Who pays for teachers” is a policy choice, like it always has been. Whether and how people are willing to pay for effective education vs. ineffective education depends on cultural values and priorities. Does that help?

edit to add: maybe what you’re implicitly asking is “Particularly in America where people view education as an indulgence and a luxury good, how would we ever fit this model into existing starvation-level budgets of the public school system, or into the existing academic institutions which pass all their costs onto students?” This doesn’t change my answer but it makes that answer a little more obvious.

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