Hacker News Reader

Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

> I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them.

What does that mean, I’m curious?

The schools and university I grew up in had a “single-sanction honor code” which meant if you were caught lying or cheating even once you would be expelled. And you signed the honor code at the top of every test.

My more progressive friends at other schools who didn’t have an honor code happily poo-pooed it as a repugnantly harsh old fashioned standard. But I don’t see a better way today of enforcing “don’t use AI” in schools, than it.

View on HN

The school has an academic honestly policy which explicitly bans it, under “Cheating”, which includes:

“Falsifying or inventing any academic work, including the use of AI (ChatGPT, etc)”

Additionally, as mentioned, the school is taking actions to change how work is done to ensure students are actually doing their own work - such as requiring written assignments be completed during class time, or giving homework on physical paper that is to be marked up by hand and returned.

Apparently this is the first year they have been doing this, as last year they had significant problems with submitted work not being authored by students.

This is in an extremely competitive Bay Area school, so there can be a lot of pressure from parents on students to make top grades, and sometimes that has negative side effects.

Asking as a non-American non-school-pupil-parent: what does it mean for a school to be competitive in this context? Competitive entry into a school I understand, but that threshold has been cleared. Isn’t US college admission based on essays and standardised tests like GMAT, SAT, GRE?

Physical paper isn't going to save them.

(Also, typing was only appropriate for only some classes anyway.)

I don’t see the problem.

I’m not sure how LLMs output is indistinguishable from Wikipedia or World Book.

Maybe? and if the question is “did the student actually write this?” (which is different than “do they understand it?” there are lots of different ways to assess if a given student understands the material…that don’t involve submitting typed text but still involve communicating clearly.

If we allow LLMs- like we allow calculators, just how poor LLMs are will become far more obvious.

If LLMs are allowed then sure. However, when LLMs are explicitly banned from use, is the case I am talking about.

Oral presentation without notes and a live Q&A would be some ways…

Do you really not see the problem? A student who pastes an essay prompt into an input box and copies out the response has learned nothing. Even direct plagiarism from Wikipedia would typically need to be reworked; there will rarely be a Wikipedia page corresponding to your teacher's specific essay prompt.

Students are also poor writers. Often LLM-generated essays can be spotted in elementary school because they write too well for that grade level. A good student will surpass a chatbot, but not if they use it as a crutch while it's still a stronger writer than they are.

That's an surprisingly "strict" (in quotes for obvious reason) honor code.

I'm at some uni in Poland, not top tier, but at the same time - not bad either, slighly above average.

The amount of cheating I saw - it's almost mundane. Teachers know this, so do we...

It worked. There was still cheating (caught and uncaught), but 50-100x less than what I saw at other schools.

And it gave students a sense of pride in their education

I'm genuinely happy to hear that, that it can be done. Really.

I have a huge respect for you and your university.

Today such infractions might result in a verbal warning…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com