The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much your homework is worth. Teaching and learning are collaborative exercises.
Homework is there to help you practise these things and have help you progress, find the areas where you're in need of help and more practise. It is collaborative, it's you, your fellow students and your teachers/professors.
I'm sorry that you had bad teachers, or had needs that wasn't being meet by the education system. That is something that should be addressed. I just don't think it's reasonable to completely dismiss a system that works for the majority. Being mad at the education system isn't really a good reason for say "AI/computers can do all these things, so why bother practising them?"
Schools should learn kids to think, but if the kids can't read or reasonably do basic math, then expecting them to have independent critical thinking seems a way of. I don't know about you, but one of the clear lessons in "problem math" in schools was to learn to reason about numbers and result, e.g. is it reasonable that a bridge span 43,000km? If not, you probably did something wrong in your calculations.
Giving people credit for homework helps because it gives students a chance to earn points outside of high pressure test times and it also encourages people to do the homework. A lot of people need the latter.
My friends who teach university classes have experimented with grading structures where homework is optional and only exam scores count. Inevitably, a lot of the class fails the exams because they didn’t do any practice on their own. They come begging for opportunities to make it up. So then they circle back to making the homework required and graded as a way to get the students to practice.
ChatGPT short circuits this once again. Students ChatGPT their homework then fail the first exam. This time there is little to do, other than let those students learn the consequences of their actions.
Thinking is a incremental process, you make small changes to things, verify if they are logically consistent and work from there.
What is to practice here? If you know something is true, practicing the mechanical aspects of it is text book definition of rote learning.
This whole thing reads like the academic system thinks making new science(Math, Physics etc) is for special geniuses and the remainder has to be happy watching the whole thing like some one demonstrating a 'sleight of hand' of hand trick.
Teach people how to discover new truths. Thats the point of thinking.
You just described the homework for a college-level math class (which will consist largely of proofs). That’s what you’re practicing.
Also, it’s 2025, if you want to discover new truths in math and science you’re going to need quite a lot of background material. We know a heck of a lot of old truths that you need to learn first.
A lot of people who say this kind of thing have, frankly, a very shallow view of what homework is. A lot of homework can be easily done by AI, or by a calculator, or by Wikipedia, or by looking up the textbook. That doesn't invalidate it as homework at all. We're trying to scaffold skills in your brain. It also didn't invalidate it as assessment in the past, because (eg) small kids don't have calculators, and (eg) kids who learn to look up the textbook are learning multiple skills in addition to the knowledge they're looking up. But things have changed now.
"The fact that forklift truck can lift over 500kg should tell you how worthwhile it is for me to go to a gym and lift 100kg." - complete non-sequitur.
This is what's happened in education. The education system is not concerned with teaching you to learn, or even teaching you, it's concerned with grades.
As many have stated here, homework is practice for the student, and can be helpful in learning. However, it's given out as something to grade without any collaboration on the learning experience.
By the way, I'm ranting about all this as someone who did very well in both high-school and university, so I feel somewhat justified in calling bullshit on the whole thing.
Then maybe the homework assignment has been poorly chosen. I like how the article's author has decided to focus on the process and not the product and I think that's probably a good move.
I remember one of my kids' math teachers talked about wanting to switch to in inverted classroom. The kids would be asked to read a some part of their textbook as homework and then they would work through exercise sheets in class. To me, that seemed like a better way to teach math.
> But things have changed now.
Yep. Students are using AIs to do their homework and teachers are using AIs to grade.
you still have to learn. The goal of learning is not to do a job. It's to enrich you, broaden your mind, and it takes work on your part.
In similar reasoning, you could argue that you can take a car to go anywhere, or let everything be delivered on your doorstep, so why should I my child learn to walk?
The fact that AI can replace the work that you are measured on should tell you something about the measurement itself.
The goal of learning should be to enrich the learner. Instead, the goal of learning is to pass measure. Success has been quietly replaced with victory. Now LLMs are here to call that bluff.
> LLMs are here to call that bluff
Students have been copying from e.g. encyclopedias for as long as anyone can remember. That doesn't mean that an encyclopedia removes the need to learn. Even rote memorization has its use. But it's difficult to make school click for everybody.
I don't see learning as a compromise with economics. I see each as entirely irrelevant to the other. Certification is not a tool for learning; it is a tool for capitalism. A certification is nothing more than evidence of victory over the educational institution. Sure, the intended path to victory involves a lot of learning, but we humans can never be truly constrained to intended paths. That's a good thing: we shouldn't be.
> it is a tool for capitalism
All communist states had normal schools and certification. Without it, the state would collapse.
We're not completely free agents, and we can't be. That's one of those Rousseau-ian delusions. We need to cooperate to form a society, and it needs to be fairly strong in order to thrive. Hence, education.
The problem is that measurement is treated as an end, and not a means. People will always be choosing who they are willing to work with. The problem I'm focused on here is that these systems gatekeep collaborative work behind cooperation. People don't necessarily need to work together to collaborate on work. We could collaborate on the work itself: we just aren't allowed to do that, because copyright defines derivative work as illegal.
However, you can instead recognize the difficulty and time that this would require on the part of the educator, and therefore expense to the student, and you can recognize that you have the goal of not just obtaining a piece of paper but actually learning a skill. With this mindset, it makes sense to take the initiative to treat the homework as an opportunity to learn and practice. It's is one of those things that's worth as much as you put into it. Of course, one can use their judgement to decide which homework is worth spending time on to learn the material, and which can be safely sailed through with minimum effort.
Having a skilled teacher that you can really collaborate with and who can spend the time to evaluate your skills in a personal way is of course going to lead to better learning outcomes than the traditional education system. It will also be far more expensive. Although, AI is offering something somewhat akin to this experience at a much lower price, to those who are able to moderate their usage so that they are learning from the AI instead of just offloading tasks to it.
Unis should adjust their testing practices so that their paper (and their name) doesn't become worthless. If AI becomes a skill, it should be tested, graded, and certified accordingly. That is, separate the computer science degree from the AI Assisted computer science degree.
> highly incentivized to get high grades, not necessarily to learn the material
Based on my own experiences and observations, I think grading is a far larger issue than cheating. I am not convinced that good grades are necessarily reflective of enrichment nor how much material has been learned. If a person makes the a high grade in a particular class, what does that actually mean?
I made high grades in plenty of classes that I couldn't tell you anything about what I actually learned.
Exactly. Grades and learning have become decoupled.
I mean... if you removed the substring "home" from that sentence, is it still true in your opinion?
That is, do you believe that because AI can perform some task, that task must not have any value? If there's a difference, help me understand it better please.
Homework should be a part of the collaborative process of learning (as others above have already elaborated on). If teachers are having a problem with AI generated homework being submitted, it shows that the system is broken because they couldn't have been collaborating with students on their learning then.
That's precisely where we went wrong. Capitalism has redefined our entire education system as a competition; just like it does with everything else. The goal is not success, it's victory.