Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmarchello | Hacker News Reader

I think AI is simply exposing problems with academia that have always been there. In my personal experience with both high school and a completed bachelor's degree, 20% of the process is actual learning while 80% is proving what one has learned for the sake of grading and measuring.

As soon as one graduates and enters the real world, the ability to learn is paramount, but the ability to grade said learning is never used again. We need to re-think the system from the ground up so that a student can leverage all available tools, AI included, and still develop a core ability to learn.

What's more, the current focus on grading has been shown to stunt the love of learning, because we're not stupid and we know when we're doing something that does not gain us anything beyond a grade.

If academia responds to this change properly we can eventually see a system that actually serves our students better than what we currently have.

View on HN

So are the teacher supposed to stop grading the students works?

Some people never leave the academia, and that is not a bad thing. What kind of research would done if there is no academia around for that?

If people barely learn how to read, write or think critically how are they expected to handle predatory companies?

How can we expect students to learn anything, if they are using tools which cannot be trusted to tell the truth?

There is not one educational system. So if US changes their system according to your idea, what would happen to us students if other countries does not follow suit? Will they fare better or worse?

Why should they study if they would get the idea that AI can help them with everything?

Strong agree. This reminds me of one of my pet theories: that research and education are fundamentally different skills. A good researcher should be flexible and open-minded, almost to a fault, but a good educator needs to be committed to certain beliefs in order to teach them. More important, an educator should instill good habits (even if those habits involve asking good questions) and set a good example, a requirement entirely lacking from research.

So why do all of our universities only employ teachers who have been trained as researchers?

I think much of the 80% grinding that you describe is just the publish-or-perish mindset of graduate school, which the teachers pick up along the way (I'm not faulting them so much as the process). It's more about appearing to know, rather than knowing. This may be what you have to do to survive in a competitive research environment, but one is left wondering what any of that has to do with educating our children, especially the majority who will never become researchers.

There's no way I could say what percentage of my schooling was "actual learning" versus assessment or "busywork." The modern obsession with standardized testing and constant measurement has certainly made things worse.

I disagree that "ability to grade said learning is never used again." Stack-ranking is very much a thing; the grading just gets fuzzier.

What the article points to is that, when a teacher gives an assignment meant to encourage students to think and learn, e.g. picking themes out of a novel, most students completely miss the point, instead getting an LLM to generate words in the shape of a student essay. They're crippling their future selves to save some time.

What would I do if I were a teacher? My impulse would be to make all assignments ungraded or pass/fail. Students could choose to learn or cheat as much as they liked. But then their grades would depend upon a midterm and a final, either oral or written in-person. For the ones who had been cheating their way along, the midterm would hopefully be a wake-up call, and they could redeem themselves on the final.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com