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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge.

This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are being given the time and training to help do this. When you are on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and completely replan your courses. And professors are largely being tasked with doing this independently rather than having universities offer training or support with adjusting methods to be more AI resistant. And unfortunately the fast speed of development of these tools is making good ideas obsolete quickly. I know some people who switch to having students make podcasts rather than writing papers as a final assignment and then we started seeing "create your own podcast" tools appear and made it roughly as easy to cheat on this assignment as a traditional paper.

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How does making podcasts solve anything? Students can just read out what the AI writes into an audio recording.

Why is this problem being fretted over? In-class written and oral tests should be fine to assess students. If AI helps them learn or even cram the material, great!

One of the skills that students are typically terrible at is convincingly recreating the flow of a conversation that is written down. Shakespeare, spoken in meter-less monotone with none of the prosody that indicates actual speech by a human being communicating something; Prosody you can often decode even in a language you have no knowledge of. If they manage to fake it convincingly for an hour-long podcast, they have taught themselves acting on a level that is commercially useful and honestly understand much of what is being said.

If they are just working from AI notes and improvising the conversation, arguably they are simply doing the work.

What I don't know is whether an instructor would be allowed to earnestly grade an hour-long podcast subjectively.

Homework and/or project assignments are often a major component of scoring for many courses.

You can do different podcast structures than a single person reading a script, which can produce some useful social barriers to cheating.

A lot of kids also suck at cheating so the small barrier of "ask ai to generate a script and then read it" appears to stop a bunch of cheaters.

There are limitations to timed evaluations such that oral exams or blue books are not panaceas.

My suggestion here isn't to have the professors do this: it's for the professors to challenge their students to do this.

I am friends with an unusually large number of professors, many of which are at very top institutions. The "make your own pedagogy" approach for students leaves huge portions of the classroom doing zero work whatsoever.

Thats useful, thanks. Sounds like this approach won't help most students.

What was the point of having those students in the classroom in the first place?

Taking their (or their parent's) money of course

alternative strategies will have them doing work and learning

And then forgetting. If you're not interested, you cram for the test and then forget. I see little point in forcing people who don't want to learn into classrooms. Worth a read https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-...

Interesting essay. Makes some very good points, however I have to disagree with this one.

> ... they keep some sort of overall concept of learning. This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and counterbalanced by ...

The author is really missing the obvious here. Learning difficult subjects fundamentally changes how you think about and approach things. People aren't born able to engage in critical thinking or being able to reason algebraically or with an ability to navigate formal logic. That doesn't mean school is the only way to impart such skills, but it is certainly one of the ways.

Of course if the metric you use is "ability to answer trivia" then you are going to fail to capture that aspect.

> Learning difficult subjects fundamentally changes how you think about and approach things.

Citation needed on this. But even if I accept the premise, what percentage of school is leaning difficult subjects? For me it was <5% and the other 95+% was stuff that could be beaten easily with rote memorization. The only classes in that 5% were upper level courses that only students who want to be there take anyway.

Is it not self evident? A subject doesn't have to be particularly difficult to impact how you think. Being exposed to algebra provides you with new ways of looking at the relations between things. Being exposed to even basic world history gives you perspective that you wouldn't otherwise have had about society at large. I've observed the effect in both myself and those around me to the extent that it appears self evident to me.

Unfortunately any of the obvious metrics you might use to quantify this would seem to be hopelessly biased. The more advanced the degree someone holds the farther above average that individual tends to be in various ways. I doubt it would be possible to control for such large cross correlations.

Perhaps asking people who learn multiple languages could provide subjective evidence since that doesn't have nearly as much of a correlation with other abilities.

There really are students that will work hard when given direction but will flounder when asked to fully self direct.

>on a 4/4

That's teaching four distinct courses?

A 4/4 means that you teach four classes each semester. This is a pretty typical schedule for non tenure track or adjunct professors in the humanities or even tenure track faculty at slacs, though I've seen 5/5s before. It is a lot of work to update this many classes to adapt to AI.

That seems like a crazy amount of work. Four classes, or four sections of the same class?

Depends, but it is often four distinct classes. And yeah, it is a lot of work. This is why reusing preps is so valuable and why it is a bit ridiculous to see people demanding that professors suddenly figure out (on their own) how to rewrite their syllabi to mitigate cheating with AI.

Yikes.

My professor often taught classes with a couple sections, I’d help out sometimes—even that was a ton of work, pretty hard to do the main job (research) during those semesters. I wonder if (given the demographics of the board) folks are suggesting things from a similar place of informed ignorance to me—coming from research oriented STEM universities. In that case it could be reasonable to say “well, the situation with our classes has gotten so dire with AI, it might make sense to sacrifice a semester of research to sort that all out.” Of course if you are already prepping for four classes, there is not much slack to sacrifice…

In that case a lot of us would be specifically more wrong than a random person plucked off the street, somebody who thinks the main job of every professor is teaching.

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