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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

> And as a last point, I fear very much what’s going on in schools. My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous. And if you think that’s okay or you don’t see a serious problem with this, then that’s an even greater problem.

If that is true, it is indeed a serious problem.

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Any examination that isn't done in person on general course material (nothing an LLM could prepare for you) is just stubborn refusal to protect students from themselves in an age where anything else can be faked. Graded homework and take-home assignments are dead as useful pedagogical tools.

Death of homework could be a great thing. The education system teaching that schoolwork must be done at home is conditioning future workers to accept working late and taking their work home.

You're conflating education work with productive work. School is about learning, for one's personal fulfilment. You're supposed to do that mostly on your own time. School is just a way to keep you motivated to learn a particular thing, and the notion of homework is necessary to reinforce that learning happens on your own and in a classroom.

But actually mostly on your own. 45 minutes twice a week in a classroom is just not enough time to learn anything of substance and depth. The Thursday-to-Tuesday memory loss is especially profound; Tuesday class is mostly spent reminding everyone who didn't do their homework what we had talked about last Thursday.

Students will need to use the same LLM as their teacher, since LLMs are biased to grade their own outputs higher.

Imagine getting downgraded because the substrings "Honestly?" and "—" didn't constitute 3.2% of your submission.

The school situation is indeed in serious problems.

I just read this piece the other day with countless witnesses from teachers in the US:

https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/

This sounds like an assignment to learn to use LLMs, which as an isolated assignment sounds reasonable. Students should learn how to use tools of all kinds to maximize their effectiveness. It might be a bigger problem if all assignments are done like this but I doubt that's the case.

I attended one of best high schools in the area.

One teacher, when I asked him what I can do about my failing grade, told me "you can go hang yourself". Why was I getting a failing grade in the first place? Well, it was normal that three quarters of the class would be failing his tests. That's just the kind of teacher he was.

The PE teacher thought that his role was to teach us discipline based on fear. Later I heard a fun story about him getting a new class and thinking that one of the girls was a student, while she was actually the mother of one of the students. She saw the students being yelled at for 45 minutes straight, she got yelled personally at and called retarded. Of course nothing happened to him.

The literature teacher yelled at us so hard that we were literally afraid of talking to her. She hated us, and at some point made that openly clear, by being mean on purpose. She never gave me more than "barely passing", even though at the standardized test I got a near-perfect score.

Once she did a test, threw the paper away, and assigned us grades by how much she liked each student. I brought up this story during reunion, and was told "she actually prepared us for how we'd be treated in college and adult life".

And that was one of the best schools that always took the most talented students from the region. In this context, having two LLMs talk to each other really isn't a bad thing.

Hence why my sympathy to teachers is limited. Not zero, for sure. But there's a limit

This is so over the top that you might as well name and shame here to lend credibility to your story. What school in what "area" are you talking about?

Yeah and dox myself. No thank you.

It's not "over the top". It's the reality of the education system in Eastern Europe.

Well at least the general area is clear!

I initially downvoted you because your story was obviously untrue. But... I was unthinkingly assuming you were American. I undid the downvote, because I have no idea what schools in your country are like.

This is a leftover from the communism where the whole point of the education system was to create obedient citizens who never dare to speak up against authorities. This was achieved by forming a strict hierarchy where those above you would shit on you and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it, but if you climb the social ladder, as a reward you'd get free pass to shit on those below you. It takes decades at best to fight the issue, and when you take into account the budget with which the ministry of education is working, it's pretty much impossible to hire competent staff at schools. The problem is particularly visible at universities, which have traditionally enjoyed higher degree of autonomy.

It's not all that bad though. Sometimes the teachers would bend the rules in the students' favor, which allows to treat them like human beings, rather than "computer says you fail".

I've heard this often recently, we jokingly call it the "dead classroom theory": the students use LLMs to solve the assignment and the teacher uses an LLM to grade it.

I hear you, but also we need to ask why is it a problem?

Used to be, it was considered critically important that students learn to write in cursive and to multiply 3 digit numbers in their head. I can't do either, and I suspect many folks these days can't either. The world has not ended. I also can't tie a square knot, lasso a steed, or mend a fence.

School assignments have always been a waste of time. Essay-writing is not a critical skill, and I'm not sure much is lost if LLMs do it for us.

Pretty sure forming a logical argument is a critical skill, just add it to the list tho.

Actually the world is more or less ending because of that. People lack more and more critical thinking skills because they aren't taught about that in school.

Sure multiplying 3-digit numbers is not really useful in everyday's life, but the important part is not the knowledge itself, it's the capacity to think and solve problems.

You can easily measure the capacity to think and solve problems with paper-and-pencil exams every week or two not hours of daily busywork.

If such tests actually measured the capacity to think and solve problems.

Thing is, LLMs beat humans on the words of such tests (if not the pencil part), and indeed basically all stabdardised tests at every level.

This is the digital divide, where students from more wealthy backgrounds can afford access to better LLM subscriptions, and are able to achieve more "academically".

> Essay-writing is not a critical skill

If not that then what? Prompt engineering?

Maybe nothing at all. Maybe human mind is obsolete. What then?

> Essay-writing is not a critical skill,

Essay writing is mainly about organizing thoughts logically. That's pretty important.

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