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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

> I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway.

I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it.

Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating.

The big issue of exam-only approach is that a one-hour exam is not enough to evaluate a student's performance, unless your educational goal is just to make students memorize stuff by rote. I'd consider a 3-hour open-book exam bare minimal. But if every class does that it'll be too exhausting.

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They will not choose to write it. Would you work on something consistently if nobody cared about it?

There needs to be a reward for doing essays. That reward can be emotional eg. "the teacher I respect liked my essay" or "my essay was read in class" or "the teacher gives feedback that makes me feel a sense of growth". In that case, maybe kids will do it.

However, I think it's hard for a teacher to inspire respect to a classroom and the difficulty scales with the number of people in the class, so grades are used as a hack.

> Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating.

I am 100% certain quite a lot of people cheat because they procrastinated and don't have time to learn. Or because they indeed were lazy to learn. Or because they cant learn, because they course is too hard for them.

Or because video games and youtube are more fun.

When I read this suggestion it sticks out that un-spoonfed, people with deficits in thier study skills, executive function, and institutional literacy would be most disadvantaged.

So, you have 2 kids who are equally bright, and you tell one "you don't have to do these assignments but there is a test at the end" and the other "you have an 80% chance if failing if you don't do these assignments. Analyse each assignments and feedback for shiboleths like the way they ask you to structure your introduction and optimize for demonstrating you know these shiboleths over everything else"

University is a wonderful petri dish for growing into who you want to be. You have access to expertise and resources abs a certain kind of institutional credibility. Few students actually use these fully and the ones who do were told to. You need some idea who you want to be and why, and this is developed in you by other people. Children don't just know stuff.

I think these are positive changes if and only if we accompany them with systematic study skills and self management courses and bridge this gap.

Do Universities no longer do that? All of my finals were 3hrs. There was a special schedule during finals week with 3 slots per day. The time of your final exam was based on when the first lecture session of a class took place. Really sucked to get an 8-11 AM slot when your classes never started before 11.

Fun prank: set all of the clocks in your dorm neighbor’s room to different wrong times. Guy across the hall knew we were messing with him, trusted his watch - which had the correct time, but wrong alarm time. Realized he had a problem when he had hot water in the shower and no one was around. He was only 45 min late to the exam. Good times.

Different groups have different standards of course, but that prank seems pretty cruel.

I'm a little confused so I could use some clarification: where did the "fun" in the fun prank kick in? You caused him to be late and risk his exam. Could you break down the fun for me?

Unfortunately English "fun" is used both for good wholesome fun and for the cruel fun that is "making fun of" people (laughing at their misfortune).

I don't see how potentially ruining someone's exam classifies as fun

We had the alarms going off early. Like every half hour from 6:00 AM. We knocked on his door and his roommate told him when he was leaving for breakfast.

He did fine in his exam. 3 hrs was overkill. Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy.

It was the 80’s. I guess kids these days are soft.

This is sociopathy, not a fun prank.

Well, agreed, but nobody said anything about 60min exams x) In fact I don't remember ever having an exam at uni that was less than 2h.

I agree that open-book exams, or at least a closed-book portion followed by an open-book portion, is important to actually gauge the student's abilities rather than his/her capability to cram.

> I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it.

I seriously doubt that. In my experience many students won't do anything that doesn't directly contribute to their grade.

Exactly. In school I only did the stuff teachers told me isn't important and I don't need to do.

You want me to don't know something? I better make sure to get to know everything about that. You push me to do stuff? Why should I care, if you already do.

I’d expect that a lower proportion of those who wrote it would have cheated, but certainly not that more would write it.

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