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Comment by trauco | Hacker News Reader

This is the correct take. To contrast the Terance Tao piece from earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972), AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. You can't, however, become a Terence Tao by asking AI to solve your homework.

So, in learning environments we might not have an option but to open the floodgates to AI use, but abandon most testing techniques that are not, more or less, pen and paper, in-person. Use AI as much as you want, but know that as a student you'll be answering tests armed only with your brain.

I do pity English teachers that have relied on essays to grade proficiency for hundreds of years. STEM fields has an easier way through this.

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Yesterday's Doonesbury was on point here: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23

Andrej and Garry Trudeau are in agreement that "blue book exams" (I.e. the teacher gives you a blank exam booklet, traditionally blue) to fill out in person for the test, after confiscating devices, is the only way to assess students anymore.

My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.

Blue book was the norm for exams in my social science and humanities classes way after every assignment was typed on a computer (and probably a laptop, by that time) with Internet access.

I guess high schools and junior highs will have to adopt something similar, too. Better condition those wrists and fingers, kids :-)

I'm oldish, but when I was in college in the late 90s we typed a huge volume of homework (I was a history & religious studies double major as an undergrad), but the vast majority of our exams were blue books. There were exceptions where the primary deliverable for the semester was a lengthy research paper, but lots and lots of blue books.

New York State recently banned phones state wide in schools.

Oh how I hated those as a student. Handwriting has always been a slow and uncomfortable process for me. Yes, I tried different techniques of printing and cursive as well as better pens. Nothing helped. Typing on a keyboard is just so much faster and more fluent.

It's a shame that some students will again be limited by how fast they can get their thoughts down on a piece of paper. This is such an artificial limitation and totally irrelevant to real world work now.

Maybe this is a niche for those low distraction writing tools that pop up from time to time. Or a school managed Chromebook that’s locked to the exam page.

Obviously the solution is to bring back manual typewriters.

> My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.

This sounds as if you expect that it will become possible to access an LLM in class without a phone or other similar device. (Of course, using a laptop would be easily noticed.)

The phone ban certainly helps make such usage noticeable in class, but I'm not sure the academic structure is prepared to go to in-person assessments only. The whole thread is about homework / out of class work being useless now.

In the process, we lose both the ability to accommodate students, or ask questions that take longer than the test period to answer.

All for a calculator that can lie.

That was how I took most of my school and university exams. I hated it then and I'd hate it now. For humanities, at least, it felt like a test of who could write the fastest (one which I fared well at, too, so it's not case of sour grapes).

I'd be much more in favour of oral examinations. Yes, they're more resource-intensive than grading written booklets, but it's not infeasible. Separately, I also hope it might go some way to lessening the attitude of "teaching to the test".

We had orals for graded programming assignments in graduate school. You had to present your solution to a panel and defend it. Some of my classmates really struggled with anxiety in front of the panel and took any question, however mild, as intense personal criticism.

Maybe this is a case for "learning styles", but it's probably logistically prohibitive to offer both options.

It is, but it does not matter, because:

1. Corporate interests want to sell product 2. Administrators want a product they can use 3. Compliance people want a checkbox they can check 4. Teachers want to be ablet to continue what they have been doing thus far within the existing ecosystem 5. Parents either don't know, don't care, or do, but are unable to provide a viable alternative or, can and do provide it

We have had this conversation ( although without AI component ) before. None of it is really secret. The question is really what is the actual goal. Right now, in US, education is mostly in name only -- unless you are involved ( which already means you are taking steps to correct it ) or are in the right zip code ( which is not a guarantee, but it makes your kids odds better ).

> AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS.

This assumes we even need more Terence Taos by the time these kids are old enough. AI has gone from being completely useless to solving challening math problems in less than 5 years. That trajectory doesn't give me much hope that education will matter at all in a few years.

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