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Comment by dapperdrake | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has also been there (close enough):

What is your guess as to how this will be different from pocket calculators?

I'm not GP but I've been an external examiner for Danish CS students for longer than a decade. When I look at my previous gradings have matched the expected distribution nationally. There was a diviation during covid, but not compared to the national distribution which was lower all over the board. For the past year things have been very different. The trend is now that you see the same amount of good students, but you see almost no middle students. You have students who hand in great projects and a well written thesis. Who can't tell you very simple things about the work they've turned in. There is no real way to prove that these students cheat, but the study programme regulations are pretty clear when students can't answer questions about what they've written.

When I look at this january's results it's all near top mark or near bottom or failed. Almost nothing in between, and my grades match what has been reported by other examiners so far.

Separate political pressures have already forced some departments to turn a blind eye to stuff like this. Even before LLMs.

It already is different in the way teachers tend to care about. Kids learn the math that pocket calculators help you with before they have the capability and self-determination to find and use a pocket calculator. Pocket calculators aren't short circuiting any 7 year old's ability to learn basic addition.

I almost think at this point anyone attempting to make this absurd connection is a paid shill.

No AI it is not like calculators, looms, engines, or any other advancement.

If AI continues to improve we will need a complete reset of how human society works. That will not happen without mountains of bodies. There are 2 main ways civilization re-balances when work/worker ratio becomes untenable. War or famine. Hope you and you loved ones are on the lucky side.

The idea was to get insights into the difference that I may not have thought about.

Cunningham's Law?

Ok. Aside from the obvious things like , calculators can't be co-opted for undermining and exploiting their users? Calculators can't be primed with false information for manipulating its users? Calculators just offload some longform math, and lets be real a huge percent of people barely touched a calculator after school. AI is basically glued to 70% of the populations hand.

Even at its current level AI is diminishing the value of being someone knowledgeable.

At the core computers are a power consolidation machine. AI streamlines boring/slow aspects of consolidating that power to those that control the AI.

The most frustrating part is that giving feedback on their essays or source code is a lot of work, which goes to waste if the student cheated.

Unlike calculators, making an assessment slop-proof often demands more resources to grade it, be it because the assignment needs to be more complicated, or because it needs more teaching assistants, or more time allotted for oral presentations. I also shudder at the suggestions to just come up with assignments that assume the students will use AI assistance anyway. That's how you end up with Programming 102 students that can't code their way around a for loop.

You can't be serious...

Am serious about asking for the opinion of someone affected by a problem or phenomenon.

Ya, sorry, I'm in a mood.

But logically, calculators only do math, and they have primitive inputs that aren't going to match exactly what is on the sheet for anything other than THE most simplest of equations. You can't talk to a calculator in natural language, you have to learn how to use one (kind of like a ahem programming language). I never found calculators helped me "cheat" at math, it was still hard.

Most of the contemporary mathematical proofs from LLMs read like first-semester failings. Doesn’t really help to cheat there, either.

Interesting! Though I will hold out for the "you're prompting it wrong" comments.

FWIW, when I was studying, I trained on some decades old physics exams. Some of them were largely about calculating things by hand.

So, yeah, calculators did lead academia to change how exams had to be designed, because it solved some questions automatically.

I still think that LLMs are much worse, but I feel that the question is actually valid.

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