I've been wondering lately if one of the good things to come out of heavy LLM use will be a return to mostly in-person interactions once nothing that happens online is trustworthy anymore.
Universities make money not by teaching, but by testing and certifying. That's why AI is so disruptive in that space.
Granted, I’m 62, so I’m from the old world. I attended college, and taught a couple of college classes, before the AI revolution. There was definitely a connection between learning and evaluation for most students. In fact most students preferred more evaluation, not less, such as graded quizzes and homeworks rather than just one great big exam at the end. Among other things, the deadlines and feedback helped them budget their efforts. Also, the exercise of getting something right and hitting a deadline is not an overt purpose of education, but has a certain pragmatic value.
Again, showing my age, in the pre-AI era, the technology of choice was cheating. But there were vanishingly few students who used cheating to circumvent the evaluations while actually learning anything from their courses.
If teaching and certifying could be separated, they would be. In fact, it has happened to some extent for computer programming, hence the “coding interview” and so forth. But computer programming is also an unusual occupation in that it’s easy to be self taught, and questionable whether it needs to be taught at the college level.
There should be a class that teaches you how to use AI to get things done, especially judging on how many even on HN admit they aren’t good at it.
Writing code on paper is frustrating to the point where, beyond small algorithms, it’s probably not an effective metric (to test performance on real-world tasks). I think even essays may not be as good a metric for writing quality when written vs typed, although the difference is probably smaller. Because e.g. being able to insert a line in the middle of the text, or find-and-replace, are much harder. Also, some people (like me) are especially bad at handwriting: my hand hurts after writing a couple paragraphs, and my handwriting is illegible to most people. While some people are especially bad at typing, they get accommodations like an alternative keyboard or dictation, whereas the accommodation for bad handwriting is…a computer (I was fortunate to get one for exams in the 2010s).