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Comment by dpoloncsak | Hacker News Reader

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Expecting a kid to run a mile in Physical Education class rather than call Uber is not denying technical progress, nor is it hurting their ability to call Uber later when it is appropriate.

Right, you're describing a curriculum clearly centered around a visible indication that the student is learning and performing. That's what I'm suggesting as well.

'AI Traps' will just forever be a game of cat-and-mouse. We need an education overhaul. School faculty should be less focused on catching LLM use, and more focused on teaching lessons that can't be easily bullshit by AI

What kind of "education overhaul" you have in mind? Some things can be easily verified in class (run a mile), but some require effort (write exam in class / testing center), and some require too much effort to be practical (multi-day research or programming project).

Unfortunately at the high school level, the materials are not that complex, and there are a lot of ways to cheat. Answer keys for textbooks, graphical calculators (or CAS systems), reports copied wholesale from some websites. AI just made all of this significantly worse.

That's an answer I don't have, and am not qualified to make. I'd defer the decision to teachers and those who work well with children already, I just don't think this current iteration works.

If I had to guess, it would look something like a software that confines the student to the software and provides interactive lessons and exams...but I'm a computer guy, my answer will always be "use a computer"

"confines the student to the software and provides interactive lessons and example" - this already exists. It is also useless without continuous supervision, as students will simply take a 2nd device (cell phone or tablet), start LLM app on it, then point to locked-down device's screen and ask to solve the problem. Yes, it slows down the process a bit since the students have to actually re-type the LLM answers instead of copy-pasting them, but it does not eliminate the problem.

"That's an answer I don't have .. I'd defer the decision to teachers" - you are really sounding right now like someone who comes to a town's discussion of whether to get more solar panels, and starts saying how nice it would be if the fusion were solved, and we all had an near-infinite source of cheap and clean energy. Yes, it would be nice, but unless you have a good idea on how to achieve this, please don't distract people from the real problems they have.

The AI-in-education is the same way: there is a crisis right now, and it seems that the only way is to lean heavily onto proctored exams - which students hate, and are more expensive for schools too. Saying "There should be a better way, I have no idea about what this better way is, but meanwhile what you are doing is bad" really does not help much.

1. Yes, and elsewhere in the thread I am suggesting proctored exams as well. Agreed.

2. I believe there is value in identifying issues with the current implementation, as it's required to fix them in the next implementation. This isn't a project I'm working on, related to my career path, or anything I'm passionate about. I am simply stating that I find the current implementation is flawed, and I believe it stems from the mindset of the original comment's "I wouldn't like cheaters to compete with honest students on the job market." I understand there is a difference between being resourceful and cheating, and using LLMs to write essays is clearly cheating, but, as someone who is not an educator and does not have children, I assume it is important to instill a sense of resourcefulness as well. If the entire purpose of education has become the job market, and the job market rewards resourceful people....

3.Seems to be replied to in 2.

The better/real reason for not allowing calculators in certain classes is because doing these things mentally promotes healthy cognitive development. The same way that handwriting for taking notes provides better recall than writing the same thing with a keyboard.

No matter where the argument is going, turning everything into competition instead of ensuring a good environment for proper and healthy cognitive development is a bad thing.

The alternative is having a society full of hollowed out people, who understand nothing. It is no different with university, it is just a shame that so many of the students who take courses are deeply uninterested in the actual learning that they should be paying money there to attain, instead of some weird grotesque attempt at taking money from people without providing any service in return. (I would be as equally critical of faculty and courses today, as I would of students who do not care.)

Yesterday someone shouted across the room at me “hey, what's 43 divided by 2?”

The point isn't that you won't have a calculator, the point is that you shouldn't need to pull out a calculator for every little operation. We drive everywhere, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to walk a mile if necessary. Failing to develop basic mental arithmetic skills is not a flex.

Right. We had to 'show our work' to prove we didn't use a calculator in school in situations where it was prohibited. This provided teachers proof that we understood the fundamentals.

Is there an equivalent to showing your work for writing? Seems like modern LLMs can already mock up a 'draft' and a 'outline' or whatever 'showing your work' would be for an essay

Which is it?

By withholding calculators, did your teachers prove you understood the fundamentals? Or did they actively hamper your ability to compete mathematically?

We were first taught the fundamentals, then taught how to use the calculator

Why wouldn't students be able to learn how to use LLMs afterwards? How does learning to use them via the completely unstructured process of getting output past an overworked teacher out of their depth develop critical skills?

> How does learning to use them via the completely unstructured process of getting output past an overworked teacher out of their depth develop critical skills?

Nobody said it did. The point isn't to get it past a teacher. The point is to develop a curriculum that encourages growth with technology as opposed to demonizing it

Every single actually good student learned information in the school and various skills outside of school. The tech is changing so much currently it would be a waste of time for a teacher to try and plan a year long course around them.

I'm not suggesting to plan a course around using ChatGPT. I just think we're seeing the idea of 'essays and paragraph-based replies to generic questions' be defeated in real-time. There has to be a better way to get quantifiable results than what we currently have

It really depends on the field you go into. If you're a writer and you want a job writing things, you go to college to become a better writer and prepare yourself for working in that industry. If the professors just let you turn in AI slop, how does that benefit anyone? You didn't write anything, why are you here paying tuition? And it demonstrates to the industry that if colleges are handing out degrees to writers for AI slop, why do they even need writers? Just cut the middleman out and they can make the slop themselves.

You go to school to learn. Turning in AI slop doesn't teach you anything. You didn't have to research the subject and commit time to crafting the work into something good. You just typed in a prompt (or copy and pasted it) and then turned in whatever the computer made. The point of learning isn't to turn in assignments, it's to learn and demonstrate your knowledge via assignments. If you want to get a job producing AI slop, don't bother going to school.

> You go to school to learn.

This is not the mindset of very many people. They go to school because it's a requirement to get a job.

Talk to someone in college, or especially a trade school, and you'll see that the overwhelming majority are cheating, especially those from lower trust cultures. I work at a FAANG and, in casual conversation, many of my colleagues admitted to cheating with a dismissive "everyone does it".

And colleges need to crack down on those students to kick them out of school. Other students should ask why their hard work is being degraded because others feel the need to cheat through school?

And if you're talking about schools in other countries, well, they get paid what they deserve.

You guys are getting jobs?

Writing specifically, I'll concede may need some oversight to prevent LLM use.

In general though, we should be looking at how to re-design assignments to demonstrate an understanding without being a large block of text, atleast imo.

We (Or atleast, my school) started teaching us how to use a calculator in things like Trig and Calc. It's not about 'can you divide correctly to arrive at the correct value of sin' but 'can you differentiate when to use sin vs cos', which I think was the more valuable lesson. But maybe LLMs are so powerful, or so 'do it all', that we just cannot compare it to the calculator (Not in their current iteration, but looking ahead...)

In person proctored exams, with individually randomized questions from a large pool, along with written answers completed during the test, like required for state certifications, are probably the only answer.

The popular way to get around video chat proctoring is to physically attach notes to your screen, so when you sweep the room with the built in camera, it doesn't see anything.

This works in theory, I wonder if it's too resource intensive to be actually feasible though. You can't proctor work done at home, and you can't trust the parents, so you'd need 'homework centers' which sounds like a nightmare, or only administer these during class hours?

Yeah, it would only make sense for in class exams, rather than coursework, and with exams being the majority of the grade.

Back in high school, this is how the state exams were performed. We had an external proctor come in.

If you’re getting prompt injected, you have skipped right passed thinking critically about what you’re doing and into the same level of intellectual dishonesty as cheating, ie, not learning the thing and then attempting to still attain a grade for work not done.

Agreed, but already in this same comment section there are people speculating on ways to defeat this, like a small model just to detect prompt injections. Students will catch on quick, and any novel trick you deploy will be killed by word-of-mouth once the first round of grades come back. I understand the need to do something, but it feels like a band-aid solution on a hemorrhaging gash. I don't think 'AI traps' are a viable solution moving forward for education

Teachers still disallow calculators in class even though we carry one, because learning is about learning, not copying.

it isn't though

it's more like having your friend write an essay for you, except the friend is an impressionable 5 year old with a PhD

Nobody cares about your college book report. It's there to prove, or teach you, that you can do the extremely basic task of synthesizing information. Same with math without a calculator. You should have a mental model of basic math. It helps avoid shooting your foot off later. You might never have to do math from first principles again, but you should get over the hump once.

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