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Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

My teachers, prior to AI, encouraged the 'equivocating waffle' essay. These essays met word count and touched on the topics but failed to say anything interesting. Basically how ChatGPT writes, and I've as mentioned previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40646682), I am very happy that AI can do these essays so well that we're going to be forced to actually think in order to differentiate ourselves.

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I learned about 'Sterotype grading'.

The teacher doesnt read, they skim, and they already know who deserves As or Ds.

I was a victim of this. I was a general A or B student, but I thought the funny kids (D students) were funny and hung out with them. I got stereotype graded. My last paper of the year I completely gave up, the least effort ever. Teacher gave me an A and said 'You improved so much!'

You failed to establish the link between giving up and getting bad grades from hanging out with the funny kids and how any of that is even remotely caused by stereotyping.

I think that is a misreading, they got good grades due their prior stereotype of 'A' student despite doing 'D' student effort.

I see what you are saying now. It should be clarified.

If their grades never changed it could be they're better at writing than they think, even with low effort.

That scenario seems rather contorted, seems like taste is important part of writing a good essay.

I could imagine, I guess that would be a side effect of large class sizes.

An optimization when I was a student was to find out what the teacher thinks and re-affirm those beliefs with a few twists to give an appearance of depth. On occasion, for fun, I would take a dissenting position and I was always punished for it.

I think the entire education system is steeped in orthodoxy such that it's not in its interest to properly teach critical thinking, failing to do so is an emergent behavior / happy accident. There would have to be an environment that would reward students for actual critical thinking and not apparent critical thinking (agreeing with the teacher) and I don't know how to create one, and I especially don't know how to reform the current system.

I still get a bit of a kick out of the idea that the often proposed solution to the mass academic plagiarism, following the replication crisis, is a mass amnesty - which strangely seems to have tacitly occurred as it's no longer even being discussed.

My literature teacher started reading my essays when I turned a report on Dante's Inferno into a crossover with Doom.

Back in the early dial-up era, when teachers were not tech-savvy, I went online and found a paper exactly matching what I was tasked to write about for a homework assignment. And I regrettably submitted it as-is with no changes. I guess I knew it was cheating, but I likely also thought I was being incredibly clever as I had not heard of anyone ever doing that before. However, another student in the class submitted the same exact paper. I received an A and he received a C.

The teacher likely didn't know that he used to be my best friend growing up, and at some point was more knowledgable with computers than me. He introduced me to things like IRC. But he became one of the most popular kids at school and started distancing himself from me.

After getting our papers back, he came over to brag about how he found his paper online and that's how we discovered we submitted the same exact essay. At that point in time, I thought the teacher must have assumed he copied from me. But I think your explanation is likely more plausible. I guess the teacher just skimmed the papers and graded based on our expected grade.

I have a friend who dealt with this in highschool. The English teacher just copied whatever their grade was from their first assignment onto all other assignments.

It got so bad that his Dad, who was an active English and Spanish teacher at another school, was convinced to write one of his papers for him. He got a D.

That’s not universal. Mine hammered on “it’s better to be interestingly wrong than boringly correct.” Equivocating waffles were returned ungraded.

That's strange. For me the persuasive essay with clear thesis and supporting evidence was the major format that was pushed.

My experience as well and this was at public school. I really thought that was the only way to write a good essay.

My Dad had a professor that would take an essay, place it on a scale, and then give a grade based on the weight of the paper.

Even through college I've found that it's hard to optimize for grades vs learning. I've had teachers spite me for disagreeing with them.

Then I developed a formula that essentially went, "While {common sense assertion is true}, we need to consider the nuanced implications of {regurgitated pros/cons}." Combined with the smooth fluff and flow from using speech recognition with minimal edits, suddenly the A's started rolling in. I later found this of course works wonderfully with standardized testing essays in the GRE and GMAT.

Edit: I realize now why I get (even if I don't fully agree with) the 'stochastic parrot' dismissal of language transformer models, I basically lived it.

This is my experience as well. I remember one day completely zoning out and writing pages of drivel "defining what it means to be a X" or whatever. Got an A+. After that I realized professors didn't care about my original thoughts or ideas, but rather the appearance that I was thinking through the prompt deeply.

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