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Comment by ChicagoBoy11 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but as a K-12 administrator, I sadly have to tell you this is just about one of the more substantive things I have seen.

Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set aside to promote experiences -- both in the context of assessments but also even in the social sphere -- there the influence of AI will be very purposefully prevented.

That is an actual stake in the ground, I think (as far as it goes in context like this). I think I would have been hard-pressed to have predicted that there would be such a revolutionary technology where the explicit ask of MIT faculty would be to prevent its influence in the school.

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It will only get harder. From the trenches in tech it’s hard enough to get people who should know better to put in the work to understand the ai output.

For education I can’t imagine. You might have to resort to actual discussion in classrooms instead of homework, with the accompanying need for both more educators and higher quality therein. Which isn’t going to be easy when education is fully under regulatory capture (at least for K-12 in the USA)

>actual discussion in classrooms

Which works in some contexts; I've taken seminars.

Not sure how that works with a multi-hundred person core calculus, physics, or chemistry class.

They did say k-12.

Maybe it just requires approaching the problem differently. What about the vulcan study pod things? Have the discussion with the AI itself. Have the AI regularly assess understanding.

So this is an alternative that I actually don't object to at all, but you still need to create mechanisms where you then get at the quality of the mental models formed without the assistance of AI. My (very unpopular) hot take is that some of this will actually usher in a new era of "standardized test"-like things; we will be far more permissive about how/in what ways students/professionals acquire knowledge, and the real task will now shift from that to guaranteeing that there is some competency that was reached with the assurance that it isn't masked by an outside influence.

If you basically assume that everyone can and will cheat at all times, then you can let yourself be far more agnostic about it AS LONG as you are confident in some ability to measure the person's skill without the tools.

The interesting thing is that ai actually helps me learn more effectively than ever before. Each session can become a personalized little seminar that dynamically tests me as it presents ideas and concepts and I attempt to apply and extend them.

I think we need to move past recall as the test itself, and tasks as the gate we judge academic achievement by. These were only ever an approximate measure, which is why we still have things like thesis defenses.

But imagine the final being an interview with an agent that is designed to probe your mastery? From my experience so far it seems we could measure much more directly the educational outcome and also accelerate the learning at the same time. But this assumes those involved want to learn, which widespread cheating suggests is not the case. Maybe the real answer is that we shouldn’t attempt to force curiosity but instead cultivate it where we find it, allowing those who reject it to be redirected until they find something engaging.

>K-12

K-12 means the public school system in USA & canada. It consists of kindergarten, elementary , middle and high schools, encompassing 12 grades/classes, each taking one year to complete.

I really do worry for our younger students - and I don't envy your job at all.

It seems as if all of teaching and student evaluation needs to be rebuilt from the ground up with AI as a default assumption.

Local high schools have added in class timed, hand written, essays for classes like AP US History.

I particularly like Chicago Law School's policy on AI.

E.g. Law students writing a "Substantial Research Paper" will have to defend it orally: "We will be adding one additional requirement, which is that all students will be required to engage in an oral discussion of their SRP with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting. This discussion will occur after a complete draft (or final version) of the paper has been submitted to the professor. The discussion could take place one-on-one, or as a class presentation in the style of an academic workshop. Either way, the oral exchange will involve the student answering questions that probe the reasoning of the paper and the implications of its arguments."

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/ai-strategy-statement

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