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Comment by summarity | Hacker News Reader

If you remove the mention of AI from this post, the authors process and setup of the notice to students is absolutely mental. The intentions might be good, but damn if this isn’t a comically inept way to set up a kafkaesque nightmare rather than a place for actual learning. The defensive attitude doesn’t help either. Just the sheer energy that went into all the steps mentioned here, not invested in any even superficial attempt to perhaps adapt. That isn’t to “give into AI” or cheating, but if 50% of students break your rules, more rules and litigation about the rules are not the next step to take.

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Using LLMs for the classroom assignment is like using a forklift to lift weights in a gym: completely inappropriate and atrophic.

That some 50% are using the LLMs rather than spend effort learning is not a cause to remove the ban of LLMs in the classroom.

90% of the power of an LLM is being yourself competent enough to judge its outputs. Besides, do we really need more humans coding like LLMs?

My comment explicitly did not focus in the use of LLMs and in fact much of the post doesn’t. Leading with the depressing “work alone” slide, it focused on similarity, not AI use. Between students, ruling even “inadvertent” exposure as the same punishable (and literally literally undeniable!) offence. There’s millions of ways to structure a class for learning, this myopic focus is not one of them. Ironically the setup ignores the very basics of human collaboration. AI merely amplifies extremes, it’s a factor but neither the cause nor culprit here.

The title includes “retrospective” but the learning and changes following such a process are absent.

> Leading with the depressing “work alone” slide

working in a team is valuable. but that value is proportional to the teammates chosen. teammates who have worked alone and can think through their decisions are more valuable, thus it is this way.

>AI merely amplifies extremes, it’s a factor but neither the cause nor culprit here.

you may have missed this part: ~As discussed in the paper, we have also run the tool against earlier semesters with very compelling and interesting results. In particular, the indicators that we use are virtually nonexistent prior to 2024 and their presence increases rapidly over the following years.~

So it stands to reason that LLM's are in fact, the culprit here.

All these analogies are kind of tortured as they ignore the elephant in the room. The students want to be there to get their job getting paper. They aren’t there to learn.

If society offered some reward for lifting the weight while not enforcing how, forklifts would absolutely be used to lift weights.

... Thus the enforcement?

The job-getting paper ceases to be meaningful if it no longer verifies competence. If it merely verifies the ability to prompt an LLM then nobody will pay a premium for people have it, and then nobody will pay to obtain one.

Yea, this letter could have been written about garden variety "suspected cheating" 20 years ago. And the professor's attitude is the same as a couple of professors I remember back then:

Prof: "I know you cheated."

Student: "How do you know it, can you prove it?"

Prof: "I have ways, trust me I know."

Student: "I know the material, I'll re-take the test right in front of you if you want."

Prof: "Either admit that you cheated and get a F, or don't admit and I'll send you to the school's academic integrity department."

This is the professor who had beef with a /middle schooler/ for copying some content on how to use a calculator from his website. His defensive attitude is clearly indicative of the massive, massive chip on his shoulder. Just reading this triggered me to my experience with similar professors in college about a decade ago. What a jackass

> Additionally, the kid that I "stuck it to" wasn't even in high school - I'd guess middle school or possibly even grade school.

"Okay, but that's worse. You do get how that's worse, right?"

To be clear to anyone reading this, that is a verbatim quote from the man's own FAQ. Wild.

I think there are two somewhat orthogonal things addressed here. The first is adapting in the face of AI, and that is happening albeit not instantaneously. The other part is simply ensuring students are working within established policies. In some sense at this level using AI is similar to handing a student a calculator while teaching them to do basic mathematics. They're not going to learn addition and subtraction if they don't actually do the work.

As far as the "comically inept" setup, I think that's acknowledged in the retrospective - including an apology.

The insistence that you must "work alone" and that similarity between submissions will get you flagged would make me really uncomfortable. I think I would be afraid to talk to the TAs lest I get poisoned by their knowledge.

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