[HN Gopher] The availability of text generators will force posit...
___________________________________________________________________
The availability of text generators will force positive changes to
education
Author : randomwalker
Score : 283 points
Date : 2022-10-21 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aisnakeoil.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aisnakeoil.substack.com)
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| There's a limit to how well you can know your students' writing
| styles if your classes are large. If this is something we want to
| change, the obvious path is to stop expecting a single teacher to
| grade 150 essays in a weekend.
|
| Fire 20 admin, hire 40 teachers (more or less, depending on the
| size of you district), then see how many AI's slip through.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| In high school the first few months of having a copy of Encarta
| to print out essays for homework was fun before the teachers
| caught on.
|
| If you don't want students to cheat like this maybe build systems
| that respect their time and engage their brains.
| thwayunion wrote:
| Have you given A grades to papers that you are certain were
| generated by LLMs? Or have you spoken with educators who have?
|
| IME, LLM-generated papers are more likely to generate concern
| about mental health than As. Seriously. I've had faculty comment
| that they are concerned that a third of their students are
| suffering from some sort of actual mental illness, and when I
| explain LLMs they are incredibly relieved that there is a
| possible alternative explanation.
| RocketOne wrote:
| I don't believe, as an ex-English teacher, that any teacher
| thinks a student is 'acing' their essay if that's not shown in
| their other writing.
|
| Little Johnny, with his poor spelling and grammar, does not
| suddenly turn in an excellent paper with exemplary grammar,
| spelling and punctuation. So unless they teach computers how to
| screw up in the exactly the same way that Johnny does every time
| he writes a sentence, any teacher worth his salt is going to know
| it's not his work.
|
| As for those with excellent writing skills, well, they have less
| need to cheat but even they would be sussed out with in class
| essays and assignments.
| hot_gril wrote:
| > unless they teach computers how to screw up in the exactly
| the same way that Johnny does every time he writes a sentence
|
| You can ask an image generator for something like "Barack Obama
| painted by Picasso" and get a passable result, so it's probably
| possible to augment a writing model to mimic the style of
| Johnny's past essays.
| noasaservice wrote:
| I'm glad I had a specific teacher in HS for English.
|
| He had us do a positional paper over a topic we were passionate
| about. Topics were first come first serve. We got them approved.
| And when everyone was done getting topics, he then said "You are
| now arguing for the OPPOSITE of what you asked for."
|
| He later explained why he did so. Obviously, the dept had paper
| requirements... But he also wanted us to learn a topic and
| viewpoints from all the angles, including ones you would normally
| dismiss. It was also a learning moment of "understand the issue
| before making opinions, and then form a well thought out
| decision".
|
| I've never seen his style before or since.
| sebringj wrote:
| I've tried doing this myself for company related compliance
| testing which mostly is bullshit anyway and doesn't apply to me.
| GPT3 is better used as a tentative backup tbh because it
| sometimes gives wrong answers or strange answers similar to how
| the images and video produced from Stable Diffusion and the like
| are strange and dreamlike or just impossibly wrong.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There's a neat trick I've seen teachers do to address the concern
| that regurgitation isn't learning (and it sort of mirrors the
| technique we use in machine learning): ask a follow-up question
| based on the essay.
|
| A student that has done the underpinning research to generate the
| essay should be able to field a closely-related question, offered
| in realtime. If they can't, that's concerning.
|
| (To be sure, some students will address this approach by having
| the machine auto-generate the essay than going off and reading
| around the answers the essay gives to understand the adjacent
| space to field the upcoming question. Good; that means they just
| used the machine as a "cliff's notes on the topic" generator,
| they still did some research).
| riskable wrote:
| That's also just testing memory. I had a teacher do that to me
| in high school where they graded papers during winter break and
| when they asked me about it in January I could barely remember
| that I _wrote_ the document let alone the specifics of the
| topic.
|
| Of course, I have a exceptionally bad (37th percentile) long-
| term memory so maybe that's just me. Schooling in general seems
| to be geared towards tests of memory at the expense of
| understanding.
|
| High school me: "Well I understood it _at the time_ " hehe
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > just testing memory
|
| IIUC, testing memory is half of pedagogy. Memory (or the
| student growing the necessary techniques and discipline to
| supplement an internal lack of it) is pretty key to (at least
| US) pedagogy in the primary / intermediate levels.
| Aunche wrote:
| > free students from the drudgery of pointless essays that ask
| them to regurgitate content (as opposed to essays that teach
| writing skills or critical thinking, which remain valuable)
|
| That's something that sounds good on paper, but it's incredibly
| difficult in practice. For one, students are all over the place
| in ability, so what's critical thinking for one student may be
| the most boring of intuition for another. Evaluating students
| based on their critical thinking is ripe for subjectivity. I've
| had multiple teachers who were great at teaching, but clearly had
| favorites and that was very discouraging for students that were
| on their bad side and received arbitrarily bad grades. The
| English teachers I most appreciated followed a boring rubric that
| incentivizes more formulaic writing.
|
| Also, regurgitating content is an important skill as well. Half
| the formal writing I do at work is documentation, which strictly
| falls into this category. The other half is design docs, which
| arguably is a form of regurgitation as well. I'd come up with the
| design anyways, and the doc is just to share it to others.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'm getting a little tired of the fallacious argument which
| compares some new technology to an old technology from the past,
| and says "see how people were afraid of that technology from the
| past, yet their fears proved unfounded? In the same way, fears
| about this new technology are unwarranted."
|
| The reasons I grumble whenever I see this argument made are:
|
| 1. The things being analogized are usually not related in such a
| way that one prediction not coming true suggests that the other
| prediction won't come true. You have to examine the likelihoods
| in isolation, you cannot reason from analogy about everything.
|
| 2. Often, predictions about the negative consequences do come
| true, it's just that we adjust our response to them and fit them
| into our new view of the world. For example, the prediction that
| allowing calculators in the classroom would make students worse
| at arithmetic wasn't _wrong_ , we just decided that we didn't
| _care_ if students are good at arithmetic anymore. That 's fine
| if it's how we decide the world should be, but it is not the same
| thing as the prediction being wrong.
|
| 3. More generally, the way I view disruptive technologies is that
| they are not "just like" some previous technology, and therefore
| analogous to it. What I mean is, when someone says "people
| staring at their phones is just like people staring at newspapers
| in the past", they ignore the fact that phones replaced
| newspapers. There was a competition, and newspapers lost, so we
| have to acknowledge there is some meaningful difference between
| the two that explains why.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I don't want to automatically defend pointless essays about 'How
| X influenced 19th century England' or whatever is the current go
| to topic for teachers, but, and it is not a small but, the whole
| point of writing pointless essays is to give students an idea on
| how to write for an audience ( their teacher ).
|
| At the end of the day, unused muscle will atrophy and students
| may have trouble even producing appropriate prompts for ML
| generator. I would weep for the future of humanity, but:
|
| 1. Coffee did not kick in yet 2. I have upped my nihilism lately
| mywittyname wrote:
| > 2. I have upped my nihilism lately
|
| We've left future generations with a mountain of garbage to
| deal with, what's another paper cup thrown onto the pile?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I find that the point of most High School essays is not to
| practice writing, per se, but to demonstrate that the student
| has internalized whatever lesson or moral the subject is trying
| to teach.
| TrickardRixx wrote:
| "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of
| those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their
| memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters
| which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of
| their own memory within them."
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I am familiar with this quote and I while I do not want to
| assume, I think it was intended as a rebuttal/counter to old
| codger how ancients also thought writing would kill memory.
|
| Spoiler alert. It did. Very few people attempt to commit
| things to memory outside some Guiness record competitions.
| And just in case I did not hit the point, introduction of
| Google with world encyclopedia at anyone's hand, further
| exacerbated that trend.
|
| To sum up, I appreciate the sentiment, but in HN I do hope
| for, nay, I expect pushback in the form that goes beyond
| weirdly smug quote.
|
| What I am saying is: argue with me. Don't quote me
| philosophical bumper stickers.
| TrickardRixx wrote:
| It seems to me that the average person around me remembers
| more than the ancients had the ability to even know. To
| your point of "pointless essays teach children how to write
| to an audience", there are entire populations of people
| who, as a matter of survival, learn how to modulate their
| communication based on the recipient. Those children learn
| this skill well before they write any essays about "How X
| influenced 19th century England".
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| <<It seems to me that the average person around me
| remembers more than the ancients had the ability to even
| know.
|
| It is possible. I have no easy way to counter that. I
| could yell anecdata is not necessarily
| valid/useful/relevant data, but I know I use it myself to
| an extent so I will avoid going down that path.
|
| It is true that is likely that I will likely be able to
| talk to a random person about a variant of pop
| psychology/crime investigation/science/relationship
| mechanics shown on recent TV show and I admittedly cannot
| produce evidence of Plato dealing with the same level of
| 'not exactly ignorance, but very low level understanding
| of anything'. I can talk with an average bloke near me
| about basic genetics, but it in a very limited kind of
| way.
|
| Is being vaguely aware of a subject memorized knowledge (
| 'ahh, yes, quantum mechanics.. that wheelchair guy
| invented gravity right' kinda way )? Plato was talking
| about the kind of memory skill that allowed one to recite
| Homer. And I am not defending oral tradition ( alphabet
| was a good invention ), but comparing my friend
| remembering lines to "Shake shake shake" does not seem to
| be on the same level.
|
| So, to put it in a more direct way:
|
| To what extent does an average person around constitute
| remembering more when compared to Homer? Or is there is
| just so much more to know in general that an average
| person can only deal with very vague generalities.
|
| << To your point of "pointless essays teach children how
| to write to an audience", there are entire populations of
| people who, as a matter of survival, learn how to
| modulate their communication based on the recipient.
|
| Do they though? Last set of news that made circles across
| all media was that of professor, who made things too
| hard. I suppose you argue yes. Not only did they survive;
| they veritably vanquished their audience into oblivion.
| But I ask you: was that what I mean when suggesting
| writing and you generalized to modulating message for
| your audience? Both answers could be argued to be true,
| but society as whole suffers more with only one of them.
|
| God I feel old just typing this.
|
| [1]https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/9
| 78-1-4...
|
| ps. The whole post seems a little snarky. Please let me
| know if that is the case and I will try to adjust
| language as needed.
|
| edit: clarified main question mid paragraph ( Does >> to
| what extent)
| tsol wrote:
| People used to recite epics and important texts from memory.
| All of culture and history was stored solely in the minds of
| the people. Illiterate people and literate people do use
| their memories differently, as one has to rely much more on
| their memory.
| quacked wrote:
| The problem with "writing pointless essays" is that students
| who write pointless essays learn that writing essays is
| pointless.
| tsol wrote:
| Sure there are. It's just kids don't know anything useful
| though that we actually need them to write essays. That's why
| we have them write pointless essays instead.
|
| But I have to write essays on how certain systems work, and
| how certain tasks are achieved in my job in order to document
| these things. My writing skills definitely play a big part in
| making a tutorial that is easy for anyone to read and
| understand.
| yucky wrote:
| Until you need to document something important in an email or
| elsewhere and have no idea how to do it effectively.
| quacked wrote:
| Do you think that the only way to learn to document
| something important is to write boring standardized essays
| in a school setting?
| yucky wrote:
| It's proven to have been the most effective way. I'm
| happy to learn about other options though since the many
| of the younger people coming in to the workplace now seem
| to be half-illiterate.
| supersrdjan wrote:
| Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's
| Writing Program, makes the point that (I'm paraphrasing)
| students don't learn to write for real world audiences by
| writing for an audience that's forced to read their crap
| (teachers).
|
| I may be misremembering what I heard when I watched this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| As a person, who, on occasion, has to read email from people,
| who send me things, I wholeheartedly disagree with this
| statement. I do, technically, have to read some of them as it
| is part of my job description ( not completely unlike the
| teachers ) and very much a captive audience.
|
| And I get that it is hard and everyone has their own
| idiosyncrasies and all that jazz, but, and this is probably
| the only time I will defend corporates, were it not
| acceptable language enforced by HR, those emails would
| somehow be even worse than they are now.
|
| So the goal is the same.. give the audience what it wants.
| What do I get? Well, it varies..
|
| edit: I am really enjoying the link provided, but clearly
| this guy is talking about a very different level of writer.
| ianbutler wrote:
| The issue is the writing paradigm shifts entirely in college. A
| college English professor would typically fail a standard B-A
| tier 5 paragraph high school information dump essay. One of the
| first things I was told in my writing courses in college was to
| forget that model entirely.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Are we sure the language models won't do just as well writing
| essays requiring writing skills or critical thinking? What about
| a couple years from now?
|
| Getting a good grade on a class assignment is getting pretty darn
| close to passing the Turing test.
| cainxinth wrote:
| I'm a copywriter. I've tested out several GPT-3-based services to
| see if they could speed up my workflow. None were up to my
| standards. I spent more time editing their semi-coherent output
| than it would have taken to just write the thing from scratch.
|
| I have no doubt, though, that the day is quickly approaching when
| they will be of greater use and even threaten the livelihoods of
| people like me.
| notRobot wrote:
| As a broke student who recently got started with copywriting to
| make ends meet, is there any way to email/message you with a
| question or two if you don't mind?
| cainxinth wrote:
| HN doesn't allow for DMs and I'd rather not give out my
| email. But you can ask me right here if you like.
| nicbou wrote:
| I needed a copywriter, and my experience with copywriters was
| similar to yours with GPT-3.
| cainxinth wrote:
| Yeah, I know. The abundance of mediocre copywriters helps me
| maintain my client portfolio. I've had clients drop me for
| someone cheaper many times before, but they often come back
| after having a bad experience.
| [deleted]
| dawnerd wrote:
| Solution? End homework assignments and make students write in
| person.
| Goronmon wrote:
| People seems to be focusing on college level work.
|
| Isn't this going to also cause huge problems at the high school
| level? When teachers are dealing with large classrooms and a very
| limited amount of time spent in class, sentiments like "just
| learn to teach better" aren't going to be very helpful.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I wonder if this will affect the split between term papers and
| in-class essay exams. My wife is a professor and has historically
| assigned the former, on the theory that it's more flexible for
| students and there's no downside if the final is open-book.
|
| But it seems that in-class essay exams may gain popularity if
| professors believe that students will use AI tools on term
| papers. Students who don't use tools like this might also
| advocate for (or simply select into classes that use) in-class
| exams.
| quacked wrote:
| I love your attitude. I have the exact same one. I'm _so excited_
| that another form of busywork has been eliminated from school by
| robots. Eventually they 're going to start having to structure
| classrooms around learning instead of worksheets.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I was thinking like you until the day I realized that a lot of
| learning actually implies busywork, like being good at a sport
| implies a lot of busywork like exercise and nutrition.
| quacked wrote:
| Busywork in sports and nutrition are all in obvious service
| of a more important goal (increase performance in sports).
| There's a clear incentive and reward to your performance.
|
| The same is not true for busywork in school. It is
| disconnected from life outside of school in a very
| fundamental way, in that there are no inherent rewards for
| being able to complete busywork--all of the rewards come from
| social cleverness, competitive instincts, networking, etc. If
| you behave like a good student in the professional world--
| keeping your head down, getting your work done on time,
| following all the rules--your friends who go out drinking
| with your boss will blow past you in your career, and you'll
| be pigeonholed as a drudge-work guy.
|
| People treat school as if it's training for real life. But it
| _is_ real life. Why is everyone so completely convinced that
| it 's got to be boring, miserable, and institutionalized?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Most jobs in the real world don't benefit from social
| cleverness. They don't even offer the opportunity to
| schmooze with the boss. They are: "Drive this exact route
| and deliver boxes, within a time precision of plus or minus
| 30 seconds." and "Repeat this physical motion on this part
| 7000 times while keeping yield over 99%." and "Ensure TPS
| reports are filled out exactly using the correct template
| and are on Lumbergh's desk every Friday morning 8:30." I
| would argue the repetition, rule-following and drudgery of
| school adequately prepares workers for this adulthood.
| quacked wrote:
| First, I don't believe you're correct about social
| cleverness not helping drivers, line workers, or office
| drones. If anything, the more basic the work, the bigger
| the rewards for social cleverness are, as you use your
| relationship with your superiors, peers, and inferiors to
| influence the work day. (This could be becoming less true
| with fully metrics-driven establishments like Amazon
| warehouses.)
|
| Second, is that society (where a huge number of people
| are consigned to that type of labor) a society that
| you're interested in continuing to build? If so, continue
| to support the methods used in modern school.
| [deleted]
| pkulak wrote:
| Learning how to write is _really_ important.
| [deleted]
| hosh wrote:
| In order to do that, we would have to be able to measure
| "learning", and so far, we have only been able to measure
| "ability to regurgitate facts". It does not help that the
| mainstream educational paradigm is "to fill the blank slate
| that is the student".
|
| See: John Taylor Gatto's book on this subject-- The Underground
| History of American Education.
|
| There are other educational paradigms, but they are radically
| different -- no tests, no curriculum, no "fill the blank
| slate", no measuring.
| quacked wrote:
| I knew I'd see Gatto come up eventually. I owe my life to
| that man. Before and after reading his work is like before
| and after the Wizard of Oz switches to color.
| moviewise wrote:
| Gaining a skill is how we can measure learning.
|
| Writing is a skill.
|
| Writing clearly, grammatically, persuasively, and logically
| takes many skills.
| hosh wrote:
| That is measuring from the outside, and quantifying it. How
| do you measure "skill"? You still look at the results,
| rather than the skill that develops inside a person. It's
| still the same problem as measuring "learning".
| jrodthree24 wrote:
| I really don't understand why essays are bad. Is there any kind
| of research that goes into this?
|
| I agree with you that learning should be the goal. And any busy
| work that doesn't help should be eliminated. But I just don't
| know if we know what the right structure should be and if we
| can say for sure that things like writing essays don't actually
| help students cultivate their writing and critical thinking
| skills.
| quacked wrote:
| Essays are _wonderful_. It gives me great joy to write essays
| today, although they 're sometimes called "blog posts" or
| "rants" or "emails" or "memos".
|
| I hated writing essays in school, because the assignment was
| always "reproduce a work of writing that adheres to the
| arbitrary standards of the institution for grading purposes".
| Great writing can't be graded, as its value is entirely
| subjective.
|
| As an example, here's an assignment that I might have
| completed under duress, vs. one that I'd complete voluntarily
| for fun:
|
| "Explain how the theme of Chaos is expressed in
| Slaughterhouse Five. Use at least five supporting examples
| from the text and cite your references MLA style. Four pages
| minimum."
|
| "Convince your best friend that Slaughterhouse Five is a
| terrible novel. Cite the text any way you please, ideally by
| comparing it to a book you think is actually good."
|
| Whatever I produced for the first prompt can be graded by
| ticking off boxes and looking at my grammar; whatever I
| produced for the second prompt would need a thorough
| investigation of my own writing style and a framework of
| grading that takes into account my own voice as an author.
|
| (To be clear--I don't think that giving my prompt in a modern
| classroom would immediately inspire students. They are far
| too burdened by the entire system for a single change to fix
| their experience. I am merely discussing the difference
| between "pointless essays" and "essays that authors care
| about".)
| HWR_14 wrote:
| 7th graders are highly unlikely to produce writing of such
| a great quality that it "cannot be graded". Maybe when
| Hemingway was in the seventh grade. And we can grade
| subjective things all the time. You can grade code based on
| something other than whether it runs efficiently, for
| instance.
|
| Meanwhile, your prompt sounds like hell. And is far more
| subjective than the previous one.
|
| > Convince your best friend that Slaughterhouse Five is a
| terrible novel.
|
| So, before you even start the assignment, you let the
| teachers dictate the position that someone has? And you're
| not going to teach students to assess themes in books, so
| what will they judge Slaughterhouse Five on, aesthetics?
|
| > Cite the text any way you please
|
| Why on earth would you change that requirement. "Cite the
| text using method X" is a direct analog to "Coding
| standards dictate this naming convention". I would fire a
| "free thinker" who refused to adhere to the, sometimes
| arbitrary, standards for communication with the rest of
| group. Standards are good.
|
| > ideally by comparing it to a book you think is actually
| good."
|
| As a rule, I don't think convincing someone that a work of
| art is "terrible" should be done by comparing it to
| something else you "think is good".
|
| > [No page limit]
|
| You can trust an adult with that, but a seventh grader?
| Usually they need a page limit to encourage them to write
| more.
|
| It seems like the following a complete essay that you would
| have to grade very well: "Slaughterhouse Five's lack of
| elves makes it terrible, because fantasy novels are just
| better and books like the Lord of the Rings have elves
| which makes it a good book [Source - My conversation with
| Johnny yesterday]"
|
| Grading that well would be bad because it's horrible in
| every way.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Great writing can't be graded, as its value is entirely
| subjective.
|
| Well... I have a lot of problems with this, on both sides
| of the fence.
|
| Provocative start: How about we give up the idea that
| students are producing great work?
|
| I mean, I imagine teachers think of the exercises they give
| as skills development.
|
| One of the skills to develop is technical writing.
|
| Surely beginning students do not know how to cite textual
| examples to back up their arguments. Understanding the role
| of evidence in making an argument should be fundamental to
| democracy. (Understanding that we are not living in that
| world recently in the US.) So they need to practice.
|
| Choosing the theme is another skill. I don't have anything
| to say about it, but I don't have a problem with teachers
| asking students to try to figure something out before they
| write about it.
| quacked wrote:
| > How about we give up the idea that students are
| producing great work?
|
| Almost all teachers are well ahead of you on this one.
| Far rarer is the belief that students are capable of
| great work. This is, in fact, my central point: if all of
| your assignments are bounded by the need for
| administrative convenience, creativity and originality
| cannot flourish.
|
| Teaching writing through dry, separate "skills
| development" exercises is like teaching basketball as
| follows:
|
| "Today we'll practice jumping from one ankle to the
| other. Today we'll practice reading a point guard centric
| offense. Today we'll be working on our vertical jump
| height. Now for the exam: demonstrate a cut behind the
| center and a layup. Hmm, your second step is slow, you
| get a C."
|
| I am arguing that if you want to teach basketball, your
| students need to play a lot of basketball. Exercises will
| only really help them once they've experienced the game
| and have a burning internal desire to compete.
| ihateolives wrote:
| > I am arguing that if you want to teach basketball, your
| students need to play a lot of basketball. Exercises will
| only really help them once they've experienced the game
| and have a burning internal desire to compete.
|
| Well. I played basketball since 7th grade. Not just
| played, trained 3 days a week. Before you can really play
| you have to master certain elements, otherwise it's just
| fooling around. And at first we trained all those
| elements separately. Balance, switching feet, turning.
| Just turning without the ball. Faster, slower. Jumping
| from left foot, from right. Catching the ball. Throwing
| it. Passing. Alone, with partner, against the wall. Hook
| shot, but just up, up, up, get the ball up. Hook from
| left, from right. Then hook standing directly below hoop.
| Left, right, left, again. Then adding movement. Over and
| over again. And then actually playing.
| quacked wrote:
| I play tennis, soccer, ultimate frisbee, jiu-jitsu, disc
| golf, rock climbing, hang gliding, whitewater kayaking,
| bicycling, and kite surfing, and I've taught many of the
| same to beginners.
|
| I _assure_ you that the instruction only works when the
| student wants to experience the final form, and they will
| not get any sense of what the final form is until they
| have "fooled around" and have an actual desire to learn
| the sport. At every level of their progression they need
| time to experience unstructured performance for fun. The
| same is true for writing.
|
| Kids love to write when they're young and no one's
| hovering over their shoulders grading them. It's only
| once they get hit with the five-paragraph essays and the
| term papers and the dry grammar exercises that they learn
| to avoid writing, and associate it with boredom and
| stress.
| gcanyon wrote:
| At the high school level it's even worse than you're
| describing. My daughter was taught using the Jane Schaffer
| method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaffer_method
|
| Note the section on Body paragraph structure -- that
| doesn't _begin_ to cover how structured the resulting
| essays were. I can still remember my daughter sing-songing
| "T, CD CM CM, CD CM CM, CD CM CM, SC." _Every_ essay had to
| follow that exact pattern. _Every_ commentary sentence had
| to start with the approved list of words, and likewise the
| concluding sentence.
|
| It's entirely about how easy it is for the teacher to
| grade, and has nothing to do with teaching students to
| actually write. It was awful, and I did everything I could,
| including contacting the Jane Shaffer people, to criticize
| it and push back.
| quacked wrote:
| Good lord, that _is_ even worse than I 'm describing.
|
| A great many people cannot fathom the fundamental truth
| that the majority of learning is useful simply because it
| allows us to enjoy to process of living in society for
| 70-90 years _and for no other reason_. There isn 't any
| greater purpose to being "good at writing" other than "it
| makes communication and competition more accessible and
| convenient", but even that is a subjective value
| judgement. There are many sub-cultures who exist even
| inside our own that are perfectly happy being sub-
| literate.
|
| A lot of people are saying "if kids don't learn dry,
| boring technical writing, then how will they write work
| emails and documentation?" The implication there is that
| if you can't write proper emails and documentation,
| you'll fail at your career. If the emails and
| documentation I receive are at all representative of
| greater industry (and I've worked in both aerospace and
| clinical research) then I can assure everyone that _few
| people can write at a useful level_ and not only are they
| still employed but their companies are still around.
|
| Given that no one can write anyway, why do we cling to
| forcing children through painful, humiliating exercises
| in standardization?
| moviewise wrote:
| These essays are usually assigned in college-prep courses
| with the intention that the students will go to college
| where they will need to read/write in APA, MLA or other
| rigid, clear styles that would allow them to read/publish
| in specific academic journals. It's a high standard for
| the high-achieving students.
| counters wrote:
| > Whatever I produced for the first prompt can be graded by
| ticking off boxes and looking at my grammar; whatever I
| produced for the second prompt would need a thorough
| investigation of my own writing style and a framework of
| grading that takes into account my own voice as an author.
|
| The two prompts motivate the writer to practice two
| completely different skillsets; they're really not
| comparable.
|
| The first one is focused more on the fundamentals of close
| reading and analysis. The writer needs to understand what
| the theme of "chaos" means, then closely read the novel or
| review their notes to identify literary devices or
| techniques that theme, and then tie it together in a
| "report". It requires the assignee to practice very basic
| skills... it's technical practice, not artistry.
|
| The second prompt is the artistry - it's an assignment in
| discourse or rhetoric. The thing is, it's not possible to
| successfully execute the second prompt unless you've
| mastered the techniques from the first prompt. Beyond
| constructing logical or emotional arguments that may be
| tailored to your audience (your best friend), you still
| have to collect evidence from the novel. It might not be a
| list of literary devices, but if one of your arguments was
| that the book was poorly and confusingly written, you would
| still probably need to collect evidence of specific
| passages that support your claim. The whole point of the
| first prompt is to build the skill to do this, but with
| some hand-holding/constraints for practice.
|
| I won't defend page limits, but even the reference style
| mandate is important because it has implications for how
| you actually write the essay. I deal with technical
| stakeholders all the time, and the amount of time that we
| could clear up issues if someone would just properly cite a
| reference can be ridiculous... perhaps those stakeholders
| were the teenagers who didn't bother to follow the citation
| guidelines for their literature class?
| btilly wrote:
| I disagree on the ability to execute the second prompt.
|
| You _would like_ them to execute the second prompt in a
| way that demonstrates the skills that the first prompt
| calls for. They won 't. They'll just take the second
| prompt, and communicate exactly the same way that they
| already do to their friends, with similar skills and
| language. The result may be persuasive - particularly to
| their friends - but it won't develop analytic skills.
| counters wrote:
| This really got me thinking, so here's another comparison
| to draw on:
|
| As a teenage musician, I hated drilling my scales and
| etudes. Why bother when practice was limited and I had
| cool ensemble and solo rep to learn? What I didn't
| understand and appreciate at the time is that all the
| technical drudgery serves a very real purpose. Most of
| the existing pedagogy is directly pulled from, based on,
| or references real repertoire which you'll undoubtedly
| encounter in your musical career.
|
| All those scales in intervals? Well, you can't even begin
| to make a complex passage musical if you can't execute
| the technique! Arpeggios in weird fingering/shifting
| patterns? Turns out that some very exposed orchestral
| passage necessitates that you use an oddball fingering
| because it's just not practical to do anything else in
| context. That entire development section in the concerto
| you need to cram for an audition? Good thing that one of
| your etudes book was effectively variations and
| embellishments on that section, so you can lean on muscle
| memory and focus on making it sound nice!
|
| Essay writing is much the same. No matter what I'm
| writing - an e-mail, a project proposal, a performance
| review, whatever - I'm trying to communicate a point.
| That means constructing an argument and supplying
| evidence. And doing so in a way that your audience will
| grok without any additional intervention. You build this
| skill by practicing, sometimes in ways that seem dumb,
| boring, and disconnected from reality. Not every pedagogy
| is ground so well in reality as my music example, but I
| can't imagine that the cynical take that it's all purely
| to automate grading is a rational take on things.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I've jumped back into doodling on guitar after a mid-20's
| post band break up and... it's totally different this
| time. I am so much more interested in scales, building
| chords by manually and so forth, when I was younger I
| wanted to play songs.
|
| The opposite is true for my math. I enjoyed algebra as a
| kid and hated trig and calculus. Now I am much more
| interested in calculus and don't like algebra algebra.
|
| Sometimes there's different ways to learning, I have no
| idea.
| riskable wrote:
| > That means constructing an argument and supplying
| evidence.
|
| Ah wouldn't it be fantastic if school essays were more
| like proving to your boss that you followed the spec to
| the letter and less like... Following the spec to the
| letter.
|
| That's the difference and it makes all the difference.
| counters wrote:
| What about convincing your colleagues that something
| about the spec is wrong?
|
| It's worth noting that the same skills the "version 1"
| essay is supposed to teach should be helpful if all you
| need to do is compile a checklist and save yourself the
| hassle of argument.
| iaaan wrote:
| > The first one is focused more on the fundamentals of
| close reading and analysis. The writer needs to
| understand what the theme of "chaos" means ...
|
| I think what ends up happening in reality, at least, in
| my experience, is that you Google "Slaughterhouse Five
| chaos" and trawl the first several pages of results
| looking for information you can essentially copy+paste
| into your essay (with slight adjustments to get around
| automatic plagiarism scanners, of course).
|
| I did still demonstrate some kind of skill, maybe
| research and the ability to condense information from
| many sources down into a single piece of work, but those
| weren't the skills you mention, and it was definitely not
| what the teacher was intending for me to do.
|
| The second prompt the person you responded to runs into
| the same issues (I can Google "Slaughterhouse Five
| reviews"), but at the very least probably feels like a
| more engaging and compelling essay prompt to the student.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| You're generalizing in a way that probably suits you and
| people like you. Not everyone though.
|
| The second prompt would have sent me spinning, panic,
| want to run.
|
| The first prompt, while being 'technical' and not what a
| future 'writer' would like to do at that point can be
| somewhat mechanically achieved and while I still wouldn't
| have liked it, I would begrudgingly do it and it probably
| helped me overall. It mentions using certain 'techniques'
| you would've learned about in class. I can apply that.
| They want a specific number of pages at minimum so that I
| don't just write 5 sentences to cover the 5 examples,
| sure, whatever.
|
| Like learning math. You gotta learn the basics, learn the
| multiplication tables by heart. Do the same "compute
| (-7^2*13-7)+5/5" style exercises over and over. It
| teaches attention to detail and memorizing and following
| simple rules. If you can't do that it is very unlikely
| that a "closer to reality" question that someone that
| will later go on to become a mathematician would like
| working on instead would not send you into panic mode.
| ModernMech wrote:
| This is a classic pitfall faced by novice teachers. I fell
| for it too.
|
| Assign the second prompt, and I guarantee you'll get
| something like this as a submission:
|
| "Bro, the novel sucks. Trust me."
|
| You can't even give this a bad grade, based on the prompt.
| You can't say it's not convincing, because they'll say
| "you're not my friend, this would convince my friend"
|
| You can't say it's too short, because they'll say you
| didn't provide a minimum.
|
| You can't say it didn't cite the novel, because you said to
| do whatever.
|
| You can't say it didn't compare to other literature,
| because you said "ideally".
|
| Lesson 1 of being a teacher: give the students an inch and
| they will take a mile.
|
| Teaching students is not unlike programming computers, in
| that they both take instructions very literally. If you are
| vague with a computer program, you know ahead of time
| because the program doesn't compile.
|
| If you are vague with an assignment you don't know until
| you get it back. The more vague the assignment, the wider
| the variety of submissions. If you don't tell them the font
| face you get a cursive one. If you don't tell them the font
| size you get huge and tiny. If you don't tell them the
| margins you get wide and thin.
|
| So even if you would personally make a good faith effort at
| this assignment, it's really better for everyone to be
| specific and follow the same format.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| Although the general gist of what you're replying to
| certainly evokes a response in me, I was not going to
| reply until I read your response and agreed with it's
| point.
|
| Having taught writing in universities over a six-year-
| long stint, my experience agrees with yours.
|
| Pragmatically, the reasons the assignments are structured
| they way they are isn't because bad faith by instructors,
| but rather because of the needs of students.
|
| I don't blame the students-- they have a lot of shit
| going on.
|
| At the same time, you're absolutely correct that making
| assignments in the general form we see them has more to
| do with what students actively demand: they absolutely do
| not want the kind of assignment suggested by the GP
| because anything other than a list of boxes to check
| causes profound anxiety in students.
|
| Our comment threads here are excellent examples of what
| short writing prompts and assessments could look like,
| and I've gotten invaluable feedback on my writing from
| participating in internet threads. In this form of
| writing, there are distinct grades in the form of karma.
| And there are real stakes for communication, as I can
| easily fail to get my points across or even upset people.
| I even sometimes get useful responses that improve my
| understanding of the world or some topic.
|
| As useful as that practice can be, if I had my academic
| advancement tied to these prompts it would cause me a
| great deal of stress: how the hell do I know in which
| contexts someone will read any given post?
|
| In the context of the general internet I have a lot of
| easy ways out. I don't have to listen to dumb people, the
| poorly informed, or malicious trolls.
|
| In the context of a classroom, I can't just tell the
| teacher "that's just, like, your opinion, man" because
| they are going to write down a letter and that's going to
| make my life easier or harder.
|
| I'm not a big fan of contemporary education for reasons I
| could develop in book-length diatribes (I quite a PhD
| during my dissertation), but I get where students are
| coming from when they demand some clarity on how they are
| being assessed.
| quacked wrote:
| I covered this point in my last paragraph. The problem
| with students isn't that they can't follow directions or
| collaborate; it's that the _hate school and don 't want
| to be there_.
|
| One of the reasons they hate school and don't want to be
| there is that they are compelled to do pointless,
| grinding busywork, all day, every day. That's why they're
| using GPT-3 to fake their essays. Even three hours of
| reprieve from the system is worth cheating and
| dishonesty, and all the better if it helps their GPA.
|
| I harbor no beliefs that a teacher can walk into the
| modern school system with a creative, exciting lesson
| plan and inspire students to perform. The system is
| broken and fundamentally flawed. It cannot be fixed. You
| are certainly correct that the best way to get consistent
| results out of your institutionalized students is to
| grade to a rigorous, clear format, but in doing so you've
| only played your part in reinforcing the exact system
| that drives them to cheat with GPT-3.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > The problem with students isn't that they can't follow
| directions or collaborate; it's that the hate school and
| don't want to be there.
|
| I'd say it's a mix of both.
|
| > That's why they're using GPT-3 to fake their essays.
|
| I'm not actually sure about the motivation for most
| students. For students who I've caught using copilot on
| assignments, it's not because of the reasons you cite.
| Maybe it is for others.
|
| > It cannot be fixed.
|
| The main improvement that would fix most of this is to
| have higher teacher to student ratios. That alone would
| be a massive improvement, because then teachers would
| have time to engage students at a different level of
| attention.
| moviewise wrote:
| As a teacher of English as a second language, I find the
| Jane Schaffer method quite helpful in teaching structure,
| idea generation, and the skill of supporting statements by
| providing examples.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaffer_method
|
| Of course all essays shouldn't be written exactly this way,
| but for students just learning about writing long form, it
| is a brilliant stepping stone to get the basics down. Too
| many students--and readers--can't differentiate between a
| "concrete detail" or statement of fact, and "commentary
| material" or statement of opinion. This method helps to
| distinguish them.
| didibus wrote:
| Your prompt doesn't seem to actually allow for any critical
| thinking development or give any guidance to how you can
| more convincingly express your points or arguments. It also
| assumes you didn't enjoy the book, which I'm sure some
| students would have actually enjoyed, so now your prompt is
| even asking them to argue in bad faith, that doesn't seem
| to be something we want to foster honestly.
|
| The first prompt requires the reader to critically analyze
| the book, by first requiring them to give it a charitable
| interpretation.
|
| It is said that you cannot disagree with someone if you're
| unable to explain their position yourself in a clear and
| definitive manner. Obviously, what are you disagreeing with
| if you don't even understand what's the ideas behind the
| thing you disagree with.
|
| That's what the first prompt would be about teaching you,
| to be able to understand other people's ideas and concepts,
| to look past your initial judgements and bias, give it a
| charitable interpretation, demonstrate you understood all
| this by summarizing the idea in a 4 page essay of your own,
| with supporting references to tie it back to the source,
| showing the source does in fact argue for these itself.
|
| Once you can do that, you have gained the right to go on
| with your own disagreement and write that essay, which
| would be your second prompt. Though honestly, your second
| prompt seems to be geared more towards discussing the
| entertainment aspect of the book, and not the ideas and
| concepts it contains, so again it's not that much about
| critical thinking, because critically there's little to
| argue about a "I prefer the color red over blue."
|
| Personally I think you were trying to get at something
| else, maybe your point was just, come up with assignments
| students enjoy and can have fun with?
|
| I think this is always true, but some things are just
| boring to some students, maybe you just don't enjoy
| reading, writing or even critical thinking, or any of that
| stuff. I don't know if there's much you can do in that
| situation. Maybe the solution is more fluid classes, let
| people move at their own pace, pick their own areas of
| interests, even if that's directly going to a trade,
| skipping on literature entirely, etc.
| quacked wrote:
| What exactly do you think "critical thinking" is?
|
| The first prompt presumes to pick what was important
| about the book, mandate the form by which the book will
| be analyzed, and set up a minimum amount of effort before
| the writer can quit.
|
| The second prompt picks a very general bit of opinion and
| then demands an open-ended argument requiring original
| thought. In fact, it's _even better_ if the reader liked
| the book, because it forces them to write as if they didn
| 't, and opens them to the possibility of a satirical
| essay.
|
| (Note that I am aware that an average modern student
| wouldn't like the second prompt any more than the first,
| but that has to more with the system than the prompt. I'm
| speaking about the pure act of teaching an interesting
| writer to write well.)
|
| Critical thinking requires both the desire and ability to
| think outside of frameworks that were predetermined by
| authority. This is part of the reason that modern schools
| are so bad at "teaching critical thinking skills". The
| most basic form of critical thinking, in fact the first
| openly critical thought that students have about
| learning--"this is a waste of my time"--is suppressed for
| the convenience of the administration.
|
| > Maybe the solution is more fluid classes, let people
| move at their own pace, pick their own areas of
| interests, even if that's directly going to a trade, etc.
|
| I could not agree with this more. I believe that 'school'
| should be life-long, year-round, and optional. Ideally
| we'd go in and out of some type of formal education until
| we died. However, this level of societal flexibility is
| directly incompatible with modern school.
| delusional wrote:
| When challenged on why we had to follow rules that real
| writers often ignored, such as those "arbitrary standards"
| you hate, he responded: "They can break the rules because
| they already know them by heart. You need to learn them."
| That stuck with me. I firmly believe that writing essays
| about boring drudgery is a necessity to develop the skill
| required to write essays about what's important to you.
|
| School is not about doing great work. It's about learning
| the tools which you can use to do great work. School does
| not ask you to do novel research, and so it doesn't ask you
| to write novel essays.
| quacked wrote:
| > School is not about doing great work. It's about
| learning the tools which you can use to do great work.
|
| We have no compatible ideas if you insist upon this being
| the case. School is not "training for real life", it is
| real life.
|
| The thought that it's appropriate and desirable to
| monopolize the bulk of the time, mental health, and
| attention of young people in order to keep them from
| attempting anything of consequence while they "prepare to
| do more work later" is deleterious to society.
|
| (It is also not true that real writers know the rules by
| heart and choose to break them for their own effect. That
| implies that there is a real set of rules that people
| agree on and that every great writer is capable of
| producing a standardized set of writing that follows
| these rules. In fact, most great writers take great pains
| to tell personal stories of failure in school due to an
| inability and unwillingness to comply with their
| teachers, and this has been true since antiquity.)
| [deleted]
| allturtles wrote:
| Leaving aside the fact that your two examples assess a
| pretty different set of skills, one has to deal with the
| reality that every teacher has many students. It's simply
| not realistic to expect them to do "a thorough
| investigation" of every student's style and "voice."
| Imagine you have 50 students across two classes, each
| turning in one of these essays. How long are you going to
| spend on each one? 5 minutes? That's 4 hours of grading
| time. 15 minutes? 12 hours. Now consider that most of your
| school day is already occupied with teaching, prepping for
| classes, office hours, and other responsibilities.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Sounds like a lot of data to process... Perhaps we should
| use gpt3 to grade the essays, too.
| _jal wrote:
| In that case, we can further automate this process and
| just leave humans out of it - pipe the student's
| generated essay back in, emit grade, done.
|
| This reminds me of a moment that has stuck with me for a
| long time. Some time in the early 00s, I was wondering
| around town with a friend fairly late at night. We
| watched a waste truck picking up outside a building,
| there were stacks of Yellow Pages piled up, as they had
| just been delivered everywhere, like they used to.
|
| My friend and I joked that they could have saved on
| transport and fuel by backing up the recycling trucks
| directly to the printing presses.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Reminds me of phone trees with a robotic voice telling to
| to press 1 for X, 2 for Y etc. When Google announced
| their automated phone tree handling, I thought, it's just
| two robots talking to each other over an imperfect
| medium, human language. Why not just connect the two
| systems together via API or something?
| endtime wrote:
| I haven't been a teacher, but I have been a TA (while a
| grad student with a full course load) with a substantial
| weekly grading burden (e.g. 30 students' problem sets a
| week, with 10-15 problems each, for a class introducing
| concepts like formal proofs and basic number theory).
|
| So I appreciate your point.
|
| But I also remember being a student forced to churn out
| mindless formulaic essays with length and structure
| requirements. I hated it. I never liked writing until I
| finally had one good English teacher in high school who
| assigned and graded in the way you say is infeasible.
|
| If a teacher doesn't have the
| bandwidth/capacity/skill/etc. to teach English well,
| maybe they should find something else to do instead of
| torturing students with mind-numbing assignments.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _50 students across two classes, each turning in one of
| these essays. How long are you going to spend on each
| one? 5 minutes? That 's 4 hours of grading time. 15
| minutes? 12 hours._
|
| Teachers with fifty students shouldn't be assigning
| essays. There is no way for them to read them, which
| means they'll grade by scanning for key words. That
| destroys the pedagogical value of an essay, this post's
| point.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Sounds like the problem isn't so much with the
| assignment, but with the idea that assignments only have
| value if they are graded.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the problem isn 't so much with the assignment, but
| with the idea that assignments only have value if they
| are graded_
|
| There's grading and evaluating. Writing something you
| know won't be read, except for the purpose of being
| scolded for missing key words, is close to useless
| pedagogically. Someone motivated enough to learn from
| that (a) didn't need the assignment and (b) deserves
| better.
| fhd2 wrote:
| This! People learn differently - which IMHO schools don't
| usually account for - but I personally always learned
| best when putting something to paper (well, preferably
| the keyboard).
|
| At my university, assignments were primarily used for
| guided learning - most of the grade came from the exam.
| If you cheat on the learning, you either don't _need_ to
| learn to pass the exam (meaning you should have a way to
| fast track), or you're asking to fail the exam, which
| hurts no one but yourself.
|
| Maybe it's different in other schools? Cause I don't
| fully get the "Good." argument based on my experience.
| YMMV.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Sure-- It's not at all tenable right now for teachers to
| provide in-depth critique on long essay assignments--
| that doesn't make critiques with avoiding, it makes long
| essay assignments worth avoiding.
|
| I took a very difficult gatekeeper exposition class at a
| famously rigorous university a few years ago and loved
| it. We had to write a ton, but I didn't mind it because
| when you're learning to write, _you need to write a ton._
| And boy did we. But not all classes there were like that!
| Some classes, mostly classes _about writing_ were deemed
| "writing intensive," but others would require little more
| than a few pages here and there. The standard for that
| scant output extremely high and the intellectual critique
| was often blistering; the teacher concentrated on the
| subject matter instead of combing 50 paragraphs for split
| infinitive.
|
| Currently, I attend a significantly less rigorous
| university as a full-time undergrad. I have 5 classes,
| including an elective on the history of a particular art
| form. The final will be a 10 page paper and 20 minute
| presentation preceded by a 2 page proposal. While this
| class requires significantly less written output than the
| exposition class, the assignment will still take an
| disproportionate amount of my time. The teacher has many
| students and no TA, so each paper will receive a cursory
| intellectual critique, but primarily graded on format and
| grammar. I'll not likely have learned more than if I'd
| written a really tight 2/3 page paper that got several
| serious critiques along the way.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I'll go further and ask "what if their 'voice' is just
| bad"? Just because I have a 'voice' doesn't mean it's
| necessarily good. Teaching students to be able to switch
| voices - some voices/styles are more appropriate for some
| types of communications than others. Recognizing these
| types, and being able to switch... that seems like it
| would be a thing to teach/learn. My early schooling was a
| long time ago, and I don't think I had the language to
| categorize all of this at that time, but I do have
| memories of doing this sort of stuff (mostly grades 6-8
| where I had the same writing teacher, but later with
| various classes through grade 12).
| quacked wrote:
| All acts of deliberate writing can be examined for
| clarity, concision, fulfillment of their own purpose,
| etc. If the purpose of an essay is to teach _writing_ ,
| then the writing should be inspired and flow freely. It's
| only _after_ someone can read and write competently that
| it 's important for them to learn mold their writing for
| specific, dry purposes.
|
| The second half of your argument is incredibly common,
| although I don't begrudge you for making it. Yes, it's
| true that teaching effectively and creatively is near-
| impossible given the current setup and demands of the
| modern education system. This should tell most people
| something about the worthiness of the modern system, but
| instead most of them defend it.
| mc32 wrote:
| I think you had a different experience. My experience with
| essays most typically was to choose your topic, research
| and write an essay. The standardized tests did usually ask
| you to choose from one of three topics, none of which was
| usually something you were enamored with, but that did
| force you to change from your comfort zone and adapt to
| situational necessity.
| [deleted]
| mysterydip wrote:
| My favorite were "reproduce a report on these specific
| historical facts without plagiarizing the textbook," and
| before the internet was readily available. More a creative
| writing course than social studies.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Those type of assignments are part of what "inspired" my
| daughter to skip out on all her high school English
| homework, forget the humanities, and study engineering in
| college. On the one hand, great, we need more women in
| engineering, and she's good at it (and graduated from a top
| college). On the other hand, the humanities are great too
| and it would be nice not to turn people off to them with
| that type of mind-numbing work that is not only subjective
| in content but also subject to the desires of the
| professor.
| rustybelt wrote:
| I'll go a step further and defend "busywork". Unfortunately
| we don't live in a perfectly efficient society so being able
| to learn and execute a formulaic task that might not seem
| valuable is a necessary skill for most adults. Especially
| since individual actors may not have all the necessary
| information to fully assess the value of a task within a
| larger framework.
| thwayunion wrote:
| Being a concert violinist is fun but playing scales isn't
| fun. I can't wait for the robots to learn how to play scales
| for me so I can focus on becoming a concert violinist.
|
| ;-)
| volkhavaar wrote:
| When I taught a class where I assigned essays I confirmed my
| own suspicions from when I was assigned essays: the majority
| of the sentences committed to paper are awful drudgery. I
| then flipped the requirements on their head and removed
| minimum page requirements and instead had extremely strict
| maximum page requirements (with of course the objective
| material requirements of the essay itself). So much
| improvement for everyone involved. I had to read through so
| much less pointless material and the students were forced to
| focus their ideas in a succinct way to be able to get to all
| of the objectives of the essay in the limited space. Everyone
| saved time and did better.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| When I taught a class, I had a strict 3 page maximum on lab
| reports for this reason. So many people are used to turning
| in 10's of pages of drudgery. I just want a few that get to
| the heart of the issue.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Writing essays is not the problem, grading the essays and
| grades in general are the problem.
|
| Feedback is obviously invaluable, but the point of grades, as
| used today, is solely to gatekeep who are allowed access to
| the next level of education. So instead of constructive
| feedback, it has become a set of filters entirely divorced
| from actual learning.
|
| (And yes, I got good grades, I just hate that so many people
| I know were denied opportunities based on a shitty system,
| wildly not fit for purpose)
| randomwalker wrote:
| I learned from one of the comments on my original post that
| many scholars have been saying this for a while, and that
| there's in fact a book that makes the same point!
|
| Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and
| Other Necessities https://www.amazon.com/Why-They-Cant-Write-
| Five-Paragraph/dp...
| lbotos wrote:
| It's an interesting question. I'd personally love to see more
| effort being given to "defend your point as succinctly as
| possible." I wrote a lot of "minimum word count essays and in
| the "real world" clarity trumps length every day.
|
| Length is used as some proxy for rigor, but we know it's only
| a proxy.
| onos wrote:
| I like this idea. Fwiw I feel I learned / grew a lot more
| in one technical writing class in college than I did in all
| my years of English classes. Later I picked ip a book
| "writing with style" that was also quite helpful.
|
| One issue for me in English was I really was not interested
| in the kinds of essays the English teachers were interested
| in having us write, eg coming up with a thesis on plot
| themes in Shakespeare. Just not my thing and so I couldn't
| get anywhere in those classes.
| adelie wrote:
| My high school English teacher adamantly refused to read
| any essay over the length of one page, double-spaced. I
| learned more from that class than any other writing class I
| took.
| endtime wrote:
| +100
|
| When I write today, for work, the challenge is _always_ to
| write less. My VP might have time to read two pages; he 's
| almost certainly not going to read anything longer.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I found that in elementary or secondary school page
| minimums were used to as a cheap proxy for effort. In
| college page maximums started appearing to encourage
| concision. Different needs for students at different points
| in their education.
| criddell wrote:
| I think you're going at it backwards. If you are going to ask
| a student to write an essay, it's on you to be able to show
| that it's the best way to help that particular student
| cultivate their writing and critical thinking skills.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Does that need to be shown? Seems tautological to me. You
| learn to write by writing.
| criddell wrote:
| The writing part isn't necessarily being questioned, but
| the form (essay) is. The tweet thread pointed to in the
| article has some pretty good suggestions.
| vlunkr wrote:
| The twitter thread is suggesting prompts for essays that
| an AI can't handle. So the form hasn't changed, they're
| just trying to stay ahead of the threat.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Perhaps I'm just... thick, but if a goal is to have someone
| write, say, 8 pages of thinking and ideas about a topic...
| I'm not sure there's 'better' ways than to have the person
| write 8 pages of thinking and ideas about a topic.
|
| If the _goal_ is wrong, perhaps just don 't do it, but...
| "it's on you to show that it's the best way". I don't get
| it.
|
| If I want to see that a student has writing skills, I would
| think expecting them to write is somewhat definitional?
|
| Maybe it's on someone else to 'show' a better way to
| demonstrate writing skills that doesn't involve writing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _want to see that a student has writing skills_
|
| This is a fine goal. Having "someone write, say, 8 pages"
| is not, it's a task, and a tedious one at that. No good
| writer starts with a page goal. It's a common criticism
| by great writer's of bad publishers.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Personally, my experience with page count assignments
| were... loose. The goal was never "write 8 pages" but
| "write about idea ABC" (book just read, subject we just
| studied). '5 pages' or 8 or whatever was a guideline,
| with the expectation that to get XYZ ideas across, it'll
| probably be around that length. If the guideline was X
| words or Y pages, and I got the ideas across in less (or
| more), but the ideas were strong, I still got a good
| grade. Perhaps some of that has changed, but... "write an
| essay about $foo", and you turn in 2 paragraphs... you'd
| get marked down.
|
| Again, it's been awhile since I've been in middle/high
| school, so it may have changed some.
| criddell wrote:
| These days it's often a word count rather than page count
| because page counts are too easy to game. There will be
| an upper and lower limit and when you submit the file, it
| might be rejected if your paper doesn't meet the
| criteria.
| happyopossum wrote:
| If you're going to up-end hundreds of yers of educational
| theory and practice, it's on you to be able to show your
| work. Not all progress is forward.
| dsr_ wrote:
| The American educational-system essay is an artificial
| construct designed to be easy to teach and easy to grade,
| without being useful for the purposes of educating the essay
| author or the audience or being persuasive.
|
| Writing is generally good. Expressing yourself is good.
| Analysis and critique are good. The artificial essay is
| useless.
| z3c0 wrote:
| Especially the 5-paragraph essay. Doubly so where
| paragraphs are rigidly-defined as "a collection of five or
| more sentences". I argued with a lot of teachers over that
| one.
|
| All it did was teach kids how to write boring simple
| sentences to meet the implicit "punctuation quota". An
| equal amount of content compacted into a couple of
| complex/compound sentences would actually result in marks
| off.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| You have to learn the rules before you break the rules.
| The 5 paragraph essay taught me a lot about how to create
| a convincing written argument. The rules are:
|
| 1. Start with a hook. Engage the reader.
|
| 2. Present the ideas (2-3) that you will be discussing in
| the essay. Have you ever read a rambling blog post? Yeah,
| they suck. There's no direction and you don't retain
| much.
|
| Also, 2-3 ideas in one essay is a great number. There's
| all those studies that say we can only hold 5 things in
| working memory at once, blah blah blah. Keeping the essay
| focused on a few core ideas helps the reader retain them
| better, and the writer to have a well defined scope.
|
| 3. Extrapolate the concise ideas in 2-3 _concise_
| paragraphs. Ever read a rambling blog post? Yeah, they
| suck. Telling students to keep paragraphs in 3-5
| sentences helps the essay communicate the ideas in a
| concise manner.
|
| It also helps block out the text in small visually
| appealing blocks. Ever read super condensed very long
| paragraphs? Yeah, they suck. It helps to break up your
| thoughts with some whitespace. (It's almost like coding
| benefits from this as well...)
|
| 4. Conclude your essay. Reiterate what you wanted to
| cover. This helps the reader retain the ideas, and it
| allows the author to tie up the ideas in a nice bow. I
| love when I finish a book or essay and everything comes
| together and reaffirms what I've been reading the whole
| time.
|
| This format is not only great building blocks, but it
| helps you write larger volumes. If you repeat these small
| steps several times, you create chapters. If you repeat
| these steps on a macro level, the chapters tie together
| into a cohesive piece of literature.
|
| These unnecessary "quotas" may sound meaningless, but a
| lot of people have thought very hard about how to create
| basic building blocks writers can follow. These building
| blocks allow the writers to create concise, well formed
| arguments. "Boring simple sentences" are extremely
| conducive to clear and concise writing. I'll take boring
| sentences that form complex ideas over complex fluff that
| describes nothing any day. (This is almost analogous to
| good code design too, weird...)
| z3c0 wrote:
| I get the goal of the framework, and I did then as well.
| It just isn't expressed well, and it's even worse in
| execution. I think kids are smart enough to handle a more
| ambiguous "five-section essay". All the same rules apply,
| but marks off can then be directed towards lack of
| clarity or belaboring a point. Truly bad writing, y'know?
|
| Maybe it's a matter of opinion, but I believe that the
| grading process is a sufficient guardrail. When the
| theories are made rigid, it's usually just to ease the
| grading. I'm okay with that in the right context. In this
| instance, however, I think it's self-defeating.
| quacked wrote:
| Which is exactly the type of writing that an AI excels
| at. Educators have made their own bed, and GPT-3 is just
| tucking them in.
| ModernMech wrote:
| The 5-paragraph essay is the larval form of the 6-page
| research paper. As a scientist, you will similarly face
| reprimands from reviewers if you deviate from the format.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Is it better to teach a good writer a specific format, or
| to teach a specific format in order to teach people how
| to write?
|
| Most people will not become scientists. Those who do can
| quickly pick up the additional burden of formatting
| requirements, when necessary.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Most people will encounter venues where they need to
| conform to arbitrary and seemingly pointless formats in
| order to publish there. Becoming comfortable doing so
| without throwing a fit is a skill that needs to be
| learned to operate in modern society.
| dsr_ wrote:
| I'm not throwing a fit. I'm saying that the five-
| paragraph essay is supposed to teach clear writing, and
| it doesn't.
|
| If you want to teach conformity to arbitrary and
| seemingly pointless strictures, the rest of the public
| education system does that already.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I didn't mean to say it's you throwing a fit, I meant to
| say that students are throwing fits. Unless you're a
| student? Sorry I didn't convey that clearly.
|
| I wouldn't say that the purpose of the 5-paragaph essay
| is to teach clear writing. It serves the same purpose as
| mandating a format for a conference; no format mandate
| means you get N formats, which makes evaluating them much
| harder.
| rongopo wrote:
| How do you want to learn good writing skills?
| broast wrote:
| By generating text from AI, evaluating it, and piecing it
| together with other AI generated text.
| rongopo wrote:
| LOL, thanks!
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| Maybe, but the flip side is that I'm wondering how many schools
| will look at the opposite and try to start using machine
| learning to grade essays as well.
| soco wrote:
| So we end up with machines grading machines, while pupils and
| teachers are left doing... something. Isn't it known fact
| that one cannot fix society with technology?
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| My degree is in English. Specifically I focused a lot on
| composition theory. Or writing about people writing. I have a few
| thoughts about this.
|
| 1. If it isn't rampant now, it will be in a few years time.
| Cheating is highly incentivized in college, and this makes it
| very hard to catch. I doubt you could generate a thesis this way,
| but you could certainly pass your electives.
|
| 2. Writing is highly conventionalized. Half of getting a good
| grade is following conventions. AI will get really good at this.
|
| 3. I suspect ESL students will use this first. When tutoring
| writing, extremely smart ESL students were getting poor grades in
| writing courses for having bad grammar, vocabulary, whatever.
| This will help them get good grades until the AI surpasses native
| speakers, who will then use it.
|
| 4. This is really tragic for students. Writing is really great
| for solidifying thoughts and learning. I still journal to this
| day just because of this. This will deeply affect how people
| learn. But the outcome remains to be seen.
|
| Edit: Better words
| jrm4 wrote:
| As a non-tenure track college instructor, I'm pretty much "good"
| on this as well.
|
| I think perhaps obviously the bigger underlying difficulty is
| that very often "teachers" aren't seriously empowered to, nor
| really judged on their ability to, teach. In higher-ed of course,
| it's because publishing is king.
|
| I have sympathy for the great number of people who teach in
| higher ed for whom this will make things harder -- but also _it
| 's gotta change._
|
| (For what it's worth, I've seen that "writing" from college
| students has improved drastically over the last decade or so and
| I'm pretty sure the vast majority of them are not doing this. I
| just think they are more involved with the "written word," even
| if those "words" include emoji, etc. But grammar and even logic
| have improved tremendously; the only downside is that it all
| sounds like branding/advertising copy. But that's better than
| what we had before)
| greenhearth wrote:
| How is it good? Writing essays teaches writing and also reading.
| It also teaches thinking critically about your writing and your
| reading. They are not pointless at all. It's exactly the same as
| taking code off the internet instead of trying to solve an
| algorithmic riddle. You may learn something new, but the problem
| solving process itself is lost and not developed.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Well you have a whole article, as well as lots of great debate
| in these comments telling you why it is (or isn't) good.
|
| That's the beauty of using those reading skills you mentioned.
| greenhearth wrote:
| What, "the education system, etc...?" Give me a break.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| That's hardly an argument against it.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Time to time I hire entry level people. Their writing in general,
| the primary method of communication is atrocious. I am not
| complaining about fundamental grammar or punctuation. I make
| those mistakes more frequently then most myself.
|
| There is no cohesive flow of thought; there is a lack of logical
| structure. They are unable to unpack their justification for
| recommendations. This _costs us_ because we have to have multiple
| "draft reviews" until the document is succinct, or _cost us_ when
| the recommendations are misunderstood.
|
| Over the last three decades I have seen the decline in the skill
| of writing.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| So automate. If computers are better than students at writing
| essays, they're probably better than entry-level hires at
| writing whatever documents you need.
| tgv wrote:
| How are computers going to write that without understanding?
| A two sentence prompt isn't going to give you what you need.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| If people are bad a structuring an argument and conveying
| their intent in writing, what makes you think they are better
| with those things when speaking? or any other form of
| communication.
| thwayunion wrote:
| The purpose of writing in professional settings, especially
| internal documents for a engineering team, is to _convey
| information_.
|
| Even if models are better at writing essays, it's highly
| unlikely that the generated essays will convey useful and
| accurate information. Ie, the writing may be better _as a
| context-free composition of words and symbols_ , but the
| semantic content of the writing within the context of the
| business will be at best nonsense and possibly even
| misleading.
|
| In GP's context, excellent writing that's pure bullshit is
| even worse than bad writing.
|
| Generating design documents that discuss real tradeoffs from
| a combination of email threads, slack messages, meetings, and
| code is quite a bit different from generating the billionth
| essay on Napoleon. We use the latter, in part, to practice
| the basic skills required for the former. But just because a
| model can do a half-decent job at the latter doesn't mean
| that it is anywhere near being able to do the former.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I make those mistakes more frequently then most myself.
|
| *than
|
| ...this checks out.
| beloch wrote:
| I think we're going to see the return of the oral exam (i.e. You
| show up to the prof's office and they ask you questions on the
| spot.). Perhaps not for massive low level courses, but likely for
| advanced courses.
|
| They're going to be the bane of the timid, but they do provide
| ample motivation to study and require elaborate measures to cheat
| on.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Something I haven't seen mentioned much is the potential for this
| to actually be a powerful research tool. As a trivial example,
| here's a prompt using the highest quality Da Vinci model:
|
| _Write an analysis of the 2020 MLB baseball season_
| The 2020 MLB baseball season was one of the most unique seasons
| in recent memory. The season started later than usual due
| to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was shortened to 60
| games. This meant that every game was even more
| important, as there were fewer opportunities for teams to make up
| ground in the standings. The Los Angeles
| Dodgers won the World Series, defeating the Tampa Bay Rays in
| six games. It was a dominant performance by the Dodgers, who won
| all three of their postseason series. They became the
| first team since the 2009 New York Yankees to win a
| World Series after losing the previous year's Fall Classic.
| In 2007 The Rays made an incredible run to the World Series,
| becoming just the second team in MLB history to reach
| the Fall Classic after winning fewer than 40% of their
| regular season games. For the 2020 season they were led by their
| pitching staff, which posted a historic ERA of 3.56 during the
| regular season.
|
| Though this is at least a little _potential_ than _actual_
| capabilities, since fact checking other responses to questions
| has shown problems-- correct facts in the wrong context, e.g.
| similar questions gave stats for a team that were correct, but
| for a season other than the 2020 one asked for in the prompt.
| croes wrote:
| >Teachers adapted to the calculator. They can certainly adapt to
| language models.
|
| The burden is once again on those poorly paid with few resources.
|
| With this logic, one also believes that more crime leads to
| better police officers.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Putting this out there: like most machine generated "art" these
| days, the relative increase of output quality is in part marked
| by a decline in both mean human output quality and the mean
| ability of humans to perceive quality.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Since this is hackernews: During my undergrad I had a professor
| that would give us our homeworks as normal. But to hand it in, we
| had to demo the project. He would tell us what to put into the
| program, check the outputs to make sure it works. Then ask us to
| show the code for specific parts to spot check it and ask us how
| it worked. Its essentially an oral exam, and would be hard to
| cheat it. It is hard to fight against technology but in person
| has a way of maintaining a good standard.
| js8 wrote:
| Students are not the only ones who needs to learn critical
| thinking, the AI needs to learn it too.
| trwayAcademic3 wrote:
| There's several purposes for these highly structured writing
| assignments.
|
| 1. What is the student's reading comprehension. Did they
| understand the reading assignments and lectures.
|
| 2. What is the student's writing skill. Is it free of grammar,
| spelling mistakes, and is it clear and comprehensible.
|
| 3. Can the student follow instructions. Did they carefully read
| the prompt and directly address all points of the prompt.
|
| Reading comprehension can be largely offloaded or doublechecked
| with cliff notes, youtube videos, or just bugging your classmates
| for their notes. Writing skill can be largely tool driven with
| spell check, grammar check, and the new NLP tools like grammarly
| or hemingway.
|
| This largely leaves modern college essays to testing bullet point
| 3, did the student fully address the prompt in the manner the
| teacher specified. In my undisclosed observations this is the
| primary point reduction in college writing that causes a student
| to not have an A. This is also the exact type of thing the
| substack suggests can be offhanded to GPT-3, what makes college
| writing awful for the college students. If this is the case, are
| we going to build anti-GPT3 techniques such as have students
| write in a controller lab setting? Are we going to accept that a
| certain number of submissions will be machine-enhanced and let
| grade inflation continue? Are we going to accept that modern
| college essays might be more an exercise in editing machine
| output than generating new text?
|
| The best math classes accepted the invention of the calculator,
| the computer, and use them as tools to teach even more math.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > regurgitate content (as opposed to essays that teach writing
| skills or critical thinking, which remain valuable).
|
| Thanks for the clarification.
|
| That said, Devil's Advocate here...
|
| But isn't "regurgitate content" a writing skill? That be all
| still quite a bit? Don't they have to walk before they can run
| (i.e., fine-tuning communication skills)?
|
| Regurgitation essays are graded, and that produces a bell curve
| of quality, doesn't that indicate the skill is a skill worth
| recognizing? Isn't the lack of such a simple skill indicative of
| something in a student?
|
| I agree that critical thinking is essential. It's something too
| few of us seem to have. But aren't these essays the gateway to
| that next step? That is, if you can't be critical of your own
| ideas, and their organization and presentation, are you truly
| ready to move on to next level lessons in critical thinking?
|
| Put another way, if it were math, why teach addition and
| subtraction? Why not just move on to calculus? Or higher?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The only real solution to this (assuming that grading systems are
| all that valuable in terms of optimal educational outcomes) is to
| base grades on in-class essay writing (and for CS, in-class
| coding) where students don't have access to any outside
| assistance, and have to think quickly.
|
| Using tools outside class to practice for the in-class work would
| make a lot of sense however, as students could then rapidly see
| what a decent essay or code body looks like.
| pjmorris wrote:
| > base grades on... and for CS, in-class coding
|
| Given that a typical programmer on a typical day has online
| access, and given the creative lengths students will go to to
| maintain access to said resources during exams, it seems worth
| considering allowing online access for programming exams. To
| address the obvious problems with that approach, could we use
| AI to generate unique variations on the problems we want the
| students to solve?
| Vrondi wrote:
| This is like any open-book exam. Make the time limit
| reasonable such that if they know the stuff, they can get it
| done while referring to a few things in a source, but if they
| don't know it, there's no way they can look it all up in the
| available time.
| Test0129 wrote:
| Or we could stop asking students trivia and force them to
| think. Most of my graduate school exams were open book +
| notes but it hardly helped. You had to demonstrate knowledge
| by producing a novel solution to the problem most of the
| time. Not novel as in new research, but novel in the sense
| you weren't just regurgitating factoids from the books. I
| also had tons of open book and open note advanced math
| classes. The problems were made in such a way you had to make
| a connection with the material and link pieces together in
| non-obvious ways. In those classes I retained more
| information even to today.
|
| Teaching, even at the collegiate level, has become "how can I
| do the least so I can do what I want". Tenured research
| professors generally make terrible teachers...perhaps we need
| professional teachers.
| mywittyname wrote:
| For me, the most "open" a test was, the more I worried
| about it. Expecting students to remember everything on the
| test meant that it had to be easy.
|
| The hardest exam I ever took was my final exam for Linear
| Algebra. It was so "open" that people could use matlab on a
| shared computer that was also projected to the entire
| class. Turns out, the best students in the class didn't
| need help on a computer, so it turned into this kind of
| mind-fuck where you weren't sure if they got a different
| answer than you because they were wrong, or because you
| were. To add to the excitement, the questions all tied
| together and used the answer from the previous one, so if
| you missed one, you were guaranteed to miss every
| subsequent question.
| bambax wrote:
| > _to base grades on in-class essay writing_
|
| Of course. I don't understand how essays written at home are
| acceptable. It's a good exercise to do them (if done properly)
| but they shouldn't count for the final grade.
|
| Before AI there were professional essay-writers, or tutors, or
| parents. In a sense AI is progress because now everyone can
| cheat, instead of only the wealthy.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Might also be time that companies stopped taking grades into
| account when hiring and selecting for internships.
| rdtwo wrote:
| I don't Think ai essays are good but they might be less bad
| than some writers
| Bakary wrote:
| This is common in UK universities at least. You can have your
| entire grade for a year of dense reading at the MSc level be
| based on three hours of hand-numbing speedwriting. It makes
| sense while at the same time rewarding and punishing different
| personality types (and calligraphers).
| nicoburns wrote:
| The worst thing about this system is that there's not usually
| any chance to retake the exam. As far as I can see, there's
| no good reason for this, and all it does is heap pressure on
| students while providing a worse overall assessment of their
| ability.
| michaelt wrote:
| Don't most UK universities let undergraduate students resit
| exams they've failed, within reason?
|
| And a degree consists of a good number of courses, each of
| which will have its own exams - so if you do poorly in one
| or two exams, there are plenty of chances to bring your
| average back up.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Don't most UK universities let undergraduate students
| resit exams they've failed, within reason?
|
| I've attended 3. Two of them made students retake the
| entire year if they needed to resit an exam. The other
| one based students' entire grade on one set of final
| exams at the end of the 3 years and had no provision for
| resits at all.
|
| I believe the first two are typical in the UK.
|
| > And a degree consists of a good number of courses, each
| of which will have its own exams - so if you do poorly in
| one or two exams, there are plenty of chances to bring
| your average back up
|
| That's true, but it's also true that a more lenient
| system would be more compassionate (student mental health
| is a _huge_ topic for universities) whilst simultaneously
| being _a better measure of student 's true abilities_.
| Bakary wrote:
| If you look at it another way, it's like a lifetime
| warranty. You can't trust an appliance vendor to provide
| quality, but you can trust that if they have a warranty
| they will meet the conditions where it will make financial
| sense to have one.
|
| Having such an exam adds enormous extraneous pressure that
| does not reflect the reality of conducting research, but it
| is this pressure that guarantees (with some exceptions)
| that the student has been coerced into learning the
| material to a sufficient standard. There will always be the
| cramming psychopath who grabs a first after just a week of
| study and who retains nothing of it, but most students just
| have to learn intensely over the course of a year to pass
| through the filter. In some ways, this is also why it's
| common in the UK for employers to not care so much about
| the specific degree, just that you have one with good
| grades from a reputable institution.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > There will always be the cramming psychopath who grabs
| a first after just a week of study and who retains
| nothing of it, but most students just have to learn
| intensely over the course of a year to pass through the
| filter.
|
| My concern is for the students who study intensely, learn
| as much as anyone else, but don't pass the filter.
| Universities in other European countries allow single
| units to be retaken without retaking an entire year, and
| it seems to me that this provides a fairer system without
| devaluing the qualification in any way.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > there's not usually any chance to retake the exam
|
| Of course there is. One of my classmates milked this system
| to remain a student for about twice as long as the rest of
| us. He was good at manipulating the bureaucracy, not so
| good at physics; probably should have studied law or some
| sort of social science instead.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| You could have them write using a program that allows the
| teacher to play back their writing process in real time as
| well.
|
| Theoretically they could copy it from offscreen but unless
| they're really good at faking going back and changing things
| and getting stuck at the right points it would probably be
| fairly easy to tell.
|
| On the flip side there'd be no definitive proof.
| bergenty wrote:
| At least for CS courses this means kids will never have the
| chance to work on something simplistic that can be coded up in
| 2 hours.
| coreyp_1 wrote:
| I agree in principle, but there are so many special
| accommodations required (extra time for graded assignments,
| special assistance in the form of a reader, etc.) that would
| make this a nightmare.
|
| I lament, though, that students are often either (A) so
| overburdened with distractions that they don't have time to
| learn, (B) so pressured to get high grades that they cannot
| afford to get a bad grade, and thus must cheat, or (C) just
| don't care. There are a few gems that are willing to put in the
| work to learn and appreciate a subject, though. I just wish
| that more students put in the work required to learn.
| Vrondi wrote:
| I have legitimately met college students in the last few
| years who had no frame of reference for how much time they
| should be putting in. Freshmen who think that spending 15
| minutes a week looking over their notes is "studying a lot"
| are pretty common right now (in the USA).
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Three hours of study for each hour spent in class is an
| average estimate of what it takes to absorb even moderately
| difficult material in courses in sci/tech.
|
| Relevant quote: " _Every truth has four corners. As a
| teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find
| the other three._ " (Confucius)
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Which with napkin math can be shown to be bullshit.
| Students are spending approximately 1/3 of their time in
| classes, so how would they get time to sleep among the
| 4/3 required by studies and classes?
| [deleted]
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 1:3 hours sounds super aspirational even for only the
| hardest of classes like organic chemistry and fluid
| dynamics.
|
| But your napkin calc isn't addressing the bit where you
| only take 1-2 classes like that per semester and pad the
| rest out with things like literature and electives so you
| could have a life.
| dasil003 wrote:
| > _students could then rapidly see what a decent essay or code
| body looks like._
|
| You mean like how today they study well-regarded human works?
| I'm not sure how the ML adds anything except which words tend
| to appear close to each other across a large corpus. The moment
| where young writers believe that ML is creating anything new
| and they try to learn from that is when modern civilization
| starts to eat its own tail.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This is awesome, I swear kids in school are the most creative
| problem solvers on earth. Just maybe not the problems you
| intended.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| These issues with AI are arising faster than ever, but no one
| seems to stop an extrapolate the inevitable end result. What do
| you do when an AI can realistically handle your average college
| student's entire course load? Existentially, does it even matter?
| Yes people will be dumber on average, but will they care if they
| have the answer to all of life's questions in their pockets?
|
| I'm old enough to remember people telling me I wouldn't always
| have a calculator handy, and obviously that didn't age very well.
|
| It sounds unnecessarily pessimistic in the face of all the things
| AI will help us with, but given what we know about human nature,
| I do expect AI to make us a lot lazier and ... dumber.
| Buldak wrote:
| Yeah, there seems to be a general sentiment that if a computer
| can do it, it wasn't worth a student doing it anyway. But
| presumably (?) there is a line to cross where that ceases to be
| the case. So where do you draw it?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >I'm old enough to remember people telling me I wouldn't always
| have a calculator handy, and obviously that didn't age very
| well.
|
| Logical error though. The analogy to calculator is poor.
|
| With a calculator it doesn't matter what your opinion of 17x93
| is. There is a right answer and a way to get there. Our ability
| to get output from a calculator doesn't change because more or
| less people use them.
|
| With AI prompted writing, there is no right answer, and what it
| spits out only exists because other people already wrote on the
| topic. The quality of the writing is entirely dependent on
| samples and usage.
| oxff wrote:
| This is good, because it shows what a cargo cult education and
| learning has been for the longest time. Critique in action.
| la64710 wrote:
| Great now students can use this free up time to do more
| productive things.
|
| /s
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I don't share your enthusiasm. Essays are a great way to learn
| structured writing for kids.
| greenhearth wrote:
| rongopo wrote:
| Professor here --- I really need a tool to detect this. I have a
| student whose text always have the same faulty patterns: circular
| sentences, paragraph that do not sum up, etc. The problems are
| consistently the same, and even in purpose this cannot be
| imitated. I think there is a machine behind.
| danielvf wrote:
| One of our local writing teachers has addressed this by having
| the students do some surprise writing in class, no phones, and
| comparing it to home work.
| rongopo wrote:
| This is IMHO the only way to go at the moment.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Persuasive writing section?
|
| "Write a persuasive essay regarding why the essay you're
| writing deserves the grade you choose based upon your
| knowledge of persuasive writing techniques and your classroom
| participation."
| agtorre wrote:
| I imagine as the technology improves and more AI tools become
| available this will become a war of attrition. Especially since
| these tools are so useful for non-school purposes, I can only
| see them getting better with time. It is a shame when people
| use these tools in a 100% no effort way though, reminds me of
| people who copied whole essays online in the past and got
| caught.
| JCharante wrote:
| Essay cheating is really annoying. I've learned a foreign
| language to the point where I've joined a rather large facebook
| group where students from that country studying abroad ask for
| advice about problems. 1/3 of the posts are students who are
| caught cheating asking for advice or asking for recommendations
| / trying to find someone to do their homework for them. It's
| made me really dissapointed in my schoolmates to see how they
| can just talk so openly about it.
| collegeburner wrote:
| why do you need a tool? if its crap writing give it a crap
| grade and move on.
| xena wrote:
| A tool would be useful so that the teacher can avoid wasting
| their time reading an AI generated submission and continue on
| to the next essay.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Teachers have turnitin that kinda does this
| rongopo wrote:
| To my knowledge turnitin does not tell you about the
| share of AI generated content.
| rongopo wrote:
| Well yes ideally I would do so, but my chair of department
| wants to have THAT work published. Horror story.
| thwayunion wrote:
| 1. Assessment is only a small part of teaching. Often the
| smallest.
|
| 2. The pedagogical intervention depends heavily on whether
| the student is cheating or just FAR below grade-level.
|
| 3. the student likely won't be truthful.
|
| 4. Even if we assume the student will tell the truth, if they
| aren't using an LLM and you accuse them of doing so it's
| going to crush the student and make teaching that pupil close
| to impossible.
|
| Teachers are teachers, not proctors.
| Balgair wrote:
| If it's just one student, then I think you should just talk to
| them about it and verify. Education is not a 'gotcha' game. If
| you're in the US, these students are the ones paying a lot of
| money to get that learning and degree.
|
| If it's a lot of students, then you likely need to rethink
| using essays and the like. Not that they aren't useful when
| done honestl; they are incredible tools for having students
| learn.
|
| But the near future is only going to be filled with this more
| and more. You're not likely to be able to outrun OpenAI and
| GPT3 on your own. Heck, even the whole CS department isn't
| going to outrun these companies. In fact, it's not a bad idea
| to put your essays through such tools to see what comes out and
| then build from there.
|
| The nature of learning and education is changing very fast
| these days and clinging to the old models and methods isn't
| likely to be the best strat. Innovate, try new things, talk
| with your students, brainstorm, etc.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >If it's just one student, then I think you should just talk
| to them about it and verify.
|
| I'm not sure I would talk the student about AI at all. I
| would talk to them about the subject matter.
|
| I think that is the obvious solution to detect this. Does the
| student know the material when "offline"?
|
| Maybe you get a few anxious people who can't talk about a
| topic they know - but that sure does seem like training for
| the real world.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| I had a chuckle at this. Good this is happening. Kids spend too
| much time on that anyway and most of it is bullshit. Sure if you
| had some great success we need a verifiable way to show it (maybe
| a resume). But this whole "oh look what great things I plan for
| the world" is nonsense. Hopefully it's a thing of the past soon.
|
| Edit - talking about essays that folks write for college
| admissions, in case the context wasn't clear.
| petercooper wrote:
| When Babelfish came out in 1997, I used it to do my French
| homework, while attempting to fix up when it didn't quite get it
| right or used an idiom that didn't translate to French. My friend
| did the same and we were casually warned to stop "whatever it is"
| we were doing after a couple of weeks ;-) It turned out it was a
| lot safer to let Babelfish _read_ French than to write it..
|
| As a bit of fun, I recently scanned my daughter's homework and
| threw it into GPT-3 and while I didn't let her see or use the end
| results (if she had the idea to do it herself, that's her call,
| but I find the younger generations are not as computer savvy as
| the media would like you to think!) it pretty much nailed it
| without me having to do anything else. It's definitely going to
| cause changes in the educational system in a way that Babelfish
| certainly did not.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| Clickbait. Nobody said students were acing their homework.
| kotlin2 wrote:
| This article contains a logical error that I see quite
| frequently, which is the belief that something being anti-X is
| somehow pro better alternative Y. In this article, the author
| believes that writing that stimulates critical thinking and
| analysis would do a better job at preparing students than the
| current five paragraph essays that students typically write. They
| argue that the prevalence of text generators will force change in
| education from the current system to something better.
|
| The argument makes no sense when considered analytically. There
| is nothing special about the factual five paragraph essay that
| lends itself well to text generators. Rather, the fundamental
| issue is that humans have discovered ways of training ML
| algorithms that can perform almost any task that a human can do.
| There's nothing stopping the creation of text generators trained
| to write any conceivable school assignment.
|
| Cheating is only going to get easier and more sophisticated over
| time. This presents a serious issue that may require rethinking
| how students are evaluated in general.
| origin_path wrote:
| There is a need for solutions on several levels here:
|
| 1. Quick, tactical. The most obvious fix would be for AI
| companies offering web access to LLMs to simply make searchable
| all the text they generated, ideally via an API so aggregator
| services can index and locate text given samples of it. If you
| pay enough (corporate/enterprise subscriptions etc), your output
| doesn't get indexed. Students would be forced to find LLM
| services that don't do this but there likely won't be that many,
| as offering such services for free is expensive.
|
| 2. Classroom changes. Force students to record their screen as
| they work on the essay, so teachers can see as it gets typed out.
| Of course again, some students can overcome this barrier, but
| it's about raising the bar.
|
| 3. Changes of approach. The hardest fix but ultimately the only
| solution. Students are forced to write arbitrary essays
| ultimately due to a belief that this teaches people "how to
| think". Ask what the justification for a humanities degree is,
| for example, and you'll probably get this answer.
|
| If teachers are awarding good grades to AI generated text either
| their exercises aren't testing this ability, or AI can actually
| think and should be protected as a sentient life form. I think
| it's more likely that these essays aren't a good way to test
| thinking skills. What could work better? Something more direct,
| maybe? Testing people on logic puzzles, rationality tests, bias
| check tasks and so on. I definitely feel our society has major
| difficulties with rationality at scale, and we saw this during
| COVID in which people routinely conflated rationality/wisdom with
| blindly outsourcing their thinking to academics and civil
| servants, regardless of the underlying merits of the arguments
| those professors were actually making.
|
| There's also the other goal of teaching people how to write, but
| being able to write well is largely about being able to think
| well, once you mastered the basics of spelling and grammar
| anyway. With modern AI driven spelling/grammar checkers it's also
| less important to deeply master the rules, and time can be better
| spent on the learning how to think and structure an argument
| aspect.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Required intro Writing courses in college aren't so bad these
| days, at least in many places, shifting more to a critical
| thinking model of writing construction.
|
| That said, other college courses are often required to have a
| writing component where it simply doesn't make sense and you get
| nonsense assignments. I like the ability of AI to respond to
| nonsense with well-constructed nonsense. Here's a nice essay I
| generated that demonstrates the ability for GPT-3 to respond to
| even ridiculous prompts, so it should have no problem plowing
| through the average topics encountered in school.
|
| Prompt: Write an essay about the horror of ice cream (start text:
| Murder) I can't think of anything worse than
| ice cream. I mean, maybe it's not as bad as, say, murder, but
| it's up there. I shudder to think about the horror of ice cream.
| It conjures images of congealed dairy product, cloyingly
| sweet and sickeningly creamy. To add insult to injury, it's often
| served at incredibly cold temperatures, making it a
| perfect vehicle for achey tummies and jittery limbs. Then you
| have to deal with the guilt. After all, you're eating something
| that was created from someone else's death. It's
| a horror that doesn't need any extra fuel. Ice cream is already
| one of the most gruesome things imaginable. Imagine
| adding in the thought of someone else's death? It would be like
| watching a horror movie and having the killer pop up out
| of nowhere, ready to devour your flesh. And that's exactly what
| happens when you eat ice cream--you become a victim in your own
| life-sized horror movie. To put it bluntly, ice
| cream is dreadful - and there's no getting around it. In fact, I
| would go so far as to say that it's one of the most
| reviled foods on the planet. After all, why would anyone
| want to consume something that tastes terrible, feels terrible on
| the stomach and makes you feel like you've been beaten
| with an ice cream scoop? Ice cream has also been
| linked to violence. In 2005, there was a murder spree in Maryland
| in which four people were killed by an ice cream
| enthusiast named Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer was known for killing and
| cannibalizing some of his victims. He would lure young men into
| his home with the promise of free ice cream and then
| murder them.
| Entinel wrote:
| When I was a student I used to make good money writing essays for
| other people. I've finally had a job replaced by an AI.
| kazinator wrote:
| The value of an assignment like "write three good things and bad
| things about biotech" is simply that you have to write something
| that is halfway coherent, using complete sentences, with good
| punctuation and grammar. It doesn't matter that you don't learn
| much about biotech, if anything at all.
|
| The idea that because a machine can learn to do that, children
| don't have to, isn't very sound.
|
| Calculators are not comparable because they aren't AI;
| calculators require a detailed specification of the calculations
| to be performed. They don't just write your math homework.
|
| Just wait, AI will do that too. Word problems like "If John has
| three times as many apples as Bob, who has four fewer than Mary,
| ..." will be solvable by AI, and so then calculators will go
| away, being replaced by zero effort.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 18-20 years ago I would just put randomly generated gibberish in
| my papers after making my point and showing competence in the
| topic but not having met the minimum word requirements.
|
| The educational attainment from my peers was so low that teachers
| were pretty understanding and gave high marks because I did the
| point of the assignment.
|
| Reminds me of that, but GPT-3 is pretty impressive.
| gojomo wrote:
| Narayanan (~randomwalker) is writing a book about, & with likely
| title, "AI Snake Oil".
|
| Of course there's plenty of BS around the domain - every epochal
| advance arrives inside a phalanx of pretenders & hypesters &
| scammers.
|
| But the rapid progress in the field risks nearly any tangible
| statements about "AI that does not and cannot work" - the book's
| stated theme - becoming invalidated by on-the-ground events
| between composition & dead-tree printing.
|
| Thus this viewpoint will more and more be driven towards a sort
| of timeless mood of generic skepticism & even denialism. There'll
| be a big audience for that. It's comforting. It meets people at
| the limits of their understanding. It assuages their fears.
|
| But like a head-of-lettuce, it won't age well, except in
| comparison to even shorter tenures.
|
| I think this 9-para, ~500 word... 'essay' - dare I call it that?
| - is an example of the trap Narayanan finds himself in.
|
| Sure, essay assignments have all sorts of long-recognized
| limitations, dutifully recited here, as could have also been said
| in the 1990s, or 1960s, or 1930s. But their longevity in
| education - their 'lindyness' - suggests they had _some_ value,
| as both exercise & evaluation. No easy replacement was found in
| the leisurely decades (centuries?) they were relied-upon.
|
| Now, through K-12, they're done-for, in just about any case where
| a student remains unobserved, with access to LLM writing-
| assistance. In another 2-5 years, LLMs will not just be writing
| A+ Senior-in-High-School-level essays, but postgraduate star-
| student level papers.
|
| Against that, Narayanan offers hand-wavy bluster: that somehow,
| in unstated ways, the "teachers and adjunct professors [who] are
| underpaid and overworked", who _already_ in the ancestral
| environment had to depend on the "easier" but "mind-numbing" and
| "easier to grade" essay-assignments, will somehow _now_ figure
| out a _better_ approach, in a _more-difficult_ environment, where
| their go-to solution for _generations_ has been yanked away.
|
| Sure, little Timmy has never swam before, but throw him into the
| deep end. His problem isn't "callousness or incompetence", so
| he'll figure it out! Narayanan's understatement: "The adjustment
| will be painful, for sure."
|
| To the extent there will be adaptations, they are unlikely to
| come from the AI-denialists, who underplay access to these tools
| as no-big-deal.
|
| Adaptations could include uncomfortable steps already on the
| rise, like closely surveilling students in tech-excluded
| environments, to be sure they practice, & can perform, those
| thinking-steps that we'd rather they not fully outsource to cheap
| thinking-substitutes.
|
| Or sessions with AI tutors, who can drill students in more-
| intensive ways than those "underpaid and overworked" teachers in
| large institutions have historically managed.
|
| Workable solutions will more likely be inspired by Stephenson's
| (1995) 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"
| than Narayanan's (2023?) 'AI Snake Oil'.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| It's just lowering the bar for cheating a little bit from buying
| essays / paying someone else to do it.
|
| Honestly I don't think writing essays for a course is a good
| measure of understanding the material. It's mostly an exercises
| in regurgitation.
| Hayarotle wrote:
| Essays are often meant not as a measure of understanding, but
| as a tool for the student to learn, to reflect on how well they
| understand the material, and for the teacher to be aware of
| their weak points. Sometimes they're also meant as a tool for
| training the skill of essay writing itself. In those cases,
| it's only graded in order to nudge the student into reading the
| material and studying (and sometimes to cushion the impact of
| test scores).
| thwayunion wrote:
| I'll happily add $100K to the _salary_ of an engineer if I have
| strong evidence that they can write well. Poor writing skills
| is probably the most common reason that people fail to receive
| a promotion to Senior (albiet often indirectly -- if you cannot
| write well, having enough impact to justify the promotion is a
| lot more difficult).
| TSiege wrote:
| I'd really disagree with this. Essay writing forces a person to
| think critically. You have to construct an argument for or
| against something. Even if it's echoing source material or a
| teacher, you still have to think in a way that other testing
| formats do not.
|
| By offloading this to a machine the students are undercutting
| themselves more than anything else. They'll be less effective
| communicators and less capable of disagreeing with ideas and
| concepts the face in the real world
| treis wrote:
| Eh, once you get the pattern down it becomes almost a rote
| operation. Especially for a 2-3 page paper. You find 3-4
| facts/arguments to support your conclusion and turn them into
| paragraphs. Slap on an intro & conclusion pre/re-stating your
| 3-4 points and you're done.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Good ol hamburger format, never fails.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| In my required college 1st year writing class I had to read
| a lot of my peers' writing. Most people have not learned
| how to do this. They do not understand the concept of
| stating a premise and then supporting it with evidence.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| "Once you get the pattern down", just like learning other
| subjects like math? But many kids don't have it down. And
| there are gradations in complexity. An 8th grader who's got
| it down and a 12 grader who's got it down will produce
| different artifacts and should have different assignments.
| thrwy_918 wrote:
| I agree with you, but I also had instructors who demanded the
| same thing: essays as arguments, drawing on evidence and
| analysis to back up a thesis.
|
| An essay that is simply a description of the source material,
| or a listing of pros and cons with no actual thesis, is a
| totally different endeavor, and one that has much less value
| as method of instruction or assessment.
| Vrondi wrote:
| If there is no thesis statement, then it isn't really an
| essay; just a book report.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Restating or paraphrasing a widely accepted thesis
| statement isn't very educational? When your freshman
| class of 200 students is writing essays on a handful of
| topics, the same ones every year, that every other school
| touches on, there's not going to much in the way of
| originality.
|
| Then again I guess the same argument can be made for
| maths but no one complains that we're teaching to
| memorize and repeat the same steps of various proofs one
| learns in 1st year.
| glasshug wrote:
| I think going from a paid sketchy service to a ~free
| institutional one lowers the bar more than a little bit.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| So, um, _is_ this cheating?
|
| The rule is you have to turn in your own, original work. You
| provided a prompt, and a piece of software turned it into an
| essay.
|
| Is this inherently different from using the predictive keyboard
| on iOS, or using Grammerly to write clearer sentences? Where is
| the cut off point where the computer did too much work on its
| own?
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> So, um, is this cheating?_
|
| It's a really good question, but also a really silly question
| that no one should have to guess about. Teachers should be
| simply be providing explicit policies one way or the other.
|
| I had "anything goes" assignments and "strict" assignments.
| For the former I didn't care. For the latter I could either
| tell whp if you were cheating, or else proctored the
| assignment.
|
| Math is a good leader here. Sometimes you allow certain
| tools. Sometimes you don't. The set of tools allowed tends to
| increase as courses get more difficult and assignments get
| larger. It really just depends on what is being evaluated.
| jjk166 wrote:
| If you're feeding in the ideas you want the essay to convey
| and the AI is just turning that into nice prose, I would
| describe it as a tool instead of cheating - you're still
| doing the important part. If you're only feeding it the same
| essay prompt you were given and it is coming up with the
| ideas it expresses, then it's cheating.
|
| Likewise using a 4 function calculator in an arithmetic class
| is cheating but in an algebra class it's not.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Is Outlook going to come with an AI that helps an
| engineering manager succinctly express the pros and cons of
| two competing approaches to a nontechnical audience and
| then justifies the decision to go with one over the other?
| What if these approaches are novel or otherwise something
| an expert system can't "know about" (or look up on the
| Wiki)?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I think you and GP agree with each other.
|
| Regardless, IMO this is where the discussion becomes too
| hypothetical:
|
| * Right now, AIs are bad at writing.
|
| * If a student is able to masterfully craft a prompt
| which causes today's bad AIs to produce good writing,
| that student is talented, and I suspect they actually did
| a significant amount of work.
|
| * If today's bad AIs are able to produce assignments
| which receive passing grades with minimal prompting,
| something is wrong with the assignment. Teachers should
| assign work that isn't so rote a computer can do it.
|
| * If, in the future, AIs are able to write strong, well-
| reasoned essays about novel concepts, students won't need
| to learn how to write. They may not need to learn much of
| anything+, because I don't think there will be much space
| left for humans in the workforce.
|
| -----
|
| + "Need" is a key word here; I do believe in learning for
| its own sake, and apparently we'll have lots of time on
| our hands. Cool story btw, learning how to develop film
| in a dark room is lots of fun, would recommend.
| jjk166 wrote:
| AI assisted technical writing is already a thing. You
| might need to give it more input and do more cleanup on
| what it spits out, but it can still greatly reduce the
| time and effort needed. There's no reason to believe the
| technology will stop improving anytime soon.
| sroussey wrote:
| Why provide a prompt when you can supply both the book to
| write about and the assignment?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| "when I were a lad"... we used to have lines given to us as a
| punishment. Cue Bart Simpson writing on a blackboard, but for us
| it was "200 lines saying I am not allowed to shitpost on HN" or
| whatever.
|
| If you could program a computer to print the lines for you, then
| 2 pages of dot-matrix printer output was accepted. I even had a
| teacher give me 2000 lines - a monstrous punishment by hand -
| because they knew I could code. They just didn't realise it would
| cost me an extra 5p in paper and nothing else.
|
| Teaching has moved on, and lines are no longer a thing.
|
| I hope teaching moves on from essays, because they're about the
| same level of educational achievement. Essay-writing is no longer
| a skill that anyone values outside academia, because we moved on.
| Academia should move on.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Real work values the ability to write clear proposals and
| designs, which isn't far from an essay. Even in tech jobs.
| Sometimes I'm given a doc that takes so long to understand that
| it'd be better to just ask the author. There needs to be some
| way to teach writing skills, whether it's essays or something
| else.
|
| My real gripe with English class is that probably 95% of my
| assignments have been about fictional work where I'm supposed
| to describe a character's emotions or explain what the author
| meant by something. And seemingly the most boring books
| possible. It was useless and repetitive.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Essay-writing is no longer a skill that anyone values outside
| academia, because we moved on.
|
| Downvote because essay writing is essentially researching a
| topic, forming an opinion, and communicating that opinion. This
| is applicable in almost every knowledge job.
| tomp wrote:
| Good.
|
| Important rate-limiting things like exams or voting should be
| done in person.
| ponyous wrote:
| The question is whether they want to adapt. I know of teachers
| who wouldn't even look at the documents. A couple of classmates
| (10+ years ago) literally turned in empty docx. They all got the
| same grade as on previous exam.
| endisneigh wrote:
| A calculator and a language model aren't really the same at all.
|
| That being said I'm generally of the opinion that homework should
| be optional anyway, so if this accelerates the demise of
| homework, fine.
|
| Evaluations should happen strictly in person under supervision.
| Cheating is just too easy these days.
| efsavage wrote:
| They're probably being graded by machines, and the GPA is going
| onto a resume that's then screened by machine.
|
| Next Steps: Machine-generated assignments on the input end,
| machine generated interviews on the output end.
| Swizec wrote:
| As an author, I've been thinking about the future and it sounds
| dreamy. AI is good at producing verbiage, which readers want for
| some reason. Humans are good at producing insight, which is the
| true product that readers are looking for, but don't want to pay
| for (with clicks or money).
|
| So what if the author produced a 5 bullet insight and AI expanded
| it into the word salad that readers want to buy? We're getting
| there, lots of startups in this space.
|
| Another aspect of why the word lettuce matters is SEO. So it
| feels like there may be a future where humans communicate in 5
| bullet insights packaged as word salad by bots for bots.
| sroussey wrote:
| Why not have the AI produce the five points?
|
| Seems silly to have an AI write an essay and derive the main
| points itself, except perhaps to differentiate from another AI,
| but isn't this what seeds are for?
| Swizec wrote:
| Because the AI can't produce a novel insight (yet?). Those 5
| bullets are the main points, AI can expand those into an
| essay.
|
| This idea comes from how you'd write any long essay, or a
| book. You start with an idea. Then you expand it into
| chapter/section titles. Then you expand into each of those
| into more sections. Then more. This gives you the full
| skeleton of what you're trying to say and, really, already
| says the whole valuable part.
|
| Then you fill the rest with relatable anecdotes and other
| salad to make a meal and drive the point home. AI would be
| great at that part.
| sroussey wrote:
| I think this would be better, at least for now. But if the
| AI was trained on material that included the book and other
| writeups about the book, it might already have the answer.
| Swizec wrote:
| I mean the inverse of that. Writing a new book or essay
| that doesn't exist yet :)
| thwayunion wrote:
| No evidence is provided. I'm curious whether the author actually
| has evidence or is just asserting that this is possible and
| likely happening.
|
| IME, and I have lots of "E" (including training and finetuning my
| own models), this probably isn't entirely true in most writing-
| heavy courses. You can use the largest language models, in an
| interactive fashion, to generate portions of half-decent papers.
| Maybe even "ace" papers on certain subjects with certain grading
| criteria (namely, "looks reasonable", not "fine-toothed comb").
| But in many courses the essays will be extremely low-quality, and
| even in the happy cases saying that the essay is "machine-
| generated" is eliding a lot of manual effort.
|
| I agree that students are probably using LLMs for their homework,
| but I'm skeptical that they are all getting As on assignments
| that are designed as big assessments, or that the essays are
| actually fully machine-generated. I bet a lot of students -- the
| laziest ones -- are getting "WTF is this essay even about... did
| you have a stroke while writing this?!" feedback if they are
| using LLMs to generate essays whole-cloth.
|
| Pedagogically, this matters. Think about calculator usage.
| There's a huge difference between allowing use of TI-83 on
| Calculus assignment with lots of word-heavy application problems
| and allowing use of Wolfram Alpha on a Calculus assignment that's
| "integration recipe practice".
| andreilys wrote:
| _I bet a lot of students -- the laziest ones -- are getting
| "WTF is this essay even about... did you have a stroke while
| writing this?!" feedback if they are using LLMs to generate
| essays whole-cloth._
|
| This comes across as very ill informed. I suggest you actually
| use some of the AI essay-writing services because they are
| pretty indistinguishable at this point from human writing.
|
| Here's one I particularly like -
|
| https://www.gomoonbeam.com/
| lumost wrote:
| When my parents were in school, they hand wrote essays and used
| type writers. Correcting a mistake meant rewriting an entire
| page! When they needed to research something, this meant
| spending a day in the library manually searching for
| quotes/citations. When I was in school I had a rudimentary
| spellchecker, Microsoft word, and Wikipedia.
|
| Now a grade school student has access to grammarly. In a few
| years they'll probably have automated fact checks and text
| generation.
|
| What will happen? My bet is that we'll expect a lot more from
| students a lot earlier.
| _delirium wrote:
| Yeah, I could believe it "aces" homework in a _really_ open-
| ended writing assignment. An assignment like: write an essay
| explaining a personal experience and what it meant to you. The
| people that 's the biggest issue for at the moment are probably
| writing instructors, since the goal of those classes is to just
| practice writing something/anything. In computer science
| though, the writing I've had turned in in my classes that I
| suspect is LLM-generated usually gets an F. It tends to just
| ramble about the subject in general and not hit any of the
| specific points that I'm asking for.
|
| Last year I had a take-home exam in an operating systems class
| that I suspect one student fed entirely as prompts to an LLM,
| and it was... odd. The answer to every question was a paragraph
| or two of text, even in cases where the expected answer was
| true/false, or a number. And even when I _did_ want text as the
| answer, it was way off, e.g. in one I asked them to explain one
| strength and one weakness of a specific scheduling algorithm on
| a given scenario. The submitted answer was just general
| rambling about scheduling algorithms. Some of this is probably
| within the reach of an expert using clever prompting
| strategies, but students who can do that could probably also
| answer the original question. :-)
|
| To be fair, I have seen the "ramble generically on the subject
| of the question" strategy manually implemented by humans too,
| in the hopes that if you throw enough BS at the question you
| might get partial credit by luck. Maybe designing assessments
| to be LLM-resistant will have the nice side benefit of reducing
| the viability of BSing as a strategy.
| cvwright wrote:
| I used to have students who would write answers like that on
| in-class exams.
|
| Every answer was at least one full, complete sentence, even
| for yes/no or true/false. And the "short answer" responses
| filled all available space when one sentence would do.
|
| My only conclusion is that some undergraduate institutions
| around the world must be intentionally drilling it into their
| students to do this.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I was told by multiple teachers/professors that its never
| acceptable to write anything other than a full sentence on
| a test (unless it's a scantron, obviously). Not sure how
| common this is, but they could have been trained by other
| instructors.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| In the entirety of my K12 education any answer that wasn't
| a full complete sentence was a zero.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think students also believe they can hedge. If they just
| put down "yes" or "no" then their answer might be
| completely wrong, but if they drop a bunch of things in the
| answer then some of those things might be true and you
| might give partial credit, or, at least, they can argue
| about it later.
| akiselev wrote:
| I suspect it starts in high school. A lot of AP subjects
| with written portions like AP biology or history are really
| hard to grade at scale so they have a relatively naive
| scoring system. The answer can be a total rambling mess but
| as long as the answer is self consistent (it doesn't
| contradict itself) it gets points for any relevant
| information it gets right.
|
| For example, if the question is about respiration a
| rambling answer that mentions "oxygen transport chain",
| "Krebs cycle", and "ATP" might get 3/5 points even if it
| doesn't make much sense otherwise as long as the answer
| doesn't confuse the Calvin and Krebs cycle or otherwise
| contradict like saying that glucose is a byproduct.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Its possible. I've had proffesors who always gave
| true/false questions with instructions to either "justify
| your answer", or "if false, justify your answer".
|
| Practically speaking, there is fairly little downside to
| putting in extra in your answer, as tests are normally
| scored by how many points in the grading rubric you hit.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I don't think it'd do well even for an open-ended assignment.
| The best language models I've seen are still easy to detect
| as bots if you read multiple paragraphs of output.
| Animats wrote:
| > To be fair, I have seen the "ramble generically on the
| subject of the question" strategy manually implemented by
| humans too, in the hopes that if you throw enough BS at the
| question you might get partial credit by luck.
|
| This is the basic speech strategy of politicians. Don't
| answer the question asked, just talk about something related
| that you want to talk about.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > To be fair, I have seen the "ramble generically on the
| subject of the question" strategy manually implemented by
| humans too, in the hopes that if you throw enough BS at the
| question you might get partial credit by luck.
|
| I had a college professor that knew to recognize this and
| actively warned against it during the mid-term and final.
|
| He said that every question will be answerable in 2 or 3
| sentences, and that if you write 2-3 paragraphs instead, he
| would mark you _down_ even if the answer was correct because
| you 're wasting his time and may have dropped in correct
| statements that answered the question by luck.
|
| So often in school, we'd be getting quizzes/tests back, and
| I'd peek over at someone else's paper as it was being handed
| back and notice they wrote an entire paragraph to answer,
| whereas I answered it in a single sentence and got full
| credit for a correct answer, and I was always left wondering
| what the hell they wrote about.
| hot_gril wrote:
| > No evidence is provided. I'm curious whether the author
| actually has evidence or is just asserting that this is
| possible and likely happening.
|
| I read the title and the domain name and thought it was going
| to talk about a false report about students using ML on
| homework.
| thwayunion wrote:
| I also noticed that bit of irony :)
| origin_path wrote:
| Evidence is provided, of a sort. The first link goes to a
| report by a journalist who interviews redditors who claim they
| are doing this and talk about why.
| thwayunion wrote:
| That article only mentions two students.
|
| One of those students doesn't mention using GPT to generate
| essays. The only mention generating lists and other short-
| response questions. I find that believable.
|
| The other student mentions essay writing, but also says that
| they "didn't ace the essay" (no mention of the grade).
|
| So, the article linked _literally isn 't _evidence for the
| claim.
| origin_path wrote:
| I agree it's not very good evidence that there's a real
| problem here, the articles and report are more of a good
| starting point for interesting discussion. On the other
| hand, the report isn't literally zero evidence either.
| There are students stating that they're doing this, even if
| they don't name GPT-3 specifically (does it really matter
| what model they use?).
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> There are students stating that they 're doing this_
|
| But there _literally aren 't_. There are _not_ students,
| quoted in that article, stating that they are "acing
| their homework by turning in machine-generated essays".
| Literally. There aren't.
|
| I don't doubt that this is possible, in some sense, but
| the details _really_ matter. Per my original comment:
|
| _> >> Pedagogically, this matters. Think about
| calculator usage. There's a huge difference between
| allowing use of TI-83 on Calculus assignment with lots of
| word-heavy application problems and allowing use of
| Wolfram Alpha on a Calculus assignment that's
| "integration recipe practice"._
|
| What was the assignment? What was the purpose of the
| assignment? What were the grading standards?
|
| Eg, I have assigned homework that could be completed by a
| combination of Copilot and GPT-2. That homework was
| graded on a very coarse rubric. Today, a student could
| get an A on that assignment using GPT-2 and Copilot. If I
| were still teaching today I would not worry about it
| because:
|
| 1. they're only cheating themselves
|
| 2. they will still fail the course if they don't learn
| the material
|
| 3. it would save _very little_ time to use those tools
| for these assignments. Maybe 5-10 minutes max, for a
| total of 5-10 assignments over the course of an entire
| semester that are collectively worth less than 1% of the
| final grade. So it 's an hour and a negligible portion of
| their grade that will almost certainly be completely
| washed out in the curve/adjustments at the end of the
| semester (I don't do knife's-edge end of course grade
| assignments -- I identify clear bifurcations in the
| cohort and assign final letter grades to each
| bifurcation).
|
| I believe copilot and gpt can do those assignments. I'm
| also 100% confident that those tools cannot complete --
| and can barely even help -- with assignments that
| actually counted toward student's grades.
|
| So, again, the context matters. Not all assignments are
| assessments and not all assessments need to be cheat-
| proof.
|
| Acing a term paper that's 50% of the grade means
| something.
|
| Acing a paper designed as an opportunity to practice and
| graded mostly for completion -- but with plenty of
| detailed feedback in preparation for a term paper --
| doesn't really mean anything and really only cheats the
| student of feedback prior to the summative assessment.
|
| This, btw, is why I'm more interested in what educators
| are saying than what students are saying. The teacher's
| intent for the assessment and the grading rubric matter a
| lot when determining what "getting an A" means. Acing a
| bulleted list graded for completion is possible with a
| 1990s Markov chain.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Oh well if _redditors_ say they 're doing it...
|
| Reddit is filled with shameless habitual liars who claim to
| be airline pilots in one thread then plumbers in another. The
| incentive structure of reddit, the internet point skinner
| box, incentivizes shameless lying and ""creative writing"".
| lmm wrote:
| I wonder if people are already using AI text generation to
| farm Reddit karma.
| thwayunion wrote:
| s/reddit/pseudo-anonymous communication mediums/g
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Those with "karma" systems are particularly susceptible,
| including HN. But I think Reddit is even worse in this
| regard than HN because there are many times more users
| (usernames are less likely to be recognized across
| threads), and reddit makes it into more of a game with
| various kinds of flare and other 'rewarding' baubles.
| david927 wrote:
| In the Czech Republic, and I'm sure this is true in some other
| countries, many of the exams are oral. The student is given a
| prompt and they have to stand in front of the teacher(s) and talk
| about it, giving as much detail as possible.
|
| I think it's a great way to handle exams and I wonder if we'll
| need to shift towards that in the future.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I had this for some classes in Spanish literature in college
| and I found it way easier than writing a long winded paper
| about some dull novel about an overbearing matriarch. My
| business classes similarly had presentations that were
| partially peer-graded and I really enjoyed those as well.
| gjulianm wrote:
| I honestly hate oral exams. I had three for my master degree,
| in english (not my native language), in math-related courses. I
| underperformed them because of several reasons
|
| - Pressure to actually talk and perform. In a written exam I
| can stop, look at the paper and take my time to actually start.
| In an oral exam I have the professor looking at me. Less time
| to actually think.
|
| - It's harder to communicate orally with complex subjects than
| in written form. Add to that the extra cognitive load of not
| dealing with your native tongue.
|
| - Time constraints on oral exams punish students that don't
| learn everything by memory but can reason in real-time. I
| didn't know by heart a certain proof, I know for sure I could
| have done it in a written exam with time to spare (it wouldn't
| have been the first time) but I wasn't quick enough for an oral
| one.
|
| - Mental blocks are much harder in oral exams. Some times I
| blank out and forget something basic (e.g., the derivative of a
| logarithm). In a written exam I can stop, think, and solve it.
| In an oral exam, the "stopping" is already making you look like
| you don't know things, adding pressure that will make you
| underperform.
|
| Written exams have been the norm for decades for a reason. Far
| easier to actually ask the things you want, they scale far more
| easily, easier to correct and grade, and easier for students to
| practice and perform well.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _harder to communicate orally with complex subjects than in
| written form_
|
| American oration is generally awful. Talent in it command a
| premium. Perhaps this is related to our lack of oral
| examination ? We're more comfortable with written argument
| because that's how we're taught to think?
| gjulianm wrote:
| Well, it was in an Swiss university and I'm Spanish so I'm
| not sure if American oratorion had anything to do with it.
|
| But, in general, oral communication is harder than written.
| Written form allows you to take time to form sentences,
| correct mistakes, reorder thoughts, follow an outline...
| Oral communication, on the other hand, forces you to think
| _and speak_ in parallel. It 's always going to be harder.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Viva voce was a substantial part of my final in Applied
| Physics at Exeter Uni. in 1977. It was nerve wracking but
| it was on a specific subject, my final year project on
| electron spin resonance, so I wasn't having to invent a
| long speech on the fly, just defend my conclusions,
| experimental methods, and analysis against critical but
| not hostile questioning.
|
| In my opinion such examinations and written finals
| succeed in filtering out people who can only regurgitate
| what they have been spoon fed in class rather than being
| able to use that information to move forward. I think I
| was lucky to study when and where I did, it stood me in
| good stead in industry.
|
| Of course there are some people who really do find such
| examinations difficult. In my opinion the solution is to
| provide assistance to those people to do better rather
| than throw the baby out with the bath water.
| gjulianm wrote:
| An oral defense of a project you've made is a very
| different matter from an oral examination of a course,
| where the expectation is to have far more breadth than
| depth of knowledge. I've had no problem with oral
| defenses of projects and thesis, but exams are completely
| different, you're not really able to prepare at the same
| level (and you usually have several exams to prepare)
| owenpalmer wrote:
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It depends on what you're trying to teach. Often the whole
| point is the writing. Being a good speaker is a relevant skill,
| but it's a different one.
| busyant wrote:
| > many of the exams are oral.
|
| I agree. But there is a "gold rush" out there in the academic
| world where the idea is to offload more and more work to "on-
| line."
|
| My son just started school at a respectable US university. Two
| of his five courses are entirely on-line. A third course
| (genetics) is done in person, but the exams and quizzes are
| done on-line.
|
| I overhead three undergraduates talking about how easy it is to
| defeat the anti-cheating software for their on-line courses
| ("The professors don't review the videos...Just hold your phone
| out of view of your laptop camera and google the answers...I've
| never been caught ...).
|
| It was disheartening and I told my son to avoid on-line classes
| in the future because he was just putting himself at a
| disadvantage.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > My son just started school at a respectable US university.
|
| > I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future
| because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.
|
| At a disadvantage for what?
|
| For learning the material - sure, when an easy avenue for
| cheating with obvious incentives is available, it's
| unreasonable to expect people not to take advantage of it.
| Also, I expect that teachers have significant incentives to
| reduce their lecture efforts - why read the room, modify the
| lecture in response to Q&A, and tailor curriculum to the
| actual class progress, when you can just push "play" on the
| recording from last semester?
|
| On-line classes give him an advantage for getting a piece of
| paper from a respectable US university, however - less work,
| same piece of paper, same results as far as job eligibility
| and resume eye-catchers...
| busyant wrote:
| > At a disadvantage for what?
|
| I'm sure you enjoy being contrarian, but I also suspect you
| know precisely what I meant.
|
| In the short-term, yeah, what's the big deal? But in the
| long-term, this devalues the courses and the degrees.
|
| It's not in the long-term interest of the universities to
| behave this way because the course they offer are,
| ostensibly, a way of determining who understands the
| material and who doesn't.
| amerkhalid wrote:
| > At a disadvantage for what?
|
| Also some people have hard time breaking the rules even
| when they know that everyone else is breaking those rules
| and they are unlikely to get caught. We probably want to
| discourage systems that give cheaters advantage over honest
| people.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Pretty much confirms what we already know: standards are
| declining, more unqualified students are attending university
| because the job market demands it, colleges make bank on
| tuition and don't want to stop the gravy train. Now online
| even offers another way for administrators to cut costs while
| reducing the quality - but no one really cares. Most students
| want their degree and want to get out now - not blaming them,
| they're playing the game.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Even a decade ago I was seeing obvious cheating when I was
| TAing classes. International students would hand in an essay
| with clearly broken english, then follow that up with essays
| with complex, well written english that was obviously not in
| their "voice" or even in the same intellectual ballpark as
| exhibited in the in-person class and discussions. Even pre-
| internet, essay writing was widely regarded as " library
| stenography" by students.
|
| The meat of the matter really comes down to the professors
| and how they approach the exams. Generalized essay prompts
| are hilariously easy to cheat on; complex hyper specific
| prompts that extend on something specifically discussed in
| the class are far harder. On-line classes, by their "mass
| distributional" nature (ie, save money by making them
| reusable) are almost by definition far more generalized than
| you would want.
| tgv wrote:
| > The meat of the matter really comes down to the
| professors and how they approach the exams.
|
| Until the professor actually asks real questions and grades
| them as they should be graded. Then the students complain,
| and the grades are "renormalized" or whatever euphemism
| they use. And certainly in the US, students have a lot of
| influence, since they're the paying clients. It's really
| not surprising that employers ask academic titles for so
| many entry-level jobs.
| nmz wrote:
| With a massive caveat, it wouldn't scale.
|
| While anyone can go into khan academy and learn/perform any
| subject, having an actual person would be tremendously costly.
| It's strange, when computerized education appeared I thought
| the cost of education would plummet, now its going to go all
| the way up.
| collegeburner wrote:
| you are looking at 2 different things we both call education
| but should have separated a long time ago. the cost of
| learning is almost unbeleivably lower than just 20, 10 years
| ago. the cost of _credentialing_ might go up.
| bergenty wrote:
| As a kid, this would have been absolutely nerve wracking for
| many people. Especially if the oral exam was in front of the
| entire class.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| How much do the results correlate with the students physical
| attractiveness?
| tcmart14 wrote:
| At least from my experience being a student in the US, we kind
| of do that, but it is separate. I had quiet a few assignments
| where I had to give a presentation of some kind. Where we mess
| up with this, it usually works out that kids make power points
| full of information and just read off the slides. Of course,
| this practice isn't exclusive to students, I've seen many
| presentations in academia, my time in the military, at
| technical talks, etc that do just this, read off a power point.
| brianbreslin wrote:
| My father who is a college professor in his late 70s is
| starting to do this in the US as he found less correlation
| between a written assignment and students actually knowing what
| the material was. Forcing a presentation makes it harder for
| them to cheat.
| n4r9 wrote:
| On the other hand, it risks privileging students that are
| extroverted and skilled at using rhetoric to disguise
| ignorance.
| mountainb wrote:
| Just like real life. When schools had more prestige, they
| also relied more heavily on intensive oral examinations.
| Some of the most prestigious schools in the world still
| rely heavily on intense oral examinations.
|
| Universities can also crib from how law school exams work
| if they want to still do written examinations.
| foobarian wrote:
| IIRC Harvard Business School tracks attendance, students
| have name plates, and get cold called.
| criddell wrote:
| I'm not sure you can do the cold calling thing at a
| public school. Everybody at HBS signed up for that,
| public school kids did not.
| frostburg wrote:
| Every school (and many university professors) does "cold
| calls" in Italy, as far as I know; scheduled oral
| examinations are the exception, not the rule, before
| university. Not knowing the answer at a random university
| lecture doesn't generally impact your grades, however,
| because in most cases those are 100% based on a final
| (often oral) exam.
|
| I wouldn't argue that it is a system without issues but
| it's still better than rote essay writing.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Yet, much of the education received is of case studies &
| frameworks, there is some technical content such as
| finances, supply chains, and balance sheets, but most of
| what's taught is equiv. of "what did you think about this
| or that?" and your simple participation in this inward
| thinking is what goes into your grade.
| sroussey wrote:
| Does not work with math and engineering. I had a very
| difficult electrical engineering course and the final was
| solving a problem on a whiteboard in the teachers office.
| account42 wrote:
| On the other hand, oral exams can be less stressful as long
| as the examiner is friendly as there can be opportunity to
| correct mistakes where you _do_ know the subject matter but
| just had a brainfart. You also get a chance to spend more
| times / show off on the parts you do know better.
|
| I am very much not an extroverted person and in University
| written exams were almost always more stressful than oral
| ones as they try to cram as much as possible into into the
| time available or were too easy (so at the top end grading
| becomes very nitpicky) or too hard (which can be
| demoralizing if no one even manages to complete all
| questions). Oral exams have much more flexibility to adapt
| to the individual here.
| gyy52380 wrote:
| I think this really depends on your specific university.
| At my university in Eastern Europe the teachers were
| bitter and overworked, and that really showed during oral
| examinations.
|
| Because of the high number students enrolled in the
| classes, almost all oral exams also featured a written
| component, very similar to a regular exam. Because of the
| unstructured nature of oral exams, you would have an
| arbitrary amount of time to solve it. After that the
| professor would make you elaborate some of your anwsers,
| or not, depending how he felt like. The students who
| performed best were indeed very extroverted and able to
| convince the professor that they actually meant something
| other than what they wrote.
|
| The professors also used these exams to give you an
| arbitrary grade for the subject, depending exclusively on
| your oral exam "performance". I remember having a high
| 90% grade in the written part of my Advanced Electronics
| class. The professor didn't feel I was confident enough
| in my answers during the oral exam, so he passed me with
| 1/30 points even though I answered most of the answers
| correct, thus bringing my grade down to barely a C.
|
| Oral exams sound great in theory but in practice they
| always felt somewhere between unfair and traumatizing. I
| much prefer the objectivity of written exams.
| gjulianm wrote:
| > On the other hand, oral exams can be less stressful as
| long as the examiner is friendly as there can be
| opportunity to correct mistakes where you do know the
| subject matter but just had a brainfart. You also get a
| chance to spend more times / show off on the parts you do
| know better.
|
| I don't agree with this at all. Even with a friendly
| examiner, they have far more presence than in a written
| exam. You are presenting and being actively judged,
| unlike in a written exam. Also, you'll spend more time on
| the parts you know worse precisely because you'll be
| slower, make more mistakes...
|
| > they try to cram as much as possible into into the time
| available or were too easy (so at the top end grading
| becomes very nitpicky) or too hard (which can be
| demoralizing if no one even manages to complete all
| questions). Oral exams have much more flexibility to
| adapt to the individual here.
|
| Badly adapted exams are a feature of the teacher, not the
| type of exam. If anything, oral exams are worse for more
| complex content, as they tend to be shorter in time.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Probably not true at the university level - they'll detect
| bullshit a mile away.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Only so long as the teacher can't tell the difference.
| collegeburner wrote:
| good. youre right i got through a lot of presentations
| easier than other classmates but thats cause learning to
| present really well is an essential skill. students should
| be skilled at using rhetoric so i see that as a feature not
| a bug.
|
| everything else in life will reward being well spoken and
| outgoing, why shouldnt school as well?
| gjulianm wrote:
| School should be testing you for knowledge and ability in
| a certain subject, as objectively as possible. Unless
| you're in a public speaking course, your public speaking
| skills should have as little bearing on your grades as
| possible.
| collegeburner wrote:
| no. every course should incorporate significant written
| and oral components because if you cannot adequately
| synthesize and communicate the information you're meant
| to be learning, that course is functionally useless. one
| of the important things i have learned is nobody cares
| what you know unless you can communicate it well.
| gjulianm wrote:
| Teachers have to prepare their classes because, despite
| knowing the subject well, actually talking about
| something requires preparation.
|
| It's unreasonable to ask students to not only study and
| understand the material, but also prepare all the course
| knowledge enough to be able to communicate that well when
| asked about a random part, and do that for all the
| classes they might have. If you wanted to give them time
| to prepare a specific topic it wouldn't be an exam
| anymore.
|
| Synthesizing and communicating properly a subject is the
| work of a teacher. It takes practice, deep knowledge of
| the subject, extra materials. You're asking students to
| both be students and teachers of all the material for a
| single exam.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't think extrovert is necessarily correlated with
| skilled speaker.
|
| I know lots of extroverts who are terrified of speaking in
| front of others and introverts who love it.
|
| I think this is easier for people who are good at speaking
| but I think exercises like this will develop the skill.
| fullstop wrote:
| > I don't think extrovert is necessarily correlated with
| skilled speaker.
|
| My oldest is quite introverted but can somehow flip a
| switch internally and is _excellent_ at public speaking.
| She 's won a number of speech competitions and is far
| better at this sort of thing than I will ever be.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I'm quite introverted and wasn't at the level that your
| daughter is, but apparently did well enough at an
| impromptu speech in college that I had a very cute girl
| from the class look me up and add me on Facebook.
|
| I still absolutely hated doing it though.
| fullstop wrote:
| Please tell me that you made a move.
| aqsalose wrote:
| Sure, extroverted students have some advantage.
|
| On the other hand, extroverted people have similar
| advantage in the real life. I myself am quite happy for
| every lesson where I was pushed to practice people-facing
| skills (presentations, demonstrations, etc). Even an
| introverted person can learn to talk about topic
| knowledgeably if they know it -- which often is valuable
| confidence-building experience to have. Despite the
| introversion, one can do it!
|
| If the professor - lecturer administering the test is any
| good, empty rhetoric won't help too much. If they are lazy,
| students one can try to give "answers" without showing what
| they don't know in written exams, too.
| mannykannot wrote:
| If students are successful at using rhetoric to disguise
| their ignorance from their teachers, we need to be looking
| into how teachers are selected, trained and compensated.
| sethammons wrote:
| I loved the style of book report that we had with a high
| school English teacher.
|
| While the class was otherwise busy, the teacher called you
| up to report on your self-chosen-from-a-list book. The
| teacher opened the book to a page and would read a passage
| and ask questions about it like what are they talking
| about, what happened right before and after this. After a
| couple of passages at different spots, you got your grade.
|
| You are not feigning anyone familiar with the material.
| aredox wrote:
| Americans and others are just going to discover that they need
| to invest in education, as in: invest in educators.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > pointless essays that ask them to regurgitate content (as
| opposed to essays that teach writing skills or critical thinking,
| which remain valuable).
|
| It's all just a question of time. GPT-3 can regurgitate content,
| GPT-4 will exhibit writing skills, and GPT-5 will write with
| critical thinking... at least on the level that an average
| student does today.
| guns wrote:
| Essay writing unconsciously reinforces one's opinion on a topic.
| This is an excellent tool for intellectual development when the
| student is free to argue any sensible position. Unfortunately,
| teachers often require students to choose orthodox positions, and
| thus essays become a primary tool for indoctrination.
|
| Cheating has no place in an academic institution, but machine
| generated essays are an interesting way for students to avoid
| enforced compliance.
| atlgator wrote:
| Better alternative to Adderall.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > "For biology, we would learn about biotech and write five good
| and bad things about biotech. I would send a prompt to the AI
| like, 'what are five good and bad things about biotech?' and it
| would generate an answer that would get me an A."
|
| I don't call that an essay, and it's something that can be done
| with a 10 seconds google search without AI.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| When I was in school, I had the mindset that I wasn't going to
| discover new insights about very common historical events or
| writings. I was given a topic like "write a 50 page paper
| describing the impact of Teutoburg Forest on Roman politics" and
| rather than try for new insight, I searched the web and found a
| couple dozen sources. I copy pasted those sources and fragments
| into a giant word document. I then organized them into what would
| roughly make sense in terms of timeline and insights. Lastly, I
| went through and paraphrased every single sentence from start to
| finish and added in an introductory and conclusion/summary
| paragraph. The end result was 100% unique (as measured by
| computer plagiarism software) and netted me an A+. The professor
| was dumfounded as to how I came up with a 100% original 50 page
| paper on such a common topic.
|
| Having ML write your paper is obviously cheating but isn't too
| far from what I did mentally. I think the valuable thing being
| lost is the ability to research a topic, quickly understand
| what's relevant, and structure the results.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| In my mind, what you did was actually the goal of the paper.
| You researched the prevailing theories of the "impact of
| Teutoburg Forest on Roman politics" and summarized them in your
| own words. You probably have a much better understanding of the
| subject than if an AI did it for you though.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| To be fair though, that sounds... mostly legit, what you did
| that is.
|
| Ie in many cases in school i don't think they actually care to
| teach you the subject. What good is that subject really going
| to have on your life going forward? Even if the sense of ethics
| or history-repeating i suspect it's quite low.
|
| What those meaningless tasks can do _(though highly dependent
| on the person, i assume)_ is teach you how to research, how to
| communicate, and how to cite.
|
| At least that was always my takeaway from many subjects in
| school that were subjective _(ie not math, science, etc)_. The
| content is often the least important aspect of many early
| learnings. .. but then again i loathed school growing up, so
| who am i to speak on the subject lol.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > I think the valuable thing being lost is the ability to
| research a topic, quickly understand what's relevant, and
| structure the results.
|
| And that's arguably a more valuable skill than the writing
| itself.
| abeppu wrote:
| In multiple subthreads here, people are embracing the idea that
| if machines can just write all the prose -- great, why should
| humans bother?
|
| As with image generation, one thing I think we haven't adequately
| considered is once a sizable fraction of the available online
| data is machine generated, but isn't marked as such, and we begin
| training models on the outputs of the last generation of models,
| structurally we can enter a different regime. A sequence of
| models each trained on the prior model's output can converge to
| meaningfully different behavior, because we're repeatedly,
| incrementally changing the task by changing the training data
| distribution. If _all_ the data is generated by the prior model,
| this process seeks a fixed point which is reflective of the model
| architecture and not the original training data. There's a very
| real possibility that using generative models more (and
| publishing their outputs) can make these models worse in the
| future.
|
| Weirder, however, is no one has really had the opportunity to
| look at what happens to human language when a sizable fraction of
| what we read is produced by these models. Will we normalize any
| quirks of their output? Will we reproduce or incorporate any
| idiosyncratic features into our own writing? How will we adapt in
| a changing linguistic environment?
| riskable wrote:
| > As with image generation, one thing I think we haven't
| adequately considered is once a sizable fraction of the
| available online data is machine generated, but isn't marked as
| such, and we begin training models on the outputs of the last
| generation of models, structurally we can enter a different
| regime.
|
| Ahh but the spark of true genius lights itself.
| jedberg wrote:
| I'm not to worried about convergence of the models that use
| prior training data. Eventually the models won't work and
| people will notice, and either create new training data or go
| back to only using older data to train. Also there will always
| be people who "want to do it the old way" and will still create
| new art and new writing, which will seed the training data.
|
| As for normalizing the quirks of the output -- maybe? But would
| that be so bad? Language changes all the time, it's constantly
| mutated by influencers (not the Instagram kind, but the ones
| that have existed for centuries). Look at how British English
| is literally called "The Queen's English" because it actually
| shifted to how the Queen spoke, since she ruled for so long and
| was very influential to that society.
|
| Also it should be noted that some news articles, especially in
| finance, have been written by computers for over a decade now,
| and not a lot of people seem to have noticed.
| js8 wrote:
| > Eventually the models won't work and people will notice,
| and either create new training data or go back to only using
| older data to train
|
| That has already happened in "free market capitalism". Prices
| are supposed to be the representative models of the product
| quality, but became decoupled from it because companies set
| the prices based on competitors and not based on quality of
| what they sell.
| abeppu wrote:
| As an applied ML practitioner, currently we get to choose how
| to use synthetic data vs "real" data, and in what
| proportions. This can be a valuable tool in our kit. To the
| degree that data in the wild becomes an unlabeled mix of the
| two, functionally we lose the ability to make those choices
| for any given model.
|
| > Eventually the models won't work and people will notice
|
| For any product dependent on these models, that sounds like
| pretty negative outcome ... and entirely consistent with my
| concern that "[t]here's a very real possibility that using
| generative models more (and publishing their outputs) can
| make these models worse in the future."
|
| > and either create new training data or go back to only
| using older data to train
|
| Especially given that currently LLMs basically learn about
| entities and concepts in the world via their training text,
| this breaks the ability to update the model to know about
| more recent topics of discourse independently from shifting
| the real vs synthetic proportions.
|
| > there will always be people who ... will still create new
| art and new writing, which will seed the training data
|
| But if we aren't able to consistently separate the human-
| generated and machine-generated content, model training won't
| be able to place any extra weight on the human-generated
| stuff. The mere fact that human-generated output doesn't
| disappear entirely doesn't remove these issues.
|
| The analogy is loose, but click fraud creates realistic
| looking data exhaust that looks close to the behavior of a
| real user, and can meaningfully disrupt one's ability to
| optimize for clicks or to know how many actual end users
| interacted with your item of interest. The fact that some
| nonzero portion of the clicks are real doesn't erase these
| problems. And that's in a system which doesn't create the
| kind of feedback loop described above.
| jvvw wrote:
| What's more likely is that coursework will be abandoned and all
| assessment will be done via invigilated exams :-) (As it was in
| my degree in fact).
|
| I've marked 'essays' in computer science (billed as reports but
| equivalent enough for these purposes) and I think they are mainly
| set because the university wants the students to be able to write
| clearly which is a reasonable ambition.
|
| It's often really hard to assess 'understanding'. It's possible
| to detect non-understanding more easily - you ask enough
| questions and hope that the non-understanding slips. I guess you
| try to give students enough rope to hang themselves. Or of course
| sometimes it is obvious that they don't understand things from
| the get-go. But it's very hard to create questions novel enough
| that they can't basically be gamed with regurgitation.
| Universities do try but still difficult.
| origin_path wrote:
| Are you sure the essays are set for that reason? I had to write
| essays and reports a lot in my CS course but the reason was
| pretty clearly because the professors didn't want to do code
| reviews. They certainly didn't care about clarity of writing
| given the absolutely minimal feedback provided on those
| reports, the general uselessness of what little was provided
| and the fact that by the time you reach a university you've
| already sat through many years of educators teaching you how to
| write (or trying), so CS profs have no edge there.
|
| What taught me to write wasn't school or essay writing
| homework, not even at university level. The crucible that
| forged my own ability to spell and argue was the internet.
| Slashdot, blogging, later HN.
|
| If I was a teacher trying to teach people to write, I'd be
| tempted to pick some reddit forums, and ask students to find a
| comment they thought they could add to, then submit (to me) a
| set of replies to them. Online forums give you real time
| feedback in whether your argument landed or not, whether people
| understood what you meant and so on. Literally every mini-essay
| is graded by other readers, in real time, on demand (maybe not
| on writing quality but it never is, not even in school).
| freeone3000 wrote:
| This is an ideal result -- after all, their working lives will be
| turning in machine-generated work to machine-evaluating bosses,
| so we should get them started early, lest they fall behind the
| prompt-engineering curve.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _free students from the drudgery of pointless essays that ask
| them to regurgitate content_
|
| What "pointless" essays are these, may I ask?
|
| The classic 5-paragraph essay (intro, point #1, point #2, point
| #3, conclusion) is the foundation of the vast majority of non-
| fiction writing. It's teaching the most foundational writing
| skills.
|
| When students are asked to "regurgitate content" and they can't,
| it means they don't understand the content or they don't know how
| to write. They _need_ to be able to master that before they can
| move onto more advanced writing (or more advanced content).
|
| I hated writing essays in high school, because I didn't
| understand the why or how, because I had mostly bad teachers.
| When I finally learned how to write papers in college, everything
| clicked and I went from getting C- grades to A grades in subjects
| that involved essays -- and the writing and explaining skills
| that I learned, I later wound up using _daily_ in my professional
| life.
|
| But the problem was never with "pointless essays" -- it was that
| nobody ever taught me how and why to do them properly.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Well said and written! Your bad teachers would be proud.
|
| The theme in the comments seems to be "X is simple, therefore
| rote practice isn't valuable."
|
| But that glosses over the fact that fully understanding and
| being proficient at X is often a prerequisite for learning X'.
|
| Or in other words, calculators can do arithmetic. If we skip
| mastery of that, how do we propose to teach children
| differential equations?
|
| What is probably more important is the grading-side of ML: by
| leveraging more ML to auto-note and -score the _mechanics_ of
| assignments, we free up teacher time to focus on interpreting
| and suggesting improvements for students, which many teachers
| are currently too overwhelmed to do.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > The classic 5-paragraph essay (intro, point #1, point #2,
| point #3, conclusion) is the foundation of the vast majority of
| non-fiction writing.
|
| Never heard of this format or it being some kind of standard.
| Is five paragraphs really an 'essay'?
| tcmart14 wrote:
| It was pretty common when I started writing papers in school
| up till maybe 10th grade? I've never heard it as "classic
| 5-paragraph" but as "1-3-1 format." After 10th grade we
| introduced bringing in counter arguments.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Seems funny that you'd decided you were making three points
| before you even knew what the topic was!
| [deleted]
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The 5-paragraph essay as taught in schools misses the point.
| The point of an essay is to make a single cohesive argument,
| preferably in as few words as possible.
|
| "Write a standard, 5-paragraph essay discussing the theme of
| chaos in Slaughterhouse Five, making sure to cite several
| examples from the text, 1000 words minimum" is a ludicrous
| assignment. The assignment should be: "Argue whether chaos is a
| significant theme in Slaughterhouse Five, 5 pages maximum."
| crazygringo wrote:
| I could not disagree more.
|
| What you call "ludicrous" I call "beginner". Beginning
| students _need_ the 5-paragraph structure, and they _need_
| minimum word counts, just like they _need_ to be told to cite
| examples. Otherwise they just turn in a single-sentence
| "Slaughterhouse Five has a lot of chaos, which you can see
| clearly from reading the book, the end." Maybe you laugh but
| you will literally receive this from 9th-graders.
|
| The assignment you're advocating for is more appropriate for
| a weekly college homework assignment, where you know that the
| (good) students will struggle to get it _down_ to five pages,
| and (hopefully) don 't have to be taught that their arguments
| need to be supported with citations. But it would be
| disastrous for most high schoolers.
|
| You need to learn to play chords and scales before you can
| play jazz. Writing is no different, you need to start with
| the fundamentals.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| > Otherwise they just turn in a single-sentence
| "Slaughterhouse Five has a lot of chaos, which you can see
| clearly from reading the book, the end." Maybe you laugh
| but you will literally receive this from 9th-graders.
|
| That essay would easily get a 0, and the student (and their
| peers) would learn not to try that. A student producing a
| single sentence instead of an essay is a different problem
| than a student producing an unclear essay or failing to
| demonstrate that they read the text, which, I think, is the
| point of the 5-paragraph essay.
|
| The actual fundamentals of good writing are grammar, logic,
| and rhetoric. We only teach one of those (grammar) in
| schools, and we don't necessarily teach it well. The
| subjects of logic and rhetoric have largely been replaced
| by the "5-paragraph essay" until you reach college. That is
| insane to me.
|
| Teaching 5-paragraph essays from middle school to high
| school is like teaching jazz by having students spend 8
| years writing renaissance chorales. Writing a few
| renaissance chorales is probably good for jazz musicians,
| but spending 8 years writing them will not produce a good
| jazz artist.
| Izkata wrote:
| Not only does it miss the point, I suspect it's why there's
| so many blog posts nowadays that end with a paragraph titled
| "Conclusion" that just repeats what was previously said,
| without actually tying those thoughts together.
| randomwalker wrote:
| OP here. The full title of this article is "Students are acing
| their homework by turning in machine-generated essays. Good."
|
| The last word was edited out by the mods, presumably under the
| belief that it's clickbait. Unfortunately, the headline now
| sounds like I'm complaining about this development, whereas my
| post is about how it will force much-needed improvements to
| education and free students from the drudgery of pointless essays
| that ask them to regurgitate content (as opposed to essays that
| teach writing skills or critical thinking, which remain
| valuable).
| dang wrote:
| The problem is that the title was linkbaity, especially with
| that "Good" at the end. For a mod to edit that out is routine
| HN moderation (" _Please use the original title, unless it is
| misleading or linkbait_ " -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
|
| Perhaps a better fix is to use a representative sentence from
| the article body. I've done that now.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Geeze. How is _"... Good. "_ considered unacceptable clickbait,
| while:
|
| - _" Why I don't..."_
|
| - _"... considered harmful. "_
|
| - _"... written in Rust! "_
|
| are so ubiquitous?
| dang wrote:
| Those things are also clickbait and we also edit them out
| when we see them. Are you perhaps assuming that we see
| everything that gets posted here? That would be very
| mistaken.
| fenomas wrote:
| I _think_ that the site auto-edits titles on first submit, but
| if you afterwards edit and save, it will use what you put in
| verbatim.
| OJFord wrote:
| This is correct, OP, if you can still edit - just put it back
| in.
| DJBunnies wrote:
| I loathe the editorializing here.
| zffr wrote:
| IMO I didn't get the sense that the title is complaining. I
| took the title as neutral statement and assumed the article
| would provide evidence for the claim and possibly commentary on
| it.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >whereas my post is about how it will force much-needed
| improvements to education and free students from the drudgery
| of pointless essays that ask them to regurgitate content (as
| opposed to essays that teach writing skills or critical
| thinking, which remain valuable)
|
| OK ... what's wrong with essays that demonstrate knowledge of a
| particular topic (as you call it "regurgitate content')? And
| why wouldn't those teach writing skills?
|
| Yes, developing critical thinking skills is important, and
| sometimes you want to focus projects, assignment, homework
| towards that end. But don't discount the value of being able to
| synthesize and summarize existing knowledge in a particular
| area of knowledge. In fact, that's almost always a pre-
| requisite to making cogent arguments that exercise 'critical
| thinking' skills.
|
| >In fact, it seems to be this kind of essay where language
| models are doing particularly well, with assignments such as
| "Write five good and bad things about biotech". As an educator,
| I think this assignment is close to useless if the goal is to
| learn about biotech.
|
| WHY?? Why is it 'close to useless' for a student to investigate
| current issues in biotech?
|
| And by the way, with academics (and especially in public
| education), it is almost always the case that a student gets
| out of it what they put in. That is, if the student is aiming
| for the absolute minimum and takes every shortcut, neither AI,
| nor the assignment structure will a make a difference. Going
| back to this 'close to useless' question, a keen student can
| really sink their teeth into it and make this topic their own -
| because this question obviously is open-ended, and leaves room
| for the student to provide an independent and critical
| evaluation of the issues that concern the field .... OR ...
| they can spend 15 mins googling around or using AI, to throw a
| bunch of stuff together, call it a day, and go back to playing
| Call of Duty.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Hahaha! Oh man. I read the headline, and I instantly said
| "Good."
|
| Click the link and saw the 'Good' and had to crack up laughing.
| Wish it was kept as part of the headline on HN.
| ksaj wrote:
| How's this for an educational product idea: Use AI to read a
| student's essay, then produce exam questions based on the
| content. This test would be delivered orally (with accommodation
| for disabilities that might impact their ability to complete the
| task, of course).
|
| The student should ace the test if they understood the subject
| well enough to ace an essay on it. They should know the answers
| very well, since the questions are specific to what they've
| apparently written. The mark they get on this test would be the
| research part of the mark they receive for the essay. Then it is
| just grammar, organization, etc. thereafter.
| ryndbfsrw wrote:
| Thats really impressive students are doing this. These tools are
| non-trivial to use and it shows great initiative from them. I
| could see these tools being used proactively as part of a
| creative writing class or helping people improve their language
| skills. Top stuff!
| FredPret wrote:
| In the 90's there was a magazine article about Bill Gates. He
| interviewed some kids to hear what they want from computers.
| Doing their homework was the top answer.
|
| I remember thinking: yeah right, that will take many decades. I
| guess 2-3 decades was enough!
| Vrondi wrote:
| Time to go back to in-person handwritten essay exams.
| sroussey wrote:
| Not handwritten cursive, kids can't read or write that today.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| I took the LSAT some years ago (mostly just for curiosity's
| sake). When I turned my documents in to the lead proctor, she
| stopped me and said something like "you were to _write_ your
| essay! "
|
| Confused, I told her I had, to which she loudly stated "you
| _printed_ your essay, and that 's not permissible!" Once I
| figured out she meant cursive writing, I told her I hadn't
| written anything in cursive since maybe 4th or 5th grade, and
| after that I typed most of my long-form homework on my trusty
| Apple ][e and "printed" handwritten notes, as I still do
| today. She turned a bit pale and then turned to the room,
| interrupted the test, and asked how many candidates were also
| "printing" their essays. Essentially everyone raised their
| hands.
|
| It turns out the poor older lady was a grade school teacher
| and had been instructing children how to write in cursive
| since the days of yore. When she faced the fact that those
| habits hadn't stuck with any of the once-4th-graders sitting
| in front of her, she turned even paler and went to get a
| drink of water. I felt a bit bad for her.
| neverartful wrote:
| Physical blue books and an ink pen in an auditorium within a
| time limit. This would work easy enough for in-person (on-
| campus) students. Not so good for online/remote.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I hated those. I can write reasonably quickly thanks to
| cursive, but it still felt like my hand was the limiting
| factor instead of my brain.
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