907
College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
907 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59582 readers
2699 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I found this too generalizing. Yes, most people only ever need and use productivity skills in their worklife. They do no fundamental research. Wether their education was this or that way has no effect on the advancement of science in general, because these people don't do science in their career.
Different people with different goals will do science, and for them an appropriate education makes sense. It also makes sense to have everything in between.
I don't see how it helps the humanities and other sciences to teach skills which are never used. Or how it helps to teach a practice which no one applies in practice. How is it a threat to education when someone uses a new tool intelligently, so they can pass academic education exams? How does that make them any less valuable for working in that field? Assuming the exam reflects what working in that field actually requires.
I think we can also spin an argument in the opposite direction: More automation in education frees the students to explore side ideas, to actually study the field.
"I don’t see how it helps the humanities and other sciences to teach skills which are never used." - I can offer an unusual counter here, you're assuming the knowledge will never be used, or that we should avoid teaching things that are unlikely to be used. Were this the case, the field of graph theory would have ceased to exist long before it became useful in mapping - indeed Bool's algebra would never have led to the foundations of computer science and the machines we are using today.
"How is it a threat to education when someone uses a new tool intelligently, so they can pass academic education exams?" - Allow me to offer you the choice of two doctors, one of whome passed using AI, and the other passed a more traditional assessment. Which doctor would you choose and why? Surely the latter, since they would have also passed with AI, but the one without AI might not have passed the more traditional route due to a lack of knowledge. It isn't a threat to education, it's adding further uncertainty as to the outcome of such an education (both doctors might have the same skill levels, but there is more room for doubt in the first case).
"Wether their education was this or that way has no effect on the advancement of science in general, because these people don’t do science in their career." - I strongly disagree! In an environment where knowledge for the sake of knowledge is not prised, a lie is more easy plant and nurture (take for example the antivax movement). Such people can be an active hinderence to the progress of knowledge - their misconceptions creating false leads and creating an environment that distrusts such sciences (we're predisposed to distrust what we do not understand).
Not exactly. What I meant to say is: Some students will never use some of the knowledge they were taught. In the age of information explosion, there is practically unlimited knowledge 'available'. What part of this knowledge should be taught to students? For each bit of knowledge, we can make your hypothetic argument: It might become useful in the future, an entire important branch of science might be built on top of it.
So this on it's own is not an argument. We need to argue why this particular skill or knowledge deserves the attention and focus to be studied. There is not enough time to teach everything. Which in turn can be used as an argument to more computer assisted learning and teaching. For example, I found ChatGPT useful to explore topics. I would not have used it to cheat in exams, but probably to prepare for them.
Good point, but it depends on context. You assume the traditional doc would have passed with AI, but that is questionable. These are complex tools with often counterintuitive behaviour. They need to be studied and approached critically to be used well. For example, the traditional doc might not have spotted the AI hallucinating, because she wasn't aware of that possibility.
Further, it depends on their work environment. Do they treat patients with, or without AI? If the doc is integrated in a team of both human and artificial colleagues, I certainly would prefer the doc who practiced these working conditions, who proved in exams they can deliver the expected results this way.
I feel we left these lands in Europe when diplomas were abandoned for the bachelor/master system, 20 years ago. Academic education is streamlined, tailored to the needs of the industry. You can take a scientific route, but most students don't. The academica which you describe as if it was threatened by something new might exist, but it lives along a more functional academia where people learn things to apply them in our current reality.
It's quite a hot take to paint things like the antivax movement on academic education. For example, I question wether the people proposing and falling for these 'ideas' are academics in the first place.
Personally, I like learning knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But I need time and freedom to do so. When I was studying computer science with an overloaded schedule, my interest in toying with ideas and diving into backgrounds was extremely limited. I also was expected to finish in an unreasonably short amount of time. If I could have sped up some of the more tedious parts of the studies with the help of AI, this could have freed up resources and interest for the sake of knowledge.
You use literally everything you learn; it shapes your worldview and influences everything you do, especially how you vote. Don't tell us that useless knowledge exists. It all has inherent worth.
Yes, within limits. Due to the information explosion, it became impossible to learn "everything". We need to make choices, prioritize.
How does your voting behaviour suffer because you lack understanding about how exactly potentiometers work, or how to express historic events in modern dance?
Both have inherent worth, but not the same for each person and context. We luckily live in a society of labor division. Not everyone has to know or like everything. While I absolutely admire science, not everyone has to be a scientist.
Because there is more knowledge available than we can ever teach a single person, it is entirely possible to spend a lifetime learning things with no use informing your ballot decision. I would much rather have students optimize some parts of their education with AI, to free up capacity for other important subjects which may seem less related to their discipline. For example, many of my fellow computer science students were completely unaware how it could be ethically questionable to develop pathfinding algorithms for military helicopters.
It actually suffers a lot because now companies that do understand those things have total control over your access to the modern world, and so turn you into a consumer and a peasant. Which is why the post-modern world is the way it is.
In a sane world, you know basic electronics so you can build your own shit when manufacturing companies decide to get smart and impose planned obsolescence to make you buy their shit continually, which damages the environment and society and fleeces you.
Modern dance is a hugely important aspect of our culture spanning music videos, theater, movies, all of which make billions of dollars so you're not even going to pretend it doesn't matter from a capitalist perspective either.
Without generalized knowledge of the world around you, you are beholden to everyone, and can trust no one. Anyone can lie to you and abuse you as they please. We see it happening with the MAGA cultists and tanktards on other Lemmy instances. We saw how a lack of generalized knowledge in a population destroys everything with our own eyes and see it every day. Don't sit there and pretend it doesn't matter or that the point of education isn't to ensure that doesn't happen.
While all of what you say is true, we simply cannot teach everything since there is just too much knowledge and too little time in a human life.
And not everyone is equally interested or capable in learning everything.
This is necessarily the world we live in, even without adding capitalism or any evil intentions to the mix. Any education you can get or offer can only be a more or less well selected subset of the knowledge available.
In this light, I don't see it as a dramatic loss to remove educational emphasis from skills which can easily be replaced with modern technology. It would make sense to shift the focus to teaching a critical usage of said technology.
That's why you just teach the basics in a variety of fields. That way, people have the baseline they need to be able to build the skills in the fields they need or care about, or have to deal with at some point in their lives. And it will be all of them sooner or later.
We live in a representative democracy and that requires everyone who can vote yo hae that kind of basic education to avoid being schnookered. Amd we gave it up, and look what happened. It's not optional or a hobby. It's a requirement for society to function, so the lazy/disinterested people will have to get over it if we're going to have a modern civilization.
The fascist nightmare that the U.S. is slowly becoming is showing us why we take that approach and why we do not treat knowledge as something you only learn the bare minimum of to get a paycheck. A fucking monkey can get a paycheck. Humans learn and expand our body of knowledge. That's just what we do.
Just the act of basic shit like reading and writing affects cognitive function which affect your odds of getting Alzheimer's when you're older. And that knowledge is the foundation of our culture.