AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework
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Aside from the irony that Borcherds probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while, instead let’s examine the purpose of homework. It helps you learn. You can read a chapter and think you understand the material, but doing homework makes you engage more with the material. Recently we’ve used the external motivator of course points to encourage this good habit. But this turns the relationship between teacher and student into a transaction- you do a problem, you get a point. And most young students really don’t care beyond that transaction. They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
So if we’re not going to rethink the purely transactional relationship schools have with most students, then you probably should stop giving points and grading homework. You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription. That’s possible to figure out. A lot of people have pointed out various equity risks but it’s really just a matter of balancing the AI risk with the equity risk at the weighting acceptable to your institution.
You could also attempt the much more challenging prospect of turning the transactional nature of college into some other relationship which fosters a student’s intrinsic motivation of learning for the sake of learning, but I bet your institution goes bankrupt in the process. So really you should just stop grading homework and put 100% of the grade weight into proctored assessments with some sort of firewall against AI tools. Anyone that faces an equity disadvantage because of this was probably also disadvantaged by the fact that you let rich kids with premium AI subscriptions get better grades on their homework.
No, that's not common at all, nor how the system works. Use of graders/TAs are on an institution basis.
"Grant money" has absolutely nothing to do with it. Grant money is earmarked for specific research and cannot be spent for teaching purposes. When grant money is used to hire graduate students, they are research assistants and must work on the research project which the grant money was given for.
TAs/graders come from separate tuition budgets. Tuition dollars are much more preferred anyway because they're stable and faculty do not have to work for them, they show up based on enrollment.
The fact you have TAs/graders at all is by institution. Large R1 institutions have grad students and undergraduate population to fill these roles. In these institutions, 1 minimally sized undergrad class = at least 1 TA, with additional TAs and graders after some enrollment threshold.
Tenure has absolutely nothing to do with it. Adjunct faculty get TAs/graders all the same.
Then I got a research assistantship, which was funded by my advisor's grant. I meant that I got paid to do my thesis research, and no longer had to teach. This was a precondition for joining his group.
As a CS undergrad, I did that kind of work at UC Berkeley in the 90s, grading courses that I'd taken 2-4 semesters earlier. I even did a semester as a TA, because the professor was having a hard time finding enough grad students who wanted to deal with one of those larger classes.
Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade.
So if grading is part of the development process for a graduate student, then go ahead and continue. But that’s not the claim in the article. And if grading doesn’t serve a purpose anymore, then stop doing it. You can pay your assistants to do nothing for 20 hrs/week, or you can find literally anything else for them to do.
It depends on the field, but grad student wages in science and engineering are usually much lower than what industry would pay for similar work. Academic research is very cost-effective because most of the work is done by underpaid graduate students.
Literally how grants work.
It is the _main_ activity which "generates value" for an institution, whose primary goal is conducting research.
- Lab access
- Access to PhD advisor
- Research seminars
- ...
Isn't there a P != NP element to this? Doing the work is hard. Checking it is not.
If a student honestly attempted a problem and failed, diagnosing the failure may be worth the professor's time, but given the bunchiness of undergrad (and frankly, any junior learning) mistake varieties, chances are the TA can identify the issue as well.
At least this is about math where there is usually a single right answer. For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points? There's should be debate over even what is the right points in any large work. And so if you're convincing in your argument of what is the important points, you can pass homework.
Edit, fix autocorrect
Answers are proofs, not numbers, and there is a ton of nuance, and it is incredibly hard to grade.
It's not as easy as judging the quality of a computer program written as an assignment.
Multiple choice?
> not interested so much in did you get the right answer as did you follow the right techniques
A student honestly attempting math problems, if it’s a well-designed problem, shouldn’t be able to get multiple answers right with wrong methods.
> For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points?
I’d say a professor should be grading English essays. But a TA can grade short answers, e.g. did you grasp the theme or understand an extratextual reference.
Checking students' homework is part of what it means to be a TA. Grading is a choice the university makes; it's absence makes one no less of a TA.
> being a TA is not some awful exploitation
It's certainly exploitation. For some TAs, who get overworked and lorded over, and in universities when the pay is low, it's awful exploitation. For most TAs it is 'regular' exploitation of getting a crappy salary for serious highly-skilled work.
It was the math class where I learned the most as well as I wasn't doing rote work and was able to talk to him whenever I had an actual question.
I dont like AI destroying some of our systems but if we return back to the sort of learning that college used to be where it was self directed with guidance from professors, I will count that as a win over the factory worker production system that high school was and universities were starting to ape.
We had homework assigned and in the high school class the teacher spent part of class time reviewing and taking questions about the previous homework set. In the university classes this was done in a discussion section or in office hours.
In high school the homework was supposed to all be in one notebook which would be reviewed periodically but only to see that some effort was being made, it was not graded. It counted maybe 10% of the grade. In the university classes it wasn't even looked at.
The vast majority of the grade was based on quizes and exams, we were typically allowed to bring one standard-sized page of notes for these, and a calculator.
This was all in the 1980s time frame.
Others have already say why TA's (and graders) often do the grading. That's also not the same as the prof not paying attention to the work students do.
But I do want folks to think about the time faculty are actually allocated to teach courses. I have a 2 unit course I teach, ~70 students this term, and 2 hours of class. I'm paid for maybe 8 hours per week for all the prep class time, planning. Doesn't actually leave much time at all for grading. There are definitely qualified students who could be TAs who would give the students much more time and feedback than I am able...
For other courses, I have a bit more time allocated, but hundreds of students and still one of me. The only way students get feedback is when TAs grade.
Anyway, that's just the practical bits...
A lot of faculty are moving to 100% proctored assessment, and I think it sucks. For me, reading at least some of the student responses and seeing the data are helpful. Faculty do want to engage with their students and are similarly demoralized when everything is reduced to a transaction. It's hard not to be nihilist about it. Our own jobs, even at a public University are just capitalistic transactions with fewer profits. Students want the degree because it's the only thing they can hold on to as a token of hope for the next few years. Both students and faculty can fall into patterns of really low trust, and it's hard to be the 'outlier' trying to trust students when most of your colleagues say people don't do the work.
I don't actually have great solutions for building intrinsic motivation in students, except talking to them and minimizing the extent to which everything is a transaction. But I'm required to assign grades, still.
Source? I have been reading this every year since like the financial crisis.
https://www.wiche.edu/resources/report-u-s-high-school-gradu...
Hasn’t this happened after each boom generation?
>62.8% of high school (or equivalent) graduates go on to postsecondary study.
>Enrollment among new high school graduates has declined 10.4% since its peak in 2009 (70.1%).
There are still a lot of kids that could go to those 3rd tier universities, but choose not to. The cost/benefit is not perceived to be there anymore.
Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for.
A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one. If you've met an exceptionally brilliant small-town mechanic, you see how that applies within countries as well.
I have no idea what you mean by this. I'm pretty sure that inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones do as well or better than dimwits in war zones, and I'm absolutely sure it's selected for. I don't know why you think stupidity is an advantage in a dangerous or difficult situation.
Too many resources are invested in children who would do well no matter what situation you put them in; imo as a retroactive justification for withdrawing resources for racist reasons. You'd think if you had an intellectually inferior group (whether genetically or due to environmental reasons), you'd invest most of your resources into them - but instead it's generally used as an excuse to withdraw resources.
The biggest secret when it comes to selective schools and universities, is that you don't have to do anything to a smart kid in order to graduate a smart kid. If the reputation of your institution is based on the achievements of its alumni rather than the improvement of its students, selecting for smart kids is loading the dice. They'd do well without you.
That's basically the model of the modern private university: give full scholarships to really talented kids (who have already proved their superiority in often very adverse circumstances), and charge the sky to the idiot children of the upper middle class, who gain prestige through paying for the credentials that the talented were paid to take.
> A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one.
I have no idea how you've decided this. I don't even know what you think a rich country is. If it's rich with no class mobility and no access to higher education or reasonable subsistence for the poor, he'll do badly. If he's in a peaceful poor country without an overbearing class structure, where he can learn in his leisure and his belly is always full, especially now with communication the way it is, he'll be able to do whatever he wants to do. The problem might be class war zones, not war zones. An bright poor kid is running the risk of getting shot or disappeared for doing his best to improve the lives of the people around him in a way the bosses don't like.
Not stupidity. Docileness. Staying low and being scared versus wandering out because something caught your interest.
> you don't have to do anything to a smart kid in order to graduate a smart kid
What are you basing this on? The evidence from gifted programs suggests the opposite–under-stimulated smart kids can become problem kids fast.
> give full scholarships to really talented kids (who have already proved their superiority in often very adverse circumstances), and charge the sky to the idiot children of the upper middle class
What are you basing this on? Most elite schools charge nothing to families making less than the median household wage.
This isn't necessarily a good thing. cf The Lisp Curse.
That said, the economics of AI… eh. I can see it replacing the $3T/year cost of hiring software developers, but this doesn't mean people will spend $3T/year on AI; I mean, Wikipedia killed demand for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but nobody values Wikipedia at the 16 trillion or so USD you'd get by multiplying the cost of the EB with how many people are online.
* even the CyberCab, which was announced as "no steering wheel or pedals", is geofenced and if it's like their other vehicles has human observers on standby for remote control.
Whether he graded it, or his assistants graded it, I’m not really sure how that matters at all to the point.
Human Interviewer: Congratulations on making it to the 12th interview!
Candidate: Hey, I'm honored to be talk to another human for once!
Human Interviewer: That's funny. And true! Now, it says here you're a recent college grad student.
Candidate: That's right. Had to increase that sweet, sweet earning potential.
Human Interviewer: Also funny, also true! Honestly, what I learned in Intro to Game Theory alone has probably increased my earning potential by 15, maybe even 20%.
Candidate: Oh man, I remember that class! My professor gave up on grading homework that semester because of ChatGPT, and that weighted the midterm and final so much. I never did so much plugging and chugging in my life!
Human Interviewer: That's great. Well, that's about it. Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you. We'll be in touch.
Candidate: ???
You went to college because it was the only way to get a job that paid well.
When other vocations stopped having the ability to ensure people could enjoy social mobility, people focused on the only pathways left.
His thinking is quite simple on this... There's absolutely nothing he could do, practically, to prevent you from feeding the questions straight to an AI and having it kick out the answers. But since this is a self-taught, self-selected course... His advice is to not do that until you get well and truly stuck, and only then will you have enough attempts built up to compare to the answer to understand the concept you're missing.
I think it's a decent middle ground for an online published self taught course. But I don't know that such an approach works in terms of, say, a Carnegie Mellon University being able to continue to charge the tuition it does for the courses that aren't self-taught.
However, now there are students that just copy the output of LLMs without even caring to understand terminology and notation. Should that count as a completed assignment? In some egregious and too obvious cases I ask them simple questions about what they wrote and don't give them marks/points if they have no clue.
Using LLMs as assistants for homework is one thing, and there's no way to prevent it. But students who just copy characters from the screen without caring to understand what is going on are on another level. Above all, they are wasting their time.
Regarding giving or not giving scores, that's a complicated issue. Scores provide a "negative incentive" for learning. A positive incentive would be some pat on the back for doing the assignments. However, our brains are not wired by the evolution to do things only for positive incentives when there are no grades/deadlines/etc.
In my experience, being lenient works great with graduate students, and undergrads won't do and won't understand anything in the course if there are no grades. I learned that the hard way.
Maybe a problem in the long term, but irrelevant here. These students paid (a lot of) money for this service. The provider of the service needs to stop complaining and do their job (grade the homework). If even a single student did the work themselves, anything otherwise would be a disservice.
There is and always will be debate on what's worth learning, but if we decide that something is worth learning, it is worth learning to do it yourself, not have AI do it. Schools all over have a big problem with that because kids are using AI to do things that we believe are learning. Is this something that's important to learn or should we now say, you know what? Everyone has an AI. Let's stop teaching these stupid things that AI does well and start teaching other things. That's a question I'm not going to answer, only time will tell and we'll have other debates in the future along similar lines about something else.
He still assigns homework. He's not grading it. The students that want to try, they're free to do it. If they have questions, there are office hours.
The only thing being removed is the grading, not their homework. If they want to learn, they can.
Except for the person refusing to grade it, of course.
The schools are providing two services to students, not one. There's one directly and the other indirectly. And those two services are sometimes at odds.
The direct service is to teach them. Skills, knowledge, perspectives, critical thinking, etc.
The indirect service is to act as a proxy for people and organizations in the world to avoid having to do a thorough examination of a person's abilities. A degree is an attestation that a student has cleared all the hurdles and accomplished something of value. The better the reputation of the institution, the more value this service is to a student.
Just because students are paying for the direct service doesn't mean they aren't also paying for the indirect one too, it's just that the reputation has been established by all the students that came before and these students will be affecting the reputation for students coming afterwards.
Regardless, because a huge chunk of the service is that attestation, it's not as simple as the customer pays so the customer should get what they want. The universities need to figure out a way to maintain the value of their attestation in the face of students who try to subvert the evaluation process and a changing world. And if homework is providing little value in that regard, some rethinking might be warranted. They could assign it and optionally grade it on request for students who want their work evaluated but make it clear that it bears no connection to the grade that leads to the degree. They could come up with some other means of evaluating whether students have worked or learned the material. They could rework the material to account for the existence of AI. Just like calculators or the internet changed the work environment to obviate previously valuable skills, today's students will be living their lives in a world where AI exists and certain previously valuable skills will not be valuable going forward. A university's job is to produce the most capable person for the environment in which they will live their life. If the old curriculum isn't doing that, the curriculum needs to be rethought. And homework might take on a different role or be significantly less important in that rethought curriculum.
While the assessment can be gamed, you must overcome the exam which are written and reviewed outside of the university, so the lecturer doesn't know what is on the exam, and the questions and exam papers are never returned.
Doing this I remember my undergrad and masters felt like I was coddled as there was a bunch of fluff grades in doing assignments and just turning up to class. The grade inflation was a farce as well.
I'm on the math faculty at a R1 (public) university, and we've not had a budget for graders for most courses for a very long time, with the exception of e.g., very large courses. For most classes the instructor does all the grading. Grading has been a significant fraction of my time teaching, certainly much more than what I can spend on preparing lectures and other teaching-related work. Moreover, much of the time grading is giving feedback, figuring out partial credit, etc; just checking "correct" or "incorrect" is often relatively quick.
In the last couple years, my personal experience has been that (i) a very small (and possibly vanishing) fraction of students are declining to use AI, or at least use it sparingly, because they want to learn; (ii) a growing percentage are using it as a personal tutor; and (iii) some are outright outsourcing all the work. The last category is small, but if that category grows (anecdotally this seems to be the case -- I've mostly taught grad courses in the last year and don't have first-hand knowledge) then what would be the point of spending all that time grading and giving detailed written feedback?
Incidentally, many students in the second category are the type who in years past would form study groups, come to office hours, etc.; now they seem to prefer AI over humans. Some of them do seem to benefit from it, but not all. How one uses AI matters a lot, and how to help students use the tech to learn is something we have to figure out (regardless of how we feel about AI's impact on research).
We might not quite be there but we’re trucking towards that point at full speed.
If we accept the narrative that LLMs can defeat the incentive structure of course work as a concept, it raises the question of if college will continue to raise earning potential for much longer.
Presumably at this point anyone tasked with such will offload it to an LLM?
Honestly he should just tell student to grade their homework with chatGPT themselves.
Entire math departments at multiple lower profile schools will close their doors before he has any actual concern about his future as an academic.
But your point is correct for other professors, much less secure in their positions, who have similar problems with AI and actually do have to concern themselves about using their TAs and RAs productively.
Thanks for explaining to me how the academic system I work in functions. Just like most managers don't literally pay their employees, the company does. The university pays TAs through funds from their various revenue streams, including endowment, tuition, grants to the university, and through indirect costs collected from research grants to researchers, probably including Borcherds own grants. So really a lot of different things pay the TAs, the university is just the clearing house.
faculty research overhead pays for department TAs. that's why departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts.
> If you have no idea how teaching works in US universities, probably better not to comment on it.
define:irony
The majority comes from tuition budgets, which are assigned per credit-unit. This also pays for faculty salaries. Math is heavily dependent on tuition because they get little overhead. Life sciences is buying millions of dollars of equipment, chemicals, animals, lab staff that incur overhead, none in math.
>departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts
In fact the University of California does not get to keep any overhead. It goes right back into the State of California General Fund and the CA Legislature, as part of the budgeting process, decides where it goes (obviously considering where it came from). During a budget squeeze, overhead can be diverted elsewhere.
Because of this, for a number of years, it was unknown whether the research enterprise at the University of California was actually covering its overhead costs or operating at a loss.
They do not, lol.
For one thing, you will always have some courses in the courseload which have assignments that count toward the grade. So of course, you prioritize getting those assignments done, at the cost of procrastinating the ones that don't contribute to the grade, which will tend not to get done. If you don't do those, you will tend to bomb on the exams.
I would instigate a system in which your assignments count toward their grade, but the assignment's marks are derived from the marks that you hit in the exam, not from the content of the assignment.
Like say that we make assignments 20% of the course grade. For the sake of simplicity, let's suppose we use the final exam grade to determine the assignment contribution.
If you do all the assignments and get 80% in the final, your assignments then contribute 16% to your course grade (out of the maximum 20%). If you've done half the assignments then you get 8% from them, and so on.
I would not impose a minimum bar of what constitutes an assignment being done. If the assignment is, say, programming assignment to make a tokenizer for a programming language, and someone hands in a tiny file containing a "hello world" function, then that will still count as the assignment being done. That student will self-punish when they bomb the final exam due to not having learned, and that exam's percentage then determines the value of their disingenuous assignment effort.
I guess that a form of this system has already existed in the past: namely when certain professors made attendance made attendance part of the grade. So just by warming a seat in the lecture you could get 5% whether you are absorbing anything or tuning out.
Grades being based purely on exams is a bad thing; it encourages "examsmanship" rather than scholarship. It's hard to see what else you can do in the face of AI. Work done in uncontrolled conditions can easily be faked. If you embrace AI, then you have to raise the bar for the size and complexity of homework problems. But then the homework measures the student's ability to take on a complex problem with AI, and not the specifics of the subject matter in the course. You can take on arbitrary complexity without understanding a specific subject matter. If we raise the complexity to the point that you fail, it's not from the subject matter, but the complexity. In no way can we arrange "AI allowed" homework such that the student learns a specific topic; the harder we make it, he more effectively the student learns to use AI, while avoiding the actual topic.
That’s the goose that’s laying the golden egg.
Are the people that do well on the proctored assignments firewalled off from AI going to be the best employees?
My guess based on my experience as a math major is that they just stop giving homework and the in class tests become more rigorous (can’t imagine how much harder they could have made these at my school at least)
My point is that no matter what tool you’re using, at some point you have to stretch your brain and the exams/screenings/etc just haven’t caught up to how to stretch someone’s brain in this new world and I’ve found just embracing the thing to be a better approach than any sort of pearl clutching
Really? When I'm reading textbooks nowadays for fun, I absolutely do the problems at the end of the chapter. It tells you when you think you learned something but didn't.
No structure needed, the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people. It’s the actual business model; undergraduate education is break even, the only way money is ever made is alums donating to the school due to the feel-good memories they formed when they attended.
Unfortunately, for schools who thought their purpose was to educate, they will be made obsolete in the near future. Expect a lot of schools to close.
But those places that always understood their purpose was for affluent young adults to mingle and connect with other affluent people, they will be just fine.
Post-GI Bill. Before university was universal, there was a strong philosophical angle to the enterprise. (Also meet your generation's rich kids, that's always been a part of it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine
He has a youtube channel with lectures in number theory, category theory and other things.
The channel: https://www.youtube.com/@richarde.borcherds7998
Yet the folks with access to unrestricted Mythos agents tackling mathematics are hiring credentialed mathematicians. Your heuristic, applied to itself, rejects itself.
Source?
EDIT: It’s news to my friend who’s high up at one of them!
This guy doesn’t just have credentials. He has record of proven results.
I am not saying this as a black and white statement. I just think there are different cohorts of students based on maturity and self motivation and we might be losing out on one cohort that is at neither extreme.
There are plenty of people who have the innate intelligence and intellectual curiosity to succeed in college, but come out of high school lacking discipline and clueless about what they want to study. They would be better off spending a few years working or serving in the military or something to get their shit together first, and then enroll in college later. Those students tend to have clearer goals and take the educational experience more seriously.
Well, that raises an interesting philosophical question. What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Surely you agree that there are a wide variety of teaching styles present among all college professors. If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material? Why is this an issue with the student, and not the professor not being teaching material, or the university not being facilitator-of-education material for failing to match students and professors well?
I agree that people have been pushed into college as a default option due to it being overloaded as both place of learning but also printing salary-granting papers, but it's NOT clear to me that students who need the specific stick mentioned in some cases are broadly unsuited for higher learning.
Any that are self motivated.
> If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material?
Honestly, no. It shows a lack of (a) institutional-navigational skills, e.g. change your professor, (b) flexibility to different learning "styles" (which are increasingly being shown to be a myth) and/or (c) ability to circumvent adversity, e.g. by reading the textbook, finding online videos or hunting down a study group. That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
Modern college students are basically afforded the freedoms and privileges of a classical scholar with a wealthy patron. Their day-to-day needs are taken care of. They have access to massive libraries. They have access to lectures and professors at office hours. And they navigate all of it with a pre-selected cohort of similar students.
(To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.)
I disagree, because muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life.
> To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.
Again, I disagree.I mean, I agree on its face, in that a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree.
But we're talking about people who aren't motivated and capable. The best path to something resembling success for people who lack the motivation and capability to be successful on their own, is to muddle through the university system and by whatever necessary means get the piece of paper.
College at large is not a waste of time for these people. Until the downstream society stops valuing a degree as it does, time spent getting the degree is not wasted, because it yielded the degree. If the paper is had, the time was well spent, regardless of how that time was actually spent or whether anything was learned.
True [1]. I'm not debating the individual incentives. (I wasn't clear about this earlier.) I'm just not convinced a college graduate who muddled through is worth 75% more to an employer or society than a high school grad who muddles.
> a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree
For a binary measure of success, yes. A successful person empowered with a peaceful, rich society and challenging college experience will do better than one without.
[1] https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/what-happened-to...
This is something that needs to be fixed downstream, by making the paper less valuable. Making the paper more difficult to get instead is just manufacturing misery because of people too stubborn to pull their heads out of the sand and admit that the function of undergrad is the salary paper, and self-motivated learning has been largely relegated to grad school.
There are often a variety of tasks which are graded. Homework, exams, presentations, labs, etc. Every class and professor sets the mix of valuation of these differently, and has different quantities of each. That's teaching style.
If you hate presentations and cannot be roused to make one except by threat of failure, but are great at learning the material and pass the exams with ease, then that's a teaching style incompatibility.
Much of college is a social signaling mechanism. Well over a decade ago one of my family members, with a degree of shame had to explain to a friend why I didn’t finish my BA.
A lot of middle and upper class people use college as a way to filter people. You can argue our top universities also serve as finishing schools.
I did, after reaching six figures anyway, finish my BA. The shame is gone.
Or does it still linger as I went to a middle of the road state school. Not Stanford, Yale or even Berkeley.
Honestly I originally attended community college in part to get grant money/loans which allowed me to get a cheap apartment. As a bonus I meet a lot of cool people, read Howard Zinn.
I did very poorly in school growing up. I think I failed at least 4-6 classes in middle/high school.
In college I did well and I'm now getting my masters in CS while working as a software engineer.
So, the 'stick' can certainly be useful. Doing poorly in high school is not necessarily an indicator of how you will do in college -- particularly if your life at home was turbulent as it was for me.
For most students it’s a mix of the two.
I am recruiting college kids right now, impeccable pedigrees, elite universities. Our recruitment process involves the kids recording videos where they answer questions as a pre-screening. They are explicitly told not to use AI for the exercise. I have the Claude and ChatGPT answer to those questions on my screen while I review their responses. 40% read it pretty much verbatim. The paradox is I don't even care whether they knew the answer or not, but to me it's an integrity test.
The responsibility part is just one element influencing the result.
"You may bring one 8.5x11 double-sided cheat sheet into the exam. You may write anything you want on it. And I promise you that if you prepare such a sheet, you'll never even look at it during the exam."
And he was right.
No, it doesn't. Repeating it ad infinitum does that.
But therefore it's a good thing grades aren't just pass or fail, but have a range, from 1 to 10, or to 20 or whatever. Too bad there's so much external pressure on the system.
Take a moment to think about it. Why does the confidence interval go smaller with more samples? What does it say about the impact of luck in repeated tests?
If it's a well-designed course it should be clear what the content of the exam will be. If not, it's the professor's fault. And barring rare emergencies being rested on the day is also generally a matter of preparation, not luck.
> barring rare emergencies
It doesn't have to be a rare emergency. Things happen, loud student parties happen, random bad nights happen.
In the case of calculus as an example, there should be nothing from the class you didn't have time to practice sufficiently. A full academic year is more than enough time to learn integrals, derivatives, sequences, and series with the small collection of tricks for solving difficult problems (telescoping series, trig sub, etc.) There's a couple dozen rules you learn that are straightforward to apply, and for the times they aren't obvious, there's like a dozen total tricks (trig sub, etc.).
I took these classes. I remember how most people just phoned in the entire thing and complained at the exam review sessions how hard everything was.
It's the simplest of memorization.
I do agree that AI has made this basically useless. Rather than skipping homeworks or doing a bad job the students just cheat and there is no opportunity to notice and intervene. They get all the way to the screen-free final and fail.
You are welcome to believe this. You are also wrong.
I am curious if you have ever taught at a university.
But it’s hard for me to imagine that for the cohorts in between (who definitely want to be motivated) having some forcing function is just an easier guiding hand to helping them become responsible vs. completely bombing a class and then potentially losing hope or self identifying as lazy/helpless - which I had seen all too often to some of my smartest classmates.
Regardless not saying this to invalidate your experience. Just hasn’t lined up with mine.
I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.
I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.
I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.
It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.
And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.
That is all gone now. What a shame.
You mean to plagiarize their work. Now finally the nerds also have the option to have somebody else do their work for them.
The students would then hand down the big book of problem and solution sets down to the freshman class.
The professors, still being a bit lazy, knew this. But instead of scarping the old problems, they'd just say that cheating only hurts the students doing it - as the homework grades would not influence the final grade. And sure enough, the students that never did their own work, rarely did well (if at all passed) on the finals exam.
Half the class was cheating in Ion Stoica’s OS class even when the whole thing was supposed to be a group effort. Like how are you cheating when you’re already working in groups of 4?
Love the optimism, but if you really believe the universe is this fair then you’re too young, too naive or too inexperienced (or any combination therein). The world is absolutely full of people who have cruised through all of that but still manage to get (and maintain) good high paying jobs all the time. “Failing upwards” is a commonly observed phenomenon everywhere, in pretty much every industry.
Truth is: none of that matters in the real world. What matters is how good you are at networking and bullshitting your way through life. Unfortunately for those of us that are terrible at bullshitting, this means a harder professional life no matter how much effort you put into it.
If you think bullshiting and networking are the only things that matter, then I believe it’s your pessimism that’s talking.
In a class of 100, if 50 decide to learn things and 50 decide to complete assignments using AI without learning, I’m willing to put money behind the idea that more people in the first group will do better in life. Of course there will be exceptions because there’s a lot more in life beyond competence, including luck that influences outcomes.
Being friends of the right people can totally give you all the promotions you need, even if all you do has negative value for the company.
I'm not the students' competitor; the interviewer is. And the students not only have to impress the interviewer, but they have to impress them more than all their peers do!
The first place I taught gave no grades or unrequested feedback on anything. And no certificate. And those cohorts had the best placement rates. There was nothing in the school for the students to game, so they kept their eye on the real prize.
The students have made it extremely clear to the teachers
Much cheaper not to train anyone and let the state or pupil pay for training.
See lack of apprenticeships for a case of this.
It confers enhanced future income largely because of the inherent vetting process that asures future employers this person is able to focus for extended periods of time on intellectual tasks, is able to follow through and function within a bureaucracy. I don't think it's as much about skills, at least it's way overkill for the skills that are actually needed on the job for most jobs.
I don't see the rise of LLMs as obviating the "functional cog in the Rube Goldberg machine" training.
Kinda like how tax breaks on housing initially help people, and then the market adjusts based on the new inflow of $.
It does not matter if Education/Training is done by the government or another company all that matters is that the company does not have any training in its accounts. If it has that is an obvious cost to cut.
Long term this is not good for a company but for the next year or two at least it is better and that is all that their shareholders will look at,
Only if someone else is footing the bill.
> If it has that is an obvious cost to cut.
When it costs tens of thousands per year, yes. If training became 10-100 times cheaper, "training" becomes as expensive per employee as the cost of offering cafeteria food or "gym memberships". Training would be on par of offering any other type of employment benefit, and you don't see shareholders asking for big companies to get rid of any of those.
Most UK large companies had cafeterias in the 1980s now they don't and you have to go out to get lunch.
Training always costs thousands a year.
If you train a person you have to pay their salary and overheads. whilst they are being trained and are not fully productive. Plus you need to pain for the people and machinery needed to provide the training. Much cheaper to do non of these.
The death of apprenticeships is because you are training your own competition. It worked in the past because you trained your kid for a trade that was arcane and took a couple decades to master, but now you'd be training someone with no loyalty to you in a field that can be speed run in a year or so with YouTube assistance.
If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now. The fact that we haven’t is proof that the promises of neo-liberalism are all lies.
Food. Consumer goods. Telecommunications services. Transportation. Clothes. All things that have gone down in absolute prices and relative amount of family income to be provided.
Education / Housing / Healthcare: all deemed "up to the State" and that takes increasingly more from people at ever diminishing returns.
We can have a long and serious conversation about how hard the Government should be involved in regulating these things, and how we could set up systems that ensure that these become universally available and not just for middle/upper class. We can even have a conversation about things that should be controlled by the Government even if it means a high cost to society. But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50208837
As the saying in Europe goes: Neo-liberalism will continue until the economy improves.
Do we have 20 years already since people are allowed to set up a solar panel in their backyard and sell excess capacity to the grid?
Do we have 20 years where farmers can grow their own biodiesel to (at least) power their own machinery, or does the state giving them subsidies to let them keep growing vegetables, wine and beef without having to compete in the global market?
Energy package 3 was supposed to fix this with some additional regulation and standardization. It did not. Energy package 4 is supposed to fix this with more standardization and regulations (including distributed generation; which I am in favor of btw.) however, it will not.
The problem is the privatizations of the 2000s, not in the regulations surrounding small scale solar. The problem is neo-liberalism. Get rid of corporations rent-seeking on our infrastructure. Our energy bills will not become lower until then.
Under state-owned infrastructure, you simply can never know the real cost of any of the services, because state-owned companies depend a lot more on subsidies that come from tax revenue than actual revenue from the service itself.
> Get rid of corporations rent-seeking on our infrastructure.
Get rid of corporations altogether. I firmly believe that any company (state owned or not) with more than 150 employees should be broken down.
However, if you look at the popular movements on the streets of Europe at the moment, you can see that the people are in fact not happy about this. There are very few political means of getting rid of neo-liberalism (see e.g. Spain for a clear example of what I mean) so people are turning to the streets as the only viable alternative.
There's a wealth of clear evidence for this in the economic data in Eastern vs Western Europe, East Germany vs West Germany when Eastern Europe was under Soviet rule. The countries under Soviet rule were significantly poorer and to this day most still haven't caught up with their Western European counterparts.
Western Europe didn’t start neo-liberal policies until after the cold war ended, and it went into full gear around the year 2000.
In either case. Is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s? Are trains running cheaper? Is power transmission cheaper now that energy generation, and delivery have been split apart and sold to private investors on the public stock market?
No, the answer to all these questions are no. Because efficiencies in a system don‘t care about the ownership model, and neo-liberalism is a religious like creed that operates out of idealism for a world that does not exist.
Is it?
> Are trains running cheaper?
They're up about 6% in real terms (or about 0.23% a year) since 2000 [1]. That said, I don't think most European rail is privatized, so this is a strange example.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/product/page/PRC_H... deflated with CP00
Yes and no. Garbage disposal is more efficient now then it was in the mid-90s, but that has everything to do with the infrastructure and nothing to do with the ownership model. More on that later.
The ownership of infrastructure and the operation are split where private operators are allowed to compete with national operators on the same infrastructure. This is true for trains and electricity, and in some cases garbage disposal. Many of the national operators are publicly traded with the national government being the majority shareholder.
Some countries in Europe have gone much further in privatizing the rail network then others. The UK being the canonical example of privatization, and Norway being an example of a country privatizing more slowly.
If the promises of neo-liberalism were true, we should see the efficiencies gained in the UK compared to Norway. Yet, no such evidence exists. And that is because efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators.
I mostly agree. Infrastructure quality (including institutional quality) dominates. Ideology is usually cover for a lack of evidence.
But ownership modes do create different incentive structures. Full private ownership is famously terrible in natural monopolies. It’s a well-known market failure and folks who proselytize fully privatized utilities are stupid or venal. For many other things, however, private ownership works. A good example is package delivery. (Train operation is a weird case. The UK fumbled. Italy did not. On the other end of the spectrum, DB is a trash fire.)
For goods and services where demand is inelastic and the barrier for entry is high, the invisible hand will end up colluding to extract the most value possible (housing, utilities, groceries, healthcare). If the state does this, the ruling party starts catching strays and is eventually replaced. Of course, for the distinction to matter, you need to be able to meaningfully create new parties.
Your point stands for elastic demand, where you can choose to vote with your wallet (restaurants, vacations, gyms). Capitalism did a good job of adding to this list during its growth stage (transportation, entertainment, communications) but nowadays it's mostly established cartels that dominate all of the above in what appears to be a race to the bottom.
The incentives for package delivery are closer to the first category than the second though, since consumers end up with whatever company the supplier signed up with, thus mostly eliminating choice and reducing quality to the bare minimum required by the contract (not unlike the postal services).
Even when the customer gets to choose, the end results are still worse than vertical integration. Consider the food delivery apps that replaced most restaurants' in-house delivery teams: they have a direct interest to collude to keep prices high since they all earn the same no matter what restaurant you buy from, whereas for the individual restaurant it makes sense to throw in free delivery to get you buying from them.
I guess the biggest downside to private ownership is that it creates an incentive to have collusion service providers masquerading as adding value (realtors, brokers, speculators, resellers, risk managers, etc.) while providing plausible deniability to the state (which is of course responsible for its failure to regulate the incentive structure for these value-added services on a case-by-case basis).
My point is that these promises are lies. Neo-liberalism is a failed policy (yet it is the dominant policy among every single government in power today). And when GP claimed education was expensive because it is done by the government, I was here to call it out as another lie of neo-liberalism.
Not what I said. Read again.
You are picking the textbook example of a natural monopoly as a way to argue against how free markets don't work?
To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.
Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.
You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.
They aren't the ones saying it. Parents, government officials and high school guidance counselors are telling everyone they need college to get a good job.
Colleges don't have to say anything thing about it but they raise their tuition abd accept the grant money while expanding their campuses to accommodate the rise in demand. That's exactly how a business would react to a growing market with rising demand and an influx of government money.
People pass through colleges on their way to getting a job and colleges oblige.
What op thinks colleges should be doing is accepting people who they think, with education, could contribute to the college's research fields. Think about the college tracks that lead to PhDs where the student stays with the university for some or all of their career. That's what OP is suggesting colleges become (or revert to, if that's what they ever were).
Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this.
And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them.
Zoho is a classics example of picking students at age 16/17, when they'd typically join a UG course, and instead train them on the job.
Some of the large tech service companies change incentives by tying a training fee ("bond") which is tied to some tenure (1-2 years). Departing before this would mean giving this back - which broadly incentives the planned tenure.
Other companies (musigma is an example) present pay as a 4 year package (10X), which is split 1/2/3/4X across 4 years.
I think the challenges US universities/companies are today facing is something India has needed for a couple decades now. I would not be surprised if many of these are tried in the US.
If you do plan - reach out to me, it's something I've wanted to expand into (currently run UG curriculums).
They'll probably just shut it all down.
With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway.
On research: If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.
The generation of Americans that went to the moon had only 5-8% of people go to college. Whether someone is smart or dumb has little to do with formal higher education.
Education is not subsidized only because it's a public good.
The OpenAI math dump showed that it’s not worth paying hundreds of PhD-years if a tech bro can do it with an agent.
In high school (2006) my physics teacher gave credit for handing in the homework (he checked it and handed it back, but no grade was assigned). Didn't hand in homework, you got a zero.
He knew then that if you assign grades to hw, people will cheat.
If I'm paying for Berkeley, the professor have office hours for me to ask questions.
I took school seriously and went through notepads solving problems from the book. But there were others that attended after work or were there for the degree.
School for most doesn’t exist in isolation from the external world, unlike a boarding school.
Grading homework is a measure of conscientiousness and perhaps a pedagogical tool to force learning but by college perhaps we should have moved out of the need for the latter.
One can simply measure conscientiousness through attendance grade and mastery through exam grade and then we have two grades the universities can certify students for that are no longer dimension reduced into a single number.
But that's easily solved - just don't reward cheating on homework.
Some of them keep the homework grade to like ~5% and mostly grade on completion because, when the student's homework proofs use advanced concepts and proof techniques not covered yet but their quizzes get sub-50 point F grades with barely coherent thoughts, it's a clear sign that they are not actually spending time using the resources the class has given them to work on the material.
It seems like all of them have given up on punishing students for it, largely because they're pretenure and the teaching part of tenure review here is primarily student evals drive (HINT: this is a MAJOR part of many broader problems). But to me it's kinda nuts that in one year or so, we have decided that it's actually ok to admit students into very competitive elite institutions, catch them passing off work that isn't theirs as theirs, and not treating that the exact same as we would have a few years ago if we caught them all sharing solutions.
I distinctly remember for the calculus courses, they told you a set of textbooks were required. By the end of the semester, I hadn't even peeled off the shrink wrap. The professor only used the books to cherry-pick homework problems from, and I personally never felt the need to complete them. I get that everyone learns differently, but making everyone buy that book never really sat well with me.
I found having deliverables helpful in knowing how one is tracking with progress and understanding of the subjects and largely reflective of the final exam result.
I've also had studies done that exams were either 80 or 100% of the grading and that was a lot more stressful without any significant added benefit. In fact given that there were fewer or no deliverables, perhaps even worse mastery / retention after exam completion.
However, counting homework grades toward course credit also creates an incentive to cheat. It probably makes sense to remove (or at least drastically reduce) that incentive.
Making homework a part of your grade is like making attendance a part of your grade. It's something that teachers who aren't capable of teaching do, so they can give students who haven't learned a thing reasonable looking grades. Students have always cheated when homework was graded, it's just that AI makes it so flagrant that it can't be conveniently ignored.
I'm overestimating people, though. There are clearly teachers who are still pretending like students don't cheat when it's like five clicks now. It was much, much harder when tons were still cheating half a century ago. You had to actually meet each other. Admitting that you're collecting a check for nothing is tough, especially because now you're going to have to work.
Who am I kidding? Teachers will just start talking about how grading is bad or racist or something, or saying that using AI is actually better preparation for the future. Hell, they should have done that half a century ago: in real life, being able to cheat well is the best skill.
The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences (EDIT: that is, doing poorly on the exam) are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
Then they lash out at the instructor, even if it’s really their fault.
> The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
For me at least, in most of my classes, the homework was a tiny part of the grade. Just enough to maybe get over what you're talking about, but not enough to really matter.
Then an in-class oral exam on a random subject drawn at exam entry.
Works great in my country.
At the end of the day, the responsibility is on the student to study.
I'd put great value, as an employer, in a degree that does nothing but weed out these people.
So basically a oral pop quiz for math. i think could work well to complement homeworks by making sure the material as taught is actually inside the students heads.
https://epochai.substack.com/p/ai-math-chat-1-thinking-smart...
Now he issues the standard taking points about looms and horses and claims he could not have foreseen it? He is an AI shill, just like Tao.
1) AI is useless.
2) AI helps me.
3) AI replaced me (unless I am a generationally gifted top performer in my field).
While he is, in fact, a generationally gifted top performer in his field, he knows that statistically speaking most of his students will not be which I think makes his apparent angst now understandable.
Later on, when I became a TA, there were obvious signs of cheating in the homework, i.e. people handing in the same homework with the same step-by-step solution, with the exact same errors.
In any case, cheating on homework wouldn't help their grade.
I came to math very late, due to poor school/environment perhaps, but later I took to it like a fish to water. At a jr college I stuffed my schedule with math classes, took everything available, and rarely missed a question on an exam. I really did enjoy working problems and became a math tutor and also graded exams for a favorite professor. Grading was quite a lot of time consuming, meticulous work, which I wouldn't claim to enjoy. I would comb over students' homework and exams and point out errors, docking points for each problem (I really wasn't paid enough for the hours I put in, but I had standards for my work..)
All I can think of, is if you really like math like I did, you could really excel in the environment today..
Also, it is important to know when you made a mistake, but that is enough. You'd learn more figuring out where you went wrong on your own. Which is why I believe you can teach yourself mathematics given a clear introduction to the concepts, a runway of problems to work, and a way to self check your answers.
Setting the curve was its own reward.
At the graduate level maybe this problem is solved by doing Moore-style classes where the students present (on the chalkboard, not slides) and the professor critiques. Students could still have AI generate proofs and print them out or hand copy them, but maybe that's fine.
Upper undergrad level is tricky, because students are expected to prove things, but maybe don't have the maturity for full-on Moore-style.
Example: If you want to learn to do something with your hands, it normally needs to be taught in person, so you can try to do it, fail, the teacher tells you what you did wrong, shows you how, you do it again and it works. But this can now almost entirely be done with AI. A YouTube video shows you how. You practice it on camera. An AI watches the video, tells you where you went wrong, and shows you specific clips to improve. You do it again until you get it right.
The piece of paper you get from a University doesn't need to come from "A University". Any organization that can give you a test in person can see whether you do the thing right or not and give you a certification if you do.
So really all we need now is an AI Khan Academy and independent testing/certification.
Don't believe the crazy lies that AI can replace your job. AI can't replace anyone's job, because it lies, cheats, hallucinates, can't learn from its mistakes, and can't be held liable.
What's the point of exercise when we have machines that can do physical labor? It keeps you healthy.
If you don't use and train your brain, you'll be unhealthy and stupid.
In-class exams are anyway a proxy for grading homeworks, because those who don't do them will get lower grades.
And as a TA, I liked the income, and there’s a knock-on benefit that you’re learning to read with a critical eye which will help as a reviewer in the future.
* or in mine own obsolescent field, a measure of accuracy that indicates a student need think** longer before writing in the future
** I know, I know
I had never taken an anatomy course prior, and thought that the flipped classroom worked very well for the younger students. People who hadn't quite developed the knack for studying were now forced into preparing before class, and active recall was embedded into the lab practicals so that the cumulative exam wasn't testing things they'd memorized and forgotten.
For me personally, as a student, homework has only ever been for grade-padding.
This is only true for subjects where there is only one answer to a question.
Plagiarism in other subjects tends to show itself. But AI has made plagiarism more viable in all sorts of fields.
I did all my studies in France, and every single grade was ALWAYS for work done in class, regardless of the subject.
He should perhaps ask students if they want it marked and if they do still provide feedback, but be clear it won’t count for grades as cheating is too easy.
Lazy students will do no work all year then fail. Clever motivated students will continue to do well.
More people will fail till they realise they need to do the work, but that’s just the way it is, it’s the only way to be sure (along with vivas) that students know the subject.
Math is an even tougher sell because it's largely a service department. It's hard to justify holding non-majors up because they can't pass calc 2. For upper division math though tests are the way.
It's the start of a golden age for those of us who are curious autodidacts. If you're working through the exercises of a math textbook, you can now instantly submit your (attempted) theorem-proof to the nearest robot, and see all your misconceptions and shortfalls of rigor laid bare.
I’ve loved using AI to learn. I made SQL and Python classes of my own to finally get beyond a basic understanding of them. I made an Anki deck to learn a foreign language with very poor existing online resources.
Wait, I'm curious about this bit - I did my math undergrad ~16 years ago and all my homework was handwritten.
Are now AIs capable of ingesting my mess of poor handwriting with arrows indicating the flow of a proof (e.g. from the bottom of the page to the top of a hand-drawn column half-way up the page to cram in the rest of the proof)?
In the lab I assist students with implementing and understanding code. Since they know they are not graded, there is no incentive for them to use AI. Sometimes we do try AI for the lulz but it makes as much sense as looking at the solutions (which I do provide already). As I frequently tell them, "AI can replace me teaching you, it cannot replace you understanding the material".
A teacher would ask his students to note 50 coinflips. And based on distribution he could immediately tell which one of them actually flipped the coin.
If I would be a math/physics teacher in a high school, in a class of 30 students, I would start every class by picking random 2 or 3 students and ask them to explain the solution to me. Or do a carbon copy of one of the assignments in front of the class. Something like that.
In my high school I had a physics teacher. Every class she had a 3 rudimentary questions about the recent subjects. She would call a random name and ask first question. If you fail to answer on the spot you get an F, and another random person will get a shot at the same question. If they fail they got and F as well. Of course by the 6th or 7th person someone would manage to find the right answer. If they got the right answer they'll get the next one. If someone answered all three - they got an A. Most of the times half of the class would get an F.
Doesn't that mean she's just not doing her job right? I mean, her job is to teach the class physics. If the class doesn't know the simple physics questions she's asking them, isn't that her fault? Why is she failing students when her teaching methods are so obviously not working?
Given stories like this, shouldn't we be glad that AI is completely disrupting our education system?
If were to teach a course today: I’d assign homework as usual, and have it be worth zero toward a student’s grade. The point is to learn, do it or not, that’s your choice. I would base the grade on in-person exams and maybe an interview. That’s it. No room for AI to boost grades.
But if you didn't do the homework / learn the material you'd be screwed on the mid-terms / final which was 100% of your grade.
Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade. The materials I'm provided are a rambling stream of consciousness that are difficult to make sense of. Only truly elite universities that educate students efficiently deserve to survive.
If anything, AI in education I think will lead to a divergence. Mediocre students will be even more mediocre as they will use it as a substitute for learning, with AI doing their homework. Good students will leverage it to learn and understand things even faster.
Sometimes I wonder what it must feel like to be able to so arrogantly make predictions about the future as if one had already lived in it. How can you be so confident about something you don't know for sure?
I went to Montessori school as a kid then I was in private school briefly till my parents went broke. Then I went to public school for the remainder of my career before I went to college and graduate school. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level and sat on academic boards for Purdue.
Graded and ranked assignments do nothing other than act as a filter for the structural organization to determine who they want to give resources to
The “educational” system has nothing to do with platonic or frankly any other thoughts of education for the polis
Good riddance
Even in the age of AI, I think I still prefer a portfolio system where you accumulate a body of work that you can present and defend in an interview for a job or graduate school position. Unfortunately diligent portfolio assessment can be a lot of work when there are hundreds of applicants for a single slot, so the first stage is usually reviewing a summary or list of work rather than the work itself, and that system can be gamed.
In any case, personalized feedback for student work is still very useful, and it may be more beneficial if it is focused on helping students individually rather than ranking them or sorting them into bins.
Without some sort of pre- and post-assessment, it can be hard to determine whether students actually learned anything in a course. The question is: how do you use that information? I think it should primarily be used as feedback to the students and the instructors, with the aim of improving learning.
So as a thumb, you want to ideally go to the brain surgeon who's done that surgery the most.
No formal testing means no formal education which means a lack of important detail. You know how you learn the details on the job? By screwing up the job. You gonna let Eddie The Trainee Surgeon work on your brain after leaving a medical school with no grades?
Large programming assignments also work decent (for now at least), where codex is encouraged, but we make the assignment research oriented and obscenely large with lots of messy and dependent steps, enough that you have to steer enough to do context management and not output slop reports/inferences. It is almost like a research project, where AI's "taste" is still extremely lacking (we often see totally circular/trivial-but-dressed-up investigative results from sloppers, very much like the slop neurips/iclr papers these days). Just one of these per course with a 10 minute in person viva at the end. Previously this used to be a project part of the course, but the old way with reports and presentations just ended up with way too much slop to use as a signal. Also, we just made it individual instead of a group project.
For this type of course, grading on a curve also made less sense, so we instead do a kind of "cluster" based grading. We start from the top giving S, see where the first big gap is, that starts A, the next big gap starts B, and so on. These clusters form really well in the above type of courses (empirically, undergrad lin alg, undergrad databases, and grad RL courses) and matches in-class judgement.
And why are you being downvoted to oblivion?!?
Break down the learning objectives to measurable experiment replication then:
Show one, do one, teach one
If you can’t do one or teach one you dont move to the next step.
It’s literally just how apprenticeship works and there’s no reason you can’t do that for calculus or intro to economics and especially applicable to EE, ME, CE
Teaching in academic settings is absurdly inefficient and counterproductive in my experience
Personally I have found well-organized, clearly presented university courses to be great ways to learn the material. The combination of readings, textbooks, lectures, tutorial sessions, writing, labs, problem sets, course projects, etc. has been effective for me. Good textbooks and online resources have also been very helpful. Obviously it only works if you actually do the work yourself.
It's a similar approach the armed services use to train MOSes as well.
Making the class pass-fail would also be more conducive for learning as well.
But still, some sort of benchmark would be needed to at least give students the ability to gauge their proficiency.
We don't yet know if AI has replaced mathematicians.
But if AI can do homework and exam problems, then it means AI has replaced students.
Give homework, have TAs go over it with students, have a final, which is the only thing graded.
Classes are for bringing you toward mastery, isn't it? You should pass based on mastery, not effort. I don't give a shit if my pilot tries really hard to fly. I care if he successfully flies.
I had two classes like this, zero grades over the semester, they were among my favorite. Though we didn't really ponder what we were doing there and the means for final grades, for the admins, were both interesting (final test too long and hard, you already know what your grade is)
Could have also just been a bad professor though.
Grades are a way for teacher and student to check their learning, but teaching still needs to happen regardless of checkpoints. Some subjects require practice, like pre-proof writing in math and many other introductory to intermediate level courses. This is where homework comes in handy.
For my set theory class, the professor still assigned problems, he just never collected or graded them. For my Data Sci 2 seminar, it was only seven of us and we did several presentations and a papers.
It would give a more accurate impression of the kids understanding, incentive understanding it, be more pleasant interaction for all involved and build the kid up to Vivas and interviews.
"So you thought AI was a gift from heaven? Ha, it's your worst nightmare! Let this be a lesson."
I have a solution, but I don't think people will appreciate it, because:
1) it is very analog 2) requires work from both student and teacher 3) there is no AI in it 4) there is not money to made on it 5) all of the above
In short, do what my MBA class did. At home you study the examples, the how behind it and possible solutions. In class, you may be called in front of the class to show that you know what you are doing.
Is it hard? Yeah, but it is kinda the point.
Based on the classes the Math Department gave me (very satisfying) and the student evaluations this seemed to work more or less fine. I was a brutal grader though, some of those entry level classes had bimodal distributions with 'F' being the low mode.
I also showed up for office hours and did my best to help people learn by digging through their questions.
I don't see why this methodology wouldn't work fine today. I wouldn't care now how a student learned. Show competency on the human only test and we're good.
I had one student who achieved a solid 'F' come by office hours after the course to tell me how much he enjoyed my teaching. Whatever!
Anyway, teaching that way, with the positive interactions with students interested in learning, was one of the greatest experiences of my life.
[1] An absolute pedagogical shitshow that wasted everyone's time for zero gain.
I had one fellow in the back of the room at UF in the basic algebra 1 course(!) who began the semester by once or twice a class doing a reasonable impression of a mooing cow. I kicked him out. Didn't happen again. Classroom atmosphere had better vibes after that.
In the event that the cascading metal mining yield declines aren't solved by new tech and we do lose AI, we are now in the state that we will probably also lose calculus, liberalism and the ability to design a steam engine.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632871...
There was constant change in the palaeolithic, change of the form "which tribe controls which valley" and no further. The range of possible changes is gonna shrink back to that small range without a stable climate and/or a solid tech foundation.
Assume they use AI and grade them based on where they can take it form there.
Never promoted genuine learning but the ability to get grades.
The first experiments are from early 1800s, also in US.
For most of history universities were places you went to study and learn, not get a piece of paper to get better job prospects in the rat race.
It’ll be like you’re studying under Aristotle while AI is doing cold fusion next to you - incomprehensible on any level.
Just wondering whether it’ll be before money/jobs collapse or after.
- Terry Tao said it best, I think: We're no longer in the heroic age of mathematics. Meaning, I think, that math is now a group project, not just a single person. Many disciplines have become this already, math was just lagging a bit there.
- Other commentors have pointed out that this professor likely hasn't graded anything in decades. I'd bet that he likely hasn't changed tests all that much either. And knowing how extensive the test banks in greek life are, I'd bet then too that many of the undergrad students haven't done any homework or test prep for decades either. Cheating is by no means a new problem. Granted, this is pure horse-crap speculation on me here.
- AI isn't going anywhere, and it seems that this Prof is kinda already throwing in the towel per students. It strikes me as mostly cowardly and asinine and just deaf to anyone beyond his nose. Like, my dude, talk to your students. They are ostensibly adults. They aren't cattle. Figure out a system, together, that actually works.
- My own opinion is that the age of cheap higher education is over. 500+ person freshman lectures at 8:00am? Yeah not with AI. I think it's gonna be more like 4-10 person study sections with a proctor; the Oxbridge system. Yes, that introduces a lot of challenges in the proctor-student relationship. But it's also very expensive. You're gonna need to up your budgets a lot. And unfortunately, that means that this era of mass higher education is also ending. I fear that only the rich, again, are going to go to college.
- There's the paternalistic argument that the adults we send to college aren't real adults and need carrots and sticks to learn properly. Making homework part of the grade helps them help themselves. This is a value judgement on what's more important (squeezing knowledge into people at any cost vs giving people agency and accountability), but I have suggestions as to exactly where people can stuff that argument. IMO, letting fully fledged adults limp through the system without the motivation or wherewithal to do a little hard work in their own self interest isn't doing them any favours.
- On the credentialing side of things, ongoing grading from something like homework helps smooth over the effects of a bad day of sleep or test anxiety. I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I think there are tools which are more accurate and less work for the students and the teachers. Start the semester with an ungraded (corrected if students want to take advantage of it, but not affecting their final grade) take-home test of the background knowledge expected for the course. This lets students decide if they're ready or should take an earlier course instead, do some selected reading on weak points during an otherwise relatively light workload in the semester, and learn the teacher's testing and grading style so that there's less anxiety leading up to a real test. Your grade in the course reflects your best demonstrated mastery on the final, which is arguably closer to what people expect from the credentialing aspect of things; nobody cares how well you executed epsilon-delta proofs during the week you studied them, they care whether you're ready for the next course or ultimate job using that skill. Allow a makeup/retake exam (new questions), maybe two, and take the maximum score. To the extent that your test has any noise, this inflates the overall score, but it mitigates the effect of a single bad day, anxiety, etc, and gives you an easy framework for handling legitimate life events. Still assign homework. Still correct it for students who want feedback. Don't let it influence the grade.
The primary purposes of research universities is research. You can't ignore the primary purpose of the institution. To the extent teaching has fallen by the wayside it's because universities are research institutions first and teach and credential on the side.
If anything, if I'm focusing on research, I'd prefer to not waste time grading a bunch of assignments. If the students aren't going to read my responses, why write them? If they're all cheating and going to get 100% on the homework anyway, just add the +20% to the homework blank at the end of the course and be done with it.
professors needs to be life coaches and motivators, less of a oral/written book reproducer. That part will be automated. Evals also will be in a locked room, do you home work, bi-weekly do the check, correct with agent what needs to be repeated. Measure if you on course/off course doing better/worse. If you are not doing good, escalate to your coach(professor).
I mean, sure, charisma can engage people into several classes, but also, lets be honest what % of professors really got charisma? If it helps lectures are great, the active work should be done with agents, individually and in the team. of human, and other peoples agents. That's the future of work.
Brian> Students learn best through intrinsic motivation, not through force. What you learn under pressure doesn't last past the exam. Everyone says these things, and yet almost all teachers continue to give grades. Why? "It's required"; "The colleges need grades"; "The parents wouldn't stand for it"; "It's the way things are." In short, the reasons for grades are political.
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/freedom.html
At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School he built a computer course of self-paced units with no grades, and about 50 kids had keys to the computer center and used it evenings and weekends without adult supervision. In his Snap!Con 2025 talk for the ACM Karlstrom award he said why the no-grades part mattered:
https://youtu.be/pDK2PE_pkqQ?t=1917
Jens> Okay. I've I've got one more question, Brian. Um, when you showed that picture of Sbury High of the Computer Lab users, computer center user Society Society, you very carefully and conscientiously mentioned every name with the title my friend, Jonathan, my friend. And that struck me as something uh that there might be a deeper message from you behind that.
Brian> Yeah. Yeah. Um, everything conspires to make teachers the enemies of kids. Not because any teacher wants that, but because institutions have a lot of weight. And when you're giving somebody grades, you can't be their friend. It just doesn't work like that. You're not their friend, you're a hurdle they have to overcome.
Brian> So yeah, it was really important to me that they let me not give grades and I think that made the whole thing possible and I couldn't have done it otherwise.
And on AI in the same talk:
https://youtu.be/pDK2PE_pkqQ?t=510
Brian> Mostly, people who talk about AI in education see it as a threat: kids will use it to cheat; or maybe AI will replace teachers so we won't have jobs anymore. Or sort of the best of these views is we don't know yet what skills kids are really going to need in an AI dominated world. Supposing that we have one. I'm pretty confident that AI won't replace teachers for rich kids -- and computers already replace teachers for poor kids, long before AI. The poor kids sit in front of computers that give them arithmetic problems. So it's not as if uh we're opening up a can of worms that's brand new.
AI didn't create the problem with graded homework. It just made it impossible to keep pretending the grade measures the learning.
bh's cs61a lectures from some years later:
https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_43829...
https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_43829...