I worry that the uncomfortable truth AI is revealing is that essay writing is a less essential skill than we'd like to believe. We can say things like "personal gain above all" and the pursuit of a diploma being our downfall, but I can't help but wonder if it would be better if we just got rid of essay writing altogether or wait until the student knows what kind of writing they want to do.
Of course you prefer teaching without grades; the only people in the room are people who want to be there.
Really it's not revealing anything at all about the value of essay-writing as a skill. It's just revealing that people will cheat in ways that are hard to directly prove, and grading writing is really hard when people have access to an infinite bullshit generator.
I don't know about this. Take away the moral gatekeeping of calling it cheating and look only at outcomes. If students use AI instead of doing it themselves, are they worse off in a material way that only essay writing could provide? If they aren't, couldn't we call essay writing busy work at worst and elective at best?
Essay writing shows that you actually know the domain material, that you are capable of holding onto a thought for more than 3 seconds and that you can communicate thoughts clearly to other people.
I never wrote a single essay for a math class, so I think there are alternatives.
But I think you're missing my point. If a student can go through their education never writing an essay the way everything thinks they're meant to do it and end up doing just fine in life, maybe the merits of essay writing aren't all what they're cracked up to be? Save the skill for specializations where the students are more motivated to learn it, like metalworking or pottery.
If argue that if you were ever asked to show your work, you were writing the equivalent of a mathematical essay. Maybe you never had to learn proofs, but I did.
“I didn’t have to do that and I turned out fine” isn’t a very rigorous pedagogy.
Sure, but now we're stretching the definition of "essay" past what's useful for the topic at hand. This is a thread about AI checkers for essays, not math proofs.
And no, it isn't rigorous, but it's a pretty good hint that you've got correlation and not causation. Perhaps it's worth entertaining the possibility there's a better way.
I kind of agree with this and am willing to take it even further: Why should I even study a subject that I can just ask a computer to explain to me when I need it? AI isn't quite there yet in terms of reliability, but there may be a point where it's as reliable as the calculator app, at which point, does it even make sense for me to study a subject just to get to the mastery level that is already matched by an AI system?
If I need to know when Abraham Lincoln was born or when the Berlin Wall fell, I could either 1. memorize it in high school history class to demonstrate some kind of "knowledge" of history, or 2. just look these things up or ask an AI when I need them. If the bar for "mastery" is at the level of what an AI can output, is it really mastery?
> Why should I even study a subject that I can just ask a computer to explain to me when I need it?
Because studying a thing is a world apart from having it explained. When you study a thing to gain understanding, your understanding is not only deeper but you are also learning and practicing essential skills that aren't directly related to the topic at hand.
If you just have a thing explained to you, you miss out on most of the learning benefit, and the understanding you end up with is shallow.
This is, sadly, an idealized notion of education that just doesn't match the reality of a general ed classroom. Students don't study to gain understanding in a majority of their classes; they study to pass. True, not all students all the time, but in the world you just described no amount of extrinsic motivation can force a student to deeper understanding, so why are we even talking about AI checkers?
Unless you're telling me you never did that in any of your classes growing up, but I'm going to be highly dubious of such a claim.
> Unless you're telling me you never did that in any of your classes growing up
I did extremely poorly in school, actually. It wasn't an environment that I could function in at all. But I got a great education outside of school.
I'm really talking about what's needed in order to get a good education rather than anything school-specific. Technically, school itself isn't needed in order to get a great education. But you do want to get educated, whether school is a tool you employ to that end or not.
"If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library." -- Frank Zappa
But, outside if reading, writing, and arithmetic, the thing I did learn in school that was the most valuable was how to learn. So, that's my bias. The most important thing you learn in school is how to learn, and much of what teachers are doing in the classroom is trying to teach that.
My fundamental point is that what we need in order to learn is not just getting answers to questions. That approach alone doesn't get you very far.
I don't think we're too far at odds. I think the difference is that I'm talking about the classroom...especially general education, where AI essays are the problem. To your point, not every student chooses to spend time at the library, and you can't make them.
When I was younger, I was a bit of an idealist about education reform. As I grew old, I began seeing this the failings of education as a reflection on human nature. Now, I just don't think we should be wasting student's time trying to make them do something that, for whatever reason, they cannot or will not do the way we want them to.
> If you just have a thing explained to you, you miss out on most of the learning benefit, and the understanding you end up with is shallow.
Sorry, but I don't get this. Isn't this exactly what the teachers/lecturers and books do - explain things?
Sure, you have to practice similar things to test yourself if you got everything right. And, of course, it's different for manual skills (e.g. knowing how to make food is kind of different from actually making food).
But a language model trained on a education materials is no different from a book with a very fancy index (save for LLM-specific issues, such as hallucinations), so I fail to see the issue in ability to get answers for specific questions. As long as the answers are accurate, of course.
And - yeah - figuring out if the answer is accurate requires knowledge.
> Isn't this exactly what the teachers/lecturers and books do - explain things?
In part, sure, but not solely. I wasn't saying that getting an explanation is a bad thing, I was saying that only getting an explanation doesn't advance your learning much.
> And, of course, it's different for manual skills
I don't think that's different. It's the same for intellectual skills as for manual in this regard.
> I fail to see the issue in ability to get answers for specific questions. As long as the answers are accurate, of course.
There's nothing wrong with getting answers to questions. But that's not the process that leads to learning anything other than the specific answers to those specific questions.
Getting an education is much, much more than that. What you are (or should be) learning goes far beyond whatever the subject of the class is. You're also learning how to learn, how to organize your thoughts, how to research, and how the topic works at a deep enough level that you can infer answers on it even when you've not been told what those answers are.
If what you're learning in class is just an compendium of facts that you can look up, you're missing out on the most valuable aspects of education.
Why lift weights when I could just use a forklift?
At some point someone actually has to do some thinking. It's hard to train your thinking if you just offload every simple task throughout your entire education.
So you're saying you've never used StackOverflow in your life?
I find your analogy works against your point, because manual labor does use a forklift and other heavy machinery whenever possible. It's better for human health (and the backs of blue collar workers) that way. Now the only people lifting weights in gyms are those who choose to be there for their health and not because they're forced to.
If you’re, say, not clear on whether Abraham Lincoln was president when the Berlin Wall fell, you might have trouble asking the AI a good question to begin with.
This line of thinking will leave you like some of the high school kids my wife works with, who can't solve 19 + -1 without a calculator. If you don't integrate anything into your understanding, you will understand nothing.
I worry that the uncomfortable truth AI is revealing is that essay writing is a less essential skill than we'd like to believe. We can say things like "personal gain above all" and the pursuit of a diploma being our downfall, but I can't help but wonder if it would be better if we just got rid of essay writing altogether or wait until the student knows what kind of writing they want to do.
Of course you prefer teaching without grades; the only people in the room are people who want to be there.