You should really try basing your opinions on direct personal experience using better modern frontier models -- not just the free ones from years ago -- instead of stochastically parroting low-effort anti-ai drive-by posts you've seen other people make.
Because that makes your own next tokens quite predictable and sloppy.
The world has passed you by, and you may be unwittingly shitting your own bed and trying to blame it on AI.
I have a fairly long experience of both teaching and grading, even though I stopped a couple of years ago. After a couple of years of trial-and-error, I think I found the "right" way:
* Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot. Theory is necessary, but the attention span of people is very limited.
* Grade either a homework assignment in the form of a real project with specifications. You give the assignment half-semester, so that students who start early can ask questions. Otherwise, grade a in-session exam, with every resource available, including the course and the whole Internet. However, you don't assess the knowledge, but if the student is able to apply their knowledge to the different tasks at hand.
These approaches are now completely moot in the age of AI.
I was surprised the first time a colleague asked me to do an oral exam. I thought it was a burden on people with poor social interaction skills. It went surprisingly well: you could see in a couple of minutes if the student had integrated the concepts of the course, even if they were shy. Now I wonder if it's the way to go. There's one caveat, though: it doesn't scale.
I was thinking that one of the great ironies of artificial intelligence is that it will make good teaching even more labour intensive. Those kids that can afford the one to one tuition required to push past our natural inclination to be lazy will learn things, while everyone else will succumb to outsourcing all their thinking.
There’s no way I’d have learnt everything I know now about software in today’s environment. So much of software development - debugging techniques, architectural decisions, structuring data etc is learned through trial and error. As the models get better is becoming easier and easier to just not look too closely at their output. I suspect it’s human nature.
Oral exams don't scale at the beginning with hundreds of students per course, agreed. So make them in-person written exams, German universities managed that just fine a few decades ago. Oral exams were reserved to advance from Grundstudium (basic) to Hauptstudium (main).
In my very limited experience (I have German major degrees in Informatik and Philosophy, I was a TA for Logic in Philosophy) the more advanced the topic the thinner the attendance anyway.
The country of Argentina, despite its crippling debt, is able to provide free university education where the majority of classes for most majors are graded with an oral exam.
They've shown that it is entirely possible to scale a system like that, as long as the society sincerely values the role of an educator.
The oral exams scale better than one might expect, at least if you're not just doing multiple choice exams and you have to actually grade the exam. The time spent on grading the exam could have also been spent on an oral exam... For bachelor level it's usually 15-20min (usually quicker for the well prepared students), and for master courses it is 30min.
Usually you know after a few minutes if it's going to be a fail, and then otherwise you only need to figure out where on the passing scale the student ends up.
That's the point. As a professor you're allowed to outsource the grading of written exams to you assistants (ongoing PhD teaching stuff). But you must do an oral exam personally.
> usually quicker for the well prepared students
That's true. More time is needed only in case the answer is missing and you have to check whether you hit accidentally the only poorly understood material piece or there are more troubles.
> Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot.
2 hours is a lot! In my universities, classes were either 50 minutes, or 70 minutes. I could handle 50 minute ones just fine, but would often have trouble with challenging courses that had 70 minutes. Particularly for stuff like math, I hadn't properly digested the material in the first half, and now he's already proving theorems with that material in the 2nd half. I can follow the logic, but the ideal is when you can digest the prior material before being exposed to theorems relying on them.
Even when alternating theory/application like you say, the amount of attention I'd give to the application in the 70 minute class was less than the 50 minute one. I could follow, but I wouldn't think critically.
Maybe the Germans were right? One in-person test, preferably an interview, at the end of the semester should be enough to motivate the smarter part of the bunch to make sure they understand the issues at hand. The rest is chaff anyway. Don't optimize for chaff.
I had that a variation of that experience. This was mostly in the pre-AI days.
Homework assignments were mandatory but only counted towards exam admission not the final grade.
Much better for motivation.
When I was a student, nobody cared if you did your home work. The teacher would go through the home work in the next class, and if you didn't do it, you would just lose the opportunity.
Then there was the written exam at the end of each course, which constituted 100% of the grade. The only reason that got abolished was because it made too many students fail, and the board hates that. So that became a race to the bottom, and apparently, we can still go lower.
It's reaching levels where most uni diplomas don't matter any longer. The only thing that will then matter is your network. That's the end of social mobility.
As was sort of offhandedly mentioned in the article, all pre-LLM research into what results in students actually learning the material (as a distinct thing from passing the class) has landed pretty solidly on the side of frequent, low-stakes exams having better outcomes than rare high-stakes exams. The best students learn the material regardless of how you evaluate them; some weaker students will benefit from more frequent nudges to keep up rather than trying to cram at the end, some students simply won't realize they're falling behind without regular feedback, and some students successfully cram at the end and pass the class without retaining much of the material. The final group often expresses a preference for the one-exam-at-the-end model despite being disserved by it if the goal is to learn and not merely pass.
Yeah and look at where this soft approach landed us. We have entitled crybabies voting for Hitler 2.0 because they can't stomach the uncomfortable feeling of seeing a diverse person in their pure white neighbourhoods. Children and young adults need to be hit with the big hard fist of reality repeatedly until they become good people. If some should fall through the cracks, they would not have made for good members of society anyway, so best they fall early and not drag the rest of us with them.
"Don't optimize for chaff." is being chaff a permanent state of a child or person?
I think I understand what you mean though, and I kind of agree. I just don't like the use of the word chaff, like something you would discard permanently.
I'm pretty sure I was "chaff" at some point (maybe multiple) in my life growing up.
Funny to see this comment, that's exactly how studying math in Cologne was. On the very first day one of our profs said:
"This is math, you can find all solutions to the course problems in old material since I've been teaching here for 20 years, but know this you're cheating yourself and at the end of the semester you're taking a three hour test on pen and paper so good luck"
I see zero reason why AI should impact teaching. You can grade exercises as information to the students as to how well they're doing, but simply have an exam at the end of the course. Needlessly to say like 60-70% flunked through Analysis I and Linear Algebra. But they're adults and they're there voluntarily, so why is this an issue
This makes me think of exams — I always did well on open-book exams, but I didn't do well on exams where I couldn't look at the book. Whether it's because of ADHD or just a lack of memorization ability.
Similarly, I did well in interviews where I could use the internet, but I didn't do well in interviews where I couldn't use the internet.
Everyone has a testing format they're good at. I'm curious about how this kind of thing is evaluated, and whether there are any papers related to this.
> I now shifted to in-person interactions with a TA. After every assignment, each student needs to schedule a 15-minute meeting with a TA to answer a couple of questions in a live conversation
Isn't the answer the 'flipped classroom' - students are assigned reading/studying to do before a class and the class becomes more interactive, answering questions/discussing topics/solving problems etc depending on subject. Of course, this is more expensive than a hall with 400 people listening to a lecture with a couple of tests/essays.
This only works if you either have very intrinsically motivated students or you verify that really everyone has actually read the assigned materials before class. Otherwise, some people will turn up unprepared, you will have to explain stuff they should have gotten from the reading assignment, other students will be annoyed, students will stop preparing for class, vicious cycle.
And then you fail them. I suspect an institute genuinely empowered to do so, where the expectations were declared up front and followed through on consistently, would fare well, after the dust settled.
As far as I can tell (based on university and high school level instruction forums) institutions increasingly are not backing the teachers that want to let kids that have earned that F fail the students.
I've heard of places where the minimum points for an assignment is 50% even if you never turn it in which is insanity.
I don't fail them usually - I expose them; and once I asked a student to leave the room because they were blatantly unprepared despite me warning them before.
My main point is: flipped classroom works great in some
contexts but is no panacea and requires setting clear expectations.
Aside: as English is not my native language: "you fail them" can mean both "you give them a failing grade" and "you fail to provide the support they need", right?
> "you fail them" can mean both "you give them a failing grade" and "you fail to provide the support they need", right?
Yes, but as written the latter would not be a reasonable parse. For that sense: “you have failed them”, sure; “you are failing them”, sure; even “in acting so, you fail them”; but “and then you fail them” as an entire sentence would be very weird. The emphasis I placed on “fail” also doesn’t feel particularly compatible with that sense of the word.
As a former flipped classroom student I can attest to the effectiveness of "exposure". It requires some skill to pull off: the first time someone is exposed it should be very lenient and then get gradually harsher. The risk of embarrassment in front of the class can be a very strong motivator if utilized right.
I've been in uni classes which used this concept (about 10 years ago though). It also requires that content is given in the right size and complexity each week, otherwise there will also be people coming to class who did do their homework but didn't understand it properly and just like the people who didn't read it need full explanations. I also felt having multiple explanations (in a regular class where you could also read the book in advance) from regular lecturers helped me in gaining understanding because having something explained in multiple ways made sure there would be at least one way to make it 'click'. I always likes the regular lectures where you would be required to do some pre class reading and a smaller set of exercises the most, as you would be engaged in the class itself and would be getting repetition with different explanations.
One of my colleagues tried it for a few terms. Unfortunately, it didn't work well. Most students don't care about learning, they are here for grades :(
Flipped classrooms are like, the quintessential siren song for teachers. EVERY teacher dreams of a day when they can focus on what they're best at (teaching deep topics, getting 'aha' moments, making connections, asking questions, and so on) and do less of what they dislike. But sadly this is just not how things work.
Flipped classrooms have incredibly weak causal evidence. However they are popular in spite of this - perhaps because of this if you're cynical - as the educational research field is pretty questionable in its standards and the profit motive is a strong thing lurking in the background. Wikipedia has a big warning on the article for a reason, but even then it has serious issues.
"Active learning" is a thing (insofar as it has meaning rather than be a useless buzzword catch-all) that does work. But the "flip" specifically does not, or rather, sometimes a mix of extra effort on behalf of the teacher and other loosely related effects occasionally can make a modest impact that makes up for its failings.
Most of the people pushing flipped classrooms are the same people who think that students learn best when they "discover" concepts on their own, maybe with a bit of guidance. This is the other, more serious, lie in education right now, akin to the whole idea that you didn't need to teach phonics to kids when they learn to read.
We still have developers because we can't outsource responsibility to AI. If shit breaks, we still need someone to fix it. Maybe you think that can also be automated. I have a counter-example. AI will rarely use the existing state when solving a bug. It will tack on it's own event queue, it will make up it's own messaging system, it is a cancerous growth. And this observation is based on both opus5.5 and gpt5.6-astra. The results are way past magical at this point, but you still have to weigh in pretty heavily for orderly code growth where solutions are succint, focused and preserve the existing structure. They are still noobs at fixing/adding stuff.
I am teaching some math courses, and I see how LLMs disrupted all standard approaches, and I don't know what to do.
I rely on written exams that are open book, but forbid any use of computers and smartphones in class.
The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning. I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.
I just had an experience where all students were given "sample problems" to try at home and prepare for the written test. Many of them just dumped the document into an LLM, asked it to produce some "exam guide", and showed up with that thing printed out, asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.
It seems like the university also has many people pushing for AI use for everything, but I teach basic stuff where the goal is to make students think on their own and digest some fundamental ideas, LLMs can produce perfect solutions, but relying on them is pointless.
There is indeed no point in grading home assignments anymore, but why not randomly ask a student at the start of each class to present their solution on the board?
And do a final exam on oen and paper and nothing else, and an exam that relies more on thinking than rote memorization of formulas (or print the relevant parts of the course on the exam document itself).
there probably is no time for 100 students to each do that in a university mathematics lecture, but there are probably ways to make sure students are still learning by restructuring the university into mandatory recitation and labs or something
there aren't 100 university lectures a semester, so there is a small chance you are picked. meaning, good odds to not give a shit or good incentive to not go to lecture if you are behind.
Homework is meant to be practice and was never actually measuring much beyond the attentiveness, availability, and involvement of the parents. The same rules apply now - does the parent simply allow the homework to be done via AI?
> why not randomly ask a student at the start of each class to present their solution on the board
This makes the class really awful. I had professors with schemes like this, maybe calling on someone's name randomly 1-2 times in class to answer a question they'd just asked, just to ensure everyone is scared into paying attention.
I'm taking a year-long sabbatical to study a language at university right now and they're changing their assignment processes to curtail AI use. We have two versions of written assignments - the first to be written by hand in class with just a Swedish-Swedish word book available, and the second version to be typed at home implementing the professor's corrections from v1.
At least in this course students seem to be taking their strict 'no AI' policy quite seriously. Then again this is also the kind of course you do when you want to actually learn the material. It provides a qualification for further higher education in Swedish, so if we don't legitimately learn the stuff there's just no point as we won't manage in future courses.
Recently it has been reported that many Chinese students in Moscow are no longer learning Russian during their years at the university (to the dismay of Russian officials who hoped this would be a form of soft power): even for in-person lectures their Bluetooth earbuds will just translate the lecturer's Russian into Chinese in real time. So, perhaps people around the world will start feeling that, thanks to technology, exams testing language skills are a mere formality and can be safely cheated on.
Russia is a bad example due to its current international reputation. On your second point, would an example of this be an oral exam where the student has tiny hidden earbuds? Outrageous but you're probably right it's going to get worse.
Actually, language is no longer the barrier it once was, it wouldn’t surprise me if some universities start opening enrollment up beyond the native language of the university accordingly.
Just don't make it open note then? Or you provide the only notes or cheat sheet available to them at the start of each test. That's what some math tests I've had had done before and I believe the SAT also does the same thing with formulas in the back of the test to reference.
I've always wanted to find out if this would work:
If I knew most of my students were using LLMs I would encourage the rest of them to use them too. I would then change the marking criteria such that if they get a single point wrong that's 20% off the entire grade. 5 mistakes gets you a big fat zero.
LLMs are great but they make mistakes. At this point your students would have had to spend so long checking, re-checking and triple checking the LLM's output that they will have accidentally learn what they need to. They will likely need to cross-reference multiple LLMs and at least have read their output which is likely an upgrade on today.
Or some variation of the above, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
This sounds like it would come at the cost of the honest students who don't want to use LLM's and train their own understanding.
Reviewing is just not the same as working through a problem yourself. You often can take shortcuts when checking answers for correctness, which generation (with mind or LLM) of the solution can't take. This isn't limited to Math but equally true for programming and many other skills.
What you would grade with that approach is how well your students can operate a LLM as well as the failure rate of whatever LLM infrastructure the individual student is using. This is usually not the goal of your educational format and hence not what you would grade for - apart from some (meta-)skill courses offered by uni libraries and the like. Those are mostly ungraded, though.
Anyone that knows the subject matter well enough will spot the LLMs mistakes and correct them. If you don't know the subject matter well enough to spot a mistake then you don't know the subject matter well enough.
Put a mixture of questions in that are impossible to answer but don't tell them, and as usual give them marks for explaining their working. Tell them you've devised the questions so some are "AI resistant" but don't tell them how. They'll never know if the AI has tripped up and hallucinated or given them the right answer. Only those that really understand what's going on will set out some working that shows they were on the right route and then got stuck where they were supposed to.
That will either lead to students becoming frustrated after spending inordinate amounts of time on the unsolvable problem or students giving up too early on the solvable problems.
That sounds pretty frustrating. I wonder if it wouldn't be a good approach to, say:
1. Make the exam the only thing that determines the grade (or technically, proves that the student learned enough);
2. Give out test assignments students can do, but don't have to;
3. Offer students for the professor to grade their work if they want to get some feedback on how they're doing.
Would that lead to less time wasted by tutors grading AI generated answers? From where I stand, students should be allowed to prepare for exams any way they like, with or without their professor's help. If they managed to learn, they pass.
When I was in engineering school ~20 years ago, some lecturers openly said that they gave the assignments just enough credit to be worth doing. Something like 10-15% of your final grade would be from assignments, the rest from the exam. So we didn't blow off the assignments to go drinking.
Of course, this a lot easier for some subjects than others. Subjects like Film Studies relied on exams much less, and assignments much more.
According to the article, #1 leads to "failure and drop-out rates of 50 to 80%". #2 and #3 might work for organized and motivated students, but graded assignments from other classes will be prioritized by most.
Then their parents come in and complain about where the $30k that semester went. This is a consequence of the exponential rise in tuition. You're now in lawsuit territory if you don't deliver the goods.
Given the education literally does not matter anymore for white collar work, I'm inclined to agree with you.
I'd rather a MUCH larger amount of professors and teachers come to class to find their classes deserted (by their own hand), and indeed, their own justification for existing gone. The world would be a lot better off. Gatekeepers are anti-human.
1. is not a terrible idea, if structured correctly, but it doesn't adequately incentive the learning process, which requires continuous practice. For 1, I'd say put 80% of the grade in three to four exams taken over the semester, and allow one midterm exam grade to be dropped or replaced by the final exam grade. The remaining 20% of the grade is to incentivize practicing problems: homework graded based on completeness not correctness, short in-class quizzes randomly sampling a homework problem to incentivize students to legitimately complete the homework that are graded for correctness, and student participation in classtime activities.
I took some classes like this and they were great. I felt they were much fairer than classes where mere diligence/compliance could masquerade as competency by way of final grades padded by homework scores.
They were disliked by many other students, though, and some people really think university grades should be about things like diligence, compliance, time management, etc., rather than pure subject mastery.
> such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output
Small nitpick: you teach math, why don't you use an automated grader?
I agree homework should be optional and your college is wrong. Even without AI, for some students it's easy to cheat and maybe for some students it's a waste of time. Maybe you can assign it a very low score, like 5% of the final grade, and/or award the grade based on attempting rather than getting the right answer.
It would be a waste of time. LLMs have become better but not perfect. Personal experience; it's easier/faster to grade for me than have the LLMs grade and cross-check each one.
Good homework feedback for a proof isn't "Did you get this right?", it's "Why did you not get this right?" or "How can we make your correct solution better?", neither of which fall out of a Lean translation-and-verification pass.
> Many of them just dumped the document into an LLM, asked it to produce some "exam guide", and showed up with that thing printed out, asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.
That student presumably performed poorly on the test. Your approach is working as intended here, isn't it?
Also, is the AI-generated exam guide all that different to a human-written guide they could have downloaded a decade ago?
It must be tiresome to be a student these days… with each teacher having different pet theories about AI use and sometimes trying to “trick” students who use AI, or implement some draconian rules about the way homework or exams must be done. It’s tiresome for you, but just imagine getting varying lectures on AI use as you go from class to class as a student. Must be hell
This is a nice idea, but if you follow the Carnegie model of the number of hours per week it takes to learn a subject per credit hour, which is estimated at something between 6-9 hours total including classtime and out-of-class study per week for a normal-semester 3 credit course, then you can't meet the amount of time students need to be exposed to lecture (explanations, demonstrations, derivations), to do the background readings which provide necessary context that can't always be adequately covered in lecture, and to practice the concepts and tools on their own.
For me it's about time management, not about getting math help. I am consistent at attending classes because it's mandatory, but not consistent at finding time to practice math every day. If I could practice during classes, I think that would help me.
That’s an entirely different problem, and a hard one to solve. I would still suggest looking at the tutoring center or groups since there is time accountability there. If you don’t show up it is more consequential than skipping class from a personal point of view.
Dude, hop on the Gemini student plan and try Gemini Notebook and Gemini Live. Live is a personal TA, Notebook literally podcasts the readings and what you need to learn
That's a terrible model though. If someone is paying to be taught and you just hand them video lectures... We already have video lectures at home. Why would they pay you? What product are you meaningfully offering in that world?
Tutoring, office hours, teaching assistants. One of the best classes I took was a "studio style" class where we would work on a project and occasionally the teacher or a TA would interrupt and give a brief lecture or demonstration based on a "teachable moment" that had occurred.
You are selling a diploma. Some universities also sell some degree of attestation to the high resilience of their graduates. And of course the space to network. Good teaching is not on the list in my experience.
In general university lectures are horrible (of course there are exceptions). The lecturures oftentimes are required to teach as a condition of research funds, so for many it's not a priority anyways.
On top of that most couldn't care less if their teaching style is didactically sound at all.
?? The model is to flip the roles, not to eliminate in-person teaching.
The product is in-class homework and at home "lectures". I'm not saying this is appropriate for everything, but seems it would be useful for mathematics at some level.
I teach math-heavy economics courses. I found that grading homeworks for completeness and pairing the homework due date with an in-class quiz on the problem set material (taken in class the day the problem set is due, after the set is turned in) has reduced the incentive for students to use LLMs to complete the homework. Exam questions closely mirror what's on the homework, and exam grades correlate with students who make legitimate attempts on their homework. I can sus out legit attempts typically by handwriting. No erasing and fast writing means it was copied.
For grade weights, I weight the homework the lowest of any grading category, with in-class quizzes next, and exams scores the highest.
Perhaps they are also dealing with administration that says things like “The university insists that homework can't be optional”, as in the grandparent comment.
The university administration needs flexibility rather than draconian rules that dont work.
In any case, even if the uni insist on homework, the teacher can simply mark everyone who hands in their homework 100%. It is impossible for the administration to police it, or if they do, they'd need to hire someone to mark the homework (which conveniently solves the teacher's issue).
Students who copy all solutions from LLMs maybe learn something, but it's like 5% compared to what someone can learn by doing the assignment without external help, or even by asking their peers. It's a bit disheartening, because I invest quite some time and thought in designing the assignments.
Yes it's all fun and games reading uni level maths nodding along to all the proofs until you're suddenly asked to do the exercises and suddenly nothing made sense and you are completely confounded by such an innocent looking question.
Exactly, it's the most important part of the math education, there is no point in memorizing definitions and theorems without putting everything into practice.
But it seems like the temptation to get perfect solutions from an LLM is too big for many students nowadays, they lack the maturity to understand that using LLMs for basic assignments is counterproductive.
Homework is a tool for students. It is where they practice. I see my job as a prof to curate the problems I think will help students best prepare for the exams, and use that space to help them gain the intuition about the problems I don't have sufficient time to cover in class, like through an application. As my profs before me used to say, true learning comes in doing problems.
I find bright people who are self-motivated tend to do problems on their own, but this is not the modal student. This is like the top 10-15% of any class. The modal student is motivated by getting a degree so they can enter the working world, and sees coursework as an obstacle to that. They'll take any and every shortcut to get the highest grades with the least amount of effort. However, particularly with first and second year undergrads (but I've also seen the same behavior in grad students), they do not understand the purpose of pedagogy. That doing problems is where you learn the material.
So if you make homework optional, the 10-15% hold steady and do it but the bulk of the class will stop doing problems and tank their grades on the exams. They will not internalize the lesson after that first bad exam, because it is morally and practially cheaper for them to believe they had a bad day or that their professor (me) is just a terrible meanie who constructed an exam with problems they've "never seen before" and "had no connection to the lecture" (actual evaluation comments I've had when I've tried to the homework-optional method).
This is a great approach. I remember even pre-AI having issues where, at a big state school, basically all the answers to homework could be found online. Sometimes I made the choice to copy a homework and tell myself I’d catch up later. But the classes where there was a scheduled quiz right away just forced me to keep up.
I think a possible solution is to make homework carry no grade weight, and simply mark it as complete or incomplete, like a presence check.
Homework still provide valuable practice for students who are truly committed to learning. An automated system could provide an initial assessment and feedback. However, students can request human feedback paired with an in-person meeting. Such requests would require a mandatory explanation of what feedback they want or what the issue is. Professors and TAs will therefore only read and answer such requests themselves and will not waste time on AI output. At the same time, the system will still support students who are genuinely interested in learning.
Students who use AI to do their homework are not interested in such feedback anyway, and they will also avoid in-person meetings because it will naturally reveal that they are unprepared and did not do the homework themselves, which is humiliating.
To make this system work, we should present the in-person meetings as collaborative 'working sessions' or group office hours. Encouraging students to sign up in pairs or small groups also reduces individual anxiety.
The main channels for grading remain exams and oral presentations.
Explaining something to an audience, even with notes, is hard to do without actually understanding what you are saying. It’s kind of like a rubber duck.
Committed to learning and going to jump ahead here to say if smart glasses (without cameras or in time with) become the norm and Ai is always right how many will not take the time to learn the information is always right in front of them in their view.
Myself as a student i take my class notes and the subject matter the teacher provides and have Ai create multiple choice quizzes. It's a much quicker way to learn tho not as quickly as AI glasses I mentioned.
> I am teaching some math courses, and I see how LLMs disrupted all standard approaches, and I don't know what to do.
I wonder what the financial cost of AI will be to teaching? Does teaching get more expensive? More things need to be supervised, more things need to be presentations or in person?
> The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning.
The problem is not LLMs, but your university. In my undergrad, almost all the math courses had no required HW. They'd assign it, but you wouldn't turn it in. You'd come to office hours for help on the HW, or ask in class (they'd often dedicate the first 10-15 minutes of each lecture to Q&A).
It was awesome for people like me. No time wasted on neatly presented HWs. I'd do it quickly, verify the answers, and study for the exams.
The flip side was there were many exams (you don't want your grade catered if you do poorly in one exam). A course like calculus could have 4-5 "midterms", and then the final. Often, they'd drop your lowest midterm score so you're allowed one bad day.
In my country of origin (not US) that's how it worked starting in high school. Homework was called "suggested problems". The teacher reviewed them in class. No grading. We ended up doing it because that was almost the only way to pass the exams (which, btw, could be up to 50 questions long...)
Indeed, I've switched over to model similar to this in the course I teach. Weekly optional problem set + in-class quiz every week with one homework problem verbatim + an extension. The homeworks are completely open resource, LLM, friend, sorcery, w/e. I figure that, even if they're given an oracle, they have to internalize the ideas to the point where they can generalize on the follow-up. I'll only really know when the course finishes, but I think this will work out. I want to pair this with an oral midterm and final, but that'll have to wait a semester.
I heard from a friend who went to German university that the homework was never graded, maybe you could get help with it but the professor didn’t have TAs and had a large class. Lots of Midterms were also not feasible given the setup, so often 100% of your grade depended on the final.
I can’t imagine as American how that would go down with most American students.
It seems to me that the only realistic option is to have more exams, closed book, and then use gen ai yourself to help reduce the workload of grading. Possibly with some kind of curve assigning more weight later in the semester.
How about cutting out the open book so that the students who don't study and to their homework actually fail? When I was in school many years ago "open book" was only used for special ed students and others who couldn't carry a regular academic workload. Homework was assigned, but our grades were determined solely by testing our mastery of the material. If you could master the material without doing the homework or showing up for class on non-testing days, more power to you. College has become more like kindergarten with all of the hand-holding.
When I was in college, whether or not an exam was open book seemed orthogonal to the difficulty of the exam as well as the class's median uncurved score. Allowing the textbook or notes lets you write an exam that might otherwise be unreasonable.
In the classes I took with open note exams where I did well, I barely ended up consulting my notes anyway. The students who didn't study could flip through the textbooks all they wanted, but they lost so much time doing it that they couldn't complete all of the problems on the exam. For the students who studied well, the textbook was way easier to jump around in because they knew it well and knew what they were looking for.
Am exam that is designed to be closed book/closed note where a specific student is allowed some amount of notes as a disability accommodation is just different from one that is designed to be open note/open book from the start. The latter, testing the same material, is generally longer or harder to make better use of the format.
Open book need not be easier, it entirely depends on the exam.
This was too long ago for me to remember the details of but, just making an example here, we might have had a course on homogeneization of elliptic problems using a model PDE with a div(A grad u) term throughout, and then the exam was about a PDE with a curl(A curl u) and some other added terms.
Notes carry the method and theoretical tools but you then still need to apply them to a new problem.
So, if anything, our open book exams were harder and a better test of understanding and mastery. You couldn’t rote your way into a good grade.
Open book exams IME are usually more difficult, since the exams can be crafted on the assumption that you don't need to dumb anything down since students can look up certain things.
We had a formula "cheat sheet" on every exam paper, but if you don't know when or why you're supposed to use a formula, it might as well not have been in the cheatsheet at all
Hmm people can now do a lot more than they were supposed to be able to without LLMs - shouldn’t we lean into that?
Force people to go all in with “impossible” tasks and see how they do with the power of LLMs. Then spend some significant time teaching people _with_ that solution in place what was actually built and what would have been a better architecture? A … software archeology session if you will.
That’s what most of what people do would be anyway - building PoC fast and then figuring out how to scale them?
> asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.
Perhaps (sarcastically) this is the new approach, because this is now the point where they’re forced to struggle and therefore actually learn. An exam every other day, let them ask the questions.
Not sarcastically, this is the flipped classroom approach. Read the examples and watch the lecture on your own time, then come and do the exercises with a teacher available to explain when you realize you didn’t understand anything.
Why not just make the assignments "reading" based and set an expectation of randomized quizzes that take 5 minutes at the start of class to fill out to get the homework credit? When I say randomized, like multiple versions. You can use LLMs to churn out PDFs to a tailored format and utilize a pool of questions.
It's crazy that we went from "we found a significant number of students used AI in our course and gave them a 0" to "yeah they all use it we can't stop it"
I know this is absolutely impossible because I run in academic circles, but the solution: Literally just expel them. Just like they did when people cheated when I was in college. Don't make it a small punishment so that they turn it into a risk/reward assessment. Colleges are overpopulated anyway; just trim the fat of students who shouldn't be there. Do a follow up oral exam interview about their project and if they can't explain what someone like me spent 30+ hours building and can speak about for 4 hours if asked, then expel them. They can make your coffee at the nearby Starbucks, who cares.
If you don't do this then understand that you are telling your students not using AI that they will need to begin cheating like the others to be able to keep up with the changes. OP mentioned they massively increased the scope of their assignments, which means OP is forcing their students to use AI now.
I've had the same experience, and likewise I have no idea what to do.
Or rather, I do have ideas, but they do require substantial restructuring. E.g.:
1) Strict, in-person (no exceptions), electronics-free exams with written and oral portion.
2) Transition to guided independent learning: students are given written materials and recommended exercises to study. They are shown how to use AI assistants productively. Instead of lectures, there are scheduled discussions, where students can ask questions and listen to additional explanations from the lecturer. They can also seek feedback for completed exercises. However, none of this contributes to grades in any way.
With such an incentive realignment, I think it's possible that higher education could be salvaged. But... apart from general institutional inertia, there is also the political angle standing in the way. Everybody needs a degree in the "developed economy", and the above changes are basically the opposite of the nobody left behind policy that enables half the population to attain one...
> The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning. I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.
Can't you just not grade it at all? If the student has done their homework, just consider it passed. And then don't count it at all for the final grade.
Grade homework for completion, have a weekly in-class quiz that is basically a few problems that are near to identical to the homework. You lose a bit of class time to the quiz, but it creates a strong incentive to complete the homework, and also eases in the midterm/final for students instead of going nothing nothing - boom here's 30%+ of your grade.
My favorite math class I ever took had optional homework, but every exam problem was taken directly from the homework. So if you did all the homework the exams were very easy.
I imagine this would work very well in the current period since there’s no reason to use LLMs for this homework. Of course even back then many students didn’t do it and got low grades, but you have to be responsible at some point.
I agree and that's my idea as well, exams are open book and extremely close to assignments. My issues are with the first year undergraduates, who are not mature enough to do homework that is optional, and when it's not optional, they'll do it with LLMs and call it a day.
> I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.
I think the problem is the students also take ~4-5 subjects per semester, and each of them may be just as demanding. High school is even more spread out with 6-8 subjects per semester. There's only a certain number of hours during the day for study and homework. For many, math homework ends up being the most time-intensive. Also these exams determine their GPA which in turn plays in part in determining their standing for the next few decades of their lives.
It's funny how people talk about "teaching" getting more difficult with LLMs.
Clearly teaching got a lot better, since we now have a new teaching tool at our use, the LLMs. It's evaluating that got harder, because students can use the same tool to cheat in traditional forms of evaluation.
If "teaching the students" means the same as "evaluating the students" to you, maybe you shouldn't teach in the first place.
It’s not just evaluating. Students used to learn skills while doing an assignment. LLMing through assignments teaches copy-paste at best.
It’s like copy-paste Wikipedia presentations 2 decades ago. People used to learn things doing research for a project. Then suddenly it became copying off Wikipedia and people not even pre-reading what they copied into PPT.
What you’re calling evaluating is a part of the learning process for the student, not just about confirming that the student knows the thing. LLMs are actively undermining learning in this way. There was useful friction which has been removed.
Teaching and evaluation are of course not the same thing, but evaluation is an important part of teaching.
There is a mismatch between students’ overall desire to learn things and the moment-to-moment experience that learning is hard.
Even devoid of all the economic and social pressures that grades impose students would compromise their learning experience.
Ever regretted looking up the solution to a puzzle in a video game or sneaked a peak at the crossword puzzle solutions?
One of the hardest part of teaching is keeping students from self-sabotage.
Evaluation helps with that.
Beyond that evaluation is of course also useful just as feedback.
Teaching is imo mostly about techniques that battle laziness. Teaching intrinsically motivated intelligent students has always been trivial. All progress in education is about scaling it to work for people who only reluctantly engage with the material.
Right, and part of that is nurturing student interest and buy-in, because it can increase. Traditionally smart teaching and the right structure could result in some percentage of reluctant learners being drawn into good habits and better retention. I think the subtle part of the AI in education crisis is how it basically has smothered that "nurturing" in the cradle, right from the get-go, so it's a bit of a cold-start situation in many classes.
That outlook is way too bleak. As a person who has taught at universities for fifteen years and has run lots of open educational formats and infrastructure with other public institutions and citizen groups, my experience is the opposite. If anything, the desire to learn and curiosity are among the strongest common traits humans possess. Grades are just a tool and a proxy that most people working in formalized educational settings have to work with at specific points.
Motivation can come from many sources, not only grading, e.g. individual encouragement, exciting applications, day-to-day relevance, interest shown by peers. Also students can just be intrinsically motivated.
It may come in different styles. But what do you do with students who don’t have motivation beyond grading/punishment? Some people just do not have motivation unless somebody standing by them with a stick.
Seems the core problem is that many/most students aren't there to learn the material, just to get grades. The class is a complex mechanism to force them to learn material against their will in a validation arms race. The teacher's job becomes something like a military commander. Seems depressing.
This is because we shield children too much from reality. If they had a fire under their ass that made them realize if they don't study well, they will forever be locked into flipping burgers or being homeless, most of them would move their assess.
Don't do anything productive for the society but still get to live a decent life on benefits, job security etc combined with addictive social media have ruined most kids will to study.
And the schools are even worse. When I was in school, teachers encouraged learning things; whether for school or outside, with teacher or self help. Everything was fair game and supported. Debate was normal.
Nowadays the teachers in schools are like a cult. Kids are tuned to reject anything from outside; anything that contradicts teacher is a no go zone. Anything that's "too advanced" compared to what teacher is doing is forbidden. Kids are scared of learning by themselves because the teachers punish it. What do you think these kids will do when they grow up?
The least paragraph... has always been the case. My parents told me stories about teachers denying facts not to lose authority. I distinctly recall my teacher pretending that peripheral vision doesn't exist not to lose authority.
> If they had a fire under their ass that made them realize if they don't study well, they will forever be locked into flipping burgers or being homeless, most of them would move their assess.
That strikes me as backward. The higher the expected monetary value of good grades, the more students will prioritise grades over deep learning.
Grades only take you so far. The ones with fire under their ass have motivation and grit. They learn, they work hard, they pivot, and most have more success in life than rich kids with everything handed to them or kids who were comfortable and just followed curriculum blindly (and nothing else).
> This is because we shield children too much from reality. If they had a fire under their ass that made them realize if they don't study well, they will forever be locked into flipping burgers or being homeless, most of them would move their assess.
This seems pretty inaccurate to me at just about every turn.
The fire under their asses is for grades and a degree because they've erroneously been told they need one or else they'll be flipping burgers.
It's such a cliche thing to say but cheating at school cheats yourself of the education you could be getting but, since that's not what most people are there for, they cheat. They are there because they've been told that they need a degree to make a decent living and the degree doesn't technically require learning.
yall have no idea what is fire under your ass is. It is a honest but ruthless understanding of society you get as a kid, understanding that you will be on your own (already or when you grow up), and your parents wont (can't) help (feed) you when you grow up. Esp true for men (women can marry up). You realize you must accomplish things, become valuable to society, and earn your keep.
It is not about being sold a lie about grades/degree but those are important too.
And just because it worked out for people like me (you?) who never needed a degree, doesn't mean that's the way for most people.
This is the way it's always been, sadly. Before AI submissions I had to regularly look for where my materials were posted on sites like Course Hero. Students copy-pasted from Wiki, articles, blogs, etc without attribution. Before that, they were buying or finding solutions books and copying out of there, or hiring people to do their homework/write papers/sit exams for them.
The primary difference now is that the both costs of cheating and ability to verify cheating on the instructor side have decreased dramatically, in tandem. There's also been a kind of mass effect, a cultural change in the attitude of students, where the sheer prevalence of cheating among their peers has made them less likely to feel fear, shame, or guilt over cheating. Students in the past who were caught were likely to confess immediately. Students now are increasingly belligerent and more likely to deny cheating, not just because they believe the professor can't 100% prove it, but also because they believe being caught out for cheating when most of their peers are getting away with it is unfair.
20 years ago my department head was saying homework was pretty pointless because everyone was copying each other. They assigned a token percentage for homework so at least the students were submitting homework.
School homework is one of those things which, like the OnlyFans economy, I hope AI utterly destroys, despite my general detestation for the corrosive effects of AI on society.
I teach mostly smaller courses but my approach to grading has been the same for years: A combination of a semester-long group project (ending in a paper, a prototype and a group presentation) with individual oral exams about aspects of the project and of the lecture. The lecture is flanked by optional TA sessions as well as access to labs which, for most hours of the day, have some experienced/teaching people being around (this results in a lot of ad-hoc learning situations and a general diffusion of knowledge and practices).
This gives me/us a lot of angles to understand what progress has been made throughout the semester as well as to consider and react to individual differences between students. In my book, it’s also resistant to faking it convincingly throughout all modalities. However, scaling that approach to big entry level courses would require more money for teaching than any research group in Europe I’ve ever seen has available.
I dunno, if I had to teach students now I think I’d just force them to stay in the lecture hall without internet for the hour I need them to work on their assignments that week. I just can’t see any other reasonable way to do this. Everyone leaves their phones at the door in some designated locker or something.
— watches, calculators, discrete technological devices. I've seen kids encode text as patterns of dashes on their desks, sharing the cipher solution with their desk mates in other periods.
The problem isn't skirting the effort. The problem is systemic. Why does the system reward taking shortcuts? I think it's because most areas are focused on short horizon tasks, min-maxing effort:output. It's not a problem with those technical fields. It's a problem with the current crop of the C-Suite across the entire occupational plane. They're short sighted.
I was at EduLearn (a major edtech conference) this year and talked to many professors exactly about this. A lot of them are pulling work back into the classroom, but keep running into the same problems:
- some skills only develop through the actual writing (similar to how you can't learn to code just by watching YouTube videos)
- in-class assignments are not always scalable (and students end up using AI anyway)
- students aren't motivated enough to participate actively
I think looking at the writing process is a more realistic approach, so I built Turingo (https://www.turingo.net). It replays how a Google Doc was written, highlights unusual edits (large pastes) and tracks how that text changed afterwards. Surprisingly, several professors reported that students often underestimate how much LLM-generated text is left in their final drafts, so just seeing the replay changes the conversation.
It's not meant to be a verdict machine like the existing AI detectors (another big problem in education), more of a starting point for the kind of conversations the author's TAs are having. In fact, we're also beta testing a feature that suggests a few questions for the professor to ask based on the replay.
And yes, it's not perfect and autotypers do exist, but they're dumber than you'd expect and nowhere close to mimicking a real human (I hope to address that soon).
It sad that it has come to this, but your approach is correct - it is the act of writing (code or prose) that is important, not the finished output itself.
Interestingly, this applies not just for learning, but also to a great extent in production/work contexts too.
I cannot shake the feeling that we are chasing the wrong goose.
The end goal of education is to help you understand how things work, with problem-solving being a means of developing and applying that understanding. LLMs shortcut the former and turn the latter into a pointless arms race that we cannot win.
I loved the example of increasing the complexity of learning projects, but I still feel like one question is missing: are people really trying to learn the same thing we were trying to teach them in the first place?
In my experience a significant proportion of "evidence-based best pedagogy practices" is hogwash. I'm pretty anti-AI, but going against education-school dogma isn't a reason to avoid AI.
I recently did a course on teaching bachelor-level education, and had to study a couple of books. They all seemed to quote their sources and I got the impression that they're rooted in science.
It's science-based in a sense, but a pretty weak sense. I did some work with education researchers and my impression was that their methodologies were quite haphazard and they were sometimes just trying to find a way to "tell a story" that they already had in mind. Also, my impression is that a lot of the research on "best practices" is based on relatively limited comparisons between schools or teaching methods, and there is insufficient evidence that this or that is truly a "best practice" in a more general sense. I also interacted a good bit with education grad students when I was in grad school and they almost uniformly seemed to have no coherent sense of what they were doing or what their field actually knew. I've known people who had similar experiences with education schools elsewhere.
I've also read news stories and stuff that support the idea that a lot of "education education" is of questionable value. This story is pretty old by now but has stuck with me: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-may-10-la-oe-zi... . A relevant quote:
> Of the 1,300 institutions awarding graduate degrees for teaching, Harvard’s director of teacher education told a 2009 conference, only about 100 prepared students for the classroom. The rest, she added, “could be shut down tomorrow.”
Some of these experiences/articles are about teaching K-12 schools rather than teaching college, but there would have to be a pretty huge difference between the two for me to think that college-level pedagogical theory was meaningfully better than that for younger ages, and I've seen nothing to give me that impression.
I’ve put that article on my reading list. Yes, I think it’s true that there are situations where the science is used to support “telling the story”. As a counterpoint, I got taught about the “illusion of learning”, where it’s pretty clear that a regular college lesson (teacher droning from a PowerPoint), retention is down the drain. So we teachers know that a good curriculum should incorporate repetition and exercises.
Now the question is, are these curriculi being rebuilt? Here in The Netherlands, yes.
I don't like it. Now, the TAs have high cognitive load. Earlier, you only need to know the material of the course. But now, you're forced to navigate AI output. And you got to keep with all new model developments.
Make all reports and assignments open source and public. Their credibility as students and professionals will be on the line. It will be obvious who puts in the effort and who doesn't
building a community around open source is hard. building one that analyses, comments, and votes on contributions is harder. who is going to read and react to the open sourced content that students submit?
> For example, the evidence favors frequent low-stakes assessments with feedback (e.g., homework, quizzes) over few high-stakes ones (e.g., exams) – but AI is undermining practice in low-stakes settings and pushing us more toward exams.
Only because you're obsessed with being able to assign grades and fail cheaters.
What is the point of learning something an AI can already do better than you? There are better methods of brain training.
The situation reminds me of what my teachers used to tell me. "Learning how to look up things in a book will be a skill you'll need all your live and you won't carry a calculator with you at all times when you are grown up." Both assumptions were proven wrong before I was even out of school.
If the only remaining value of education is "to become a well rounded person" then why waste your time on it? It used to be you went to university because that was the only place to get knowledge from. Which is also why it was dominated by the rich and powerful. These days university feels a lot like paper money. Everyone just pretends it has a real value and because everyone agrees, that's where the value comes from.
Okay why do we need literacy if we have such beautiful screen readers? Maybe because it's better when you actually absorb these fundamental skills rather than rely on a disability aid to relieve you of a self imposed handicap.
Practicality. It's more convenient to read door and street signs, restaurant menus, name badges, ticket machines etc. etc. without going through a screen reader.
It's little effort for a large benefit. But anything you learn past middle school in formal education is a moderate to large effort for a small to neglectable benefit. And you'll forget it anyway if it is uninteresting and not useful in your daily life.
Anything interesting or useful in your daily life, you'll pick up by yourself even without formal education.
This same logic applies to all the upstream education. It's convinient to have a more limited calculator in your own brain, or better yet, the ability to simply see numerical properties factors, in a way a calculator doesn't replace. It's good when you can yourself understand the physics of everyday systems, or perform useful calculations about them. And if your work is indeed tied to it, it's good to know basic semiconductor physics, even if the ordinary person has a million more immediately useful things to study.
Knowledge is not a tool for answering the absolutely minimum questions you encounter in daily life, but a way of seeing the world. Reading allows you to use language in ways you could not imagine with spoken word alone, just as math or physics or computer science enable new ways of thinking inaccessible without intense study.
I don't disagree that this is all useful to have. My point of contention is that the effort required is not worth the time investment if you are going to forget about it in a few years anyway because you never needed it in your daily life.
Our brains can't hold infinite amounts of data and a lot of information will become inaccessible if not used regularly. This is also why most of us do not speak twelve different languages, despite this being a supremely useful skill that is relatively easy to pick up compared to semiconductor physics.
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[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 95.7 ms ] threadAI can talk the talk, but it can't walk the walk.
A simple "explain why this is the best solution" will make it shit the bed 10 out 10 times.
Because that makes your own next tokens quite predictable and sloppy.
The world has passed you by, and you may be unwittingly shitting your own bed and trying to blame it on AI.
* Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot. Theory is necessary, but the attention span of people is very limited. * Grade either a homework assignment in the form of a real project with specifications. You give the assignment half-semester, so that students who start early can ask questions. Otherwise, grade a in-session exam, with every resource available, including the course and the whole Internet. However, you don't assess the knowledge, but if the student is able to apply their knowledge to the different tasks at hand.
These approaches are now completely moot in the age of AI.
I was surprised the first time a colleague asked me to do an oral exam. I thought it was a burden on people with poor social interaction skills. It went surprisingly well: you could see in a couple of minutes if the student had integrated the concepts of the course, even if they were shy. Now I wonder if it's the way to go. There's one caveat, though: it doesn't scale.
There’s no way I’d have learnt everything I know now about software in today’s environment. So much of software development - debugging techniques, architectural decisions, structuring data etc is learned through trial and error. As the models get better is becoming easier and easier to just not look too closely at their output. I suspect it’s human nature.
In my very limited experience (I have German major degrees in Informatik and Philosophy, I was a TA for Logic in Philosophy) the more advanced the topic the thinner the attendance anyway.
I mean some people are good at Tetris and some aren’t. Tetris can tell you which ones are which.
They've shown that it is entirely possible to scale a system like that, as long as the society sincerely values the role of an educator.
Finally, if a student feels their result is unjustified, reevaluate the recorded session.
Usually you know after a few minutes if it's going to be a fail, and then otherwise you only need to figure out where on the passing scale the student ends up.
That's the point. As a professor you're allowed to outsource the grading of written exams to you assistants (ongoing PhD teaching stuff). But you must do an oral exam personally.
> usually quicker for the well prepared students
That's true. More time is needed only in case the answer is missing and you have to check whether you hit accidentally the only poorly understood material piece or there are more troubles.
2 hours is a lot! In my universities, classes were either 50 minutes, or 70 minutes. I could handle 50 minute ones just fine, but would often have trouble with challenging courses that had 70 minutes. Particularly for stuff like math, I hadn't properly digested the material in the first half, and now he's already proving theorems with that material in the 2nd half. I can follow the logic, but the ideal is when you can digest the prior material before being exposed to theorems relying on them.
Even when alternating theory/application like you say, the amount of attention I'd give to the application in the 70 minute class was less than the 50 minute one. I could follow, but I wouldn't think critically.
Then there was the written exam at the end of each course, which constituted 100% of the grade. The only reason that got abolished was because it made too many students fail, and the board hates that. So that became a race to the bottom, and apparently, we can still go lower.
It's reaching levels where most uni diplomas don't matter any longer. The only thing that will then matter is your network. That's the end of social mobility.
The article gives examples of LLMs being wrong. An AI grading of an AI submission would presumably give a good mark, to a wrong answer.
I think I understand what you mean though, and I kind of agree. I just don't like the use of the word chaff, like something you would discard permanently.
I'm pretty sure I was "chaff" at some point (maybe multiple) in my life growing up.
"This is math, you can find all solutions to the course problems in old material since I've been teaching here for 20 years, but know this you're cheating yourself and at the end of the semester you're taking a three hour test on pen and paper so good luck"
I see zero reason why AI should impact teaching. You can grade exercises as information to the students as to how well they're doing, but simply have an exam at the end of the course. Needlessly to say like 60-70% flunked through Analysis I and Linear Algebra. But they're adults and they're there voluntarily, so why is this an issue
Similarly, I did well in interviews where I could use the internet, but I didn't do well in interviews where I couldn't use the internet.
Everyone has a testing format they're good at. I'm curious about how this kind of thing is evaluated, and whether there are any papers related to this.
Isn't the answer the 'flipped classroom' - students are assigned reading/studying to do before a class and the class becomes more interactive, answering questions/discussing topics/solving problems etc depending on subject. Of course, this is more expensive than a hall with 400 people listening to a lecture with a couple of tests/essays.
https://fltmag.com/the-flipped-classroom/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
I've heard of places where the minimum points for an assignment is 50% even if you never turn it in which is insanity.
My main point is: flipped classroom works great in some contexts but is no panacea and requires setting clear expectations.
Aside: as English is not my native language: "you fail them" can mean both "you give them a failing grade" and "you fail to provide the support they need", right?
Yes, but as written the latter would not be a reasonable parse. For that sense: “you have failed them”, sure; “you are failing them”, sure; even “in acting so, you fail them”; but “and then you fail them” as an entire sentence would be very weird. The emphasis I placed on “fail” also doesn’t feel particularly compatible with that sense of the word.
It’s a virtuous circle though, as many universities are there for the money, so it’s a beautiful exchange.
Flipped classrooms have incredibly weak causal evidence. However they are popular in spite of this - perhaps because of this if you're cynical - as the educational research field is pretty questionable in its standards and the profit motive is a strong thing lurking in the background. Wikipedia has a big warning on the article for a reason, but even then it has serious issues.
"Active learning" is a thing (insofar as it has meaning rather than be a useless buzzword catch-all) that does work. But the "flip" specifically does not, or rather, sometimes a mix of extra effort on behalf of the teacher and other loosely related effects occasionally can make a modest impact that makes up for its failings.
Most of the people pushing flipped classrooms are the same people who think that students learn best when they "discover" concepts on their own, maybe with a bit of guidance. This is the other, more serious, lie in education right now, akin to the whole idea that you didn't need to teach phonics to kids when they learn to read.
I rely on written exams that are open book, but forbid any use of computers and smartphones in class.
The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning. I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.
I just had an experience where all students were given "sample problems" to try at home and prepare for the written test. Many of them just dumped the document into an LLM, asked it to produce some "exam guide", and showed up with that thing printed out, asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.
It seems like the university also has many people pushing for AI use for everything, but I teach basic stuff where the goal is to make students think on their own and digest some fundamental ideas, LLMs can produce perfect solutions, but relying on them is pointless.
And do a final exam on oen and paper and nothing else, and an exam that relies more on thinking than rote memorization of formulas (or print the relevant parts of the course on the exam document itself).
This makes the class really awful. I had professors with schemes like this, maybe calling on someone's name randomly 1-2 times in class to answer a question they'd just asked, just to ensure everyone is scared into paying attention.
At least in this course students seem to be taking their strict 'no AI' policy quite seriously. Then again this is also the kind of course you do when you want to actually learn the material. It provides a qualification for further higher education in Swedish, so if we don't legitimately learn the stuff there's just no point as we won't manage in future courses.
If I knew most of my students were using LLMs I would encourage the rest of them to use them too. I would then change the marking criteria such that if they get a single point wrong that's 20% off the entire grade. 5 mistakes gets you a big fat zero.
LLMs are great but they make mistakes. At this point your students would have had to spend so long checking, re-checking and triple checking the LLM's output that they will have accidentally learn what they need to. They will likely need to cross-reference multiple LLMs and at least have read their output which is likely an upgrade on today.
Or some variation of the above, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
Reviewing is just not the same as working through a problem yourself. You often can take shortcuts when checking answers for correctness, which generation (with mind or LLM) of the solution can't take. This isn't limited to Math but equally true for programming and many other skills.
Students will complain to the admins and waste more of your time.
1. Make the exam the only thing that determines the grade (or technically, proves that the student learned enough);
2. Give out test assignments students can do, but don't have to;
3. Offer students for the professor to grade their work if they want to get some feedback on how they're doing.
Would that lead to less time wasted by tutors grading AI generated answers? From where I stand, students should be allowed to prepare for exams any way they like, with or without their professor's help. If they managed to learn, they pass.
Of course, this a lot easier for some subjects than others. Subjects like Film Studies relied on exams much less, and assignments much more.
I'd rather a MUCH larger amount of professors and teachers come to class to find their classes deserted (by their own hand), and indeed, their own justification for existing gone. The world would be a lot better off. Gatekeepers are anti-human.
They were disliked by many other students, though, and some people really think university grades should be about things like diligence, compliance, time management, etc., rather than pure subject mastery.
Small nitpick: you teach math, why don't you use an automated grader?
I agree homework should be optional and your college is wrong. Even without AI, for some students it's easy to cheat and maybe for some students it's a waste of time. Maybe you can assign it a very low score, like 5% of the final grade, and/or award the grade based on attempting rather than getting the right answer.
LLM verifies output of another LLM. The circle is complete, and nobody has any doubts that this is just a theatre.
With manual grading, that one student who genuinely tries still has a chance to meaningfully engage.
If the proof isn't trivially translatable to lean, is it actually a good proof?
That student presumably performed poorly on the test. Your approach is working as intended here, isn't it?
Also, is the AI-generated exam guide all that different to a human-written guide they could have downloaded a decade ago?
I think this development should make all educational programs reconsider the flip-model: homework at school and video lessons at home.
Homework sucks. Learning should be at your own pace (play/pause/rewind).
In general university lectures are horrible (of course there are exceptions). The lecturures oftentimes are required to teach as a condition of research funds, so for many it's not a priority anyways. On top of that most couldn't care less if their teaching style is didactically sound at all.
For grade weights, I weight the homework the lowest of any grading category, with in-class quizzes next, and exams scores the highest.
In any case, even if the uni insist on homework, the teacher can simply mark everyone who hands in their homework 100%. It is impossible for the administration to police it, or if they do, they'd need to hire someone to mark the homework (which conveniently solves the teacher's issue).
Students who copy all solutions from LLMs maybe learn something, but it's like 5% compared to what someone can learn by doing the assignment without external help, or even by asking their peers. It's a bit disheartening, because I invest quite some time and thought in designing the assignments.
It was very different before LLMs.
But it seems like the temptation to get perfect solutions from an LLM is too big for many students nowadays, they lack the maturity to understand that using LLMs for basic assignments is counterproductive.
I find bright people who are self-motivated tend to do problems on their own, but this is not the modal student. This is like the top 10-15% of any class. The modal student is motivated by getting a degree so they can enter the working world, and sees coursework as an obstacle to that. They'll take any and every shortcut to get the highest grades with the least amount of effort. However, particularly with first and second year undergrads (but I've also seen the same behavior in grad students), they do not understand the purpose of pedagogy. That doing problems is where you learn the material.
So if you make homework optional, the 10-15% hold steady and do it but the bulk of the class will stop doing problems and tank their grades on the exams. They will not internalize the lesson after that first bad exam, because it is morally and practially cheaper for them to believe they had a bad day or that their professor (me) is just a terrible meanie who constructed an exam with problems they've "never seen before" and "had no connection to the lecture" (actual evaluation comments I've had when I've tried to the homework-optional method).
Homework still provide valuable practice for students who are truly committed to learning. An automated system could provide an initial assessment and feedback. However, students can request human feedback paired with an in-person meeting. Such requests would require a mandatory explanation of what feedback they want or what the issue is. Professors and TAs will therefore only read and answer such requests themselves and will not waste time on AI output. At the same time, the system will still support students who are genuinely interested in learning.
Students who use AI to do their homework are not interested in such feedback anyway, and they will also avoid in-person meetings because it will naturally reveal that they are unprepared and did not do the homework themselves, which is humiliating.
To make this system work, we should present the in-person meetings as collaborative 'working sessions' or group office hours. Encouraging students to sign up in pairs or small groups also reduces individual anxiety.
The main channels for grading remain exams and oral presentations.
These can be written by AI. Or do you mean something more like the defending of a thesis?
Myself as a student i take my class notes and the subject matter the teacher provides and have Ai create multiple choice quizzes. It's a much quicker way to learn tho not as quickly as AI glasses I mentioned.
I wonder what the financial cost of AI will be to teaching? Does teaching get more expensive? More things need to be supervised, more things need to be presentations or in person?
The problem is not LLMs, but your university. In my undergrad, almost all the math courses had no required HW. They'd assign it, but you wouldn't turn it in. You'd come to office hours for help on the HW, or ask in class (they'd often dedicate the first 10-15 minutes of each lecture to Q&A).
It was awesome for people like me. No time wasted on neatly presented HWs. I'd do it quickly, verify the answers, and study for the exams.
The flip side was there were many exams (you don't want your grade catered if you do poorly in one exam). A course like calculus could have 4-5 "midterms", and then the final. Often, they'd drop your lowest midterm score so you're allowed one bad day.
I can’t imagine as American how that would go down with most American students.
How about cutting out the open book so that the students who don't study and to their homework actually fail? When I was in school many years ago "open book" was only used for special ed students and others who couldn't carry a regular academic workload. Homework was assigned, but our grades were determined solely by testing our mastery of the material. If you could master the material without doing the homework or showing up for class on non-testing days, more power to you. College has become more like kindergarten with all of the hand-holding.
In the classes I took with open note exams where I did well, I barely ended up consulting my notes anyway. The students who didn't study could flip through the textbooks all they wanted, but they lost so much time doing it that they couldn't complete all of the problems on the exam. For the students who studied well, the textbook was way easier to jump around in because they knew it well and knew what they were looking for.
Am exam that is designed to be closed book/closed note where a specific student is allowed some amount of notes as a disability accommodation is just different from one that is designed to be open note/open book from the start. The latter, testing the same material, is generally longer or harder to make better use of the format.
This was too long ago for me to remember the details of but, just making an example here, we might have had a course on homogeneization of elliptic problems using a model PDE with a div(A grad u) term throughout, and then the exam was about a PDE with a curl(A curl u) and some other added terms.
Notes carry the method and theoretical tools but you then still need to apply them to a new problem.
So, if anything, our open book exams were harder and a better test of understanding and mastery. You couldn’t rote your way into a good grade.
We had a formula "cheat sheet" on every exam paper, but if you don't know when or why you're supposed to use a formula, it might as well not have been in the cheatsheet at all
Force people to go all in with “impossible” tasks and see how they do with the power of LLMs. Then spend some significant time teaching people _with_ that solution in place what was actually built and what would have been a better architecture? A … software archeology session if you will.
That’s what most of what people do would be anyway - building PoC fast and then figuring out how to scale them?
Perhaps (sarcastically) this is the new approach, because this is now the point where they’re forced to struggle and therefore actually learn. An exam every other day, let them ask the questions.
I know this is absolutely impossible because I run in academic circles, but the solution: Literally just expel them. Just like they did when people cheated when I was in college. Don't make it a small punishment so that they turn it into a risk/reward assessment. Colleges are overpopulated anyway; just trim the fat of students who shouldn't be there. Do a follow up oral exam interview about their project and if they can't explain what someone like me spent 30+ hours building and can speak about for 4 hours if asked, then expel them. They can make your coffee at the nearby Starbucks, who cares.
If you don't do this then understand that you are telling your students not using AI that they will need to begin cheating like the others to be able to keep up with the changes. OP mentioned they massively increased the scope of their assignments, which means OP is forcing their students to use AI now.
Or rather, I do have ideas, but they do require substantial restructuring. E.g.:
1) Strict, in-person (no exceptions), electronics-free exams with written and oral portion.
2) Transition to guided independent learning: students are given written materials and recommended exercises to study. They are shown how to use AI assistants productively. Instead of lectures, there are scheduled discussions, where students can ask questions and listen to additional explanations from the lecturer. They can also seek feedback for completed exercises. However, none of this contributes to grades in any way.
With such an incentive realignment, I think it's possible that higher education could be salvaged. But... apart from general institutional inertia, there is also the political angle standing in the way. Everybody needs a degree in the "developed economy", and the above changes are basically the opposite of the nobody left behind policy that enables half the population to attain one...
Can't you just not grade it at all? If the student has done their homework, just consider it passed. And then don't count it at all for the final grade.
They don't even have to be a significant part of the rubric.
Just ensure the students know what they don't know.
But now you could have the students take a written exam every other week and use a LLM to grade it?
I'm pretty sure Opus 5.5 has good enough vision capabilities to auto grade with the right prompt.
I imagine this would work very well in the current period since there’s no reason to use LLMs for this homework. Of course even back then many students didn’t do it and got low grades, but you have to be responsible at some point.
I think the problem is the students also take ~4-5 subjects per semester, and each of them may be just as demanding. High school is even more spread out with 6-8 subjects per semester. There's only a certain number of hours during the day for study and homework. For many, math homework ends up being the most time-intensive. Also these exams determine their GPA which in turn plays in part in determining their standing for the next few decades of their lives.
Clearly teaching got a lot better, since we now have a new teaching tool at our use, the LLMs. It's evaluating that got harder, because students can use the same tool to cheat in traditional forms of evaluation.
If "teaching the students" means the same as "evaluating the students" to you, maybe you shouldn't teach in the first place.
It’s like copy-paste Wikipedia presentations 2 decades ago. People used to learn things doing research for a project. Then suddenly it became copying off Wikipedia and people not even pre-reading what they copied into PPT.
Even devoid of all the economic and social pressures that grades impose students would compromise their learning experience. Ever regretted looking up the solution to a puzzle in a video game or sneaked a peak at the crossword puzzle solutions?
One of the hardest part of teaching is keeping students from self-sabotage. Evaluation helps with that.
Beyond that evaluation is of course also useful just as feedback.
Don't do anything productive for the society but still get to live a decent life on benefits, job security etc combined with addictive social media have ruined most kids will to study.
And the schools are even worse. When I was in school, teachers encouraged learning things; whether for school or outside, with teacher or self help. Everything was fair game and supported. Debate was normal.
Nowadays the teachers in schools are like a cult. Kids are tuned to reject anything from outside; anything that contradicts teacher is a no go zone. Anything that's "too advanced" compared to what teacher is doing is forbidden. Kids are scared of learning by themselves because the teachers punish it. What do you think these kids will do when they grow up?
Need to divide. Show long division. TEACHER DIDN'T SHOW THIS METHOD. THIS IS FALSE!
Let's not even go into social/political issues since HN is filled with mental illnesses.
That strikes me as backward. The higher the expected monetary value of good grades, the more students will prioritise grades over deep learning.
This seems pretty inaccurate to me at just about every turn.
The fire under their asses is for grades and a degree because they've erroneously been told they need one or else they'll be flipping burgers.
It's such a cliche thing to say but cheating at school cheats yourself of the education you could be getting but, since that's not what most people are there for, they cheat. They are there because they've been told that they need a degree to make a decent living and the degree doesn't technically require learning.
It is not about being sold a lie about grades/degree but those are important too.
And just because it worked out for people like me (you?) who never needed a degree, doesn't mean that's the way for most people.
The primary difference now is that the both costs of cheating and ability to verify cheating on the instructor side have decreased dramatically, in tandem. There's also been a kind of mass effect, a cultural change in the attitude of students, where the sheer prevalence of cheating among their peers has made them less likely to feel fear, shame, or guilt over cheating. Students in the past who were caught were likely to confess immediately. Students now are increasingly belligerent and more likely to deny cheating, not just because they believe the professor can't 100% prove it, but also because they believe being caught out for cheating when most of their peers are getting away with it is unfair.
This gives me/us a lot of angles to understand what progress has been made throughout the semester as well as to consider and react to individual differences between students. In my book, it’s also resistant to faking it convincingly throughout all modalities. However, scaling that approach to big entry level courses would require more money for teaching than any research group in Europe I’ve ever seen has available.
— watches, calculators, discrete technological devices. I've seen kids encode text as patterns of dashes on their desks, sharing the cipher solution with their desk mates in other periods.
The problem isn't skirting the effort. The problem is systemic. Why does the system reward taking shortcuts? I think it's because most areas are focused on short horizon tasks, min-maxing effort:output. It's not a problem with those technical fields. It's a problem with the current crop of the C-Suite across the entire occupational plane. They're short sighted.
If someone manages to learn without doing the homework, or finds some way to learn better using an LLM, fine. The exam will show that.
- some skills only develop through the actual writing (similar to how you can't learn to code just by watching YouTube videos)
- in-class assignments are not always scalable (and students end up using AI anyway)
- students aren't motivated enough to participate actively
I think looking at the writing process is a more realistic approach, so I built Turingo (https://www.turingo.net). It replays how a Google Doc was written, highlights unusual edits (large pastes) and tracks how that text changed afterwards. Surprisingly, several professors reported that students often underestimate how much LLM-generated text is left in their final drafts, so just seeing the replay changes the conversation.
It's not meant to be a verdict machine like the existing AI detectors (another big problem in education), more of a starting point for the kind of conversations the author's TAs are having. In fact, we're also beta testing a feature that suggests a few questions for the professor to ask based on the replay.
And yes, it's not perfect and autotypers do exist, but they're dumber than you'd expect and nowhere close to mimicking a real human (I hope to address that soon).
Interestingly, this applies not just for learning, but also to a great extent in production/work contexts too.
The end goal of education is to help you understand how things work, with problem-solving being a means of developing and applying that understanding. LLMs shortcut the former and turn the latter into a pointless arms race that we cannot win.
I loved the example of increasing the complexity of learning projects, but I still feel like one question is missing: are people really trying to learn the same thing we were trying to teach them in the first place?
I recently did a course on teaching bachelor-level education, and had to study a couple of books. They all seemed to quote their sources and I got the impression that they're rooted in science.
I've also read news stories and stuff that support the idea that a lot of "education education" is of questionable value. This story is pretty old by now but has stuck with me: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-may-10-la-oe-zi... . A relevant quote:
> Of the 1,300 institutions awarding graduate degrees for teaching, Harvard’s director of teacher education told a 2009 conference, only about 100 prepared students for the classroom. The rest, she added, “could be shut down tomorrow.”
Some of these experiences/articles are about teaching K-12 schools rather than teaching college, but there would have to be a pretty huge difference between the two for me to think that college-level pedagogical theory was meaningfully better than that for younger ages, and I've seen nothing to give me that impression.
Now the question is, are these curriculi being rebuilt? Here in The Netherlands, yes.
Only because you're obsessed with being able to assign grades and fail cheaters.
No obsession required.
The situation reminds me of what my teachers used to tell me. "Learning how to look up things in a book will be a skill you'll need all your live and you won't carry a calculator with you at all times when you are grown up." Both assumptions were proven wrong before I was even out of school.
If the only remaining value of education is "to become a well rounded person" then why waste your time on it? It used to be you went to university because that was the only place to get knowledge from. Which is also why it was dominated by the rich and powerful. These days university feels a lot like paper money. Everyone just pretends it has a real value and because everyone agrees, that's where the value comes from.
It's little effort for a large benefit. But anything you learn past middle school in formal education is a moderate to large effort for a small to neglectable benefit. And you'll forget it anyway if it is uninteresting and not useful in your daily life.
Anything interesting or useful in your daily life, you'll pick up by yourself even without formal education.
Knowledge is not a tool for answering the absolutely minimum questions you encounter in daily life, but a way of seeing the world. Reading allows you to use language in ways you could not imagine with spoken word alone, just as math or physics or computer science enable new ways of thinking inaccessible without intense study.
Our brains can't hold infinite amounts of data and a lot of information will become inaccessible if not used regularly. This is also why most of us do not speak twelve different languages, despite this being a supremely useful skill that is relatively easy to pick up compared to semiconductor physics.