In high school math ,we usually had a stanupin the beginning of every lesson. Basically th entire class on their feet answering rapid fire questions from the teacher , usually some stuff that had been taught in the previous lesson. No calculator/notes just doing math in your head to get to sit down and start the class.
Gnereally sucked when we were going through it , looking back though made digesting the material easier as you had to know, not just cram or hope for a calc or scrap paper to caluclate with.
So basically a oral pop quiz for math. i think could work well to complement homeworks by making sure the material as taught is actually inside the students heads.
That is not the point of the article, though. He posits AI will just do better than humans soon, and he no longer knows whether people should even study math (from the article). So the point is that pursuing those studies is no longer useful; how or whether you grade is irrelevant at that point. (To be clear, I am not defending the statement, just explaining what I understood.)
With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought.
Zoho is a classics example of picking students at age 16/17, when they'd typically join a UG course, and instead train them on the job.
Some of the large tech service companies change incentives by tying a training fee ("bond") which is tied to some tenure (1-2 years). Departing before this would mean giving this back - which broadly incentives the planned tenure.
Other companies (musigma is an example) present pay as a 4 year package (10X), which is split 1/2/3/4X across 4 years.
I think the challenges US universities/companies are today facing is something India has needed for a couple decades now. I would not be surprised if many of these are tried in the US.
If you do plan - reach out to me, it's something I've wanted to expand into (currently run UG curriculums).
I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.
To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.
Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.
You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.
The software projects you work on as coursework just give you the shallowest possible mechanical introduction on how to put together working code, and their point is almost always to demostrate some underlying theory like networking or distributed systems or graphics or whatever has been understood. It's not to pretend to produce anything viable in a commercial sense or please any imagined customer or market.
Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this.
And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them.
Maybe AI will be yet another disincentivized for higher education. When I was considering law school a decade ago, the overwhelming advices from existing attorneys was “unless you’re in the top 10% of the top 10% of universities, you’re wasting your time getting a law degree”. Seems very similar to university today (at least in the USA)
I've heard this argument over decades and to this day it doesn't make any sense to me. You know what happens when you do that ivory tower thing? Those professions die.
This is quite sad. Even if students would cheat off each other, someone had to do the homework. And even the collaboration of cheating on homework always served as a forcing function for me or others to think about the material. If not actively, at least in the form of a quasi background radiation. With AI that is completely gone, and without reward loops for incremental work, the truth is there is a large number of people (especially 18-20 year olds) who will not do well on the exams because they need a bit of a stick.
I am not saying this as a black and white statement. I just think there are different cohorts of students based on maturity and self motivation and we might be losing out on one cohort that is at neither extreme.
When I was young, public universities in Spain only evaluated the final exam. That was not a problem; it helped people become responsible. Nowadays, they have changed it to evaluate continuous homework, and students end up worse prepared.
Unfortunately the single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day? Can you perform under arbitrarily selected stressful conditions? Are your executive functions fine with that plan?
The responsibility part is just one element influencing the result.
>single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day?
If it's a well-designed course it should be clear what the content of the exam will be. If not, it's the professor's fault. And barring rare emergencies being rested on the day is also generally a matter of preparation, not luck.
It's clear what pool the content will be from. But it's impossible to check everything. Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.
> barring rare emergencies
It doesn't have to be a rare emergency. Things happen, loud student parties happen, random bad nights happen.
> Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.
In the case of calculus as an example, there should be nothing from the class you didn't have time to practice sufficiently. A full academic year is more than enough time to learn integrals, derivatives, sequences, and series with the small collection of tricks for solving difficult problems (telescoping series, trig sub, etc.) There's a couple dozen rules you learn that are straightforward to apply, and for the times they aren't obvious, there's like a dozen total tricks (trig sub, etc.).
I took these classes. I remember how most people just phoned in the entire thing and complained at the exam review sessions how hard everything was.
Your argument seems to imply that the only thing that an exam is possibly allowed to measure is ability to answer a question at some arbitrary point in time. It also separates the people with the wit to understand a bunch of topics in a span of 3 or 5 months, the ability to plan accordingly, enough self control, and some motivation to see the plan through from the ones that don't. That's not a bad thing, as diplomas are often used as a proxy not only for intelligence, but also for suitability to certain jobs.
"You may bring one 8.5x11 double-sided cheat sheet into the exam. You may write anything you want on it. And I promise you that if you prepare such a sheet, you'll never even look at it during the exam."
I certainly find that now, going back to uni. In a couple of subjects we get the option to prepare a cheat sheet, and I would say I actually look at less than 10% of it. The act of preparing it forces me to revise, and internalise the facts and ideas.
Only if you were planning to scrape by. If you actually know the material (the thing the exam is supposed to determine), you should do fine, and any good or bad luck will tend to average out by the time you graduate. Besides, there really aren't any alternatives left. Completed homework had some weak-ish signal for a while, but now it doesn't.
Ultimately the goal of education shouldn't just be a filter but it should ensure that as many people as possible learn the material. Homework allows for early intervention by faculty to get people back on track. There really are students who end up succeeding after this intervention.
The solution is not to feed students from spoon all the time. They are adults and should act as such, it is not a school where it is really important to give every child a chance. Grading homework must be opt-in. Those who want it, get the grade as a feedback, can seek for help then and get the help, those who skip should be assumed prepared for final exam and judged by it. There are millions of people in the world who can use education opportunities to their maximum, and the place should not be reserved to those who feel entitled by whatever privilege they have.
We observe that intervention leads to more students learning. I don't believe that "well they are adults they can fail if they want" is an excuse for a university refusing to take steps that they know would improve pedagogy.
I do agree that AI has made this basically useless. Rather than skipping homeworks or doing a bad job the students just cheat and there is no opportunity to notice and intervene. They get all the way to the screen-free final and fail.
I do not think that controlling homework does improve pedagogy at scale. Homework helps engaged and motivated students who are ready to accept the feedback. Maybe in your place they are majority and effects are visible. As soon as grades for homework become the goal, the Goodhart‘s law starts playing the role in the dynamics of relationships between students and teachers. AI has nothing to do with it, cheating with homework did always exist.
As someone who tasted both education models, the US model of babysitting students for the first few years after high school is superior. Students coming in with relatively weak preparation are able to catch up to their better prepared peers within a couple years. At the junior (3rd year) level you can hardly tell the difference between the graduates of elite high schools and run of the mill public schools. I think the entry bar is much higher, and in many cases insurmountable, in Europe. It persists through the years so someone perfectly capable of developing the required discipline and chops has no chance if they didn't come from the right high school or high school track.
I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.
I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.
I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.
It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.
And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.
Cheating always has been available as an option. AI just makes it faster. At Cal, you always had students who would still pursue doing things on their own even when not cheating led to lower grades. The reality of it all is that cheating catches up to you eventually and the later it does, the worse are the outcomes. If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.
Half the class was cheating in Ion Stoica’s OS class even when the whole thing was supposed to be a group effort. Like how are you cheating when you’re already working in groups of 4?
> If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.
Love the optimism, but if you really believe the universe is this fair then you’re too young, too naive or too inexperienced (or any combination therein). The world is absolutely full of people who have cruised through all of that but still manage to get (and maintain) good high paying jobs all the time. “Failing upwards” is a commonly observed phenomenon everywhere, in pretty much every industry.
Truth is: none of that matters in the real world. What matters is how good you are at networking and bullshitting your way through life. Unfortunately for those of us that are terrible at bullshitting, this means a harder professional life no matter how much effort you put into it.
I think you’re conflating too many things here. Never claimed that the universe is fair nor do I claim that failing upwards isn’t a thing.
If you think bullshiting and networking are the only things that matter, then I believe it’s your pessimism that’s talking.
In a class of 100, if 50 decide to learn things and 50 decide to complete assignments using AI without learning, I’m willing to put money behind the idea that more people in the first group will do better in life. Of course there will be exceptions because there’s a lot more in life beyond competence, including luck that influences outcomes.
I know you chose 50/50 arbitrarily. But I think the real numbers are much worse. A few years ago, I stayed a couple nights at a hostel in a rural spot in Italy. I’m in my 50s, and most of the others there were Americans in their 20s, fairly recent grads. A dozen of us went out to dinner one night, and among the topics discussed was cheating in college. Only myself and one of the younger people said we did not cheat, the others all treated it as an expected part of the college experience. This isn’t exactly “data”, and perhaps there’s some sort of correlation between hostel-goer and cheater, but I was shocked at the numbers. And that was before LLM usage was common.
Another angle on this is the tope that curriculum is so out of date your AI completed assignment may be ahead of the class subject matter. The real teacher is is having a motivation or need to do something and learning about what you need to learn to get the goal accomplished, AI can be a great companion for that journey, weeding out the sycophantic slop and getting to truth is the new challenge. There are a lot of elements to school that discourage curiosity (asking a stupid question in front of class) or being picked on for being a keener or other anti-intellectual "cool kid" mentalities. In the end we need to make the line between learning and success more obvious for young people, maybe that doesn't work when the definition of success includes fitting into a burocracy and letting the singing key be "4".
Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place. We have pushed far too many youths into college as the default option, and that hasn't been good for the students or the institutions.
There are plenty of people who have the innate intelligence and intellectual curiosity to succeed in college, but come out of high school lacking discipline and clueless about what they want to study. They would be better off spending a few years working or serving in the military or something to get their shit together first, and then enroll in college later. Those students tend to have clearer goals and take the educational experience more seriously.
> Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place
Well, that raises an interesting philosophical question. What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Surely you agree that there are a wide variety of teaching styles present among all college professors. If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material? Why is this an issue with the student, and not the professor not being teaching material, or the university not being facilitator-of-education material for failing to match students and professors well?
I agree that people have been pushed into college as a default option due to it being overloaded as both place of learning but also printing salary-granting papers, but it's NOT clear to me that students who need the specific stick mentioned in some cases are broadly unsuited for higher learning.
It's about having to be externally motivated for that particular assignment. Or class of assignment, whatever.
There are often a variety of tasks which are graded. Homework, exams, presentations, labs, etc. Every class and professor sets the mix of valuation of these differently, and has different quantities of each. That's teaching style.
If you hate presentations and cannot be roused to make one except by threat of failure, but are great at learning the material and pass the exams with ease, then that's a teaching style incompatibility.
> What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Any that are self motivated.
> If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material?
Honestly, no. It shows a lack of (a) institutional-navigational skills, e.g. change your professor, (b) flexibility to different learning "styles" (which are increasingly being shown to be a myth and (c) ability to circumvent adversity, e.g. by reading the textbook on their own time or finding alternate resources or hunting down a study group. That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
> That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
I disagree, because muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life.
> To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.
Again, I disagree.I mean, I agree on its face, in that a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree.
But we're talking about people who aren't motivated and capable. The best path to something resembling success for people who lack the motivation and capability to be successful on their own, is to muddle through the university system and by whatever necessary means get the piece of paper.
College at large is not a waste of time for these people. Until the downstream society stops valuing a degree as it does, time spent getting the degree is not wasted, because it yielded the degree. If the paper is had, the time was well spent, regardless of how that time was actually spent or whether anything was learned.
> muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life
True [1]. I'm not debating the individual incentives. (I wasn't clear about this.) I'm just not convinced a college graduate who muddled through is worth 75% more to an employer or society than a high school student who muddles.
> a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree
For a binary measure of success, yes. A successful person empowered with a peaceful, rich society and challenging college experience will do better than one without.
In the real world, those on the bottom of the social hierarchy (such as undergrad students) need to adapt to the styles of those on the top (professors). Perhaps that's unfair but it's just the way the world operates. College can be a great environment to learn that essential life skill of adaptability. Find a way to succeed even when you're in a shitty environment surrounded by toxic people.
If we're talking about "the way the world operates", then because of how society values college degrees, any path that gets you the piece of paper is a worthwhile and valuable one. Whether that path involves learning, complaining until given a passing grade, or forcing/convincing your professors to accommodate your preferred style of "learning".
This is something that needs to be fixed downstream, by making the paper less valuable. Making the paper more difficult to get instead is just manufacturing misery because of people too stubborn to pull their heads out of the sand and admit that the function of undergrad is the salary paper, and self-motivated learning has been largely relegated to grad school.
Much of college is a social signaling mechanism. Well over a decade ago one of my family members, with a degree of shame had to explain to a friend why I didn’t finish my BA.
A lot of middle and upper class people use college as a way to filter people. You can argue our top universities also serve as finishing schools.
I did, after reaching six figures anyway, finish my BA. The shame is gone.
Or does it still linger as I went to a middle of the road state school. Not Stanford, Yale or even Berkeley.
Honestly I originally attended community college in part to get grant money/loans which allowed me to get a cheap apartment. As a bonus I meet a lot of cool people, read Howard Zinn.
Sure, there are fundamental questions about what college should really be for. Should the focus be on training competent employees or educating well-rounded citizens or anointing social elites or eliminating injustice or advancing the frontiers of human knowledge? Everyone seems to be coming to the debate with different unstated assumptions about that.
I did very poorly in school growing up. I think I failed at least 4-6 classes in middle/high school.
In college I did well and I'm now getting my masters in CS while working as a software engineer.
So, the 'stick' can certainly be useful. Doing poorly in high school is not necessarily an indicator of how you will do in college -- particularly if your life at home was turbulent as it was for me.
You missed the point. Some level of "stick" is appropriate and often necessary for children in middle/high school. But this article is about adults in college. If you get to college and still need the stick then it's probably not the right place for you.
None of that would seem like a problem to me if the costs for going to US colleges and universities weren't so ridiculous and the penalties for student loan debt weren't so one sided.
Back when I was a student, 25+ years ago, many professors were a bit lazy. They just re-used problem sets which they had made earlier. No single year would be alike, but the problem sets would still be from a larger collection.
The students would then hand down the big book of problem and solution sets down to the freshman class.
The professors, still being a bit lazy, knew this. But instead of scarping the old problems, they'd just say that cheating only hurts the students doing it - as the homework grades would not influence the final grade. And sure enough, the students that never did their own work, rarely did well (if at all passed) on the finals exam.
When I was at university, a student caught cheating was cause for being expelled.
I am recruiting college kids right now, impeccable pedigrees, elite universities. Our recruitment process involves the kids recording videos where they answer questions as a pre-screening. They are explicitly told not to use AI for the exercise. I have the Claude and ChatGPT answer to those questions on my screen while I review their responses. 40% read it pretty much verbatim. The paradox is I don't even care whether they knew the answer or not, but to me it's an integrity test.
I use this in class. Basically if you turn in the complete work, your getting an A. But I make sure they know that there's an interviewer with slathering fangs waiting to make sure they have it down.
I'm not the students' competitor; the interviewer is. And the students not only have to impress the interviewer, but they have to impress them more than all their peers do!
The first place I taught gave no grades or unrequested feedback on anything. And no certificate. And those cohorts had the best placement rates. There was nothing in the school for the students to game, so they kept their eye on the real prize.
I had two classes like this, zero grades over the semester, they were among my favorite. Though we didn't really ponder what we were doing there and the means for final grades, for the admins, were both interesting (final test too long and hard, you already know what your grade is)
> Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework.
In high school (2006) my physics teacher gave credit for handing in the homework (he checked it and handed it back, but no grade was assigned). Didn't hand in homework, you got a zero.
He knew then that if you assign grades to hw, people will cheat.
If I'm paying for Berkeley, the professor have office hours for me to ask questions.
Cambridge engineering had something similar called "standard credit" for minor assignments. You'd get the full mark by default, only losing marks if missing or egregiously bad. The exam at the end of each year carried almost all of the grade. It meant you had to engage with the work, but didn't turn it into an exhausting competition for the best coursework grades.
Yes I also had this in Uni at some point. Just going through the homework can be a huge effort. If the course is small enough, you probably don't want to hand in obvious junk/slop, especially if you're asked to present "your" solution.
When I worked as a teaching assistant at my university, we had a mix of knowledge-based questions to which you had to research the correct answers, as well as some questions you had to brainstorm and argue your decision. We didn't grade correct answers, just looked over them to see if the student engaged with the question. In my opinion, those were really easy points to get, especially considering it was one of the hardest courses in the whole study program, but there still were many students who skipped the homework. Now, I've never been able to prove causation (wouldn't even know how), but it turns out that students who solved the homework questions also did well on the exams, and those who seemed to have used some AI chat for the questions did not. And even me telling my students exactly this did not affect the outcome of semester after semester. I believe that lots of guys were just there for the degree and looking to coast by with minimal effort, but for me it always seemed like a big waste of time to go to a university if you're not even going to try to learn something. The first few semesters, I was really frustrated avout this, but as the old saying goes: You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.
Everyone is on their own journey and learn when they are ready for it.
I took school seriously and went through notepads solving problems from the book. But there were others that attended after work or were there for the degree.
School for most doesn’t exist in isolation from the external world, unlike a boarding school.
I never had a good math teacher in college that graded homework. The good ones told you which problems to do, and they told you that you'd be doomed on the exams if you didn't do them. They also only assigned the problems that had answers in the book.
Making homework a part of your grade is like making attendance a part of your grade. It's something that teachers who aren't capable of teaching do, so they can give students who haven't learned a thing reasonable looking grades. Students have always cheated when homework was graded, it's just that AI makes it so flagrant that it can't be conveniently ignored.
I'm overestimating people, though. There are clearly teachers who are still pretending like students don't cheat when it's like five clicks now. It was much, much harder when tons were still cheating half a century ago. You had to actually meet each other. Admitting that you're collecting a check for nothing is tough, especially because now you're going to have to work.
Who am I kidding? Teachers will just start talking about how grading is bad or racist or something, or saying that using AI is actually better preparation for the future. Hell, they should have done that half a century ago: in real life, being able to cheat well is the best skill.
I have a solution, but I don't think people will appreciate it, because:
1) it is very analog
2) requires work from both student and teacher
3) there is no AI in it
4) there is not money to made on it
5) all of the above
In short, do what my MBA class did. At home you study the examples, the how behind it and possible solutions. In class, you may be called in front of the class to show that you know what you are doing.
It's already here. For instance I could walk into this guys math class, not even read the questions or material being taught and _guarantee_ that I'm going to be the highest performer as long as I have access to Astra/Fable. Like, it's not even close.
I went to Montessori school as a kid then I was in private school briefly till my parents went broke. Then I went to public school for the remainder of my career before I went to college and graduate school. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level and sat on academic boards for Purdue.
Graded and ranked assignments do nothing other than act as a filter for the structural organization to determine who they want to give resources to
The “educational” system has nothing to do with platonic or frankly any other thoughts of education for the polis
I'm a bit mixed on this. A lot of graded work is busywork, but a benchmark is needed to see whether concepts are landing or not before midterms or finals, and the easiest way for that is some kind of grading.
Break down the learning objectives to measurable experiment replication then:
Show one, do one, teach one
If you can’t do one or teach one you dont move to the next step.
It’s literally just how apprenticeship works and there’s no reason you can’t do that for calculus or intro to economics and especially applicable to EE, ME, CE
Teaching in academic settings is absurdly inefficient and counterproductive in my experience
Apprenticeship is a good model. The tutorial system also seems to work at some universities.
Personally I have found well-organized, clearly presented university courses to be great ways to learn the material. The combination of readings, textbooks, lectures, tutorial sessions, writing, labs, problem sets, course projects, etc. has been effective for me. Good textbooks and online resources have also been very helpful. Obviously it only works if you actually do the work yourself.
You're not wrong about grading being largely a ranking system for resource allocation.
Even in the age of AI, I think I still prefer a portfolio system where you have a body of work that you can present and defend in an interview for a job or graduate school position.
However, personalized feedback for student work is still very useful, and it may be more beneficial if it is focused on helping students individually rather than ranking them or sorting them into bins.
Without some sort of assessment, it can be hard to determine whether the students actually learned anything. The question is: how do you use that information? I think it should primarily be used as feedback to the students and the instructors, with the aim of improving learning.
So, the guy who does brain surgery on you... you want him to have taken some electives he was interested in, passed for having a pulse, then sent off to work in the operating room? Or, should he be required to have gotten at least 80% of questions right on a test of his surgical knowledge?
Well yeah, we just do in person assignments. We keep one every week, not necessarily a new topic every week, the difficulty is distributed, and take best K of N, which automatically allows for absentees and such. The system works well overall. For very weak students (bottom 10%ish) we customize it a bit and make a curriculum of sorts, sometimes re-covering content from a few weeks ago (AI is very useful for analysing answer transcripts and finding these weak points). And then, a final, also in person, for like 15% of the grade.
Large programming assignments also work decent (for now at least), where codex is encouraged, but we make the assignment research oriented and obscenely large with lots of messy and dependent steps, enough that you have to steer enough to do context management and not output slop reports/inferences. It is almost like a research project, where AI's "taste" is still extremely lacking (we often see totally circular/trivial-but-dressed-up investigative results from sloppers, very much like the slop neurips/iclr papers these days). Just one of these per course with a 10 minute in person viva at the end. Previously this used to be a project part of the course, but the old way with reports and presentations just ended up with way too much slop to use as a signal. Also, we just made it individual instead of a group project.
For this type of course, grading on a curve also made less sense, so we instead do a kind of "cluster" based grading. We start from the top giving S, see where the first big gap is, that starts A, the next big gap starts B, and so on. These clusters form really well in the above type of courses (empirically, undergrad lin alg, undergrad databases, and grad RL courses)
I never graded homework or anything else except the final exam.
In the lab I assist students with implementing and understanding code. Since they know they are not graded, there is no incentive for them to use AI. Sometimes we do try AI for the lulz but it makes as much sense as looking at the solutions (which I do provide already). As I frequently tell them, "AI can replace me teaching you, it cannot replace you understanding the material".
When I studied, in Norway, we never got any marks or points for our homework. Our final grade was based 100% on our final exam (or mix of final exam + projects for the classes which had those), which was always a pen and paper type of exam. We did have mandatory homework we had to complete, in order take the final exam, but we never got any grades on those.
Later on, when I became a TA, there were obvious signs of cheating in the homework, i.e. people handing in the same homework with the same step-by-step solution, with the exact same errors.
In any case, cheating on homework wouldn't help their grade.
Part of the purpose of rigorous education is to make sure that students are competent for the academic labor force, but that's only half of the story. The other purpose is to preserve existing knowledge and prevent its loss to the force of entropy eating away at texts, files and neurons. If there's no preservation of knowledge in the academic form anymore we have no choice but to rely on AI, which has a massive downside:
In the event that the cascading metal mining yield declines aren't solved by new tech and we do lose AI, we are now in the state that we will probably also lose calculus, liberalism and the ability to design a steam engine.
There was constant change in the palaeolithic, of the form "which tribe controls which valley" and no further. The range of possible changes is gonna shrink without a stable climate and/or a solid tech foundation.
At the lower undergrad level, there was already no point in grading homework a decade ago because Wolfram Alpha existed.
At the graduate level maybe this problem is solved by doing Moore-style classes where the students present (on the chalkboard, not slides) and the professor critiques. Students could still have AI generate proofs and print them out or hand copy them, but maybe that's fine.
Upper undergrad level is tricky, because students are expected to prove things, but maybe don't have the maturity for full-on Moore-style.
Maybe forcing them to turn in the homework hand written would help. They’d probably at least learn something by osmosis if they had to write down what the LLM spit out.
I'm willing to give him (or anyone else going through this) a lot of grace here as I think almost everyone who will be impacted by AI will go through 3 major stages, at different rates with each step taking a while to both really be true, and then a bit longer to accept and solidify into reality. And our egos act as blinders on accepting that the next step is likely.
1) AI is useless.
2) AI helps me.
3) AI replaced me (unless I am a generationally gifted top performer in my field).
While he is, in fact, a generationally gifted top performer in his field, he knows that statistically speaking most of his students will not be which I think makes his apparent angst now understandable.
On the flip side, AI's can now grade pure math problems with the accuracy and rigor of a postdoc. And unlike PhD tutors, they're universally accessible to all.
It's the start of a golden age for those of us who are curious autodidacts. If you're working through the exercises of a math textbook, you can now instantly submit your (attempted) theorem-proof to the nearest robot, and see all your misconceptions and shortfalls of rigor laid bare.
Yeah this is what confuses me and gives me hope. I would have loved to have had AI in college. I probably would have had the confidence to take more and harder classes and generally been much less stressed.
10 years ago it felt like most students would take any easy chance to cheat, especially on nightly homework freshman year. I wouldn’t do it because for some sick reason I was actually motivated by learning more than the grade.
I’ve loved using AI to learn. I made SQL and Python classes of my own to finally get beyond a basic understanding of them. I made an Anki deck to learn a foreign language with very poor existing online resources.
> On the flip side, AI's can now grade pure math problems with the accuracy and rigor of a postdoc.
Wait, I'm curious about this bit - I did my math undergrad ~16 years ago and all my homework was handwritten.
Are now AIs capable of ingesting my mess of poor handwriting with arrows indicating the flow of a proof (e.g. from the bottom of the page to the top of a hand-drawn column half-way up the page to cram in the rest of the proof)?
Brian Harvey, who taught CS 61A at Berkeley for decades (and wrote Berkeley Logo and Simply Scheme and Snap!), was making this argument long before AI. From "Using Computers for Educational Freedom":
>Students learn best through intrinsic motivation, not through force. What you learn under pressure doesn't last past the exam. Everyone says these things, and yet almost all teachers continue to give grades. Why? "It's required"; "The colleges need grades"; "The parents wouldn't stand for it"; "It's the way things are." In short, the reasons for grades are political.
At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School he built a computer course of self-paced units with no grades, and about 50 kids had keys to the computer center and used it evenings and weekends without adult supervision. In his Snap!Con 2025 talk for the ACM Karlstrom award he said why the no-grades part mattered:
>Everything conspires to make teachers the enemies of kids. Not because any teacher wants that, but because institutions have a lot of weight. And when you're giving somebody grades, you can't be their friend. It just doesn't work like that. You're not their friend -- you're a hurdle they have to overcome.
>Um so yeah, it was really important to me
that they let me not give grades and I think that made the whole thing possible and I couldn't have done it otherwise.
>Mostly, people who talk about AI in education see it as a threat: kids will use it to cheat; or maybe AI will replace teachers so we won't have jobs anymore [...] I'm pretty confident that AI won't replace teachers for rich kids — and computers already replace teachers for poor kids, long before AI.
AI didn't create the problem with graded homework. It just made it impossible to keep pretending the grade measures the learning.
Brian Harvey was really great as a professor. I loved his personality and demeanor that he brought to class. I came to cs61a for a SICP experience, and I'd say he delivered exceptionally well -- maybe more relaxed but equally engaging as lectures I've seen from Abelson and Sussman. It was very fun and rewarding; the course notes and assignments were great. To much regret, I only made it to his office hours a few times (was living in The City, and not an AM person), but I think he really cared for the students, and felt like a wise uncle that I wish I had.
this is what comes for education, the same way as agents can solve home work, they can grade, curate what you learn, what you work on etc.
professors needs to be life coaches and motivators, less of a oral/written book reproducer. That part will be automated. Evals also will be in a locked room, do you home work, bi-weekly do the check, correct with agent what needs to be repeated. Measure if you on course/off course doing better/worse. If you are not doing good, escalate to your coach(professor).
I mean, sure, charisma can engage people into several classes, but also, lets be honest what % of professors really got charisma? If it helps lectures are great, the active work should be done with agents, individually and in the team. of human, and other peoples agents. That's the future of work.
The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
Aside from the irony that Borcherds probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while, instead let’s examine the purpose of homework. It helps you learn. You can read a chapter and think you understand the material, but doing homework makes you engage more with the material. Recently we’ve used the external motivator of course points to encourage this good habit. But this turns the relationship between teacher and student into a transaction- you do a problem, you get a point. And most young students really don’t care beyond that transaction. They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
So if we’re not going to rethink the purely transactional relationship schools have with most students, then you probably should stop giving points and grading homework. You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription. That’s possible to figure out. A lot of people have pointed out various equity risks but it’s really just a matter of balancing the AI risk with the equity risk at the weighting acceptable to your institution.
You could also attempt the much more challenging prospect of turning the transactional nature of college into some other relationship which fosters a student’s intrinsic motivation of learning for the sake of learning, but I bet your institution goes bankrupt in the process. So really you should just stop grading homework and put 100% of the grade weight into proctored assessments with some sort of firewall against AI tools. Anyone that faces an equity disadvantage because of this was probably also disadvantaged by the fact that you let rich kids with premium AI subscriptions get better grades on their homework.
One of my freshman math teachers gave grades out for 3 tests and none on homework. He also told us that if we didnt take the first 2 tests, it wouldn't count against us and only the grade on our final would count. Along with that he had extensive open office hours.
It was the math class where I learned the most as well as I wasn't doing rote work and was able to talk to him whenever I had an actual question.
I dont like AI destroying some of our systems but if we return back to the sort of learning that college used to be where it was self directed with guidance from professors, I will count that as a win over the factory worker production system that high school was and universities were starting to ape.
My university math and even my high school calculus class was pretty much like this.
We had homework assigned and in the high school class the teacher spent part of class time reviewing and taking questions about the previous homework set. In the university classes this was done in a discussion section or in office hours.
In high school the homework was supposed to all be in one notebook which would be reviewed periodically but only to see that some effort was being made, it was not graded. It counted maybe 10% of the grade. In the university classes it wasn't even looked at.
The vast majority of the grade was based on quizes and exams, we were typically allowed to bring one standard-sized page of notes for these, and a calculator.
> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.
Maybe a problem in the long term, but irrelevant here. These students paid (a lot of) money for this service. The provider of the service needs to stop complaining and do their job (grade the homework). If even a single student did the work themselves, anything otherwise would be a disservice.
Is that what the students are really paying for? Even before LLMs, some of my college classes had optional and ungraded homework. Students could show up for discussion sessions to ask questions and get help from the instructor or teaching assistants if needed, but that didn't impact their grades. That seemed to be a reasonable approach, although it might vary by subject.
Doing homework is a time-tested, proven way to learn. That is why schools around the world continually assign homework and then grade it. I don't care that you get the right answer. If my daughter's first grade teacher really wanted to subtract 7 from 9, she would grab a calculator or just do it herself. But my daughter is assigned that work anyway because my daughter needs to do those things to learn.
There is and always will be debate on what's worth learning, but if we decide that something is worth learning, it is worth learning to do it yourself, not have AI do it. Schools all over have a big problem with that because kids are using AI to do things that we believe are learning. Is this something that's important to learn or should we now say, you know what? Everyone has an AI. Let's stop teaching these stupid things that AI does well and start teaching other things. That's a question I'm not going to answer, only time will tell and we'll have other debates in the future along similar lines about something else.
This discussion is about college, not first grade. College students who want to do homework to learn more are still free to do so. No one is stopping them.
People of all ages rarely do hard things that are good for them. Colleges have long assigned homework. My daughter has enough time reserved in class to do the work without taking it home.
> Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. He admitted that it is “not a very good system,” but at the moment, he has no alternative
He still assigns homework. He's not grading it. The students that want to try, they're free to do it. If they have questions, there are office hours.
The only thing being removed is the grading, not their homework.
The service being paid for is not homework grading. Homework grading is merely one part of how the service has historically been implemented, but if changing circumstances make grading homework less useful, then not grading homework is the service provider doing their job.
> These students paid (a lot of) money for this service
The schools are providing two services to students, not one. There's one directly and the other indirectly. And those two services are sometimes at odds.
The direct service is to teach them. Skills, knowledge, perspectives, critical thinking, etc.
The indirect service is to act as a proxy for people and organizations in the world to avoid having to do a thorough examination of a person's abilities. A degree is an attestation that a student has cleared all the hurdles and accomplished something of value. The better the reputation of the institution, the more value this service is to a student.
Just because students are paying for the direct service doesn't mean they aren't also paying for the indirect one too, it's just that the reputation has been established by all the students that came before and these students will be affecting the reputation for students coming afterwards.
Regardless, because a huge chunk of the service is that attestation, it's not as simple as the customer pays so the customer should get what they want. The universities need to figure out a way to maintain the value of their attestation in the face of students who try to subvert the evaluation process and a changing world. And if homework is providing little value in that regard, some rethinking might be warranted. They could assign it and optionally grade it on request for students who want their work evaluated but make it clear that it bears no connection to the grade that leads to the degree. They could come up with some other means of evaluating whether students have worked or learned the material. They could rework the material to account for the existence of AI. Just like calculators or the internet changed the work environment to obviate previously valuable skills, today's students will be living their lives in a world where AI exists and certain previously valuable skills will not be valuable going forward. A university's job is to produce the most capable person for the environment in which they will live their life. If the old curriculum isn't doing that, the curriculum needs to be rethought. And homework might take on a different role or be significantly less important in that rethought curriculum.
Many of the 3rd-tier institutions are going to go bankrupt anyway. Demographic changes had already made that inevitable but AI has accelerated the timeline. If they want to survive at all then they'll need to reinvent themselves as vocational training facilities or senior assisted living or something. This is going to be rough for the faculty, and will make the process of finding a tenure track teaching position even more brutal.
All of them will. There's zero value in higher education nowadays. In fact I'd argue there's negative value. An inquisitive 13 year old backed by AI can be more productive and resourceful than a team of 100+ Ivy League educated PhDs. Sad, but true. And this is today. Fast forward twenty years after massive AI augmented improvements of hardware and more advanced models have occured and it's game over.
HN’s love for the Platonic autodidact meets HN’s agreement with whatever tech SC is shoving down our throats (mudulo “sad but true” or whatever value judgements which still agree with the investor trajectory).
The number of students graduating high school peaked in 2025 and has now started a gradual decline. Colleges are essentially now playing a game of "musical chairs" competing for students and there aren't enough to go around. The elite institutions and cost-effective state schools will probably be fine but less exclusive private colleges without a solid value proposition have no clear path to survival.
We have pretty accurate counts of numbers of babies born each year, and number of child immigrants. So that makes it straightforward to forecast the number of high school graduates. People are having fewer children.
Well since you mentioned it, I posit that most of the financial issues the world is facing today is because the GFC wasn’t allowed to occur, it’s been a slow bleeding out ever since.
> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.
No structure needed, the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people. It’s the actual business model; undergraduate education is break even, the only way money is ever made is alums donating to the school due to the feel-good memories they formed when they attended.
Unfortunately, for schools who thought their purpose was to educate, they will be made obsolete in the near future. Expect a lot of schools to close.
But those places that always understood their purpose was for affluent young adults to mingle and connect with other affluent people, they will be just fine.
> the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people
Post-GI Bill. Before university was universal, there was a strong philosophical angle to the enterprise. (Also meet your generation's rich kids, that's always been a part of it.)
The irony is that homework barely helped even before AI. I feel like we should move more into self grading extra material for students to peruse if they are unsure about their ability in the subject, rather than adding chore to those that are fine and a point of worry for those that need that bit extra.
Really? When I'm reading textbooks nowadays for fun, I absolutely do the problems at the end of the chapter. It tells you when you think you learned something but didn't.
Maybe in some other subjects. Not in mathematics. When I did my math degree a large amount of the learning came via doing problem sets and this was a very common experience among other students too.
>This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
No, that's not common at all, nor how the system works. Use of graders/TAs are on an institution basis.
"Grant money" has absolutely nothing to do with it. Grant money is earmarked for specific research and cannot be spent for teaching purposes. When grant money is used to hire graduate students, they are research assistants and must work on the research project which the grant money was given for.
TAs/graders come from separate tuition budgets. Tuition dollars are much more preferred anyway because they're stable and faculty do not have to work for them, they show up based on enrollment.
The fact you have TAs/graders at all is by institution. Large R1 institutions have grad students and undergraduate population to fill these roles. In these institutions, 1 minimally sized undergrad class = at least 1 TA, with additional TAs and graders after some enrollment threshold.
Tenure has absolutely nothing to do with it. Adjunct faculty get TAs/graders all the same.
Indeed, to support your point, I had a teaching assistantship for my first two years of grad school, meaning that I worked on an as-needed basis for things like supervising labs, proctoring exams, grading papers, etc. It was funded by the department. Where I went to school, the TA workload was pretty light.
Then I got a research assistantship, which was funded by my advisor's grant. I meant that I got paid to do my thesis research, and no longer had to teach. This was a precondition for joining his group.
My group was new, lacking much in the way of research funds. Therefore, we taught for support (Chemistry): lab proctor, recitation leader. Somebody had to wrangle those 1000 people taking 1st-year chemistry. Pre-med, pre-vet, pre-dental, biology and a rare chemistry major or two. In return, the department covered my living expenses. This was in ancient times, but I figure similar mechanisms exist today because the student base seems to be quite similar.
And, for larger undergraduate courses, the graders may be undergrads hired to do this menial work for the TAs, while the TAs focus on things like extra study sections and office hours.
As a CS undergrad, I did that kind of work at UC Berkeley in the 90s, grading courses that I'd taken 2-4 semesters earlier. I even did a semester as a TA, because the professor was having a hard time finding enough grad students who wanted to deal with one of those larger classes.
In interviews I sort of bit the bullet and do pair ai coding interviews - you just have to change with the times
My guess based on my experience as a math major is that they just stop giving homework and the in class tests become more rigorous (can’t imagine how much harder they could have made these at my school at least)
My point is that no matter what tool you’re using, at some point you have to stretch your brain and the exams/screenings/etc just haven’t caught up to how to stretch someone’s brain in this new world and I’ve found just embracing the thing to be a better approach than any sort of pearl clutching
Grading homework is still less degrading then the other shenanigans that professors use students for- as in ghost writting books, having them program apps as unpaid labour or doing similar stuff. Academia is just very casty at times..
Academia is just a bunch of egotistical people forcing kids to work on their particular hobbies and if the kids don't enjoy it, the professors have the potential to signal a bad reputation to employers. The system is kind of disgusting.
Students should be given much more free reign in what they study.
While there are professors who use students to ghostwrite books or force them to submit papers in co-autorship, that's definitely not common, and practically impossible outside of graduate school. Your average professor/TA is underpaid and struggles to teach basic stuff to the undergrads, that is totally unrelated to their scientific interests and "hobbies".
This motivation is why, when I was in grad school, I never liked handing out grades. I would have rather just marked the problems I found with a HW submission, added notes where appropriate, and that's it. If no grade is given, it is obvious that you have provided the student the service of reading and checking their work, rather than allowed them to increase their 'score' or collect 'points'.
That's what I am doing for my classes, just provide useful feedback and mark the homework as submitted. The university wants points, but for me any submission is 100% points, even if there are errors and omissions.
However, now there are students that just copy the output of LLMs without even caring to understand terminology and notation. Should that count as a completed assignment? In some egregious and too obvious cases I ask them simple questions about what they wrote and don't give them marks/points if they have no clue.
Using LLMs as assistants for homework is one thing, and there's no way to prevent it. But students who just copy characters from the screen without caring to understand what is going on are on another level. Above all, they are wasting their time.
Regarding giving or not giving scores, that's a complicated issue. Scores provide a "negative incentive" for learning. A positive incentive would be some pat on the back for doing the assignments. However, our brains are not wired by the evolution to do things only for positive incentives when there are no grades/deadlines/etc.
In my experience, being lenient works great with graduate students, and undergrads won't do and won't understand anything in the course if there are no grades. I learned that the hard way.
Some of my engineering professors had a policy that you couldn't get a lower grade in the class than your grade on the final. You could and they said some students did turn in no work at all and still got an A based on the final.
> They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
Human Interviewer: Congratulations on making it to the 12th interview!
Candidate: Hey, I'm honored to be talk to another human for once!
Human Interviewer: That's funny. And true! Now, it says here you're a recent college grad student.
Candidate: That's right. Had to increase that sweet, sweet earning potential.
Human Interviewer: Also funny, also true! Honestly, what I learned in Intro to Game Theory alone has probably increased my earning potential by 15, maybe even 20%.
Candidate: Oh man, I remember that class! My professor gave up on grading homework that semester because of ChatGPT, and that weighted the midterm and final so much. I never did so much plugging and chugging in my life!
Human Interviewer: That's great. Well, that's about it. Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you. We'll be in touch.
I'm doing law school through an unconventional program called LPAB. You have to complete 20 subjects, each with a 20% assessment and an 80% exam, with only a 3 hr lecture every week and that's it. You don't really get a chance to ask questions and there's no tutorials or handholding.
While the assessment can be gamed, you must overcome the exam which are written and reviewed outside of the university, so the lecturer doesn't know what is on the exam, and the questions and exam papers are never returned.
Doing this I remember my undergrad and masters felt like I was coddled as there was a bunch of fluff grades in doing assignments and just turning up to class. The grade inflation was a farce as well.
> They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it
If we accept the narrative that LLMs can defeat the incentive structure of course work as a concept, it raises the question of if college will continue to raise earning potential for much longer.
I teach CS at Berkeley, as a lecturer. i.e., I'm contingent and on a contract. And don't really have grant money—though, y'know I actually try to supplement my income so I can live in the Bay Area. I spent years working in EdTech as well.
Others have already say why TA's (and graders) often do the grading. That's also not the same as the prof not paying attention to the work students do.
But I do want folks to think about the time faculty are actually allocated to teach courses. I have a 2 unit course I teach, ~70 students this term, and 2 hours of class. I'm paid for maybe 8 hours per week for all the prep class time, planning. Doesn't actually leave much time at all for grading. There are definitely qualified students who could be TAs who would give the students much more time and feedback than I am able...
For other courses, I have a bit more time allocated, but hundreds of students and still one of me. The only way students get feedback is when TAs grade.
Anyway, that's just the practical bits...
A lot of faculty are moving to 100% proctored assessment, and I think it sucks. For me, reading at least some of the student responses and seeing the data are helpful. Faculty do want to engage with their students and are similarly demoralized when everything is reduced to a transaction. It's hard not to be nihilist about it. Our own jobs, even at a public University are just capitalistic transactions with fewer profits. Students want the degree because it's the only thing they can hold on to as a token of hope for the next few years. Both students and faculty can fall into patterns of really low trust, and it's hard to be the 'outlier' trying to trust students when most of your colleagues say people don't do the work.
I don't actually have great solutions for building intrinsic motivation in students, except talking to them and minimizing the extent to which everything is a transaction. But I'm required to assign grades, still.
Blame the game, not the player. Grading is about securing status in a primate social dominance hierarchy. Fuck it - math should transcend that as much as our bodies allow.
It is time that most evaluation at universities separate from exams, go back to in-person student-instructor interaction.
Otherwise, a university degree will lack value if it doesn't convey adequate evaluation having taken place.
Perhaps that means hiring more professors to be directly involved in teaching, instead of research-wanting academics who are "forced" to teach. And instead of having 80-student classes, maybe smaller classes make a return.
As an aside, Richard Borcherds is probably most well known for proving the “Monstrous Moonshine” conjecture of Conway and Norton that there is some sort of correspondence between modular functions and representations of the Monster Group. When the conjecture was made in the 1970s, it was purely because someone noticed that a certain number was the same as the cardinality of the monster group. It seemed a crazy coincidence, so John H Conway said (playfully) that it was “Moonshine”. Hence the name “Monstrous Moonshine”.
> As an aside, the professor in question is Richard Borcherds, fields medalist.
I get what you're saying but credentialism of this kind has literally zero meaning today. For instance restating your opening sentence as "As an aside, the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents" sounds far more credible and intimidating at this point.
We’re a long way from that world. Does your company even interview people who don’t fit the requirements of a job position? No, of course not. So what are you filtering on, if not credentials.
This guy doesn’t just have credentials. He has record of proven results.
> the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents
Yet the folks with access to unrestricted Mythos agents tackling mathematics are hiring credentialed mathematicians. Your heuristic, applied to itself, rejects itself.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 23.9 ms ] threadSo basically a oral pop quiz for math. i think could work well to complement homeworks by making sure the material as taught is actually inside the students heads.
In-class exams are anyway a proxy for grading homeworks, because those who don't do them will get lower grades.
Zoho is a classics example of picking students at age 16/17, when they'd typically join a UG course, and instead train them on the job.
Some of the large tech service companies change incentives by tying a training fee ("bond") which is tied to some tenure (1-2 years). Departing before this would mean giving this back - which broadly incentives the planned tenure.
Other companies (musigma is an example) present pay as a 4 year package (10X), which is split 1/2/3/4X across 4 years.
I think the challenges US universities/companies are today facing is something India has needed for a couple decades now. I would not be surprised if many of these are tried in the US.
If you do plan - reach out to me, it's something I've wanted to expand into (currently run UG curriculums).
To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.
Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.
You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.
Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this.
And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them.
I am not saying this as a black and white statement. I just think there are different cohorts of students based on maturity and self motivation and we might be losing out on one cohort that is at neither extreme.
The responsibility part is just one element influencing the result.
If it's a well-designed course it should be clear what the content of the exam will be. If not, it's the professor's fault. And barring rare emergencies being rested on the day is also generally a matter of preparation, not luck.
> barring rare emergencies
It doesn't have to be a rare emergency. Things happen, loud student parties happen, random bad nights happen.
In the case of calculus as an example, there should be nothing from the class you didn't have time to practice sufficiently. A full academic year is more than enough time to learn integrals, derivatives, sequences, and series with the small collection of tricks for solving difficult problems (telescoping series, trig sub, etc.) There's a couple dozen rules you learn that are straightforward to apply, and for the times they aren't obvious, there's like a dozen total tricks (trig sub, etc.).
I took these classes. I remember how most people just phoned in the entire thing and complained at the exam review sessions how hard everything was.
It's the simplest of memorization.
"You may bring one 8.5x11 double-sided cheat sheet into the exam. You may write anything you want on it. And I promise you that if you prepare such a sheet, you'll never even look at it during the exam."
And he was right.
I do agree that AI has made this basically useless. Rather than skipping homeworks or doing a bad job the students just cheat and there is no opportunity to notice and intervene. They get all the way to the screen-free final and fail.
You are welcome to believe this. You are also wrong.
I am curious if you have ever taught at a university.
You mean to plagiarize their work. Now finally the nerds also have the option to have somebody else do their work for them.
I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.
I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.
I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.
It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.
And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.
That is all gone now. What a shame.
Half the class was cheating in Ion Stoica’s OS class even when the whole thing was supposed to be a group effort. Like how are you cheating when you’re already working in groups of 4?
Love the optimism, but if you really believe the universe is this fair then you’re too young, too naive or too inexperienced (or any combination therein). The world is absolutely full of people who have cruised through all of that but still manage to get (and maintain) good high paying jobs all the time. “Failing upwards” is a commonly observed phenomenon everywhere, in pretty much every industry.
Truth is: none of that matters in the real world. What matters is how good you are at networking and bullshitting your way through life. Unfortunately for those of us that are terrible at bullshitting, this means a harder professional life no matter how much effort you put into it.
If you think bullshiting and networking are the only things that matter, then I believe it’s your pessimism that’s talking.
In a class of 100, if 50 decide to learn things and 50 decide to complete assignments using AI without learning, I’m willing to put money behind the idea that more people in the first group will do better in life. Of course there will be exceptions because there’s a lot more in life beyond competence, including luck that influences outcomes.
Being friends of the right people can totally give you all the promotions you need, even if all you do has negative value for the company.
The students have made it extremely clear to the teachers
There are plenty of people who have the innate intelligence and intellectual curiosity to succeed in college, but come out of high school lacking discipline and clueless about what they want to study. They would be better off spending a few years working or serving in the military or something to get their shit together first, and then enroll in college later. Those students tend to have clearer goals and take the educational experience more seriously.
Well, that raises an interesting philosophical question. What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Surely you agree that there are a wide variety of teaching styles present among all college professors. If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material? Why is this an issue with the student, and not the professor not being teaching material, or the university not being facilitator-of-education material for failing to match students and professors well?
I agree that people have been pushed into college as a default option due to it being overloaded as both place of learning but also printing salary-granting papers, but it's NOT clear to me that students who need the specific stick mentioned in some cases are broadly unsuited for higher learning.
There are often a variety of tasks which are graded. Homework, exams, presentations, labs, etc. Every class and professor sets the mix of valuation of these differently, and has different quantities of each. That's teaching style.
If you hate presentations and cannot be roused to make one except by threat of failure, but are great at learning the material and pass the exams with ease, then that's a teaching style incompatibility.
Any that are self motivated.
> If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material?
Honestly, no. It shows a lack of (a) institutional-navigational skills, e.g. change your professor, (b) flexibility to different learning "styles" (which are increasingly being shown to be a myth and (c) ability to circumvent adversity, e.g. by reading the textbook on their own time or finding alternate resources or hunting down a study group. That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
I disagree, because muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life.
> To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.
Again, I disagree.I mean, I agree on its face, in that a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree.
But we're talking about people who aren't motivated and capable. The best path to something resembling success for people who lack the motivation and capability to be successful on their own, is to muddle through the university system and by whatever necessary means get the piece of paper.
College at large is not a waste of time for these people. Until the downstream society stops valuing a degree as it does, time spent getting the degree is not wasted, because it yielded the degree. If the paper is had, the time was well spent, regardless of how that time was actually spent or whether anything was learned.
True [1]. I'm not debating the individual incentives. (I wasn't clear about this.) I'm just not convinced a college graduate who muddled through is worth 75% more to an employer or society than a high school student who muddles.
> a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree
For a binary measure of success, yes. A successful person empowered with a peaceful, rich society and challenging college experience will do better than one without.
[1] https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/what-happened-to...
This is something that needs to be fixed downstream, by making the paper less valuable. Making the paper more difficult to get instead is just manufacturing misery because of people too stubborn to pull their heads out of the sand and admit that the function of undergrad is the salary paper, and self-motivated learning has been largely relegated to grad school.
Much of college is a social signaling mechanism. Well over a decade ago one of my family members, with a degree of shame had to explain to a friend why I didn’t finish my BA.
A lot of middle and upper class people use college as a way to filter people. You can argue our top universities also serve as finishing schools.
I did, after reaching six figures anyway, finish my BA. The shame is gone.
Or does it still linger as I went to a middle of the road state school. Not Stanford, Yale or even Berkeley.
Honestly I originally attended community college in part to get grant money/loans which allowed me to get a cheap apartment. As a bonus I meet a lot of cool people, read Howard Zinn.
I did very poorly in school growing up. I think I failed at least 4-6 classes in middle/high school.
In college I did well and I'm now getting my masters in CS while working as a software engineer.
So, the 'stick' can certainly be useful. Doing poorly in high school is not necessarily an indicator of how you will do in college -- particularly if your life at home was turbulent as it was for me.
The students would then hand down the big book of problem and solution sets down to the freshman class.
The professors, still being a bit lazy, knew this. But instead of scarping the old problems, they'd just say that cheating only hurts the students doing it - as the homework grades would not influence the final grade. And sure enough, the students that never did their own work, rarely did well (if at all passed) on the finals exam.
I am recruiting college kids right now, impeccable pedigrees, elite universities. Our recruitment process involves the kids recording videos where they answer questions as a pre-screening. They are explicitly told not to use AI for the exercise. I have the Claude and ChatGPT answer to those questions on my screen while I review their responses. 40% read it pretty much verbatim. The paradox is I don't even care whether they knew the answer or not, but to me it's an integrity test.
I'm not the students' competitor; the interviewer is. And the students not only have to impress the interviewer, but they have to impress them more than all their peers do!
The first place I taught gave no grades or unrequested feedback on anything. And no certificate. And those cohorts had the best placement rates. There was nothing in the school for the students to game, so they kept their eye on the real prize.
I had two classes like this, zero grades over the semester, they were among my favorite. Though we didn't really ponder what we were doing there and the means for final grades, for the admins, were both interesting (final test too long and hard, you already know what your grade is)
In high school (2006) my physics teacher gave credit for handing in the homework (he checked it and handed it back, but no grade was assigned). Didn't hand in homework, you got a zero.
He knew then that if you assign grades to hw, people will cheat.
If I'm paying for Berkeley, the professor have office hours for me to ask questions.
I took school seriously and went through notepads solving problems from the book. But there were others that attended after work or were there for the degree.
School for most doesn’t exist in isolation from the external world, unlike a boarding school.
Making homework a part of your grade is like making attendance a part of your grade. It's something that teachers who aren't capable of teaching do, so they can give students who haven't learned a thing reasonable looking grades. Students have always cheated when homework was graded, it's just that AI makes it so flagrant that it can't be conveniently ignored.
I'm overestimating people, though. There are clearly teachers who are still pretending like students don't cheat when it's like five clicks now. It was much, much harder when tons were still cheating half a century ago. You had to actually meet each other. Admitting that you're collecting a check for nothing is tough, especially because now you're going to have to work.
Who am I kidding? Teachers will just start talking about how grading is bad or racist or something, or saying that using AI is actually better preparation for the future. Hell, they should have done that half a century ago: in real life, being able to cheat well is the best skill.
"So you thought AI was a gift from heaven? Ha, it's your worst nightmare! Let this be a lesson."
I have a solution, but I don't think people will appreciate it, because:
1) it is very analog 2) requires work from both student and teacher 3) there is no AI in it 4) there is not money to made on it 5) all of the above
In short, do what my MBA class did. At home you study the examples, the how behind it and possible solutions. In class, you may be called in front of the class to show that you know what you are doing.
Is it hard? Yeah, but it is kinda the point.
It’ll be like you’re studying under Aristotle while AI is doing cold fusion next to you - incomprehensible on any level.
Just wondering whether it’ll be before money/jobs collapse or after.
I went to Montessori school as a kid then I was in private school briefly till my parents went broke. Then I went to public school for the remainder of my career before I went to college and graduate school. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level and sat on academic boards for Purdue.
Graded and ranked assignments do nothing other than act as a filter for the structural organization to determine who they want to give resources to
The “educational” system has nothing to do with platonic or frankly any other thoughts of education for the polis
Good riddance
Break down the learning objectives to measurable experiment replication then:
Show one, do one, teach one
If you can’t do one or teach one you dont move to the next step.
It’s literally just how apprenticeship works and there’s no reason you can’t do that for calculus or intro to economics and especially applicable to EE, ME, CE
Teaching in academic settings is absurdly inefficient and counterproductive in my experience
It's a similar approach the armed services use to train MOSes as well.
Making the class pass-fail would also be more conducive for learning as well.
But still, some sort of benchmark would be needed to at least give students the ability to gauge their proficiency.
Personally I have found well-organized, clearly presented university courses to be great ways to learn the material. The combination of readings, textbooks, lectures, tutorial sessions, writing, labs, problem sets, course projects, etc. has been effective for me. Good textbooks and online resources have also been very helpful. Obviously it only works if you actually do the work yourself.
Even in the age of AI, I think I still prefer a portfolio system where you have a body of work that you can present and defend in an interview for a job or graduate school position.
However, personalized feedback for student work is still very useful, and it may be more beneficial if it is focused on helping students individually rather than ranking them or sorting them into bins.
Without some sort of assessment, it can be hard to determine whether the students actually learned anything. The question is: how do you use that information? I think it should primarily be used as feedback to the students and the instructors, with the aim of improving learning.
So as a thumb, you want to ideally go to the brain surgeon who's done that surgery the most.
Large programming assignments also work decent (for now at least), where codex is encouraged, but we make the assignment research oriented and obscenely large with lots of messy and dependent steps, enough that you have to steer enough to do context management and not output slop reports/inferences. It is almost like a research project, where AI's "taste" is still extremely lacking (we often see totally circular/trivial-but-dressed-up investigative results from sloppers, very much like the slop neurips/iclr papers these days). Just one of these per course with a 10 minute in person viva at the end. Previously this used to be a project part of the course, but the old way with reports and presentations just ended up with way too much slop to use as a signal. Also, we just made it individual instead of a group project.
For this type of course, grading on a curve also made less sense, so we instead do a kind of "cluster" based grading. We start from the top giving S, see where the first big gap is, that starts A, the next big gap starts B, and so on. These clusters form really well in the above type of courses (empirically, undergrad lin alg, undergrad databases, and grad RL courses)
In the lab I assist students with implementing and understanding code. Since they know they are not graded, there is no incentive for them to use AI. Sometimes we do try AI for the lulz but it makes as much sense as looking at the solutions (which I do provide already). As I frequently tell them, "AI can replace me teaching you, it cannot replace you understanding the material".
Later on, when I became a TA, there were obvious signs of cheating in the homework, i.e. people handing in the same homework with the same step-by-step solution, with the exact same errors.
In any case, cheating on homework wouldn't help their grade.
In the event that the cascading metal mining yield declines aren't solved by new tech and we do lose AI, we are now in the state that we will probably also lose calculus, liberalism and the ability to design a steam engine.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632871...
There was constant change in the palaeolithic, of the form "which tribe controls which valley" and no further. The range of possible changes is gonna shrink without a stable climate and/or a solid tech foundation.
At the graduate level maybe this problem is solved by doing Moore-style classes where the students present (on the chalkboard, not slides) and the professor critiques. Students could still have AI generate proofs and print them out or hand copy them, but maybe that's fine.
Upper undergrad level is tricky, because students are expected to prove things, but maybe don't have the maturity for full-on Moore-style.
https://epochai.substack.com/p/ai-math-chat-1-thinking-smart...
Now he issues the standard taking points about looms and horses and claims he could not have foreseen it? He is an AI shill, just like Tao.
1) AI is useless.
2) AI helps me.
3) AI replaced me (unless I am a generationally gifted top performer in my field).
While he is, in fact, a generationally gifted top performer in his field, he knows that statistically speaking most of his students will not be which I think makes his apparent angst now understandable.
It's the start of a golden age for those of us who are curious autodidacts. If you're working through the exercises of a math textbook, you can now instantly submit your (attempted) theorem-proof to the nearest robot, and see all your misconceptions and shortfalls of rigor laid bare.
I’ve loved using AI to learn. I made SQL and Python classes of my own to finally get beyond a basic understanding of them. I made an Anki deck to learn a foreign language with very poor existing online resources.
Wait, I'm curious about this bit - I did my math undergrad ~16 years ago and all my homework was handwritten.
Are now AIs capable of ingesting my mess of poor handwriting with arrows indicating the flow of a proof (e.g. from the bottom of the page to the top of a hand-drawn column half-way up the page to cram in the rest of the proof)?
>Students learn best through intrinsic motivation, not through force. What you learn under pressure doesn't last past the exam. Everyone says these things, and yet almost all teachers continue to give grades. Why? "It's required"; "The colleges need grades"; "The parents wouldn't stand for it"; "It's the way things are." In short, the reasons for grades are political.
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/freedom.html
At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School he built a computer course of self-paced units with no grades, and about 50 kids had keys to the computer center and used it evenings and weekends without adult supervision. In his Snap!Con 2025 talk for the ACM Karlstrom award he said why the no-grades part mattered:
>Everything conspires to make teachers the enemies of kids. Not because any teacher wants that, but because institutions have a lot of weight. And when you're giving somebody grades, you can't be their friend. It just doesn't work like that. You're not their friend -- you're a hurdle they have to overcome.
>Um so yeah, it was really important to me that they let me not give grades and I think that made the whole thing possible and I couldn't have done it otherwise.
https://youtu.be/pDK2PE_pkqQ?t=1917
And on AI in the same talk:
>Mostly, people who talk about AI in education see it as a threat: kids will use it to cheat; or maybe AI will replace teachers so we won't have jobs anymore [...] I'm pretty confident that AI won't replace teachers for rich kids — and computers already replace teachers for poor kids, long before AI.
AI didn't create the problem with graded homework. It just made it impossible to keep pretending the grade measures the learning.
bh's cs61a lectures from some years later:
https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_43829...
professors needs to be life coaches and motivators, less of a oral/written book reproducer. That part will be automated. Evals also will be in a locked room, do you home work, bi-weekly do the check, correct with agent what needs to be repeated. Measure if you on course/off course doing better/worse. If you are not doing good, escalate to your coach(professor).
I mean, sure, charisma can engage people into several classes, but also, lets be honest what % of professors really got charisma? If it helps lectures are great, the active work should be done with agents, individually and in the team. of human, and other peoples agents. That's the future of work.
Aside from the irony that Borcherds probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while, instead let’s examine the purpose of homework. It helps you learn. You can read a chapter and think you understand the material, but doing homework makes you engage more with the material. Recently we’ve used the external motivator of course points to encourage this good habit. But this turns the relationship between teacher and student into a transaction- you do a problem, you get a point. And most young students really don’t care beyond that transaction. They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
So if we’re not going to rethink the purely transactional relationship schools have with most students, then you probably should stop giving points and grading homework. You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription. That’s possible to figure out. A lot of people have pointed out various equity risks but it’s really just a matter of balancing the AI risk with the equity risk at the weighting acceptable to your institution.
You could also attempt the much more challenging prospect of turning the transactional nature of college into some other relationship which fosters a student’s intrinsic motivation of learning for the sake of learning, but I bet your institution goes bankrupt in the process. So really you should just stop grading homework and put 100% of the grade weight into proctored assessments with some sort of firewall against AI tools. Anyone that faces an equity disadvantage because of this was probably also disadvantaged by the fact that you let rich kids with premium AI subscriptions get better grades on their homework.
It was the math class where I learned the most as well as I wasn't doing rote work and was able to talk to him whenever I had an actual question.
I dont like AI destroying some of our systems but if we return back to the sort of learning that college used to be where it was self directed with guidance from professors, I will count that as a win over the factory worker production system that high school was and universities were starting to ape.
We had homework assigned and in the high school class the teacher spent part of class time reviewing and taking questions about the previous homework set. In the university classes this was done in a discussion section or in office hours.
In high school the homework was supposed to all be in one notebook which would be reviewed periodically but only to see that some effort was being made, it was not graded. It counted maybe 10% of the grade. In the university classes it wasn't even looked at.
The vast majority of the grade was based on quizes and exams, we were typically allowed to bring one standard-sized page of notes for these, and a calculator.
This was all in the 1980s time frame.
Maybe a problem in the long term, but irrelevant here. These students paid (a lot of) money for this service. The provider of the service needs to stop complaining and do their job (grade the homework). If even a single student did the work themselves, anything otherwise would be a disservice.
There is and always will be debate on what's worth learning, but if we decide that something is worth learning, it is worth learning to do it yourself, not have AI do it. Schools all over have a big problem with that because kids are using AI to do things that we believe are learning. Is this something that's important to learn or should we now say, you know what? Everyone has an AI. Let's stop teaching these stupid things that AI does well and start teaching other things. That's a question I'm not going to answer, only time will tell and we'll have other debates in the future along similar lines about something else.
He still assigns homework. He's not grading it. The students that want to try, they're free to do it. If they have questions, there are office hours.
The only thing being removed is the grading, not their homework.
Except for the person refusing to grade it, of course.
The schools are providing two services to students, not one. There's one directly and the other indirectly. And those two services are sometimes at odds.
The direct service is to teach them. Skills, knowledge, perspectives, critical thinking, etc.
The indirect service is to act as a proxy for people and organizations in the world to avoid having to do a thorough examination of a person's abilities. A degree is an attestation that a student has cleared all the hurdles and accomplished something of value. The better the reputation of the institution, the more value this service is to a student.
Just because students are paying for the direct service doesn't mean they aren't also paying for the indirect one too, it's just that the reputation has been established by all the students that came before and these students will be affecting the reputation for students coming afterwards.
Regardless, because a huge chunk of the service is that attestation, it's not as simple as the customer pays so the customer should get what they want. The universities need to figure out a way to maintain the value of their attestation in the face of students who try to subvert the evaluation process and a changing world. And if homework is providing little value in that regard, some rethinking might be warranted. They could assign it and optionally grade it on request for students who want their work evaluated but make it clear that it bears no connection to the grade that leads to the degree. They could come up with some other means of evaluating whether students have worked or learned the material. They could rework the material to account for the existence of AI. Just like calculators or the internet changed the work environment to obviate previously valuable skills, today's students will be living their lives in a world where AI exists and certain previously valuable skills will not be valuable going forward. A university's job is to produce the most capable person for the environment in which they will live their life. If the old curriculum isn't doing that, the curriculum needs to be rethought. And homework might take on a different role or be significantly less important in that rethought curriculum.
We might not quite be there but we’re trucking towards that point at full speed.
Source? I have been reading this every year since like the financial crisis.
https://www.wiche.edu/resources/report-u-s-high-school-gradu...
Hasn’t this happened after each boom generation?
>62.8% of high school (or equivalent) graduates go on to postsecondary study.
>Enrollment among new high school graduates has declined 10.4% since its peak in 2009 (70.1%).
There are still a lot of kids that could go to those 3rd tier universities, but choose not to. The cost/benefit is not perceived to be there anymore.
No structure needed, the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people. It’s the actual business model; undergraduate education is break even, the only way money is ever made is alums donating to the school due to the feel-good memories they formed when they attended.
Unfortunately, for schools who thought their purpose was to educate, they will be made obsolete in the near future. Expect a lot of schools to close.
But those places that always understood their purpose was for affluent young adults to mingle and connect with other affluent people, they will be just fine.
Post-GI Bill. Before university was universal, there was a strong philosophical angle to the enterprise. (Also meet your generation's rich kids, that's always been a part of it.)
Really? When I'm reading textbooks nowadays for fun, I absolutely do the problems at the end of the chapter. It tells you when you think you learned something but didn't.
No, that's not common at all, nor how the system works. Use of graders/TAs are on an institution basis.
"Grant money" has absolutely nothing to do with it. Grant money is earmarked for specific research and cannot be spent for teaching purposes. When grant money is used to hire graduate students, they are research assistants and must work on the research project which the grant money was given for.
TAs/graders come from separate tuition budgets. Tuition dollars are much more preferred anyway because they're stable and faculty do not have to work for them, they show up based on enrollment.
The fact you have TAs/graders at all is by institution. Large R1 institutions have grad students and undergraduate population to fill these roles. In these institutions, 1 minimally sized undergrad class = at least 1 TA, with additional TAs and graders after some enrollment threshold.
Tenure has absolutely nothing to do with it. Adjunct faculty get TAs/graders all the same.
Then I got a research assistantship, which was funded by my advisor's grant. I meant that I got paid to do my thesis research, and no longer had to teach. This was a precondition for joining his group.
As a CS undergrad, I did that kind of work at UC Berkeley in the 90s, grading courses that I'd taken 2-4 semesters earlier. I even did a semester as a TA, because the professor was having a hard time finding enough grad students who wanted to deal with one of those larger classes.
You went to college because it was the only way to get a job that paid well.
When other vocations stopped having the ability to ensure people could enjoy social mobility, people focused on the only pathways left.
Whether he graded it, or his assistants graded it, I’m not really sure how that matters at all to the point.
My guess based on my experience as a math major is that they just stop giving homework and the in class tests become more rigorous (can’t imagine how much harder they could have made these at my school at least)
My point is that no matter what tool you’re using, at some point you have to stretch your brain and the exams/screenings/etc just haven’t caught up to how to stretch someone’s brain in this new world and I’ve found just embracing the thing to be a better approach than any sort of pearl clutching
Presumably at this point anyone tasked with such will offload it to an LLM?
However, now there are students that just copy the output of LLMs without even caring to understand terminology and notation. Should that count as a completed assignment? In some egregious and too obvious cases I ask them simple questions about what they wrote and don't give them marks/points if they have no clue.
Using LLMs as assistants for homework is one thing, and there's no way to prevent it. But students who just copy characters from the screen without caring to understand what is going on are on another level. Above all, they are wasting their time.
Regarding giving or not giving scores, that's a complicated issue. Scores provide a "negative incentive" for learning. A positive incentive would be some pat on the back for doing the assignments. However, our brains are not wired by the evolution to do things only for positive incentives when there are no grades/deadlines/etc.
In my experience, being lenient works great with graduate students, and undergrads won't do and won't understand anything in the course if there are no grades. I learned that the hard way.
Human Interviewer: Congratulations on making it to the 12th interview!
Candidate: Hey, I'm honored to be talk to another human for once!
Human Interviewer: That's funny. And true! Now, it says here you're a recent college grad student.
Candidate: That's right. Had to increase that sweet, sweet earning potential.
Human Interviewer: Also funny, also true! Honestly, what I learned in Intro to Game Theory alone has probably increased my earning potential by 15, maybe even 20%.
Candidate: Oh man, I remember that class! My professor gave up on grading homework that semester because of ChatGPT, and that weighted the midterm and final so much. I never did so much plugging and chugging in my life!
Human Interviewer: That's great. Well, that's about it. Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you. We'll be in touch.
Candidate: ???
That’s the goose that’s laying the golden egg.
Are the people that do well on the proctored assignments firewalled off from AI going to be the best employees?
While the assessment can be gamed, you must overcome the exam which are written and reviewed outside of the university, so the lecturer doesn't know what is on the exam, and the questions and exam papers are never returned.
Doing this I remember my undergrad and masters felt like I was coddled as there was a bunch of fluff grades in doing assignments and just turning up to class. The grade inflation was a farce as well.
If we accept the narrative that LLMs can defeat the incentive structure of course work as a concept, it raises the question of if college will continue to raise earning potential for much longer.
Others have already say why TA's (and graders) often do the grading. That's also not the same as the prof not paying attention to the work students do.
But I do want folks to think about the time faculty are actually allocated to teach courses. I have a 2 unit course I teach, ~70 students this term, and 2 hours of class. I'm paid for maybe 8 hours per week for all the prep class time, planning. Doesn't actually leave much time at all for grading. There are definitely qualified students who could be TAs who would give the students much more time and feedback than I am able...
For other courses, I have a bit more time allocated, but hundreds of students and still one of me. The only way students get feedback is when TAs grade.
Anyway, that's just the practical bits...
A lot of faculty are moving to 100% proctored assessment, and I think it sucks. For me, reading at least some of the student responses and seeing the data are helpful. Faculty do want to engage with their students and are similarly demoralized when everything is reduced to a transaction. It's hard not to be nihilist about it. Our own jobs, even at a public University are just capitalistic transactions with fewer profits. Students want the degree because it's the only thing they can hold on to as a token of hope for the next few years. Both students and faculty can fall into patterns of really low trust, and it's hard to be the 'outlier' trying to trust students when most of your colleagues say people don't do the work.
I don't actually have great solutions for building intrinsic motivation in students, except talking to them and minimizing the extent to which everything is a transaction. But I'm required to assign grades, still.
Honestly he should just tell student to grade their homework with chatGPT themselves.
Assume they use AI and grade them based on where they can take it form there.
Otherwise, a university degree will lack value if it doesn't convey adequate evaluation having taken place.
Perhaps that means hiring more professors to be directly involved in teaching, instead of research-wanting academics who are "forced" to teach. And instead of having 80-student classes, maybe smaller classes make a return.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine
He has a youtube channel with lectures in number theory, category theory and other things.
I get what you're saying but credentialism of this kind has literally zero meaning today. For instance restating your opening sentence as "As an aside, the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents" sounds far more credible and intimidating at this point.
This guy doesn’t just have credentials. He has record of proven results.
Yet the folks with access to unrestricted Mythos agents tackling mathematics are hiring credentialed mathematicians. Your heuristic, applied to itself, rejects itself.
The channel: https://www.youtube.com/@richarde.borcherds7998