Thread

How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments

305 points · 288 comments · azhenley

a57721 · 1790407197 · focus · HN ↗
I am teaching some math courses, and I see how LLMs disrupted all standard approaches, and I don't know what to do.
I rely on written exams that are open book, but forbid any use of computers and smartphones in class.
The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning. I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.
I just had an experience where all students were given "sample problems" to try at home and prepare for the written test. Many of them just dumped the document into an LLM, asked it to produce some "exam guide", and showed up with that thing printed out, asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.
It seems like the university also has many people pushing for AI use for everything, but I teach basic stuff where the goal is to make students think on their own and digest some fundamental ideas, LLMs can produce perfect solutions, but relying on them is pointless.
1. throw93038383 · 1790407512 · focus · HN ↗
  > I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest
  Perhaps some people do not belong at university? It is just a waste of everyone time, to insist 50% of population studies until 25 years old.
  1. fr2029 · 1790408202 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  2. ant6n · 1790410964 · focus · HN ↗
    It's like we're putting everybody on crack and then say they're too weak if they become addicted.
    Hendrikto · 1790414803 · focus · HN ↗
    If you do not want to learn, and take every shortcut available to avoid it, university might not be the path for you.
    johnnyanmac · 1790493983 · focus · HN ↗
    1. We don't exactly do a great job showing upcoming adults their options and paths in life to begin with.
    2. We're also actively giving them less paths in life to begin with. How many high school grads @ 18 will find any job whatsoever without additional school/training, and how else will they afford housing with zero income? The military is the only consistent employer at that age, and the only one who'd provide shelter with the deal.
    3. On top of all that, it's in university's best interests to keep 1) and 2) the way they are. Their incentives start at recruitment, and end at enrollment. Past keeping them in college for 4-6 years, they do not care about performance, post-grad job placement, nor societal wellbeing. And part of that is due to a lack of pressure in the recruitment stage to make universities focus on such metrics. Turns out a fancy new gym is a cheaper investment.
    threatofrain · 1790508535 · focus · HN ↗
    By the time you are 18 and going to college it’s time to reap your lifetime of prep, you’re about to spend a ton of money to specialize. What does it mean to show you all the doors and motivations of life when you’re basically going “all in” on a domain?
    Hopefully it doesn’t mean extending high school two years into college, still prepping to make a bet not yet made.
    alpaca128 · 1790511614 · focus · HN ↗
    That lifetime of prep is completely disconnected from actual job & life experience. The kids are shown all the doors but have to choose without first opening any. Aside from the occasional internship they might have done by that point or a glimpse into what their parents are doing, which is very hit or miss.
    As long as students ask the teacher what they're going to need understanding of maths for they are not prepared adequately.
    johnnyanmac · 1790533720 · focus · HN ↗
    >What does it mean to show you all the doors and motivations of life when you’re basically going “all in” on a domain?
    I don't know about you, but I sure didn't have my life set at 18.I could have easily been a mechanical or electrical engineer if my alma mater rejected me. And that was more focused than most students.
    It pretty much means what it says on the tin. Before hoisting an 18yo with the sudden responsibility of an adult, show them what lies beyond their GED. That's not just limited to college; there's many more roads out there and seeing what options motivate you can let you try to specialize while you're still in your prep phase.
    That's precisely why some student go into a major undeclared or even take a gap year after graduating. No one gave them that exploratory transition time, so some make it for themselves.
    ant6n · 1790760413 · focus · HN ↗
    That's easy to say. I might as well say nobody wants to be addicted to crack (or whatever drug), yet here we are.
  3. MattPalmer1086 · 1790414360 · focus · HN ↗
    25? At least in the UK, most degrees are 3 years long and most people start when they are 18.
    TFNA · 1790424891 · focus · HN ↗
    UK (and the wider Anglo-American system) is different from the continent, where in many countries the MA is the basic degree -- a mere BA will get you nowhere -- and this easily takes 5-6 years to achieve.
  4. dahart · 1790472066 · focus · HN ↗
    Who’s insisting that? Where does 25 come from? 4 year degree attainment is just under 40% in the U.S., and most of them finish by 22 or 23.
    People are choosing to go to university. It might have something to do with having better job options and statistically higher pay…
2. bambax · 1790409224 · focus · HN ↗
  There is indeed no point in grading home assignments anymore, but why not randomly ask a student at the start of each class to present their solution on the board?
  And do a final exam on oen and paper and nothing else, and an exam that relies more on thinking than rote memorization of formulas (or print the relevant parts of the course on the exam document itself).
  1. someothherguyy · 1790410923 · focus · HN ↗
    there probably is no time for 100 students to each do that in a university mathematics lecture, but there are probably ways to make sure students are still learning by restructuring the university into mandatory recitation and labs or something
    Aeolun · 1790414730 · focus · HN ↗
    Having two random people picked each time might cause all of them to at least pay attention.
    lostlogin · 1790468245 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m wondering if this is the way, but more faculty time is needed for assessing. So education costs go up.
    lazyasciiart · 1790497466 · focus · HN ↗
    They said “one person at the start of class”?
    someothherguyy · 1790499600 · focus · HN ↗
    there aren't 100 university lectures a semester, so there is a small chance you are picked. meaning, good odds to not give a shit or good incentive to not go to lecture if you are behind. also, wasting 100 students' time to watch someone struggle through one gotcha, is more of a punishment for everyone, not something to make students learn.
  2. [deleted] · 1790463290 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  3. hombre_fatal · 1790513387 · focus · HN ↗
    > why not randomly ask a student at the start of each class to present their solution on the board
    This makes the class really awful. I had professors with schemes like this, maybe calling on someone's name randomly 1-2 times in class to answer a question they'd just asked, just to ensure everyone is scared into paying attention.
3. drakonka · 1790409727 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm taking a year-long sabbatical to study a language at university right now and they're changing their assignment processes to curtail AI use. We have two versions of written assignments - the first to be written by hand in class with just a Swedish-Swedish word book available, and the second version to be typed at home implementing the professor's corrections from v1.
  At least in this course students seem to be taking their strict 'no AI' policy quite seriously. Then again this is also the kind of course you do when you want to actually learn the material. It provides a qualification for further higher education in Swedish, so if we don't legitimately learn the stuff there's just no point as we won't manage in future courses.
  1. TFNA · 1790424749 · focus · HN ↗
    Recently it has been reported that many Chinese students in Moscow are no longer learning Russian during their years at the university (to the dismay of Russian officials who hoped this would be a form of soft power): even for in-person lectures their Bluetooth earbuds will just translate the lecturer's Russian into Chinese in real time. So, perhaps people around the world will start feeling that, thanks to technology, exams testing language skills are a mere formality and can be safely cheated on.
    officehero · 1790504372 · focus · HN ↗
    Russia is a bad example due to its current international reputation. On your second point, would an example of this be an oral exam where the student has tiny hidden earbuds? Outrageous but you're probably right it's going to get worse.
    mopsi · 1790528106 · focus · HN ↗
    There is a well-known scene in a famous Russian comedy about exactly that: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3n4LptYWNo&t=2482s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3n4LptYWNo&t=2482s
    seanmcdirmid · 1790526249 · focus · HN ↗
    Actually, language is no longer the barrier it once was, it wouldn’t surprise me if some universities start opening enrollment up beyond the native language of the university accordingly.
4. satvikpendem · 1790410817 · focus · HN ↗
  Just don't make it open note then? Or you provide the only notes or cheat sheet available to them at the start of each test. That's what some math tests I've had had done before and I believe the SAT also does the same thing with formulas in the back of the test to reference.
5. fartfeatures · 1790412017 · focus · HN ↗
  I've always wanted to find out if this would work:
  If I knew most of my students were using LLMs I would encourage the rest of them to use them too. I would then change the marking criteria such that if they get a single point wrong that's 20% off the entire grade. 5 mistakes gets you a big fat zero.
  LLMs are great but they make mistakes. At this point your students would have had to spend so long checking, re-checking and triple checking the LLM's output that they will have accidentally learn what they need to. They will likely need to cross-reference multiple LLMs and at least have read their output which is likely an upgrade on today.
  Or some variation of the above, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
  1. foresterre · 1790412791 · focus · HN ↗
    This sounds like it would come at the cost of the honest students who don't want to use LLM's and train their own understanding.
    Reviewing is just not the same as working through a problem yourself. You often can take shortcuts when checking answers for correctness, which generation (with mind or LLM) of the solution can't take. This isn't limited to Math but equally true for programming and many other skills.
    fartfeatures · 1790413130 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd push back slightly on this: I spend more of my time reading / reviewing code than writing it yet I still find reading / reviewing code much more mentally demanding. I don't think I'm alone in that.
    The people that do their own work would be at a huge advantage as the LLM(s) can work as reviewers instead of doing the work so there is more chance of catching a mistake before you lose 20%.
    On top of that there will be some issues where the LLM is just plain wrong. Being able to work out when that is the case is a hugely useful skill in 2026. It is also something the people who blindly feed their work into an LLM and print its answer without reading it will be unable to discover. Much to their own detriment.
    foresterre · 1790414318 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not trying to suggest that reviewing (code) can't feel (more) mentally demanding. The thing with at least reviews is that if you have worked through the problem yourself, you will also hit certain walls where stuff didn't work or wasn't as beautiful as you wanted (ie trial and error), and you have to activate your brain to think of other solutions, ie really think a problem through multiple times with active feedback. As a reviewer you don't get the active feedback usually.
    Now this i think applies in lesser degree to the comment I was replying to. With maths, and some comp sci problems, you often can check an answer much faster than actually solving it, eg by using simple substitution for simple math problems. That is a useful skill, but a different one from solving the problem yourself. It employs different types of skills.
    fartfeatures · 1790414944 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you might be letting perfect be the enemy of good here. Right now some students are using an LLM to do all of their work. I don't suggest for a moment my method is perfect but I do claim it could be better than the status quo (or at least warrants further investigation in my opinion).
    johnnyanmac · 1790494473 · focus · HN ↗
    > I spend more of my time reading / reviewing code than writing it yet I still find reading / reviewing code much more mentally demanding. I don't think I'm alone in that.
    That's because we write much smaller quantities of code than we read. Not that LoC is a useful metric, but I'd be surprised if I write more than a few hundred lines a code a day in a legacy codebase. Most of the time is spent planning and deliberating over what to write, and perhaps revising code a few times. Meanwhile, understanding what a snippet of code does can easily spiral into having you read thousands of lines of code across several modules.
    But that's for work. writing is a stronger learning tool than reading, and we needed to write tens of thousands of lines of code before we got into the door and started reading more than we wrote. It's still preferable for students to do the same and write as much for their homework as possible.
    Explaining that paradigm shift from learning to working isn't trivial, and is often poorly done. But it's needed if we ever want people to frame these tools as productivity boosters, and not shortcuts through tedium. Learning by its nature involves some tedium.
  2. thow88737363667 · 1790415788 · focus · HN ↗
    What you would grade with that approach is how well your students can operate a LLM as well as the failure rate of whatever LLM infrastructure the individual student is using. This is usually not the goal of your educational format and hence not what you would grade for - apart from some (meta-)skill courses offered by uni libraries and the like. Those are mostly ungraded, though.
    fartfeatures · 1790416621 · focus · HN ↗
    Anyone that knows the subject matter well enough will spot the LLMs mistakes and correct them. If you don't know the subject matter well enough to spot a mistake then you don't know the subject matter well enough.
6. darreninthenet · 1790412955 · focus · HN ↗
  Put a mixture of questions in that are impossible to answer but don't tell them, and as usual give them marks for explaining their working. Tell them you've devised the questions so some are "AI resistant" but don't tell them how. They'll never know if the AI has tripped up and hallucinated or given them the right answer. Only those that really understand what's going on will set out some working that shows they were on the right route and then got stuck where they were supposed to.
  1. adrianN · 1790417151 · focus · HN ↗
    That will either lead to students becoming frustrated after spending inordinate amounts of time on the unsolvable problem or students giving up too early on the solvable problems.
  2. pks016 · 1790442617 · focus · HN ↗
    > Put a mixture of questions in that are impossible to answer
    Students will complain to the admins and waste more of your time.
  3. xpct · 1790521701 · focus · HN ↗
    The AI would just output that it can't be solved..
    darreninthenet · 1790521862 · focus · HN ↗
    And the students will think "damn that's the AI resistant question", or those that actually understand it will answer why with their working
7. fhd2 · 1790413181 · focus · HN ↗
  That sounds pretty frustrating. I wonder if it wouldn't be a good approach to, say:
  1. Make the exam the only thing that determines the grade (or technically, proves that the student learned enough);
  2. Give out test assignments students can do, but don't have to;
  3. Offer students for the professor to grade their work if they want to get some feedback on how they're doing.
  Would that lead to less time wasted by tutors grading AI generated answers? From where I stand, students should be allowed to prepare for exams any way they like, with or without their professor's help. If they managed to learn, they pass.
  1. michaelt · 1790415505 · focus · HN ↗
    When I was in engineering school ~20 years ago, some lecturers openly said that they gave the assignments just enough credit to be worth doing. Something like 10-15% of your final grade would be from assignments, the rest from the exam. So we didn't blow off the assignments to go drinking.
    Of course, this a lot easier for some subjects than others. Subjects like Film Studies relied on exams much less, and assignments much more.
  2. psyklic · 1790425687 · focus · HN ↗
    According to the article, #1 leads to "failure and drop-out rates of 50 to 80%". #2 and #3 might work for organized and motivated students, but graded assignments from other classes will be prioritized by most.
    hahn-kev · 1790477734 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe more drop outs is a good thing, we need more skilled labor anyway
    isityettime · 1790490131 · focus · HN ↗
    In many cases it probably is. But lower graduation rates cuts against the incentives structures in place at many universities and colleges.
    gosub100 · 1790497409 · focus · HN ↗
    Then their parents come in and complain about where the $30k that semester went. This is a consequence of the exponential rise in tuition. You're now in lawsuit territory if you don't deliver the goods.
    procaryote · 1790509683 · focus · HN ↗
    Failing people who didn't learn anything during the course sounds like a desirable outcome
    Der_Einzige · 1790521389 · focus · HN ↗
    Given the education literally does not matter anymore for white collar work, I'm inclined to agree with you.
    I'd rather a MUCH larger amount of professors and teachers come to class to find their classes deserted (by their own hand), and indeed, their own justification for existing gone. The world would be a lot better off. Gatekeepers are anti-human.
    procaryote · 1790522278 · focus · HN ↗
    If education doesn't matter, you've had the wrong education.
  3. professorthread · 1790442728 · focus · HN ↗
    1. is not a terrible idea, if structured correctly, but it doesn't adequately incentive the learning process, which requires continuous practice. For 1, I'd say put 80% of the grade in three to four exams taken over the semester, and allow one midterm exam grade to be dropped or replaced by the final exam grade. The remaining 20% of the grade is to incentivize practicing problems: homework graded based on completeness not correctness, short in-class quizzes randomly sampling a homework problem to incentivize students to legitimately complete the homework that are graded for correctness, and student participation in classtime activities.
  4. dghlsakjg · 1790464086 · focus · HN ↗
    Give a short quiz at the start of the class with one or two problems directly from the homework.
  5. isityettime · 1790490297 · focus · HN ↗
    I took some classes like this and they were great. I felt they were much fairer than classes where mere diligence/compliance could masquerade as competency by way of final grades padded by homework scores.
    They were disliked by many other students, though, and some people really think university grades should be about things like diligence, compliance, time management, etc., rather than pure subject mastery.
8. armchairhacker · 1790415334 · focus · HN ↗
  > such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output
  Small nitpick: you teach math, why don't you use an automated grader?
  I agree homework should be optional and your college is wrong. Even without AI, for some students it's easy to cheat and maybe for some students it's a waste of time. Maybe you can assign it a very low score, like 5% of the final grade, and/or award the grade based on attempting rather than getting the right answer.
  1. anal_reactor · 1790416103 · focus · HN ↗
    > why don't you use an automated grader?
    LLM verifies output of another LLM. The circle is complete, and nobody has any doubts that this is just a theatre.
    With manual grading, that one student who genuinely tries still has a chance to meaningfully engage.
    armchairhacker · 1790432350 · focus · HN ↗
    LLMs have become much better at avoiding hallucinations. Moreover, students can submit grade appeals, which should be reviewed by a human.
    pks016 · 1790442823 · focus · HN ↗
    It would be a waste of time. LLMs have become better but not perfect. Personal experience; it's easier/faster to grade for me than have the LLMs grade and cross-check each one.
    olyjohn · 1790804320 · focus · HN ↗
    But won't be reviewed by a human. They'll instead just rely on the AI output. Just like the students.
    jmalicki · 1790473367 · focus · HN ↗
    Translate the proof to lean and verify it.
    If the proof isn't trivially translatable to lean, is it actually a good proof?
    DonaldPShimoda · 1790527905 · focus · HN ↗
    Good homework feedback for a proof isn't "Did you get this right?", it's "Why did you not get this right?" or "How can we make your correct solution better?", neither of which fall out of a Lean translation-and-verification pass.
  2. singpolyma3 · 1790464712 · focus · HN ↗
    Good math grading is looking at things you can't trivially automate. Process, proofs, etc
    jmalicki · 1790473321 · focus · HN ↗
    Things that, in 2026, are trivial to automate grading of.
    singpolyma3 · 1790474086 · focus · HN ↗
    No?
9. MaxBarraclough · 1790416377 · focus · HN ↗
  > Many of them just dumped the document into an LLM, asked it to produce some "exam guide", and showed up with that thing printed out, asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.
  That student presumably performed poorly on the test. Your approach is working as intended here, isn't it?
  Also, is the AI-generated exam guide all that different to a human-written guide they could have downloaded a decade ago?
10. -1 · 1790419442 · focus · HN ↗
  It must be tiresome to be a student these days… with each teacher having different pet theories about AI use and sometimes trying to “trick” students who use AI, or implement some draconian rules about the way homework or exams must be done. It’s tiresome for you, but just imagine getting varying lectures on AI use as you go from class to class as a student. Must be hell
  1. analog31 · 1790515403 · focus · HN ↗
    Learning and understanding were always and option, and still are.
11. xtiansimon · 1790434673 · focus · HN ↗
  > “…students were given "sample problems" to try at home….Many…just dumped the document into an LLM…”
  I think this development should make all educational programs reconsider the flip-model: homework at school and video lessons at home.
  Homework sucks. Learning should be at your own pace (play/pause/rewind).
  1. professorthread · 1790442962 · focus · HN ↗
    This is a nice idea, but if you follow the Carnegie model of the number of hours per week it takes to learn a subject per credit hour, which is estimated at something between 6-9 hours total including classtime and out-of-class study per week for a normal-semester 3 credit course, then you can't meet the amount of time students need to be exposed to lecture (explanations, demonstrations, derivations), to do the background readings which provide necessary context that can't always be adequately covered in lecture, and to practice the concepts and tools on their own.
  2. dprkh · 1790463392 · focus · HN ↗
    This. I am currently a university student and I wish I could practice in class and not at home.
    dghlsakjg · 1790463985 · focus · HN ↗
    Office hours, tutoring centres, and self formed study groups are all great options.
    dprkh · 1790464913 · focus · HN ↗
    For me it's about time management, not about getting math help. I am consistent at attending classes because it's mandatory, but not consistent at finding time to practice math every day. If I could practice during classes, I think that would help me.
    dghlsakjg · 1790468723 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s an entirely different problem, and a hard one to solve. I would still suggest looking at the tutoring center or groups since there is time accountability there. If you don’t show up it is more consequential than skipping class from a personal point of view.
    Footprint0521 · 1790469085 · focus · HN ↗
    Dude, hop on the Gemini student plan and try Gemini Notebook and Gemini Live. Live is a personal TA, Notebook literally podcasts the readings and what you need to learn
    dprkh · 1790471275 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not buying this. I use AI to check my work, but it is absolutely terrible at teaching or explaining.
  3. singpolyma3 · 1790464455 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a terrible model though. If someone is paying to be taught and you just hand them video lectures... We already have video lectures at home. Why would they pay you? What product are you meaningfully offering in that world?
    wffurr · 1790469260 · focus · HN ↗
    Tutoring, office hours, teaching assistants. One of the best classes I took was a "studio style" class where we would work on a project and occasionally the teacher or a TA would interrupt and give a brief lecture or demonstration based on a "teachable moment" that had occurred.
    Wool2662 · 1790504997 · focus · HN ↗
    You are selling a diploma. Some universities also sell some degree of attestation to the high resilience of their graduates. And of course the space to network. Good teaching is not on the list in my experience.
    In general university lectures are horrible (of course there are exceptions). The lecturures oftentimes are required to teach as a condition of research funds, so for many it's not a priority anyways. On top of that most couldn't care less if their teaching style is didactically sound at all.
    singpolyma3 · 1790522529 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. You've described the problem very well
    xtiansimon · 1790687205 · focus · HN ↗
    ?? The model is to flip the roles, not to eliminate in-person teaching. The product is in-class homework and at home "lectures". I'm not saying this is appropriate for everything, but seems it would be useful for mathematics at some level.
  4. eviks · 1790503822 · focus · HN ↗
    Homework is learning at your own pace! You pick the time and place and pace
12. professorthread · 1790442435 · focus · HN ↗
  I teach math-heavy economics courses. I found that grading homeworks for completeness and pairing the homework due date with an in-class quiz on the problem set material (taken in class the day the problem set is due, after the set is turned in) has reduced the incentive for students to use LLMs to complete the homework. Exam questions closely mirror what's on the homework, and exam grades correlate with students who make legitimate attempts on their homework. I can sus out legit attempts typically by handwriting. No erasing and fast writing means it was copied.
  For grade weights, I weight the homework the lowest of any grading category, with in-class quizzes next, and exams scores the highest.
  1. rao-v · 1790495204 · focus · HN ↗
    Humm doesn’t this perhaps suggest you should do away with the homework, offer optional practice exercises and double down on in-class testing?
    lazyasciiart · 1790497055 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps they are also dealing with administration that says things like “The university insists that homework can't be optional”, as in the grandparent comment.
    chii · 1790503543 · focus · HN ↗
    The university administration needs flexibility rather than draconian rules that dont work.
    In any case, even if the uni insist on homework, the teacher can simply mark everyone who hands in their homework 100%. It is impossible for the administration to police it, or if they do, they'd need to hire someone to mark the homework (which conveniently solves the teacher's issue).
    a57721 · 1790524118 · focus · HN ↗
    This is basically my solution.
    Students who copy all solutions from LLMs maybe learn something, but it's like 5% compared to what someone can learn by doing the assignment without external help, or even by asking their peers. It's a bit disheartening, because I invest quite some time and thought in designing the assignments.
    It was very different before LLMs.
    WillAdams · 1790510450 · focus · HN ↗
    Seems to me that requiring the homework and having it paired with the quiz works well in terms of cause-effect for the students.
    grey-area · 1790514878 · focus · HN ↗
    Homework is actually useful practice if you’re not stupid enough to use an LLM to complete it.
    i80and · 1790515240 · focus · HN ↗
    I might argue that homework is, for mathematics, where the useful learning happens.
    djtango · 1790517155 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes it's all fun and games reading uni level maths nodding along to all the proofs until you're suddenly asked to do the exercises and suddenly nothing made sense and you are completely confounded by such an innocent looking question.
    a57721 · 1790524840 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly, it's the most important part of the math education, there is no point in memorizing definitions and theorems without putting everything into practice.
    But it seems like the temptation to get perfect solutions from an LLM is too big for many students nowadays, they lack the maturity to understand that using LLMs for basic assignments is counterproductive.
    driverdan · 1790515535 · focus · HN ↗
    It sounds like doing the homework is a form of practice exercises for the quizzes.
    professorthread · 1790517668 · focus · HN ↗
    Homework is a tool for students. It is where they practice. I see my job as a prof to curate the problems I think will help students best prepare for the exams, and use that space to help them gain the intuition about the problems I don't have sufficient time to cover in class, like through an application. As my profs before me used to say, true learning comes in doing problems.
    I find bright people who are self-motivated tend to do problems on their own, but this is not the modal student. This is like the top 10-15% of any class. The modal student is motivated by getting a degree so they can enter the working world, and sees coursework as an obstacle to that. They'll take any and every shortcut to get the highest grades with the least amount of effort. However, particularly with first and second year undergrads (but I've also seen the same behavior in grad students), they do not understand the purpose of pedagogy. That doing problems is where you learn the material.
    So if you make homework optional, the 10-15% hold steady and do it but the bulk of the class will stop doing problems and tank their grades on the exams. They will not internalize the lesson after that first bad exam, because it is morally and practially cheaper for them to believe they had a bad day or that their professor (me) is just a terrible meanie who constructed an exam with problems they've "never seen before" and "had no connection to the lecture" (actual evaluation comments I've had when I've tried to the homework-optional method).
  2. chis · 1790527938 · focus · HN ↗
    This is a great approach. I remember even pre-AI having issues where, at a big state school, basically all the answers to homework could be found online. Sometimes I made the choice to copy a homework and tell myself I’d catch up later. But the classes where there was a scheduled quiz right away just forced me to keep up.
13. tha_hnrain · 1790442607 · focus · HN ↗
  I think a possible solution is to make homework carry no grade weight, and simply mark it as complete or incomplete, like a presence check.
  Homework still provide valuable practice for students who are truly committed to learning. An automated system could provide an initial assessment and feedback. However, students can request human feedback paired with an in-person meeting. Such requests would require a mandatory explanation of what feedback they want or what the issue is. Professors and TAs will therefore only read and answer such requests themselves and will not waste time on AI output. At the same time, the system will still support students who are genuinely interested in learning.
  Students who use AI to do their homework are not interested in such feedback anyway, and they will also avoid in-person meetings because it will naturally reveal that they are unprepared and did not do the homework themselves, which is humiliating.
  To make this system work, we should present the in-person meetings as collaborative 'working sessions' or group office hours. Encouraging students to sign up in pairs or small groups also reduces individual anxiety.
  The main channels for grading remain exams and oral presentations.
  1. lostlogin · 1790468165 · focus · HN ↗
    > oral presentations.
    These can be written by AI. Or do you mean something more like the defending of a thesis?
    lazyasciiart · 1790497333 · focus · HN ↗
    Explaining something to an audience, even with notes, is hard to do without actually understanding what you are saying. It’s kind of like a rubber duck.
  2. paul7986 · 1790474322 · focus · HN ↗
    Committed to learning and going to jump ahead here to say if smart glasses (without cameras or in time with) become the norm and Ai is always right how many will not take the time to learn the information is always right in front of them in their view.
    Myself as a student i take my class notes and the subject matter the teacher provides and have Ai create multiple choice quizzes. It's a much quicker way to learn tho not as quickly as AI glasses I mentioned.
  3. gosub100 · 1790497151 · focus · HN ↗
    In most colleges, if too many students fail the course, the instructor is blamed. So you cannot optimize solely on catching AI cheaters.
14. sakesun · 1790462207 · focus · HN ↗
  In the future, homework and officework will only exists to generate AI providers revenue.
15. lostlogin · 1790468111 · focus · HN ↗
  > I am teaching some math courses, and I see how LLMs disrupted all standard approaches, and I don't know what to do.
  I wonder what the financial cost of AI will be to teaching? Does teaching get more expensive? More things need to be supervised, more things need to be presentations or in person?
16. BeetleB · 1790469942 · focus · HN ↗
  > The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning.
  The problem is not LLMs, but your university. In my undergrad, almost all the math courses had no required HW. They'd assign it, but you wouldn't turn it in. You'd come to office hours for help on the HW, or ask in class (they'd often dedicate the first 10-15 minutes of each lecture to Q&A).
  It was awesome for people like me. No time wasted on neatly presented HWs. I'd do it quickly, verify the answers, and study for the exams.
  The flip side was there were many exams (you don't want your grade catered if you do poorly in one exam). A course like calculus could have 4-5 "midterms", and then the final. Often, they'd drop your lowest midterm score so you're allowed one bad day.
  1. submain · 1790475059 · focus · HN ↗
    In my country of origin (not US) that's how it worked starting in high school. Homework was called "suggested problems". The teacher reviewed them in class. No grading. We ended up doing it because that was almost the only way to pass the exams (which, btw, could be up to 50 questions long...)
  2. trostaft · 1790478211 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed, I've switched over to model similar to this in the course I teach. Weekly optional problem set + in-class quiz every week with one homework problem verbatim + an extension. The homeworks are completely open resource, LLM, friend, sorcery, w/e. I figure that, even if they're given an oracle, they have to internalize the ideas to the point where they can generalize on the follow-up. I'll only really know when the course finishes, but I think this will work out. I want to pair this with an oral midterm and final, but that'll have to wait a semester.
  3. seanmcdirmid · 1790525867 · focus · HN ↗
    I heard from a friend who went to German university that the homework was never graded, maybe you could get help with it but the professor didn’t have TAs and had a large class. Lots of Midterms were also not feasible given the setup, so often 100% of your grade depended on the final.
    I can’t imagine as American how that would go down with most American students.
17. FuckButtons · 1790476897 · focus · HN ↗
  It seems to me that the only realistic option is to have more exams, closed book, and then use gen ai yourself to help reduce the workload of grading. Possibly with some kind of curve assigning more weight later in the semester.
18. StanislavPetrov · 1790479887 · focus · HN ↗
  >I rely on written exams that are open book
  How about cutting out the open book so that the students who don't study and to their homework actually fail? When I was in school many years ago "open book" was only used for special ed students and others who couldn't carry a regular academic workload. Homework was assigned, but our grades were determined solely by testing our mastery of the material. If you could master the material without doing the homework or showing up for class on non-testing days, more power to you. College has become more like kindergarten with all of the hand-holding.
  1. isityettime · 1790490023 · focus · HN ↗
    When I was in college, whether or not an exam was open book seemed orthogonal to the difficulty of the exam as well as the class's median uncurved score. Allowing the textbook or notes lets you write an exam that might otherwise be unreasonable.
    In the classes I took with open note exams where I did well, I barely ended up consulting my notes anyway. The students who didn't study could flip through the textbooks all they wanted, but they lost so much time doing it that they couldn't complete all of the problems on the exam. For the students who studied well, the textbook was way easier to jump around in because they knew it well and knew what they were looking for.
    Am exam that is designed to be closed book/closed note where a specific student is allowed some amount of notes as a disability accommodation is just different from one that is designed to be open note/open book from the start. The latter, testing the same material, is generally longer or harder to make better use of the format.
  2. MITSardine · 1790494128 · focus · HN ↗
    Open book need not be easier, it entirely depends on the exam.
    This was too long ago for me to remember the details of but, just making an example here, we might have had a course on homogeneization of elliptic problems using a model PDE with a div(A grad u) term throughout, and then the exam was about a PDE with a curl(A curl u) and some other added terms.
    Notes carry the method and theoretical tools but you then still need to apply them to a new problem.
    So, if anything, our open book exams were harder and a better test of understanding and mastery. You couldn’t rote your way into a good grade.
  3. sensanaty · 1790518652 · focus · HN ↗
    Open book exams IME are usually more difficult, since the exams can be crafted on the assumption that you don't need to dumb anything down since students can look up certain things.
    We had a formula "cheat sheet" on every exam paper, but if you don't know when or why you're supposed to use a formula, it might as well not have been in the cheatsheet at all
19. seer · 1790482621 · focus · HN ↗
  Hmm people can now do a lot more than they were supposed to be able to without LLMs - shouldn’t we lean into that?
  Force people to go all in with “impossible” tasks and see how they do with the power of LLMs. Then spend some significant time teaching people _with_ that solution in place what was actually built and what would have been a better architecture? A … software archeology session if you will.
  That’s what most of what people do would be anyway - building PoC fast and then figuring out how to scale them?
20. Alacart · 1790483949 · focus · HN ↗
  > asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.
  Perhaps (sarcastically) this is the new approach, because this is now the point where they’re forced to struggle and therefore actually learn. An exam every other day, let them ask the questions.
  1. lazyasciiart · 1790497433 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sarcastically, this is the flipped classroom approach. Read the examples and watch the lecture on your own time, then come and do the exercises with a teacher available to explain when you realize you didn’t understand anything.
21. SamInTheShell · 1790486497 · focus · HN ↗
  Why not just make the assignments "reading" based and set an expectation of randomized quizzes that take 5 minutes at the start of class to fill out to get the homework credit? When I say randomized, like multiple versions. You can use LLMs to churn out PDFs to a tailored format and utilize a pool of questions.
22. viccis · 1790490530 · focus · HN ↗
  It's crazy that we went from "we found a significant number of students used AI in our course and gave them a 0" to "yeah they all use it we can't stop it". Basically just accepting widespread cheating, normalizing and accepting the complete abandonment of the first lesson in ethics we are taught and held to in academia.
  I know this is absolutely impossible because colleges and universities have headed in completely the opposite direction, but the solution: Literally just expel them. Just like they did when people cheated when I was in college. Don't make it a small punishment so that they turn it into a risk/reward assessment. Colleges are overpopulated anyway; just trim the fat of students who shouldn't be there. Do a follow up oral exam interview about their project and if they can't explain what someone like me spent 30+ hours building and can speak about for 4 hours if asked, then expel them. They can make your coffee at the nearby Starbucks, who cares.
  If you don't do this then understand that you are telling your students not using AI that they will need to begin cheating like the others to be able to keep up with the changes. OP mentioned they massively increased the scope of their assignments, which means OP is forcing their students to use AI now.
  1. chemodax · 1790513063 · focus · HN ↗
    Agreed. It’s very sad modern society is stopping using ethics and at the same time increase using different firms of policing.
23. mppm · 1790501777 · focus · HN ↗
  I've had the same experience, and likewise I have no idea what to do.
  Or rather, I do have ideas, but they do require substantial restructuring. E.g.:
  1) Strict, in-person (no exceptions), electronics-free exams with written and oral portion.
  2) Transition to guided independent learning: students are given written materials and recommended exercises to study. They are shown how to use AI assistants productively. Instead of lectures, there are scheduled discussions, where students can ask questions and listen to additional explanations from the lecturer. They can also seek feedback for completed exercises. However, none of this contributes to grades in any way.
  With such an incentive realignment, I think it's possible that higher education could be salvaged. But... apart from general institutional inertia, there is also the political angle standing in the way. Everybody needs a degree in the "developed economy", and the above changes are basically the opposite of the nobody left behind policy that enables half the population to attain one...
24. barapa · 1790502734 · focus · HN ↗
  If grades matter, the students will cheat.
25. bananaflag · 1790503119 · focus · HN ↗
  > The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning. I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.
  Can't you just not grade it at all? If the student has done their homework, just consider it passed. And then don't count it at all for the final grade.
26. buckle8017 · 1790508627 · focus · HN ↗
  Short in person quizzes frequently.
  They don't even have to be a significant part of the rubric.
  Just ensure the students know what they don't know.
27. procaryote · 1790509474 · focus · HN ↗
  Perhaps let them take a practice exam early on, so they can realise they'll fail the real one unless they actually study?
28. cocoflunchy · 1790516402 · focus · HN ↗
  I wonder if you could see this the other way round? Prior to AI you were limited in your ability to grade handwritten tests.
  But now you could have the students take a written exam every other week and use a LLM to grade it?
  I'm pretty sure Opus 5.5 has good enough vision capabilities to auto grade with the right prompt.
29. somenameforme · 1790517857 · focus · HN ↗
  Grade homework for completion, have a weekly in-class quiz that is basically a few problems that are near to identical to the homework. You lose a bit of class time to the quiz, but it creates a strong incentive to complete the homework, and also eases in the midterm/final for students instead of going nothing nothing - boom here's 30%+ of your grade.
30. [deleted] · 1790519947 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
31. zeroonetwothree · 1790522632 · focus · HN ↗
  My favorite math class I ever took had optional homework, but every exam problem was taken directly from the homework. So if you did all the homework the exams were very easy.
  I imagine this would work very well in the current period since there’s no reason to use LLMs for this homework. Of course even back then many students didn’t do it and got low grades, but you have to be responsible at some point.
  1. a57721 · 1790525230 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree and that's my idea as well, exams are open book and extremely close to assignments. My issues are with the first year undergraduates, who are not mature enough to do homework that is optional, and when it's not optional, they'll do it with LLMs and call it a day.
32. johntarter · 1790524022 · focus · HN ↗
  > I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.
  I think the problem is the students also take ~4-5 subjects per semester, and each of them may be just as demanding. High school is even more spread out with 6-8 subjects per semester. There's only a certain number of hours during the day for study and homework. For many, math homework ends up being the most time-intensive. Also these exams determine their GPA which in turn plays in part in determining their standing for the next few decades of their lives.

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