Thread

1. vjk800 · 1790409528 · focus · HN ↗

   It's funny how people talk about "teaching" getting more difficult with LLMs.

   Clearly teaching got a lot better, since we now have a new teaching tool at our use, the LLMs. It's evaluating that got harder, because students can use the same tool to cheat in traditional forms of evaluation.

   If "teaching the students" means the same as "evaluating the students" to you, maybe you shouldn't teach in the first place.

   1. mantas · 1790409878 · focus · HN ↗

      It’s not just evaluating. Students used to learn skills while doing an assignment. LLMing through assignments teaches copy-paste at best.

      It’s like copy-paste Wikipedia presentations 2 decades ago. People used to learn things doing research for a project. Then suddenly it became copying off Wikipedia and people not even pre-reading what they copied into PPT.

   2. chrismorgan · 1790410038 · focus · HN ↗

      What you’re calling evaluating is a part of the learning process for the student, not just about confirming that the student knows the thing. LLMs are actively undermining learning in this way. There was useful friction which has been removed.
   3. YmiYugy · 1790410487 · focus · HN ↗

      Teaching and evaluation are of course not the same thing, but evaluation is an important part of teaching. There is a mismatch between students’ overall desire to learn things and the moment-to-moment experience that learning is hard.

      Even devoid of all the economic and social pressures that grades impose students would compromise their learning experience. Ever regretted looking up the solution to a puzzle in a video game or sneaked a peak at the crossword puzzle solutions?

      One of the hardest part of teaching is keeping students from self-sabotage. Evaluation helps with that.

      Beyond that evaluation is of course also useful just as feedback.

   4. adrianN · 1790410963 · focus · HN ↗

      Teaching is imo mostly about techniques that battle laziness. Teaching intrinsically motivated intelligent students has always been trivial. All progress in education is about scaling it to work for people who only reluctantly engage with the material.

      1. cheesecakegood · 1790490249 · focus · HN ↗

         Right, and part of that is nurturing student interest and buy-in, because it can increase. Traditionally smart teaching and the right structure could result in some percentage of reluctant learners being drawn into good habits and better retention. I think the subtle part of the AI in education crisis is how it basically has smothered that "nurturing" in the cradle, right from the get-go, so it's a bit of a cold-start situation in many classes.
   5. tgv · 1790412566 · focus · HN ↗

      Without grading, students don't learn. It's as simple as that.

      1. defrost · 1790413327 · focus · HN ↗

         Pretty strong opinion that overlooks all those students that study or attend courses specifically to learn.
      2. thow88737363667 · 1790415236 · focus · HN ↗

         That outlook is way too bleak. As a person who has taught at universities for fifteen years and has run lots of open educational formats and infrastructure with other public institutions and citizen groups, my experience is the opposite. If anything, the desire to learn and curiosity are among the strongest common traits humans possess. Grades are just a tool and a proxy that most people working in formalized educational settings have to work with at specific points.
      3. psyklic · 1790426717 · focus · HN ↗

         Motivation can come from many sources, not only grading, e.g. individual encouragement, exciting applications, day-to-day relevance, interest shown by peers. Also students can just be intrinsically motivated.

         1. mantas · 1790443064 · focus · HN ↗

            It may come in different styles. But what do you do with students who don’t have motivation beyond grading/punishment? Some people just do not have motivation unless somebody standing by them with a stick.

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