Thread

1. 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. 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. 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.

         1. 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.

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