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427 points JumpCrisscross | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.496s | source
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lwhi ◴[] No.41901852[source]
It is no longer effective to solely use a written essay to measure how deeply a student comprehends a subject.

AI is here to stay; new methods should be used to assess student performance.

I remember being told at school, that we weren't allowed to use calculators in exams. The line provided by teachers was that we could never rely on having a calculator when we need it most—obviously there's irony associated with having 'calculators' in our pockets 24/7 now.

We need to accept that the world has changed; I only hope that we get to decide how society responds to that change together .. rather than have it forced upon us.

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strogonoff ◴[] No.41902027[source]
The best method for assessing performance when learning is as old as the world: assess the effort, not how well the result complies with some requirements.

If the level of effort made is high, but the outcome does not comply in some way, praise is due. If the outcome complies, but the level of effort is low, there is no reason for praise (what are you praising? mere compliance?) and you must have set a wrong bar.

Not doing this fosters people with mental issues such as rejection anxiety, perfectionism, narcissism, defeatism, etc. If you got good grades at school with little actual effort and the constant praise for that formed your identity, you may be in for a bad time in adulthood.

Teacher’s job is to determine the appropriate bar, estimate the level of effort, and to help shape the effort applied in a way that it improves the skill in question and the more general meta skill of learning.

The issue of judging by the outcome is prevalent in some (or all) school systems, so we can say LLMs are mostly orthogonal to that.

However, even if that issue was addressed, in a number of skills the mere availability of ML-based generative tools makes it impossible to estimate the level of actual effort and to set the appropriate bar, and I do not see how it can be worked around. It’s yet another negative consequence of making the sacred process of producing an amalgamation of other people’s work—something we all do all the time; passing it through the lens of our consciousness is perhaps one of the core activities that make us human—to become available as a service.

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1. concordDance ◴[] No.41902126[source]
> The best method for assessing performance when learning is as old as the world: assess the effort, not how well the result complies with some requirements.

I am really quite confused about what you think the point of education is.

In general, the world (either the physical world or the employment world) does not care about effort, it cares about results. Someone laboriously filling their kettle with a teaspoon might be putting in a ton of effort, but I'd much rather someone else make the tea who can use a tap.

Why do we care about grades? Because universities and employers use them to quickly assess how useful someone is likely to be. Few people love biochemistry enough that they'd spend huge sums of money and time at university if it didn't help get them a job.

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2. strogonoff ◴[] No.41902376[source]
You may be mistaking “the world” with “education” or “learning”. Producing a result is not evidence of learning progress. During learning, result is a somewhat useful metric if it roughly correlates with the level of effort, but relying only on result when determining whether to praise or reward a person during the learning stage is always a recipe for issues. A student may quickly learn to reproduce the desired result and stop progressing.
3. strogonoff ◴[] No.41903605[source]
> Someone laboriously filling their kettle with a teaspoon might be putting in a ton of effort, but I'd much rather someone else make the tea who can use a tap.

By your own logic, the student who fills the kettle with the spoon has produced the expected result. Fast enough with the spoon and sky’s the limit, right?

A good teacher, while praising the effort, would help them find out about the tap. Not praising the effort would give the opposite signal! You have worked hard, and through no fault of your own (no one has built-in knowledge about the tap) you were essentially told that was for nothing?!

And if you have learned the tap, do you want to be done with it? Or be pushed to keep applying the same effort as with the spoon, but directed more wisely knowing that there’s a tap? Imagine what heights would you reach then!

The worst teachers are in whose class 30% of the students are filling their kettle with spoons all their time, 30% simply dip them into the puddle and never get used to do the work, 30% give up because what is even the point of filling the kettle when their home has a hot water dispenser.

Love your analogy, by the way.