A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

I’m an AI engineer but I think schools need a nuclear option

Banish tech in schools (including cell phones) (except during comp classes) but allow it at home

Ie in high school only allow paper and pencil/pen

Go back to written exams (handwriting based)

Be lenient on spelling and grammer

Allow homework, digital tutoring AI assistants and AI only when it not primary- ie for homework not in class work

Bring back oral exams (in a limited way)

Encourage study groups in school but don’t allow digital tech in those groups in class or libraries only outside of campus or in computer labs

Give up iPads and Chromebooks and Pearson etc

There was a time when governments, banks, corporations and institutions had big iron computers, and they were not in the classroom. That time was okay; education happened, and some people who went into computing did very cool things anyway.

The best format I ever learned math was with plain sheets of printer paper, essentially a page per problem letting me doodle the problem and really think it through freely. After working with the concepts we then logged on to Mathematica for visualizations to really cement the concepts.

Back in the day we were writing code on paper (or on punched cards, using them as a paper substitute, as there were a lot of them left over from the Soviet times and they looked very "computer-y"), so even during computer classes you didn't necessarily need a computer. Not that I really think that it can still work in the year 2025 and beyond...

There's another side of this. The teachers have gotten used to technology, too. They don't want to grade papers by hand anymore.

My SO was a TA in college, so I can echo this.

You'd get a stack of 120 blue books to grade in a week's time a few times a quarter.

The grading was entirely just checking if the student used a set of key words and had a certain length. This was a near universal method across the University for blue book exams.

Honestly, an LLM would be a better grader than most stressed out grad students.

Everyone has been phoning it in for a few centuries now

> Bring back oral exams

With 30 kids in a class Im not sure this is possible. Oral exams scale horribly

No issues to me in using LLM for suggestive grading assuming we have some evidence on its grading rubric and paper trail to audit for appeals to human review - ie human teacher is responsible not LLM

Doesn't France still do oral exams?

I was just talking to younger coworkers about this recently. Mid-90s to early 2000s: FORTRAN, COBOL, C, and C++ classes all had handwritten code parts for homework, handouts, exams, etc. This wasn't just pseudocode, you had to have full syntax, variable declarations, correct spelling of functions, etc. You frequently had to show code optimization, debugging, etc even on paper. Wild times!!

* All of those classes also had lab time (some dedicated, similar to a chemistry class), info on how to get the IDE if you had $ access to a computer at home, and alternatives as well.

Personally, I see more value in pseudo code (written or typed) and sketch type diagrams (analog or digital) than handwriting code. However, it was WILD and amazing to watch the gray-hairs of those days debug your code on paper!

Or just give them laptops that are on an internal network only, with just the tools they need.

You could write your essay and save it in your classroom shared folder. I don't think this is rocket science.

Bring back smaller classroom sizes.

Bring back functional school funding models.

Bring back a populace proud to pay for their priorities with taxes

I struggled alot with hand writing assignments and the greatest boost in my grade and academic ability was getting my own laptop in highschool because of the writing.

So i really do not wish to see that backtracked. But i could see the internet being declared too destructive.

A computer without internet, a book, and ample time would have worked for me.

This i could see work. Either white-list specific online resources or just full on local digital library of pdfs.

Phones still pose a problem. But asking for things on a phone and typing it back to a computer would be rather inefficient cheating.

Maths is probably the safest subject. Reading compression and writing is the dangerous stuff. Its arguably the most important subject in regular school, 2nd only to socialisation skills.

Ban phones in the classroom. Thems were the rules for me in high school - phones went in our locker.

As does Denmark.

> They don't want to grade papers by hand anymore.

This is only half correct. Grading by hand isn't an issue. Reading students' handwriting is the issue. Having to read the hurried scribbling of dozens of students is a huge challenge for teachers, who were already struggling grading typed papers on a deadline.

Double education budget.

Most western countries I follow are cutting on public education and teachers are miserable. It doesn't sound promising to be honest.

They do, but teachers are on the street every year as their conditions degrade. It might not last for long.

Any audits will be quickly farmed out to yet another AI for review, is my guess.

I'd imagine some system like YTs appeals system, where everyone is maximally unhappy.

One anecdote from my SO's time as a grader was that pre med students were the worst. They would just wear you down to get the best possible grade, appealing literally every missed point ad nauseum. Most profs would give in eventually in the undergrad classes and not deal with them. Of course further emboldening them.

No other major was like that, only those dealing with the future hellscape that was US healthcare.

I'd imagine that, yes, eventually your appeals in the AI future will end up at a prof, but delayed to hell and back. Even paying $200k+ won't matter.

My exams had both per question. Pseudo code then actual code.

This was early 2000s, Java.

>Be lenient on spelling and grammer

How about be strict on spelling and grammer (sic) to have a GPA that accurately places students in colleges. The days of dunces getting 3.9 GPA and making it into Yale need to end.

I was a TA and knew many TAs, and no one I knew did things that way. (To some extent this can depend on the field though.)

My best experience for book reports was by oral exam in high school with a class of about 30.

Everyone has independent work and one by one you are called to the teacher's desk. He would take your book, open it up to a "random" spot and read a couple of sentences and then ask about what is going on in that scene. Hard to bull shit.

This could be modified to be like parent:teacher conferences where appointment slots exist while everyone else is doing something else (lunch, another class, maybe scheduled after hours)

In my Uni we still had some coding test done with pen and paper (2014-2018), and AFAIK, they're still doing them. I even done a part of an exam in assembly with a provided Xilinx PicoBlaze assembly mnemonics list.

I don't know why people demonize them. If you know the syntax you're asked for, you can write in that language, and if you were asked to write in pseudo-code some algorithms, you should be able without any additional computerize help.

Studied Fortran 65 as elective, submitted assignment/exams by writing actual code with pencil paper. Never got access to the cool looking machines in the actually cooled room. I am not kidding that I really enjoyed that paper compared to my other papers.

But the issue is not there is not enough money in the budget, it's just not a priority. Old people are prioritized, not young future.

From a teacher's perspective, I'm sure the craft is a mess of bad school policies vs. so-called "best practices" vs. real learning science vs. government policies vs. ancient bad advice (eg. learning styles and tablets in classrooms) vs. personal opinion.

It's not like there is a senior engineer who's got mountains of expertise to defer to (like a software team would have). Teachers are likely given directives from their schools and get dumped a bunch of tablets and are told this is "modern" education and to just roll it out.

Anyway, to your point - top-down directives are what change schools. There has been success such as banning smartphones in Ireland & UK recently. Schools taking on the problems and then solving it themselves could go a long way, rather than waiting for government to mandate things.