A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes.

Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet.

Caught with a cellphone, you fail the test. Caught twice you fail the class.

The non-story beatings will continue until morale and common sense improve.

Are you suggesting kids spend longer times in school or suggesting kids spend less time on education?

I’m not sure where the OP said that. Can you show us?

Neither? it's quite clear they're suggesting improving assessments. This will lead to upstream learning not being gamed.

Completely agree. I think this was kind of solved going to university where most of the math courses did not allow calculators and similar tools or books present and the tests were designed to not require these and instead focused on theory and concepts. I think isolating test environments is one thing and then you can in addition have classes or assignments where AI and other tools are available and acceptable to use.

If substantially changing school device and testing policies is required by new technology, doesn't that mean everything is different now?

As far as I can remember phones were not allowed in class and testing was generally done on paper. College was a lot more lax about this stuff than K-12 was. But colleges could and should proctor their exams more strictly.

No phones in class, at scale and enforced, feels like a last 5 years thing in K-12. And the trend was very much towards increased digital testing, pre-LLM.

This is pivoting back to paper-based, but it's going to be as messy and slow of a transition as the no-mobile-device one was.

Especially given how much money there is in "AI".

And hamfistedly-handed, will likely leave another generation fucked over with regards to basic education (like the predatory social+mobile adoption before regulation did previously).

"No phones" was the rule back in the 2000s, when phones were flip phones or pagers for drug deals. Then helicopter parents demanded to be able to contact their children at any time, including during classes, so phones were allowed. There was the added bonus of "What if there's a shooting? I need to be able to call my kid during a shooting!" Now, phones are not allowed again.

The takeaway is that phones should never have been allowed in school. They distract from school, and kids need to learn to focus on tasks without being distracted.

I attended high school in the US in the early 00’s and cell phones were absolutely banned from classrooms. You could keep them in your locker and use them between classes, but that was it.

I attended college in the late 00’s, and I don’t think I took a single digital exam. Quizzes, sure, but for final exams even CS was pencil and paper (or a final project, which admittedly will have issues in the post-LLM era).

I'm surprised the answer of doing all exercises (including essay writing) in class is apparently not obvious.

High school me was a moron and should not be trusted to do the real work and people who know better should force him to practice the skills lol

Once he's grown and has a job he will one day realize and be thankful for the teachers that forced him to do the work.

Obviously not true for all students but I don't think it harms anyone inverting it but please point out if I'm wrong!

I see your blue book exam and number two pencil and I reraise you a micro earbud smart glasses and wifi connection.

If testing is taking up so much time it can't fit inside schools then my god definitely have them spend less time on education.

In high school, with so many hours of classes per day, homework should be a small part of the day. There's enough time to get the important parts into the actual classroom. If homework is a very large amount of time, then there should be less homework.

Raise you a Faraday Cage.

Right: If parents needed to contact students during class--or vice-versa--there was never[0] any technical barrier to that!

You don't need hundreds of distraction/cheating pocket computers in a giant invisible wireless network for that, a school could easily route the information if the organization chose to do so.

The technology was used as an end-run around an organizational barrier.

There is no organizational barrier. Parent can still call the school and say jimmys dad is in the hospital or whatever.

They were technically banned in my school in the 00s as well, but it wasn't enforced. Teachers often have bigger concerns than quiet kids.

I'd love for someone from the 10s to chime in, as that seemed the heyday of unchecked social media use.

I was in high school in the late 2010s. No cell phones allowed during most of class time, and it was somewhat enforced. I definitely recall students being chewed out for having their phones out in class, but I also recall some students having their phones out with no repercussions.

I was also in high school in that time period and had a similar experience. As I recall it, pretty much every student had a phone by 2007ish (flip phones back then), and using a phone in class was grounds to have it confiscated for the day and get a detention. This was absolutely enforced.

My college experience was similar to yours as well. All exams were paper (often blue books). Having a phone out would get you kicked out of the exam hall. But by the time I did med school, it was all digital.

Cheat on the test by bringing the answers memorized and ready to use in your brain!

> Caught with a cellphone, you fail the test. Caught twice you fail the class.

One of my coworker's has their kids in a school where if you are caught with a cellphone, on the first offense you are suspended. Apparently it's working well.

Some assignments are bigger than can be done in one class period. And class time is for lecture; there isn't a lot of time for students to work problems on their own.

So we're just dealing with what (some) students have always done: get someone else to write the report or do the math homework. Or have parents pay a tutor to help. Or use Cliff's Notes instead of reading the book. But now it's trivially easy and free. There are no obstacles to cheating other than knowing it's wrong and self-defeating, and those are things that young people don't really have a well-developed sense about.

And, it allows parents and students to completely ignore making plans. Jimmy needs a ride home from football practice? That should be (a) expected and (b) planned for in advance. He should not have to text mom to come and pick him up.

He wants to go home with Tommy instead? Well too bad, that wasn't the plan.

It's all fun and games until it's a public school that implements the mandatory schooling law and so can't really kick out students unless they murder someone.

Some people promote a “flipped classroom” where you’re supposed to watch video lectures on your own and classroom time is used to discuss them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

What about this idea: flip the script. Students must learn the subject OUTside of class: teacher provides video lectures for those that want to use them, but any source is open game -- YouTube, AI, you name it.

Then class time is reserved exclusively for doing the assignments. No phones or computers allowed.

That's funny that I just had that idea around the same time that you must have been typing your answer. (See my adjacent answer). Actually thought it was probably a crazy idea and would get quickly downvoted. Quite surprised that there's already a Wikipedia article about it. Cool.

That's why states are implementing no-cell-phone laws. To give the educators cover for harsh consequences. They are basically making using a cell phone in school the same as assaulting someone, so that they can remove the student for repeat offenses.

Agreed. What we're actually witnessing is the end of mass-produced education.

> High school me was a moron and should not be trusted to do the real work and people who know better should force him to practice the skills lol

I knew some people doing great at high school due to being forced to study. Then they taste the "freedom" in college and fail hard because no one tells them what to do now.

So teachers are...proctors? No reason to have every teacher recording their own lectures. One teacher per grade per district? Per state? Outsourced to the lowest bidder who generates it with AI?

Part of the problem is that in some areas schools (and parents) have leaned so heavily into certain notions of "equity" or "care" that they no longer are willing to require anything so specific. I use quotes because while I think there is value in moving more towards those goals than schools often did in the past, I think it's possible to take it too far. At some point there has to be some sort of standard that has to be met, and by pushing that point further and further into life (e.g, from junior high to high school to college) we're similarly lowering the bar in various areas of life.

I've met numerous parents who seem to be offended by the idea that someone would tell their child "You must do this, even if you don't want to" in basically any context. In the past I think such things were said in many contexts where they shouldn't have been, but the pendulum is swinging a bit too far the other way these days.

Hey now we’re talking!

But seriously, teaching in public schools these days relies so much on technology, youtube, that it makes no sense to have teacher’s as paid professionals, just get subscriptions to technology services for the kids and teach them how to work them. I think we still need places to socialize kids, but that’s a different job. Anyway, yes, too many teachers are simply there to enforce unnecessary social hierarchies and rigid modes of thinking, there is no need for most of them.

Sure.

Current paradigm:

Education time = time at school + time doing assignments

OP said:

  > Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom.

So my question is, when is homework done? If it is being done at school, then our two options are to extend hours spent at school or give up time normally spent lecturing. I guess there's the alternative of getting rid of homework and only evaluating students on exams, but considering how terrible of an idea this is, I'm assumed that's not what's being suggested.

Now I'll be fair, I interpreted "testing and grading" as including homework. Why? Well...

1) exams are already performed (primarily) in the classroom. Everyone is already aware of how supervised settings reduce (but not eliminates) cheating. I'm assuming the OP isn't so disconnected that they are aware of this. I'm assuming they also went to school and had a fairly typical education. I'm also assuming that the OP isn't making the wild assumption that the majority of school teachers and news reporters aren't comatose, so capable of understanding this rather obvious solution.

2) I assumed the OP RTFA

The entire problem that's constantly talked about, including THE ARTICLE, is HOMEWORK. No one is talking about 1) for the aforementioned reasons. *Everyone is talking about homework.* It has been the conversation the entire time. So I restate, if you are evaluating /homework/ in class, then what are we giving up? It really doesn't take a genius to figure out something has to give, right?

So the option is to what, stop handing out homework? That would result in less education time. To clarify, I mean education time, not classroom time.

Did your kids spend a year doing virtual classes? Our district here did a pretty good job compared to most, but for many kids it was basically a lost year.

  > I'm surprised the answer of doing all exercises (including essay writing) in class is apparently not obvious.

Because that results in less education time. If you do homework in class then you have to give up lecture time.

Of course, the other option is to extend school time.

Here's a good litmus test: if something seems very obvious, you're likely missing some hidden complexity.

It's not a perfect test, but if it's obvious to you and not to the people closer to the problem then there really should be alarm bells going off in your head. That feeling of "this is weird" is your brain telling you "I'm missing something" not "everyone is so dumb" (well... not mutually exclusive)

They might perform well, but might hate every second of it. I was like that.

For example, high school poisoned reading for me. I hated fiction for several years after high school.

Instead of extending hours in classrooms, which might feel like torture, what about no-tech libraries for individual work like homework? Or with a coffeeshop vibe. I'd personally say four hours a day but I'm guessing two might be what many found reasonable. If you finished your work early you could read what you'd like. Town and city libraries could be enlisted for this along with the school libraries, which might need to be expanded to fit all of these kids. Add sports and you get a serious full day for kids, not the kind of half day they have now in the U.S. That additionally lightens the load on working parents.

> Because that results in less education time. If you do homework in class then you have to give up lecture time.

Homework is the real education time. The lecture is less than half the ingredients. You can't learn without engaging with the material. The best lectures follow a question-trytoanswer-getrightanswer pattern where students are basically doing homework as part of the lecture.

We wrote all graded essays during class. It was great. Nice and timeboxed. When you're done you're done. Also forces you to keep it short enough that the teacher doesn't drown in stuff to grade because how much can you really write by hand in 2 hours?

There is far more value in skilled individual attention at the doing exercises stage - helping where people are stuck, figuring out which parts need revision - than at the lecture stage. Think about how college seminars work - you do the reading on your own, the learning happens when you're digging into it in a group setting.

Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud. Phone bans have never been about improving education, they're just adults seizing a chance to make children's lives more miserable.

Homework has never been shown to improve education. It gets given out because parents demand it.

Right. I was forced to study, I hate it. Now I'm forced to work, quite good at what I do, but hate it as well.

From The New York Times 1996, the internet is ruining education:

https://archive.is/qTAXR

It's an easy win for a journalist.

I mean, it kind of did...

Look at our political leaders now vs in the 1990s as an example of how poorly educated we are now

  > The best lectures follow a question-trytoanswer-getrightanswer pattern where students are basically doing homework as part of the lecture.

Are you referring to the Socratic Method?

I agree that homework is where a significant chunk of learning happens but I'm highly skeptical that the utility is preserved through such a short timeframe. Spaced repetition is highly effective for memory, and this is baked into any method which has take home assignments. A collaborative style lecture is good, but this serves a different purpose.

  > We wrote all graded essays during class.

Sorry, you jumped a little here. Who is "we"? Is there a "when" and "where" to this too? Are you a current high schooler? Recent grad? Was this years ago? I've lost the context here.

I'm going to need some serious citation here. Through my personal experience, homework and at home studying were critical to my education. I would not have made it through any of my degrees (B.S., M.S., PhD) by just attending lecture (PhD doesn't even have lectures!), despite this being sufficient for high school and early college. Though, that does not mean this was a good thing as it only means the education was insufficient.

So... citation needed

that was television that destroyed our political leaders ... https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/how-early-warning...

It absolutely did.

100% literacy, but all we read is garbage, and all we write is short and shallow. 100% computer literacy too, if that term means making accounts, clicking on links, scrolling up and down, taking videos of things, and commenting.

The internet has ended up being a massive drain on people's energy, and driven communities apart. Of course, there are exceptions here and there amongst the better educated classes, people who manage to shield themselves from the worst transgressions of the behemoths running the tech infrastructure that dominates people's lives.

And, of course, these exalted internet users then vehemently argue that the internet is great, and people just aren't using it right, like them. And round and round the thing goes, getting worse and worse for most people.

> that results in less education time. If you do homework in class then you have to give up lecture time

The most advanced classes I took, including in high school, made us do the reading and initial problem solving at home and then advanced problem solving in class. This was true for math, English and economics. Lectures with application combined.

But that doesn't work if students don't do the reading. Just as lectures only in class doesn't work if students aren't doing the homework. So a compromise is required--it's doing exercises live. Possibly even just one of the problems from last night's homework.

I think you misunderstood parent's (admittedly poorly illustrated) point.

As someone who grew up mostly before cell phones, it forced a greater level of planning, responsibility, and freedom on me than kids now normally experience.

I'd often call my parents (gasp! Remembering my house phone number!) to adjust plans, by telling them where I'd be for how long. And generally, they had no problem with it.

I laugh thinking about the absolute fucking nuclear meltdown a lot of helicopter parents would have today at middle schoolers saying "I'll be over at this friend's house for the day. Will give you a call closer to dinner. If you want me, call their house phone, but we might be out in the neighborhood or woods."

Some might say school is designed not to educate people, but to train them for the workplace.

the funny thing is those kind of parents are just handicapping their own kids. Or is it sad? Maybe both.

I’m sure they’ll be very proud when their child grows into a half functioning adult that can’t cope with real life.

These type of parents are so shortsighted it literally hurts my brain to interact with them lol.

And then the same policy at your company.

If kids have to learn not to cheat on homework, why the heck don't adults? Is learning over by the time you have a job?

I think your assumption is where this falls apart. To be clear, your assumption about where time is spent and how there can only be 2 outcomes.

Correct. Parents want kids to have phones at school because it allows the parents to be lazy about making plans for the day and sticking to them.

> Sorry, you jumped a little here. Who is "we"?

Right, this was in high school some 20 years ago in Slovenia and also in college after. Anything graded happened at school. All tests were open answer where you have to write 2 or 3 sentences. We also had oral exams in front of the whole class where the teacher asks you questions and you answer. In college the orals were more private because the classes were huge and the exam periods more condensed.

Homework was graded in that you’d get a + for doing it and a - for not doing it. Collect enough - and you get an F. This was more to make us do the homework than to actually check the work.

Afaik this hasn’t changed but I don’t know any recent school children in Slovenia so maybe it has.

> Are you referring to the Socratic Method?

I don’t know what it’s called. The approach where you challenge students to try figuring out the answer/explanation before you explain it to them because that has been shown to lead to better learning outcomes even though, or because, it’s harder and slower.

Doing all the work in the classroom is more equitable for students who don't have comfortable and quiet places to do work at home.

It's harder for those who have additional accommodations at home, but we could arrange for those accommodations to be made in the school, and those who have accommodations at home are in a better position to advocate for getting what they need than those with rough or busy home lives.

Right a broader theme about AI safety and AI politics and all of it: we have choices as a society, so if our choices are good and our will to see those choices respected are intact, then the scope for harm is pretty manageable.

When the one that can make Captain Trips bioweapon in a garage comes out, I'll start blaming the technology, at the moment, its the choices made by humans.

College seminars are taken by people who want to be there.

If we're talking about K-12 education, that is for everyone and it's in society's interest that the most people learn the fundamental knowledge that we are trying to teach them.

I'm certainly open to the idea that our current approach is not optimal but I'd need to see evidence that a seminar-style approach would work in that setting. Maybe for some high school subjects. In fact some English classes were that way. We'd get a reading assignment, and then discuss in class, and then typically also have to write something about it on our own.

But math, sciences, and English topics such as grammar were all taught by lecture and example and I'm not sure the seminar approach would work as well there.

Chicago Public Schools has 176 days of school in the school year.

That's 88 days per semester.

Take 8 of those and use them to assess student progress and determine grades in class. That leaves 90% of the school year for learning in class.

Continue to assign homework. Tie the homework to in class assessment such that if a student can do well on homework, without AI assistance, they are expected to do well on tests conducted in class, again without AI assistance.

Set homework grades to be a relatively small percentage of the final grade.

With the above framework, a student is incentivized to complete homework. If they cheat themselves and use AI, they'll do badly on the tests and badly in the class overall.

Tell the students about the above rationale. Tell them that they're not to use AI for homework, that you can't stop them from using AI, but that by using AI, all they get is a perfect score on homework and probably a bad overall grade.

My take is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45141954

The most advanced and best classes I had were small, Socratic, and had take home tests. We were able to get through a lot of material, in a lot of depth, because people did the reading, but a big reason people did the reading is everyone liked the class and the professor (granted, this was college).

When I ended up teaching during my PhD I mimicked his style as best I could. Made my course very project based, made homeworks easy to get good grades but also included ways every student could expand on and gave lots of feedback. I like to think the students really liked me, as they would frequently stop by my office just to say hi and a bunch would show up the next term either showing me how they expanded their project or wanting to talk about how to do more or just general advice. YET only half the kids ever attended lecture, a third of kids chose to do a final project not much more complicated than homework, a few didn't turn in their final project, and 2 grad students complained to the department when I failed them for not turning in their final (they ended up being given Cs). This wasn't long ago, early GPT and tail/just post covid days.

There's just a time problem with doing the grading in class. You cannot cover as much material. An ideal class is students do reading before lecture, you go through the material together and have a healthy dialogue about where there is confusion, and then the students build on the solid foundation you created. This certainly works for high school and college, though I suspect not as well for lower levels due to lower independence. The unfortunate truth is that when teaching you're also teaching students a lot of auxiliary skills too, like time management and self-reliance. If you aren't teaching students these skills, where do you think they are going to get them? Sure, some will be able to learn them themselves, but you can't look at their success and claim victory through survivor bias.

But I don't think this is the whole problem.

I'll be honest. My experience with students, the big reason for them cheating is grades. Covid and GPT exacerbated the problems[0] (and created some new ones), but a lot stems from what was already there. We place so much emphasis on grades that this is valued more than the education itself. I've seen bright students that cheat because they feel overwhelmed. Because they know to get into the top colleges and top grad programs they need straight As. Strike that, they need a >4.0 GPA. They have to navigate the unknowns of which professors even hand out A+s, will forgo a better teacher for a teacher that gives more As, and so on. *They are not optimizing their education, they are optimizing their GPA*. Not because they don't care about their education, but because they do. Because everyone knows that the next rung of education is more important, so it is wroth forgoing some now to get access to more later. No one will say it out loud, but we all know even pretty mediocore students can play catch-up even up in undergrad and good students can do that in grad school. I'm sure if you randomly selected kids with GPAs >3.5 from high school and dropped them into your top universities you wouldn't see a big difference in outcomes[1]. I believe this stress is part of why some students just check out. But there is some aspect that is simple here: if grades didn't matter, there's no reason to cheat. I'm not saying to abandon grades, but I think it is worth reevaluating the system. I don't think patchwork solutions are gonna solve things.

All of this misses the entire point of education. Honestly, there's a larger crisis that's going on and it is that our world has just embraced Goodhart's Law as a good thing, not a warning.

[0] For example, that it is actually really difficult to punish cheaters. Any serious accusation needs serious evidence. Even more so when departments measure the amount of cheating by how many cheaters are prosecuted. That same metric hacking is why those students got Cs, just as much as it was that the chair was empathetic towards them. Part of that empathy being back connected to the importance of grades...

[1] Legacy students make this complicated but that's a whole other long conversation that mainly deals with connections.

I think this is easier said than done. It pretty much sounds like you're suggesting there are pop-quizes. We've seen that style of teaching before. IME it isn't as effective. Though I'm quite suspect that a big part of that is simply coordination with other classes. All it takes is one teacher who thinks their class is the most important and not give enough wiggle room so that there is room for triage and expected life events. Just because there's theoretically enough time does not mean there is enough time. Think of it like lifeboats. Do you want enough lifeboats so that each person has a spot or do you want extra lifeboats so that in case one gets destroyed or in case a person is unable to make it to the other lifeboat that they will still survive? Over optimization ignores the noise inherent to reality.

Sure, you're right, we don't have to treat time as a zero sum game (normally I'm upset about non-zero sum games being treated as zero sum lol). But that's a different problem. Yes, we don't need to worry about time if our goal is to meet a fixed quality of education. You can increase the quality of education, getting more done in less time.

But that's a different optimization problem. My assumption here is that we want to maximize education, not meet a specific threshold. Especially if we're talking about the US. Maybe there is a specific threshold we want to reach, but I don't think we're close enough that this is the main concern.

So that's why I'm treating time as a finite and scarce resource.

And you're right to point this out. We're making different assumptions about what problem to solve and we should make sure we're not talking past one another. So I hope this helps clear up some of my assumptions.

I wasnt allowed to use a phone during exams back in 2006.

All of our tests including computer science exams were written on paper with a pencil. We can just go back to that.

> 2 grad students complained to the department when I failed them for not turning in their final (they ended up being given Cs)

Wat.

Thanks that helps. I mean it appears Slovenia has a pretty good general education system but I don't know much about their higher ed (it is really weird how the US is so good at higher ed but not general education[0])

I'm not opposed to the idea, but I still think things can be done a lot better. I left a much more detailed comment in the cousin to this one.

But yeah, that's called the Socratic Method. Big fan. When I taught I'd frequently ask students to answer. Basically while lecturing I'd stop at some points and ask them how they would go about solving certain challenges or whatever. Usually directly related to what would be on the next slide. This style is pretty common fwiw, and I even saw it throughout my education even prior to high school. But it is also unfortunate that there's also a lot of teachers who just begin talking and don't stop.

[0] As a side note, I made the claim in another comment about how you could drop a random but average student into a top school and I'd expect not a high variance on outcome. Well I think this discrepency is part of the evidence to that. Though the US varies widely in general education, with some states being world class and others being... well... Alabama is a state after all...)

I'd say I was surprised but my first year of grad school I was a TA and caught two kids cheating. One student accidentally (maybe needs quotes? I'm unsure tbh) had his GitHub repo set to public. Two other students found it and just copy pasted his work. We had a meeting with the professor and he yelled at them about how the syllabus says you can't copy anything off the internet. I shit you not, the students' (juniors) excuse was "I didn't know GitHub was 'on the internet'". My jaw dropped. I looked at the professor and the only way I can describe it is that this dude had to do a full reboot. Like halt and catch fire situation. I swear I saw the gears stop moving in his head as he was trying to comprehend one of the stupidest things either of us have ever heard. Professor tried to get them expelled. Best we could do is give them a 0 on the assignment. And that's how I learned about the cheating metric... In the next class the prof mentioned if we catch anyone cheating again he's going to flunk even the person that work was being copied off of. Those students didn't pass and even without saying their names I saw them get kicked out of their social circles real quick. So students knew... and man they got paranoid...

The next year, my advisor pulled me aside. He talked about how some student said they didn't know GitHub was on the internet. I thought he was talking about my experience. Turns out he wasn't... He was talking about two other students, who he talked with independently, and were in his sophomore level class.

This was pre-covid btw. The other story was post. Things only got worse post and I heard similar stories from friends in other departments and other universities. A friend of mine teaching history on the other side of the country had Freshmen who failed an assignment that was "call the library, go check out a book."

So I think this context should help in understanding the actual problem here. I do think GPT is a problem. But like I said, I think the actual problem runs much deeper. Kids were turning off their brains before that... But it was definitely a very sharp drop with covid and another sharp drop after 3.5 came out.

It is easily done as well. In-class pen and paper assessments are a reality, and execution is well known. No rocket science.

Don't allow assessments to be gamed and everything will follow.

  > Don't allow assessments to be gamed and everything will follow.

That's the hard part...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

No I was a teacher before I started working in this industry