A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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