I have mentioned this in a few comments: for my CS classes I have gone from a historical 60-80% projects / 40-20% quizzes grade split, to a 50/50 split, and have moved my quizzes from being online to being in-person, pen-on-paper with one sheet of hand-written notes
Rather than banning AI, I'm showing students how to use it effectively as a personalized TA. I'm giving them this AGENTS.md file:
And showing them how to use AI to summarize the slides into a quiz review sheet, generate example questions with answer walk throughs, etc.
Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves: the projects are designed to draw them into the art of programming and give them decent, real-world coding experience that they will need, even if they end up working at a higher level in the future.
AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations (e.g. how twos complement works) that I wouldn't have otherwise. But it is obviously extremely dangerous as well.
"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."
I had planned to move towards projects counting towards the majority of my CS class grades until chatgpt was released, now I've stuck with a 50/50 split. This year I said they were free to use AI all they liked (as if I can do anything about it anyway) , then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty well, plus they got some experience developing the important skull of communicating technical ideas.
Would like to give them some guidance on how to get AI to help prepare them for their interviews next year, will definitely take a look at your AGENTS.md approach.
You seem like a great professor(/“junior baby mini instructor who no one should respect”, knowing American academic titles…). Though as someone whose been on the other end of the podium a bit more recently, I will point out the maybe-obvious:
Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves
This is the right thing to say, but even the ones who want to listen can get into bad habits in response to intense schedules. When push comes to shove and Multivariate Calculus exam prep needs to happen but you’re stuck debugging frustrating pointer issues for your Data Structures project late into the night… well, I certainly would’ve caved far too much for my own good.
IMO the natural fix is to expand your trusting, “this is for you” approach to the broader undergrad experience, but I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to adapt while admin & senior professors refuse to reconsider the race for a “””prestigious””” place in a meta-rat race…
For now, I guess I’d just recommend you try to think of ways to relax things and separate project completion from diligence/time management — in terms of vibes if not a 100% mark. Some unsolicited advice from a rando who thinks you’re doing great already :)
I think that's a great approach. I've thought about how to handle these issues and wonder how you handle several issues that come to mind:
Competing with LLM software users, 'honest' students would seem strongly incentivized to use LLMs themeselves. Even if you don't grade on a curve, honest students will get worse grades which will look worse to graduate schools, grant and scholarship committees, etc., in addition to the strong emotional component that everyone feels seeing an A or C. You could give deserving 'honest' work an A but then all LLM users will get A's with ease. It seems like you need two scales, and how do you know who to put on which scale?
And how do students collaborate on group projects? Again, it seems you have two different tracks of education, and they can't really work together. Edit: How do class discussions play out with these two tracks?
Also, manually doing things that machines do much better has value but also takes valuable time from learning more advanced skills that machines can't handle, and from learning how to use the machines as tools. I can see learning manual statistics calculations, to understand them fundamentally, but at a certain point it's much better to learn R and use a stats package. Are the 'honest' students being shortchanged?
> AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations
I feel like this is still underappreciated. Awesome meaningful diagrams with animations that I would take me days to make in a basic form can now be generated in under an hour with all the styling bells and whistles. It's amazing in practice because those things can deliver lots of value, but still weren't worth the effort before. Now you just tell the LLM to use anime.js and it will do a decent job.
As someone who has taught CS before, I just wanted to say thanks for doing all this for your students. They don't understand how much work you are putting in, but I'd like you to know that at least one other person does.
Thanks for taking the time for your students. Your students will thank you, too, but that will be years from now.
I'm not sure I agree with the example interactions.
If a lecturer prepared slides with basically an x86 assembly to show how to loop, what is so bad about an AI regurgitating that and possibly even annotating it with the inner workings.
> have moved my quizzes from being online to being in-person, pen-on-paper with one sheet of hand-written notes
I guess it depends quite a bit on what the answers to these questions look like but in college nothing frustrated me more than being asked to write a C program on paper. Even back then IDE autocomplete was something I depending on heavily and I felt forcing me to memorize arcane syntax was a complete waste of everyone's time. It's not at all representative of work in the real world nor does memorizing exact syntax IMHO.
Now, if you are being asked to write pseudo code or just answer questions it's a bit different but I really hate writing, my handwriting has never been great but why should I care? I've been typing on a computer since elementary school. Being asked to use paper/pencil in a computer class always rubbed me wrong.
I hear the concerns on AI/LLMs/cheating but I can't help but feel like there must be a better solution.
Do you find advocating for AI literacy to be controversial amongst peers?
I find, as a parent, when I talk about it at the high school level I get very negative reactions from other parents. Specifically I want high schoolers to be skilled in the use of AI, and particular critical thinking skills around the tools, while simultaneously having skills assuming no AI. I don’t want the school to be blindly “anti AI” as I’m aware it will be a part of the economy our kids are brought into.
There are some head in the sands, very emotional attitudes about this stuff. (And obviously idiotically uncritical pro AI stances, but I doubt educators risk having those stances)
> “Over the years I’ve found that when students read on paper they're more likely to read carefully, and less likely in a pinch to read on their phones or rely on chatbot summaries,” Shirkhani wrote to the News. “This improves the quality of class time by orders of magnitude.”
This is the key part. I'm doing a part-time graduate degree at a major university right now, and it's fascinating to watch the week-to-week pressure AI is putting on the education establishment. When your job as a student is to read case studies and think about them, but Google Drive says "here's an automatic summary of the key points" before you even open the file, it takes a very determined student to ignore that and actually read the material. And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade.
Schools are struggling to figure out how to let students use AI tools to be more productive while still learning how to think. The students (especially undergrads) are incredibly good at doing as little work as possible. And until you get to the end-of-PhD level, there's basically nothing you encounter in your learning journey that ChatGPT can't perfectly summarize and analyze in 1 second, removing the requirement for you to do anything.
This isn't even about AI being "good" or "bad". We still teach children how to add numbers before we give them calculators because it's a useful skill. But now these AI thinking-calculators are injecting themselves into every text box and screen, making them impossible to avoid. If the answer pops up in the sidebar before you even ask the question, what kind of masochist is going to bother learning how to read and think?
I had to take some literature classes in high school, and had a truly exceptional teacher who facilitated great and interesting discussions. Really opened up my mind and I only later realized how lucky I was.
Those summaries always existed, in the past you could buy them as little books for most of the classic literature we read. Thing is they were always the same trite points even back then.
Our teacher would see right through any BS, but never call it out directly. Instead there would be 1 precise and nicely asked follow-on question or even just asking their opinion on a talking point. Not details, but a regular discussion question.
If someone hadn't read the book they'd stutter and grasp at straws at that point and everyone knew they hadn't actually read it.
On the other hand if you had read the book the answer was usually pretty easy, and often not what the common summaries contained as talking points.
So cheating not only didn't work, the few regular cheaters we had in our class (everybody knew who those were) actually suffered badly.
Only in hindsight did I realize that this is not the normal experience. Most other literature classes in fact do just focus on or repeat the same trite points, is what I've heard from many others.
It takes a great teacher to make cheating not "work" while making the class easy, intellectually stimulating and
refreshing at the same time.
Last weekend I was arguing with a friend that physical guitar pedals are better for creativity and exploration of the musical space than modelers even though modelers have way more resources for a fraction of the cost, the physical aspect of knobs and cables and everything else leads to something that's way more interactive and prone to "happy mistakes" than any digital interface can offer.
In my first year of college my calculus teacher said something that stuck with me "you learn calculus getting cramps on your wrists", yeah, AI can help remember things and accelerate learning, but if you don't put the work to understand things you'll always be behind people that know at least with a bird eye view what's happening.
> And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade.
If reading an AI summary of readings is all it takes to make an exercise a facade, then the exercise was bad to begin with.
AI is certainly putting pressure on professors to develop better curricula and evaluations, and they don’t get enough support for this, imho.
That said, good instruction and evaluation techniques are not some dark art — they can be developed, implemented, and maintained with a modest amount of effort.
At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education.
If the sole purpose of college is to rank students, and funnel them to high prestige jobs that have no use for what they actually learn in college then what the students are doing is rational.
If however the student is actually there to learn, he knows that using ChatGPT accomplishes nothing. In fact all this proves is that most students in most colleges are not there to learn. Which begs the question why are they even going to college? Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.
It starts at admissions where learning is not a rewarded activity. You should be making impact in the community, doing some performative task that isn't useful for anything except making you different to your class mates who naively read the books and do the classwork honestly.
College is wildly useful for motivated students: the ones who go out of their way to pursue opportunities uniquely available to them like serving as TAs, doing undergrad research, rising up the ranks in clubs and organizations, etc. They graduate not just with a credential but social capital. And it's that social capital that shields you from ChatGPT.
College for the "consumer" student isn't worth much in comparison.
It's not for "signaling," and it's not for "high prestige" jobs.
It's for jobs, period. Because a) as the world grows more complex, more and more jobs genuinely require higher education, and at the same time b) with the near-total disappearance of training by employers, they expect job seekers to come into every job with all the skills needed, and with the decline in labor power (as compared to the late 20th century), there's very little meaningful resistance to that.
> At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education.
I think this is mostly accurate. Schools have been able to say "We will test your memory on 3 specific Shakespeares, samples from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc" - the students who were able to perform on these with some creative dance, violin, piano or cello thrown in had very good chances at a scholarship from an elite college.
This has been working extremely well except now you have AI agents that can do the same at a fraction of the cost.
There will be a lot of arguments, handwringing and excuse making as students go through the flywheel already in motion with the current approach.
However, my bet is it's going to be apparent that this approach no longer works for a large population. It never really did but there were inefficiencies in the market that kept this game going for a while. For one, college has become extremely expensive. Second, globalization has made it pretty hard for someone paying tuition in the U.S. to compete against someone getting a similar education in Asia when they get paid the same salary. Big companies have been able to enjoy this arbitrage for a long time.
> Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies
Now that everyone has access to labor cheaper than the cheapest English speaking country in the world, humanity will be forced to adapt, forcing us to rethink what has seemed to work in the past
Over a decade ago now, I was teaching college English as a grad student, and my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class.
My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem.
It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week.
Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.
> my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class.
That's just weird. Why would you bother. These are young adults paying to be taught. But teaching is only half of it, learning is the other. If they can't be bothered to learn the surely they will just fail the course and you can kick them out to make way for someone who actually wants to learn.
Perhaps it's just a difference between UK (and other European unis) and US unis. When I studied applied physics in the UK (half a century ago) attendance at lectures was not even compulsory. You were expected to behave like a student, that is one who studies, and if you wanted help all you had to do was ask. Those who didn't work simply failed the end of year exams and the finals.
>This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence.
I didn't get it. How can printing avoid AI? And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?
The students were reading AI summaries rather than the original text.
Does this literally work? It adds slightly more friction, but you can still ask the robot to summarize pretty much anything that would appear on the syllabus. What it likely does it set expectations.
This doesn't strike me as being anti-AI or "resistance" at all. But if you don't train your own brain to read and make thoughts, you won't have one.
This approach is just cheap theater. It doesn't actually stop AI, it just adds a step to the process. Any student can snap a photo, OCR the text and feed it into an LLM in seconds. All this policy accomplishes is wasting paper and forcing students to engage in digital hoop-jumping.
You can't easily copy and paste from a printout into AI. Sure, you can track down the reading yourself online, and then copy and paste in, but not during class, and not without some effort.
"TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option."
And later in OA it states that the cost to a student is $0.12 per double sided sheet of printing.
In all of my teaching career here in the UK, the provision of handouts has been a central cost. Latterly I'd send a pdf file with instructions and the resulting 200+ packs of 180 sides would be delivered on a trolley printed, stapled with covers. The cost was rounding error compared to the cost of providing an hour of teaching in a classroom (wage costs, support staff costs, building costs including amortisation &c).
While I fully agree with this, this quote bothers me:
>Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option
Does a student need to print out multiple TYCO Packets ? If so, only the very rich could afford this. I think educations should go back to printed books and submitting you work to the Prof. on paper.
But submitting printed pages back to the Prof. for homework will avoid the school saying "Submit only Word Documents". That way a student can use the method they prefer, avoiding buying expensive software. One can then use just a simple free text editor if they want. Or even a typewriter :)
""When you read a book or a printed course packet, you turn real pages instead of scrolling, so you have a different, more direct, and (I think) more focused relationship with the words,” Fadiman wrote."
I concur completely with Fadiman's comment as that has been my experience despite that I have been using computer screens and computers for many decades and that I am totally at ease with them for reading and composing documentation.
Books and printed materials have physical presence and tactility about them that are missing from display screens. It is hard to explain but handling the physical object, pointing to paragraphs on printed pages, underlining text with a pencil and sticking postit notes into page margins adds an ergonomic factor that is more conducive to learning and understanding than when one interacts with screens (including those where one can write directly to the screen with a stylus).
I have no doubt about this, as I've noticed over the years if I write down what I'm thinking with my hand onto paper I am more likely to understand and remember it better than when I'm typing it.
It's as if typing doesn't provide as tighter coupling with my brain as does writing by hand. There is something about handwriting and the motional feedback from my fingers that makes me have a closer and more intimate relationship with the text.
That's not to say I don't use screens—I do but generally to write summaries after I've first worked out ideas on paper (this is especially relevant when mathematics is involved—I'm more cognitively involved when using pencil and paper).
Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even at top universities, generally incapable of evolving, much like the stereotypical average vegetable seller.
We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills.
The result on a large scale is that we have an increasingly incompetent population on average, with teaching staff competing to see who can revert the most to the past and refusing to see that the more they do this, the worse the incompetent graduates they produce.
The computer, desktop, FLOSS, is the quintessential epistemological tool of the present, just as paper was in the past. The world changes, and those who fall behind are selected out by history; come to terms with that. Not only, those who lag behind ensure that few push forward an evolution for their own interest, which typically conflicts with that of the majority.
> Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even at top universities, generally incapable of evolving
It feels to me like teaching has always been bandwidth constrained and providing 1:1 feedback to students have always been a bottleneck. I believe that AI agents are the true gateway to fixing that limitation and education should be embracing AI agents to increase bandwidth of 1:1 teacher student interaction.
I worry that everytime I talk to a teacher about how they're adapting to AI, it's almost as if they are trying to figure out how they can continue to use the same teaching techniques that they had seen their teachers practice decades ago.
Printed books are expensive and they should be. We already have paper equivalents that allow highlighting, rewriting, annotating, sharing notes - recyclable materials in all ways superior to paper that can be reused by multiple students - these are things we should be embracing instead of going back to one time use printed materials that are heavy to carry around, take up space in a room and will need to be disposed of soon.
If current technology is creating an issue for teachers - teachers need to pivot, not block current technology.
Society typically cares about work getting done and not much about how it got done - for some reason, teachers are so deep into the weeds of the "how", that they seem to forget that if the way to mend roads since 1926 have been to learn how to measure out, mix and lay asphalt patches by hand, in 2026 when there are robots that do that perfectly everytime, they should be teaching humans to complement those robots or do something else entirely.
> We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills
Is your intuition that the EU will continue down it's path of technical irrevelance? If so, what are the top 5 reasons this is happening?
I have been thinking about this and it seems like it's an asset that students want to do as little work as possible to get course credits. They also love playing games of various sorts. So instead of killing trees, printing pages of materials out and having students pay substantial sums to the printing press so we can inject distance between students reading the material and ChatGPT, why not turn it around completely?
1. Instead of putting up all sorts of barriers between students and ChatGPT, have students explicitly use ChatGPT to complete the homework
2. Then compare the diversity in the ChatGPT output
3. If the ChatGPT output is extremely similar, then the game is to critique that ChatGPT output, find out gaps in ChatGPT's work, insights it missed and what it could have done better
4.If the ChatGPT output is diverse, how do we figure out which is better? What caused the diversity? Are all the outputs accurate or are there errors in some?
Similarly, when it comes to coding, instead of worrying that ChatGPT can zero shot quicksort and memcpy perfectly, why not game it:
1. Write some test cases that could make that specific implementation of `quicksort` or `memcpy` fail
2. Could we design the input data such that quicksort hits its worst case runtime?
3. Is there an algorithm that would sort faster than quicksort for that specific input?
4. Could there be architectures where the assumptions that make quicksort "quick", fail to hold true? Instead, something simpler and worse on paper like a "cache aware sort" actually work faster in practice than quicksort?
I have multiple paragraphs more of thought on this topic but will leave it at this for now to calibrate if my thoughts are in the minority
In pretty much any school system, just complain that the printout is not compatible with your text-to-speech engine, and the instructor will be required to provide an electronic version, no questions asked.
That's not true in any U.S. school system unless the student has a disability which requires the use of a text-to-speech engine.The ADA does allow schools to require the student to prove the disability through medical documentation, which is why the fake-disability doctor market exists.
Who is behind this over digitization of primary school? My understanding is that in the Us pretty much all homework and tests are done on computers or iPads.
This obv isn’t a push by parents because I can’t imagine parents I know want their kids in front of a screen all day. At best they’re indifferent. My only guess is the teachers unions that don’t want teachers grading and creating lesson plans and all the other work they used to do.
And since this trend kid scores or performance has not gotten better, so what gives?
Can anyone comment if it’s as bad as this and what’s behind it.
My kids are in elementary school in the SF area (although pretty far in the ‘burbs) and this is not my experience.
The older one has a chromebook and uses it for research and production of larger written projects and presents—the kind of things you’d expect. The younger one doesn’t have any school-supplied device yet.
Both kids have math exercises, language worksheets, short writing exercises, etc., all done on paper. This is the majority of homework.
I’m fine with this system. I wish they’d spend a little more time teaching computer basics (I did a lot of touch typing exercises in the 90’s; my older one doesn’t seem to have those kind of lessons). But in general, there’s not too much homework, there’s good emphasis on reading, and I appreciate that the older one is learning how to plan, research, and create projects using the tool he’ll use to do so in future schooling.
* People needed to be taught digital skills that were in growing demand in the workplace.
* The kids researching things online and word-processing their homework were doing well in class (because only upper-middle-class types could afford home PCs)
* Some trials of digital learning produced good results. Teaching by the world's greatest teachers, exactly the pace every student needs, with continuous feedback and infinite patience.
> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option.
This made sense a couple of decades ago. Today, it's just bizarre to be spending $150 on a phonebook-sized packet of reading materials. So much paper and toner.
No, the cost of the paper, toner, and binding is the cost of providing of a provably distraction-free environment.
To make it more palpable for an IT worker: "It's just bizarre to give a developer a room with a door, so much sheetrock and wood! Working with computers is what open-plan offices are for."
>Last semester, professor Pamela Newton, who also teaches the course, allowed students to bring readings either on tablets or in printed form. While laptops felt like a “wall” in class, Newton said, students could use iPads to annotate readings and lie them flat on the table during discussions. However, Newton said she felt “paranoid” that students could be texting during class.
>This semester, Newton has removed the option to bring iPads to class, except for accessibility needs, as a part of the general movement in the “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay” seminars to “swim against the tide of AI use,” reduce “the infiltration of tech,” and “go back to pen and paper,” she said.
Is this about teaching efficiency or managing the teacher's feelings? If "the infiltration of tech" allowed for better learning, would this teacher even be open to it?
If they provided the packets I could sort of understand but no, they are just shifting the cost to the students to the tune of $20-$150/packet, insane.
And the line
> Regarding the printing cost, Newton and Shirkhani both emphasized that Yale has programs to help students who need financial assistance paying for printing.
Does not solve the issue. Not every school has programs like that, they aren't always easy to take advantage of, and often have extra hoops to jump through.
It's really hard to not see this through the same lense as the scam of textbooks and other required (paid) readings for classes. Even more so when the professor wrote the book and/or gets a kickback. See also: new editions every year that are required so you can buy used or an online key that is one-time-use and costs as much as the book.
I've brought my kindle to even the most strict of technology-banned lectures (with punishments like dropping a letter grade after one violation, and failing you after two), and never have they given me a problem when asked. They realize the issue isn't the silicon or lithium, it's the distractions it enables. I'm sure I could connect to some LLM on it, it's just that no one ever will.
I’ve tried many e-readers since early Kindle but I keep coming back to two fundamental problems with e-ink, both relevant to education.
First, extremely cumbersome and error-prone to type compared to swipe-typing on a soft keyboard. Even highlighting a few sentences can be problematic when spanning across a page boundary.
Second, navigation is also painful compared to a physical book. When reading non-fiction, it’s vital to be able to jump around quickly, backtrack, and cross-reference material. Amazon has done some good work on the UX for this, but nothing is as simple as flipping through a physical book.
Android e-readers are better insofar as open to third-party software, but still have the same hardware shortcomings.
My compromise has been to settle on medium-sized (~Kindle or iPad Mini size) tablets and treat them just as an e-reader. (Similar to the “kale phone” concept ie minimal software installed on it … no distractions.) They are much more responsive, hence fairly easy to navigate and type on.
This is a bit off topic, but why are used books so expensive on abebooks, thriftbooks, amazon so expensive compared to booksales, etc? I recall a time when a lot of these online stores were selling them for a few cents (granted, it was a long time ago and it was still called zShops on Amazon).
> This is a bit off topic, but why are used books so expensive on abebooks, thriftbooks, amazon so expensive compared to booksales, etc?
A mix of enforcement, laws and good old market capture.
20 years ago I could bring a suitcase full of brand new books - fiction or not, from India, no questions asked. These are functionally the same as those that cost 50x more in the U.S. - just that they are black and white, paperback and use cheaper recycled paper that will yellow in 20 years and become brittle in 30. I cannot bring them with me anymore. The books clearly say they are not for export especially in the U.S., the print for this uses some kind of ink that shows up on XRays clearly and TSA enforces it.
Similarly, used books in the U.S. are repurchased by bookstores to be sold at a profit.
From what I see students doing - they sell or exchange books over FB Marketplace or school lists or in person.
It only struck me recently how geared universities are towards careers and many of the requirements are set by industry, not necessarily by whats good for the student. If you want to enjoy learning for its own sake or enjoy a particular subject I'd suggest ditching uni and going for self learning. Ofc if you need a job you probably need certification, but not if you're learning for fun. Also if you want to make sure you're well rounded, browse uni websites and have a look at the syllabus / reading list and filter out any obvious industry requirements if they don't suit you.
My thesis paper about a course for Freshman Composition Writing to stress fundamentals by way of using quill, pencil, pen, and finally a typewriter, was written 20 YEARS AGO in response to Spell Check and Auto Predict at the time...2006...
This isn't my article nor do I know this Educator but I like her approach and actions taken:
Computers have not advanced education — the data shows the opposite. I think we should just go back to physical books (which can be used!), and pen and paper for notes and assignments.
At the very least, every school, subject, and teacher should be obliged to conduct experiments during the school year -- A/B/C trials in which various forms of note taking are explored: handwritten, computer-typed, and neither.
Then see how it affects the kids' learning speed and retention of the various subjects. Then they need to compare notes with the other teachers to learn what they did differently and what did or didn't work for them.
Ideally they'd also assess how this worked for different types of students, those with good vs bad reading skills, with good vs bad grades, esp those who are underperforming their potential.
Love it. Practical advice that helps everyone. All us tech guys know Jobs limited his kids' time on iphones (allegedly). Never let tech screw up the fundamentals.
If textbooks weren't so expensive I'd be more cheering on them.
> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option.
Lol $150 for reading packets? Not even textbooks? Seriously the whole system can fuck off.
I don't think that the format or method of information consumption matters at all when compared to the ability of the individual to retrieve and expound the information consumed. Printing out reading materials, while well-intentioned, seems to miss the point.
If you are flipping through the reading to find a quote, then printed readings are hard to beat, unless you can search for a word with digital search. But speed reading RSVP presentation beats any kind of print reading by a mile, if you are aiming for comprehension. So, it is hard to say where the technology is going. Nobody has put in the work to really make reading on an iPad as smooth and fluid as print, in terms of rapid page flipping. But the potential is there. It is kind of laughable how the salesman will be saying, oh it has a fast processor, and then you open up a PDF and scroll a few pages fast and they start being blank instead of actually having text.
College instructor here. One thing I'm seeing here that's kind of funny is how badly so many of you are misunderstanding the value of "friction."
You see a policy, and your clever brains come up with a way to get around it, "proving" that the new methodology is not perfect and therefore not valuable.
So wrong. Come on people, think about it -- to an extent ALL WE DO is "friction." Any shift towards difficulty can be gained, but also nearly all of the time it provides a valuable differentiator in terms of motivation, etc.
recursivedoubts|29 days ago
Rather than banning AI, I'm showing students how to use it effectively as a personalized TA. I'm giving them this AGENTS.md file:
https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac
And showing them how to use AI to summarize the slides into a quiz review sheet, generate example questions with answer walk throughs, etc.
Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves: the projects are designed to draw them into the art of programming and give them decent, real-world coding experience that they will need, even if they end up working at a higher level in the future.
AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations (e.g. how twos complement works) that I wouldn't have otherwise. But it is obviously extremely dangerous as well.
"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."
j_french|29 days ago
Would like to give them some guidance on how to get AI to help prepare them for their interviews next year, will definitely take a look at your AGENTS.md approach.
What's your student feedback on it been like?
bbor|29 days ago
IMO the natural fix is to expand your trusting, “this is for you” approach to the broader undergrad experience, but I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to adapt while admin & senior professors refuse to reconsider the race for a “””prestigious””” place in a meta-rat race…
For now, I guess I’d just recommend you try to think of ways to relax things and separate project completion from diligence/time management — in terms of vibes if not a 100% mark. Some unsolicited advice from a rando who thinks you’re doing great already :)
mmooss|29 days ago
Competing with LLM software users, 'honest' students would seem strongly incentivized to use LLMs themeselves. Even if you don't grade on a curve, honest students will get worse grades which will look worse to graduate schools, grant and scholarship committees, etc., in addition to the strong emotional component that everyone feels seeing an A or C. You could give deserving 'honest' work an A but then all LLM users will get A's with ease. It seems like you need two scales, and how do you know who to put on which scale?
And how do students collaborate on group projects? Again, it seems you have two different tracks of education, and they can't really work together. Edit: How do class discussions play out with these two tracks?
Also, manually doing things that machines do much better has value but also takes valuable time from learning more advanced skills that machines can't handle, and from learning how to use the machines as tools. I can see learning manual statistics calculations, to understand them fundamentally, but at a certain point it's much better to learn R and use a stats package. Are the 'honest' students being shortchanged?
viraptor|28 days ago
I feel like this is still underappreciated. Awesome meaningful diagrams with animations that I would take me days to make in a basic form can now be generated in under an hour with all the styling bells and whistles. It's amazing in practice because those things can deliver lots of value, but still weren't worth the effort before. Now you just tell the LLM to use anime.js and it will do a decent job.
buckle8017|29 days ago
I once got "implement a BCD decoder" with about a 1"x4" space to do it.
bsder|29 days ago
Thanks for taking the time for your students. Your students will thank you, too, but that will be years from now.
commandersaki|28 days ago
If a lecturer prepared slides with basically an x86 assembly to show how to loop, what is so bad about an AI regurgitating that and possibly even annotating it with the inner workings.
joshstrange|28 days ago
I guess it depends quite a bit on what the answers to these questions look like but in college nothing frustrated me more than being asked to write a C program on paper. Even back then IDE autocomplete was something I depending on heavily and I felt forcing me to memorize arcane syntax was a complete waste of everyone's time. It's not at all representative of work in the real world nor does memorizing exact syntax IMHO.
Now, if you are being asked to write pseudo code or just answer questions it's a bit different but I really hate writing, my handwriting has never been great but why should I care? I've been typing on a computer since elementary school. Being asked to use paper/pencil in a computer class always rubbed me wrong.
I hear the concerns on AI/LLMs/cheating but I can't help but feel like there must be a better solution.
softwaredoug|29 days ago
I find, as a parent, when I talk about it at the high school level I get very negative reactions from other parents. Specifically I want high schoolers to be skilled in the use of AI, and particular critical thinking skills around the tools, while simultaneously having skills assuming no AI. I don’t want the school to be blindly “anti AI” as I’m aware it will be a part of the economy our kids are brought into.
There are some head in the sands, very emotional attitudes about this stuff. (And obviously idiotically uncritical pro AI stances, but I doubt educators risk having those stances)
thenipper|29 days ago
ageitgey|29 days ago
This is the key part. I'm doing a part-time graduate degree at a major university right now, and it's fascinating to watch the week-to-week pressure AI is putting on the education establishment. When your job as a student is to read case studies and think about them, but Google Drive says "here's an automatic summary of the key points" before you even open the file, it takes a very determined student to ignore that and actually read the material. And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade.
Schools are struggling to figure out how to let students use AI tools to be more productive while still learning how to think. The students (especially undergrads) are incredibly good at doing as little work as possible. And until you get to the end-of-PhD level, there's basically nothing you encounter in your learning journey that ChatGPT can't perfectly summarize and analyze in 1 second, removing the requirement for you to do anything.
This isn't even about AI being "good" or "bad". We still teach children how to add numbers before we give them calculators because it's a useful skill. But now these AI thinking-calculators are injecting themselves into every text box and screen, making them impossible to avoid. If the answer pops up in the sidebar before you even ask the question, what kind of masochist is going to bother learning how to read and think?
jval43|29 days ago
Those summaries always existed, in the past you could buy them as little books for most of the classic literature we read. Thing is they were always the same trite points even back then.
Our teacher would see right through any BS, but never call it out directly. Instead there would be 1 precise and nicely asked follow-on question or even just asking their opinion on a talking point. Not details, but a regular discussion question.
If someone hadn't read the book they'd stutter and grasp at straws at that point and everyone knew they hadn't actually read it.
On the other hand if you had read the book the answer was usually pretty easy, and often not what the common summaries contained as talking points.
So cheating not only didn't work, the few regular cheaters we had in our class (everybody knew who those were) actually suffered badly.
Only in hindsight did I realize that this is not the normal experience. Most other literature classes in fact do just focus on or repeat the same trite points, is what I've heard from many others.
It takes a great teacher to make cheating not "work" while making the class easy, intellectually stimulating and refreshing at the same time.
thomasfortes|29 days ago
In my first year of college my calculus teacher said something that stuck with me "you learn calculus getting cramps on your wrists", yeah, AI can help remember things and accelerate learning, but if you don't put the work to understand things you'll always be behind people that know at least with a bird eye view what's happening.
csa|29 days ago
If reading an AI summary of readings is all it takes to make an exercise a facade, then the exercise was bad to begin with.
AI is certainly putting pressure on professors to develop better curricula and evaluations, and they don’t get enough support for this, imho.
That said, good instruction and evaluation techniques are not some dark art — they can be developed, implemented, and maintained with a modest amount of effort.
sashank_1509|29 days ago
If the sole purpose of college is to rank students, and funnel them to high prestige jobs that have no use for what they actually learn in college then what the students are doing is rational.
If however the student is actually there to learn, he knows that using ChatGPT accomplishes nothing. In fact all this proves is that most students in most colleges are not there to learn. Which begs the question why are they even going to college? Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.
rr808|29 days ago
the_snooze|29 days ago
College for the "consumer" student isn't worth much in comparison.
testfoobar|29 days ago
danaris|29 days ago
It's for jobs, period. Because a) as the world grows more complex, more and more jobs genuinely require higher education, and at the same time b) with the near-total disappearance of training by employers, they expect job seekers to come into every job with all the skills needed, and with the decline in labor power (as compared to the late 20th century), there's very little meaningful resistance to that.
subhobroto|29 days ago
I think this is mostly accurate. Schools have been able to say "We will test your memory on 3 specific Shakespeares, samples from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc" - the students who were able to perform on these with some creative dance, violin, piano or cello thrown in had very good chances at a scholarship from an elite college.
This has been working extremely well except now you have AI agents that can do the same at a fraction of the cost.
There will be a lot of arguments, handwringing and excuse making as students go through the flywheel already in motion with the current approach.
However, my bet is it's going to be apparent that this approach no longer works for a large population. It never really did but there were inefficiencies in the market that kept this game going for a while. For one, college has become extremely expensive. Second, globalization has made it pretty hard for someone paying tuition in the U.S. to compete against someone getting a similar education in Asia when they get paid the same salary. Big companies have been able to enjoy this arbitrage for a long time.
> Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies
Now that everyone has access to labor cheaper than the cheapest English speaking country in the world, humanity will be forced to adapt, forcing us to rethink what has seemed to work in the past
WalterBright|29 days ago
This topic comes up all the time. Every method conceivable to rank job candidates gets eviscerated here as being counterproductive.
And yet, if you have five candidates for one job, you're going to have to rank them somehow.
cbfrench|29 days ago
My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem.
It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week.
Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.
ninalanyon|28 days ago
That's just weird. Why would you bother. These are young adults paying to be taught. But teaching is only half of it, learning is the other. If they can't be bothered to learn the surely they will just fail the course and you can kick them out to make way for someone who actually wants to learn.
Perhaps it's just a difference between UK (and other European unis) and US unis. When I studied applied physics in the UK (half a century ago) attendance at lectures was not even compulsory. You were expected to behave like a student, that is one who studies, and if you wanted help all you had to do was ask. Those who didn't work simply failed the end of year exams and the finals.
zkmon|29 days ago
I didn't get it. How can printing avoid AI? And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?
coffeefirst|29 days ago
Does this literally work? It adds slightly more friction, but you can still ask the robot to summarize pretty much anything that would appear on the syllabus. What it likely does it set expectations.
This doesn't strike me as being anti-AI or "resistance" at all. But if you don't train your own brain to read and make thoughts, you won't have one.
mold_aid|29 days ago
Every online service in the university has an AI summarization tool in it. This includes library services.
>And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?
It can get in line. Engl academics have been talking about sustainability for decades. Nobody cared before, professors aren't going to care now.
Flavius|29 days ago
secabeen|29 days ago
2b3a51|29 days ago
"TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option."
And later in OA it states that the cost to a student is $0.12 per double sided sheet of printing.
In all of my teaching career here in the UK, the provision of handouts has been a central cost. Latterly I'd send a pdf file with instructions and the resulting 200+ packs of 180 sides would be delivered on a trolley printed, stapled with covers. The cost was rounding error compared to the cost of providing an hour of teaching in a classroom (wage costs, support staff costs, building costs including amortisation &c).
How is this happening?
lokar|29 days ago
Public universities are always underfunded.
Universities can get more money by putting the cost on the students and then they cover it with gov grants and loans.
jmclnx|29 days ago
>Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option
Does a student need to print out multiple TYCO Packets ? If so, only the very rich could afford this. I think educations should go back to printed books and submitting you work to the Prof. on paper.
But submitting printed pages back to the Prof. for homework will avoid the school saying "Submit only Word Documents". That way a student can use the method they prefer, avoiding buying expensive software. One can then use just a simple free text editor if they want. Or even a typewriter :)
anilakar|29 days ago
Symbiote|29 days ago
Flavius|29 days ago
hilbert42|29 days ago
I concur completely with Fadiman's comment as that has been my experience despite that I have been using computer screens and computers for many decades and that I am totally at ease with them for reading and composing documentation.
Books and printed materials have physical presence and tactility about them that are missing from display screens. It is hard to explain but handling the physical object, pointing to paragraphs on printed pages, underlining text with a pencil and sticking postit notes into page margins adds an ergonomic factor that is more conducive to learning and understanding than when one interacts with screens (including those where one can write directly to the screen with a stylus).
I have no doubt about this, as I've noticed over the years if I write down what I'm thinking with my hand onto paper I am more likely to understand and remember it better than when I'm typing it.
It's as if typing doesn't provide as tighter coupling with my brain as does writing by hand. There is something about handwriting and the motional feedback from my fingers that makes me have a closer and more intimate relationship with the text.
That's not to say I don't use screens—I do but generally to write summaries after I've first worked out ideas on paper (this is especially relevant when mathematics is involved—I'm more cognitively involved when using pencil and paper).
kkfx|29 days ago
We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills.
The result on a large scale is that we have an increasingly incompetent population on average, with teaching staff competing to see who can revert the most to the past and refusing to see that the more they do this, the worse the incompetent graduates they produce.
The computer, desktop, FLOSS, is the quintessential epistemological tool of the present, just as paper was in the past. The world changes, and those who fall behind are selected out by history; come to terms with that. Not only, those who lag behind ensure that few push forward an evolution for their own interest, which typically conflicts with that of the majority.
subhobroto|29 days ago
It feels to me like teaching has always been bandwidth constrained and providing 1:1 feedback to students have always been a bottleneck. I believe that AI agents are the true gateway to fixing that limitation and education should be embracing AI agents to increase bandwidth of 1:1 teacher student interaction.
I worry that everytime I talk to a teacher about how they're adapting to AI, it's almost as if they are trying to figure out how they can continue to use the same teaching techniques that they had seen their teachers practice decades ago.
Printed books are expensive and they should be. We already have paper equivalents that allow highlighting, rewriting, annotating, sharing notes - recyclable materials in all ways superior to paper that can be reused by multiple students - these are things we should be embracing instead of going back to one time use printed materials that are heavy to carry around, take up space in a room and will need to be disposed of soon.
If current technology is creating an issue for teachers - teachers need to pivot, not block current technology.
Society typically cares about work getting done and not much about how it got done - for some reason, teachers are so deep into the weeds of the "how", that they seem to forget that if the way to mend roads since 1926 have been to learn how to measure out, mix and lay asphalt patches by hand, in 2026 when there are robots that do that perfectly everytime, they should be teaching humans to complement those robots or do something else entirely.
> We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills
Is your intuition that the EU will continue down it's path of technical irrevelance? If so, what are the top 5 reasons this is happening?
subhobroto|29 days ago
1. Instead of putting up all sorts of barriers between students and ChatGPT, have students explicitly use ChatGPT to complete the homework
2. Then compare the diversity in the ChatGPT output
3. If the ChatGPT output is extremely similar, then the game is to critique that ChatGPT output, find out gaps in ChatGPT's work, insights it missed and what it could have done better
4.If the ChatGPT output is diverse, how do we figure out which is better? What caused the diversity? Are all the outputs accurate or are there errors in some?
Similarly, when it comes to coding, instead of worrying that ChatGPT can zero shot quicksort and memcpy perfectly, why not game it:
1. Write some test cases that could make that specific implementation of `quicksort` or `memcpy` fail
2. Could we design the input data such that quicksort hits its worst case runtime?
3. Is there an algorithm that would sort faster than quicksort for that specific input?
4. Could there be architectures where the assumptions that make quicksort "quick", fail to hold true? Instead, something simpler and worse on paper like a "cache aware sort" actually work faster in practice than quicksort?
I have multiple paragraphs more of thought on this topic but will leave it at this for now to calibrate if my thoughts are in the minority
dlcarrier|29 days ago
gamblor956|29 days ago
berhunter420|29 days ago
bko|29 days ago
This obv isn’t a push by parents because I can’t imagine parents I know want their kids in front of a screen all day. At best they’re indifferent. My only guess is the teachers unions that don’t want teachers grading and creating lesson plans and all the other work they used to do.
And since this trend kid scores or performance has not gotten better, so what gives?
Can anyone comment if it’s as bad as this and what’s behind it.
el_benhameen|29 days ago
The older one has a chromebook and uses it for research and production of larger written projects and presents—the kind of things you’d expect. The younger one doesn’t have any school-supplied device yet.
Both kids have math exercises, language worksheets, short writing exercises, etc., all done on paper. This is the majority of homework.
I’m fine with this system. I wish they’d spend a little more time teaching computer basics (I did a lot of touch typing exercises in the 90’s; my older one doesn’t seem to have those kind of lessons). But in general, there’s not too much homework, there’s good emphasis on reading, and I appreciate that the older one is learning how to plan, research, and create projects using the tool he’ll use to do so in future schooling.
michaelt|29 days ago
* People needed to be taught digital skills that were in growing demand in the workplace.
* The kids researching things online and word-processing their homework were doing well in class (because only upper-middle-class types could afford home PCs)
* Some trials of digital learning produced good results. Teaching by the world's greatest teachers, exactly the pace every student needs, with continuous feedback and infinite patience.
* Blocking distractions? How hard can that be?
crazygringo|29 days ago
This made sense a couple of decades ago. Today, it's just bizarre to be spending $150 on a phonebook-sized packet of reading materials. So much paper and toner.
This is what iPads and Kindles are for.
nine_k|29 days ago
To make it more palpable for an IT worker: "It's just bizarre to give a developer a room with a door, so much sheetrock and wood! Working with computers is what open-plan offices are for."
Zababa|28 days ago
>This semester, Newton has removed the option to bring iPads to class, except for accessibility needs, as a part of the general movement in the “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay” seminars to “swim against the tide of AI use,” reduce “the infiltration of tech,” and “go back to pen and paper,” she said.
Is this about teaching efficiency or managing the teacher's feelings? If "the infiltration of tech" allowed for better learning, would this teacher even be open to it?
joshstrange|28 days ago
And the line
> Regarding the printing cost, Newton and Shirkhani both emphasized that Yale has programs to help students who need financial assistance paying for printing.
Does not solve the issue. Not every school has programs like that, they aren't always easy to take advantage of, and often have extra hoops to jump through.
It's really hard to not see this through the same lense as the scam of textbooks and other required (paid) readings for classes. Even more so when the professor wrote the book and/or gets a kickback. See also: new editions every year that are required so you can buy used or an online key that is one-time-use and costs as much as the book.
arnavpraneet|29 days ago
sodality2|29 days ago
mmahemoff|29 days ago
First, extremely cumbersome and error-prone to type compared to swipe-typing on a soft keyboard. Even highlighting a few sentences can be problematic when spanning across a page boundary.
Second, navigation is also painful compared to a physical book. When reading non-fiction, it’s vital to be able to jump around quickly, backtrack, and cross-reference material. Amazon has done some good work on the UX for this, but nothing is as simple as flipping through a physical book.
Android e-readers are better insofar as open to third-party software, but still have the same hardware shortcomings.
My compromise has been to settle on medium-sized (~Kindle or iPad Mini size) tablets and treat them just as an e-reader. (Similar to the “kale phone” concept ie minimal software installed on it … no distractions.) They are much more responsive, hence fairly easy to navigate and type on.
PlatoIsADisease|29 days ago
That said, I always thought exams should be the moment of truth.
I had teachers that spoke broken english, but I'd do the homework and read the textbook in class. I learned many topics without the use of a teacher.
edge17|29 days ago
subhobroto|29 days ago
A mix of enforcement, laws and good old market capture.
20 years ago I could bring a suitcase full of brand new books - fiction or not, from India, no questions asked. These are functionally the same as those that cost 50x more in the U.S. - just that they are black and white, paperback and use cheaper recycled paper that will yellow in 20 years and become brittle in 30. I cannot bring them with me anymore. The books clearly say they are not for export especially in the U.S., the print for this uses some kind of ink that shows up on XRays clearly and TSA enforces it.
Similarly, used books in the U.S. are repurchased by bookstores to be sold at a profit.
From what I see students doing - they sell or exchange books over FB Marketplace or school lists or in person.
rr808|29 days ago
globalnode|29 days ago
6stringmerc|29 days ago
This isn't my article nor do I know this Educator but I like her approach and actions taken:
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5631779/ai-schools-teac...
azinman2|29 days ago
randcraw|29 days ago
Then see how it affects the kids' learning speed and retention of the various subjects. Then they need to compare notes with the other teachers to learn what they did differently and what did or didn't work for them.
Ideally they'd also assess how this worked for different types of students, those with good vs bad reading skills, with good vs bad grades, esp those who are underperforming their potential.
ChadNauseam|29 days ago
bahmboo|29 days ago
rajnathani|26 days ago
scrubs|28 days ago
raincole|29 days ago
> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option.
Lol $150 for reading packets? Not even textbooks? Seriously the whole system can fuck off.
lunias|28 days ago
Mathnerd314|29 days ago
everybodyknows|29 days ago
What could it mean for an "option" to be "required"?
unknown|29 days ago
[deleted]
jrm4|29 days ago
You see a policy, and your clever brains come up with a way to get around it, "proving" that the new methodology is not perfect and therefore not valuable.
So wrong. Come on people, think about it -- to an extent ALL WE DO is "friction." Any shift towards difficulty can be gained, but also nearly all of the time it provides a valuable differentiator in terms of motivation, etc.