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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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As someone who has been a teenager. Cheating is easy, and class wasn't as fun as video games. Plus, what teenager understands the importance of an assignment? Of the skill it is supposed to make them practice?
That said, I unlearned to copy summaries when I heard I had to talk about the books I "read" as part of the final exams in high school. The examinor would ask very specific plot questions often not included in online summaries people posted... unless those summaries were too long to read. We had no other option but to take it seriously.
As long as there isn't something that GPT can't do the work for, they won't learn how to write/do the assignment.
Perhaps use GPT to fail assignments? If GPT comes up with the same subject and writing style/quality, subract points/give 0s.
Last November, I gave some volunteer drawing classes at a school. Since I had limited space, I had to pick and choose a small number of 9-10yo kids, and asked the students interested to do a drawing and answer "Why would you like to participate in the drawing classes?"
One of the kids used chatgpt or some other AI. One of the parts that gave it away was that, while everyone else wrote something like "I want because", he went on with "By participating, you can learn new things and make friends". I called him out in private and he tried to bullshit me, but it wasn't hard to make him contradict himself or admit to "using help". I then told him that it was blatantly obvious that he used AI to answer for him and what really annoyed me wasn't so much the fact he used it, but that he managed to write all of that without reading, and thought that I would be too dumb or lazy to bother reading or to notice any problems.
Did he get into the class after all that?
That call out was after the first class, I didn't tell him he was out and said "See you next week". Still, he didn't show up on the other 3 classes, though those were also very rainy days, so I can't say what was the reason he didn't show up again
It is so weird seeing these stories and trying to make sense of what it means for the future of humans using written communication.
I've heard stories from some of the youth that they see no reason why not to use genAI to save time and effort.
But it's not like using a spell check, it's like asking someone else to do the thinking for you.
And the only reason we have genAI is because it ingested oodles of real people's creative output made before genAI was created.
"Why do you want to take the class?" --If you can't be honest in how you answer, why should you get to take the class? On the other hand, if it's not important to be able to write about it, why ask them to spend time on that assignment?
I get that step 1 is to stop assigning any homework that is drudgery. But they can't all be replaced by oral reports, or in-class writing assignments, can they? Are teachers going to start asking for assignments to be handwritten, so it's at least not so easy to copy and paste?
If education is for teaching kids how to think, and (I suppose) interact with emerging technologies, how do you teach people to think and write for themselves?
Or is the answer that with LLMs being so good at generating plausible text, people of the future won't need to be good at the writing process, and the skill of writing will decline?
I mean, once we had texting and the internet, people wrote a lot fewer letters. It's something of a disappearing art.
Maybe good writing just goes away?
I have a similar background and no surprise, it's mostly a problem in my asynchronous class. The ones who have my in person lectures are much more engaged, since it is a fun topic and I don't enjoy teaching unless I'm also making them laugh. No dice with asynchronous.
And yeah, I'm also kinda doing that with my essay questions, requiring stuff you sorta can't just summarize. Important you critical thinking, even if you're not just trying to detect GPT.
I remember reading that GPT isn't really foolproof on verifying bad usage, and I am not willing to fail anyone over it unless I had to. False positives and all that. Hell, I just used GPT as a sounding board for a few new questions I'm writing, and it's advice wasn't bad. There's good ways to use it, just... you know, not so stupidly.