Comment by freeopinion
9 hours ago
Do you have the stomach to walk into a high school in the USA these days? Teachers use AI to generate assignments. Students feed the assignments to AI and submit the responses. Teachers feed the student submissions to an AI for grading.
As a high schooler going to a school with stricter rules on AI than most in my area, I can say that it's been going downhill ever since GPT 4. Teachers constantly use AI to create assignments(my French Teacher regularly handed us work with GPT 5.1 prose and emojis). Students are also rampantly using AI and bypassing school restrictions(We have a google account, making it easy to use Gemini if we just sign out), causing an inflation in GPAs and test scores. There's no easy solution to the problem, banning AI-tools only help somewhat as even typing into Google has AI web results, and students are quickly overcoming ways to restrict them. I have a friend that vibe coded an application that allowed his Mac Mini's desktop to be mirrored on his school chromebook, bypassing every restriction with sub 1-second latency. Of course, that opens the can of worms to whether schools should allow students to use AI...
> Of course, that opens the can of worms to whether schools should allow students to use AI...
We are starting to see results indicating cognitive decline due to AI in education, so no, we should do everything possible to ban it except for very limited fields.
LLMs aren't calculators or even computers, their generated output is too flexible, generic and basically starts replacing thinking.
Most likely they should only be allowed during late highschool years or just at university level, when people at least have a chance to learn how to research on their own.
Remembering my teachers 20 years ago talking about staying in school grading until 8-9 PM, I wonder if these things are a symptom instead of a disease
I know many teachers who actually have respect for the profession, themselves, and the students. Thankfully that means they don't do this.
Whether this is a widespread macro trend is another issue, and would be terryfying.
If true, however, it would reflect on the values of the organization: we have spent decades underpaying teachers, and doing a poor job of pretecting schools from frivoluos lawsuits. Add into that, districts have thrown money into new buildings, have been suckered by Big Tech to adopt their policies (common core was pushed by Big Tech and has been a distaster as well as computers in classrooms). As a nation (the USA) we can't get our act together for a rigorous national exam, etc etc.
About half of the states in the USA require the ACT or SAT for high school graduation.
Alabama is one state that requires the ACT. The mean score in Alabama is below 18/36. Wisconsin is another. Its students score on average about 1 point higher than the national average of 19.4/36.
If you prefer states that require the SAT, the mean SAT score of students from Delaware is less than 980/1600, about 50 points below the national average.
I'll leave it to others to argue about whether these exams are rigorous.
Please tell me this is not true.
I have two kids in engineering programs at a state University. They are allowed to use AI for homework assignments, but the homework is no longer worth any credit. They have a lot more papers, quizzes, and tests in class that count for their entire grade.
This is true even at the undergraduate level unfortunately…
Then here we are. AI apocalypse. Something of note. I've started to pay more attention to canned goods. Soups with lentils and so forth.
2 replies →
It's true of most work in many and soon most white collar jobs, too. Claude writes some dense useless thing, everyone else uses Claude to summarize and write a reply to the thing. The Claude-submitted PRs get automatically reviewed and commented on by a GitHub Claude review bot. The programmer asks Claude to check out Claude's review comments to Claude. Claude pushes a commit to the branch and writes a comment. The Claude review bot reviews the commit and leaves a comment. The human [...].
My hot take is that it's not really that terrible in the long run for work since I think LLMs will probably be nearly or actually AGI and better white collar workers than most humans within 5 years of today. But it is very funny and surreal in the meantime.
It is definitely bad for school, though. Kids IMO should actually be encouraged to use LLMs but not in or for class work outside of an AI best practices class. Probably stop giving them homework (90% will always try to find a way to make AI do it) and have them solve problems in class hours with no electronics so that they're forced to not defer learning. This will become even more important once we have AGI.
> LLMs will probably be nearly or actually AGI
What if they don't?
> This will become even more important once we have AGI.
What if we achieve AGI in 50+ years? Should everyone live in this Kafkaesque world until then?